Memory Man

Belinda Wyatt had been gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead. The motive was probably that her attackers had found out about her intersex condition. The trauma had changed her brain, turning her into what Decker also was.

I wonder if she remembers the rape and beating? Or if she’s forgotten it like I did the hit on me? I wonder if she can never forget all the things she wants to forget?

He did not like feeling any sort of connection to someone who had ended the lives of so many innocent people, but part of him could not help it. They were bound by their conditions. They were connected by their histories, their paths crossing at a traumatic point in their lives.

Decker and Belinda had been at the institute together. Something he had done there had caused her to target him. At some point Belinda had become Billy. Billy had met up with Sebastian Leopold, an Austrian whose family had been killed and no one had been punished for the crime. Where had their paths crossed? A lot could happen in twenty years. Was it before or after she’d made the change to Billy? Had their meeting precipitated all the killings?

And what the hell did I do to Wyatt to deserve all this misery?

“I thought I might find you here.”

Decker glanced over to see Bogart standing at the top of the steps leading from the tunnel. He held up a file.

“Information on the Wyatts’ finances. And Sebastian Leopold’s family.”

They walked back to the library together and Bogart, Decker, Jamison, and Lancaster started to go over the files.

Twenty minutes later Lancaster held up a paper. “The Wyatts sold their house in Utah for forty thousand dollars about nineteen years ago. The new one they built, at a cost of nearly two million. And it came with twenty acres.”

“And the source of the wealth?” asked Decker.

“We couldn’t find one,” said Bogart.

“How about a payoff?” said Decker.

Lancaster shot him a glance. “A payoff? You mean blackmail?”

“It would explain the absence of a police report on Belinda’s rape. It would explain where the cash came from to buy the house. Far away in Colorado.”

Bogart added, “And it might explain Belinda’s outrage. That her parents could be bribed to not press the case.”

“Abuse and abandonment?” said Decker, eyeing him.

Bogart nodded. “Hence the mutilation. And the murders of her parents.”

Decker looked at the paper again. “With her parents dead, I wonder what happened to whatever money was in their accounts?”

“But if people didn’t know they were dead?” said Jamison.

“These days money is accessible by computer. You just have to have logins and passwords,” said Decker. “Which I’m sure Belinda, or Billy, could get.”

“He would need something to live on, to fund travel,” opined Bogart.

“He might need it for something else,” said Decker.

“What?” asked Bogart and Lancaster together.

Decker stood. “We need to go to where the Wyatts lived when she was raped. And we need to find out who raped her, and how they got away with it. And we have to determine who paid all that money to the Wyatts.”

“It’s a twenty-year-old case, Decker,” protested Bogart.

“There’s another reason to go. An even more important one.”

“What is it?” asked Bogart.

“Worth a ride in your private jet, for sure.”

Chapter 58

They landed near a small town in northern Utah.

“Mercy, Utah,” said Lancaster, as they deplaned into heavy snow and saw the sign on a plane hangar.

“Okay, that’s the height of irony,” commented Jamison.

Bogart shivered and pulled his parka closer around him. “So what was the reason worth a tank of jet fuel?” he asked Decker.

Decker eyed the three SUVs sitting on the tarmac, engines running and heaters, he hoped, turned on full blast.

“I’ll show you.”

They drove to the address of Belinda Wyatt’s former home. It was in a small community of post — World War II housing, each house nearly a carbon copy of its neighbor. The streets were frozen slush. The house was dark. No cars were in the driveway.

Decker sat in the backseat of the second SUV with Lancaster and Jamison next to him. Bogart was in front.

Decker looked out the window and said, “So it was recently sold?”

Bogart nodded. “Twenty months ago. Purchaser was a company.”

“Around four months before my family was killed. They’d need a place to stay and plan it all out.”

“You really think Wyatt bought her old house back?” said Lancaster. “And with it all those terrible memories?”

“This was her home. Not the behemoth where she killed her parents and wrapped them in plastic. Despite what happened to her, she might see it as a place of solace, of safety. And she probably used some of the bribe money to buy it. I’m sure she would have thought it fitting to use their blood money to buy back what they so desperately wanted to sell.”

Jamison shot him a glance. “And what do you think we’ll find inside?”