Memory Man

After leaving Lancaster and Bogart, Decker heads back to the 7-Eleven where he supposedly first met Leopold. While there, he sees a front-page newspaper article that shows a photo of Decker conversing with Leopold. The write-up casts suspicion on Decker as the murderer of his own family.

He goes back to the hotel to sleep a few hours and then eats breakfast. Jamison walks into the dining room to talk to him. Decker isn’t pleased with her story. She says it isn’t too late to hear his side, but he refuses to give her a quote. Instead, he warns that anyone connected with him is at risk. This includes Jamison now that she’s written a story about him.

Decker tells her, “‘I have never seen menace like this […] Menace coupled with brains and cunning. It’s a very dangerous combination’” (217).

He goes on to say that the killer will go after anyone associated with Decker until he gets down to his last planned victim—Decker, himself.

Jamison is about to leave the dining room, terrified by Decker’s warning. Before she goes, Decker asks who took the photo of him in the bar with Leopold. Jamison admits it was an anonymous tip. She’s reluctant to give Decker the email address until Decker mentions that the killer was the person who sent it to her.

Shortly after Jamison leaves, she sends Decker a copy of the email. The email address “Mallard2000” means nothing to him. Decker asks Lancaster and the FBI to trace it. 

Decker finds himself wondering how two people could hate him enough to kill so many others just to make Decker suffer. He remembers reading In Cold Blood—the story of a family murdered by two criminals. Neither man alone could commit such a horrific crime; it was their deadly combination that led to murder.

A phone call from Lancaster interrupts Decker’s thoughts. She tells him to come to the morgue immediately. He arrives at the postmortem for Lafferty. The killer has carved a message into her back: “When will it end bro. You tell me” (225).

After Lancaster and Decker leave the morgue, Bogart blames Decker for Lafferty’s death and picks a fight. The two men struggle until Bogart pulls a gun. Shocked at his own overreaction, Bogart apologizes.

Once Bogart calms down, the two men discuss the status of the case. Decker can only be sure of a few things: The killer is the sole person with a grudge against Decker and isn’t working alone—Leopold is the killer’s accomplice.

Decker goes back to the bar where he met Leopold. He’s trying to figure out who took the photo of them and sent it to Jamison. As he scans his memory, the figure that leaps out is the blond waitress who served him a beer. When he questions the bartender, he learns that she was a temp who only showed up a few days before Decker came to the bar.

The bartender is also sure that the waitress was a transvestite. He calls her “it.” Decker goes to the employee restroom and seals it off. He calls Lancaster, hoping she can get a forensics team there to lift prints as well as a sketch artist to capture the bartender’s description of the waitress.

Decker is convinced that the waitress took the incriminating photo and assisted Leopold in his getaway. He can’t figure out how such a person could also pass for the tall, muscular Mansfield shooter, but he intends to find out.

Decker goes back to the shop classroom intent on proving a theory. If the waitress at the bar is the same man as the shooter, he would have needed a padded bodysuit.

Decker finds the gear hidden in the storage room behind the shop class. The outfit was designed to pad both the torso and legs to make him look bulkier. Special platform boots raised his height above six feet.

He calls Lancaster to explain what he’s found, but one question still nags at him: Why would the killer have chosen Mansfield? The answer is because this was Decker’s school, but the school holds much more personal items related to Decker himself. On a hunch, Decker goes to the gymnasium’s award display case. All the trophies with his name on them are gone.

He then gets a call from Lancaster. She tells him that someone wearing a Burlington police uniform attacked Lafferty. The uniform had been Decker’s.

After he discovers his trophies missing, Decker rushes to the storage unit where he’s kept everything remaining from his home and family. His uniform is missing, and someone has blackened the lens of the security camera outside.

Decker calls Bogart, and he arrives with a group of FBI agents who examine the storage unit for clues. Decker asks to see his old uniform, which was found in a dumpster after Lafferty’s death. Someone has drawn an “X” across his badge, but he doesn’t know the significance of the mark.

Decker checks the uniform for pinholes. As he explains to Bogart, the killer would have had to roll up the pants legs and pin the shirt to adjust for his smaller size. He now knows the killer is about five-foot-eleven, thin, and wears a size nine shoe.

When Decker returns to his hotel room, he finds vandalism and hate messages scrawled on the windows and door. Jamison’s article has convicted him of child murder in the court of popular opinion.

Jamison appears to offer an apology. They walk to a nearby coffee shop to talk. She says she wants to help him solve the Mansfield case and explains that her mentor was killed in the attack, so this crime is personal for her as well as Decker.

Jamison agrees not to publish anything about the case without Decker’s approval and offers her skills as a researcher. Because Decker is the motivation for the killings, she believes she can help him get to the source. They shake hands and agree to work together.