Long Shadows (Amos Decker, #7)(33)

They approached Draymont’s apartment, which was on the third floor.

“Any problems with a search warrant here?” said Decker.

“There is if he lives with someone,” pointed out White. “Who might have killed him. Then there is a Fourth Amendment issue, because even murderers have an expectation of privacy under the law. Go figure.”

Decker nodded. “Right. So let’s knock on the door and find out if he did live with someone. Because consent to search by someone legally authorized to do so is the best exception to a warrant requirement.”

When they got to the third floor and approached Draymont’s apartment, Decker pulled his gun and said, “Okay, that’s maybe an opportunity.”

The door was partially open.

Andrews and White had drawn their weapons, too.

Decker eyed Andrews. “Your turf, how do you want to handle this?”

“Me first, you left, White right.” Andrews moved past Decker, shouted out, “FBI, identify yourselves. Now!” There was no response. “FBI, coming in.” He kicked the door open, and edged into the front room. Decker was on his left wing and White on the right, their guns doing sweeping arcs in front of them.

“Shit,” said Decker. “Somebody beat us to it.”

The place had been turned upside down.

They made a quick search to make sure no one was there, dead, injured, or hiding.

Decker said, “Check with the management and see if anyone saw anybody here either last night or today, and also when was the last time anyone saw Draymont. And you’ll have to dial up a forensics team. Since we’re not sure if he lives with someone, get a warrant.”

“Right.”

The place was only about a thousand square feet, Decker estimated. Little furniture, and what was there was cheap and old. It might have come with the apartment for all he knew. There were no personal photos that he could see, nothing to really show who had lived there.

Andrews returned about a half hour later after his questioning of management and other personnel.

“No one saw or heard anything. The place only has the manager and a handyman on-site. The manager had liquor on his breath and the handyman was working on his pickup truck in the back and didn’t really seem with it.”

“No maid service or anything?” asked Decker.

“Nope. People clean their own units. I tried the apartments on either side of Draymont’s. Nobody answered. I taped my card to both doors with a message to call me if they know anything about Draymont. The manager said he pays on time and caused no problems. No visitors that he knows of, but I doubt he keeps close watch. And there’s no one else on the lease other than Draymont.”

“When we did the quick search I didn’t see anything business related here,” said White. “No home office, laptop. No files or documents.”

“And his phone was not found on his body at Cummins’s house,” said Andrews. “People weren’t taking chances. If they took his phone, they turned it off, because we couldn’t track it. Same for Lancer.”

“Let’s get Patty Kelly’s cell phone number and see if we can track it,” suggested White.

“On it,” said Andrews. “And I’ll have the apartment secured until the warrant drops. Even if no one else is on the lease, I don’t want to take chances that someone else might reside here.”

“Good idea,” said White.

Decker looked over the railing at the parking lot below. The day had produced a truckload of questions and really not a single answer. In fact, it was getting more complex by the minute.

This is going to take my A game. But I’m not sure I’m up for it.





Chapter 23



THEIR HOTEL HAD A SAD four-seater bar and Decker was sitting in one of them cradling a half-empty bottle of Bud. He eyed the TV screen, where a hockey game was on. To him, it was a little incongruous watching heavily clothed men skating on ice with palm trees gently swaying just outside the hotel, and a temperature of seventy degrees at eleven p.m.

He took out his phone, placed it on the bar, and looked at the caller log. Mary Lancaster had phoned him at 2:58 in the morning. She would have roughly seven minutes left to live.

The image of the woman putting the gun in her mouth once more came to his brutalized mind. And he had just stood there without saying one damn thing to stop her.

When he had woken up in the hospital after the blindside hit on the football field that had ended his athletic career as well as the person he had once been, Decker had no idea what had happened to him. As the doctors explained about his dying twice before being resuscitated, it was as though they were speaking to him about someone else.

Traumatic brain injury, they had said. The extent of the damage was unknown as yet, they had told him. They had simply done their best to keep him alive. It would not be until weeks later that he would learn what had truly happened to him that day.

Then came the extended stay at the Cognitive Institute in Chicago, where he had met folks who had also suffered injuries to their brains. And for all of them that trauma had led to startling new mental superpowers.

Superpowers. Yeah, I can forget nothing, most of the time. I see death as electric blue and other shit sometimes as orange or pink or green. Big, bad numbers used to come to eat me. I’m as socially awkward as a fourteen-year-old boy with a face full of zits at his first dance. I get tongue-tied on things I used to do easily, like being funny instead of annoying, having a filter, being sympathetic, though I have gotten a bit better with that. I have the same body but not the same person inside of that body. It cost me my family, though, and because of that I can never forgive…me.