Long Shadows (Amos Decker, #7)(87)

It had taken her seemingly an eternity to open her eyes and look down at his small body with the sheet pulled up to his chest. A part of her was thinking that if she didn’t open her eyes and see him, he couldn’t possibly be dead.

Yet she had to accept the reality of her son being gone. And when she had looked down at him…?

She suddenly felt panicked as her heart commenced to beat rapidly. The dread ate into her belly and her lungs heaved, making her breaths erratic.

With a shaky hand she used a Zippo to light her cigarette. In the momentary flicker of flame she saw Donte—not the boy on the slab, but the child she had birthed and raised until senseless violence had taken him away from his mother.

She controlled and slowed her breathing, letting the cigarette smoke drift from her. It lazily moved over the pool and then disappeared into the night.

Like Donte had.

“Didn’t figure you for a closet smoker.”

She whirled to see Decker standing off to the right, in the fringe of flickering shadows.

White said, “I allow myself one every once in a while.”

Decker nodded and drew closer. He stared at the still waters of the pool. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Apparently just like you couldn’t.”

“I never sleep well. Apparently, it’s just not my thing,” he added.

“I sent you a file on the incident with Langley and the prostitute.”

“I read it and saw the pictures. She’s lucky to be alive. And then she dropped her complaint and left town. Leaving Langley free and clear.”

“For guys like him, there’s never any accountability.” White took another puff. “And Barry Davidson’s weapon is a Sig nine-mill. Same caliber round found in Draymont and Lancer. If ballistics confirms that it was the gun used to kill them, that blows your theory of two killers.”

“Maybe,” said Decker.

“I don’t see any way around it.”

“We also need to see Gloria Chase and Dennis Langley, separately.”

“You think you can get her to flip on him?”

Decker shrugged. “Who knows? And we won’t be able to do it if Langley didn’t kill Cummins.”

“The way I see it, we have two primary suspects for Cummins’s murder: Barry Davidson and Dennis Langley. But if the gun matches, Davidson did all three and Langley is innocent. Do you agree with that?”

“There are problems with that theory,” said Decker. “One big one is that Cummins was stabbed and not shot.”

“I know that. But if Davidson was there shooting Draymont, odds are he knifed his ex-wife.”

“And the Slovakian money in the mouth?” asked Decker.

White finished her smoke, tapped it out, and threw the butt away in a trash can. “Could just be an intentional distraction.”

“And the two men who took Lancer from the hospital? Are they Davidson’s or Langley’s associates? And where did they keep Lancer all that time? And why beat her? What did she know that could hurt them? And if Draymont was only killed because he was there when either Davidson or Langley showed up to murder Cummins, why kill Lancer at all?”

“Decker, I thought you believed it was one of these two guys,” said a frustrated White.

“I never said that. They’re suspects, sure. And they could have killed Cummins, but not Draymont and Lancer. And not Kelly. They would have had no reason to.”

“But you think Davidson or Langley might have killed Cummins?” asked White.

“It’s certainly possible. They had motive and means and maybe opportunity if their alibis don’t hold up. So we have to follow that through. Especially since we now know Davidson knew how to avoid the security gate.”

“Okay but if Davidson’s gun comes back as the murder weapon on Draymont and Lancer? What then?”

“Then maybe I’ve been looking at this case completely wrong,” conceded Decker.





Chapter 64



T?HE CALL CAME IN AS Decker and White were having breakfast at the hotel the following morning. Decker listened and then put his phone down.

“Well?” asked White.

“That was the U.S. attorney’s office. Based on the ballistics test, they went before a federal magistrate and had an arrest warrant issued for Barry Davidson for murder. The Feds are leading the prosecution because of Cummins’s connection. Their theory is Davidson killed all three.”

“So the ballistics matched on Draymont and Lancer. Which means you were looking at this case all wrong.”

Decker finished his coffee. “The U.S. marshals are making the pickup on Davidson. I do want to talk to him. Hopefully he’ll be sober.”

“What about Tyler?”

“Shitty all around. If his father gets convicted he’ll go off to college with an albatross wrapped around his neck.”

“If he even goes after all this.”

“Maybe the best thing for him to do is to get away from this place.”

*



Later that day, Decker and White arranged to interview Davidson at the federal lockup in Fort Myers, where he had been processed and jailed. They met him in a small, windowless room. He was in his prison-issued one-piece, his wrists and ankles shackled.

The man was stone-cold sober and also looked utterly bewildered. And he had, surprisingly, not requested a lawyer, at least not yet.