Redemption (Amos Decker #5)(90)

“How did he know to go to that area to get drugs?” asked Decker.

He saw Gardiner flinch slightly.

“What?”

“You just told me that your father didn’t do drugs. Hated them. So how’d he know where to go? Or who to talk to, to buy the stuff? And where did he get the five hundred bucks he had in his pocket when the police picked him up?”

“I…I don’t know where he got the money. And it was pretty easy to tell back then where the bad areas were if you wanted to score drugs. I already told you that. And you know that too from being a cop here back then.”

“Well, Mitzi, the thing is, he didn’t want just any drugs for your mother. He wanted something like pure morphine. Stuff that had been stolen from a hospital or pharmacy, not off-the-street crap. And having worked the narcotics detail as a cop here, I know that there were very few people in that particular market. And you really had to know your shit to get to them.”

Mitzi looked extremely apprehensive in the face of all this. “I…I don’t know what to tell you.”

“And on top of that, your old man was still walking around quite a few hours after allegedly killing four people. You’d think the guy would have been running for the hills.”

She licked her lips nervously. “Maybe…maybe he was confused or shocked at what he’d done. Or he was just trying to lie low. And hope that the police would conclude what you just did.”

“But if he had committed the murders, he would know his DNA was likely to be under a dead girl’s fingernails. It was just a matter of time before we came knocking on his door.”

She let out a quick breath. “I can’t explain it. It’s just what happened.”

Decker rose. “I’m sorry.”

She glanced up at him, trepidation on her features. “Sorry about what?”

“Your life must have truly been in the gutter for you to have done this to your father.”

“I don’t know what—”

He put up his hand. “Don’t bother. I don’t have the patience or time for more bullshit from you.” He lowered his hand. “I think you gave him the five hundred bucks after someone gave it to you. Then you managed to scratch the shit out of him at some point and passed his DNA off to whoever paid you. Maybe your father just chalked it up to you being in a drug-induced fit. He’d probably seen that many times before. And then you told your old man where to go to get the stolen hospital drugs. Only the person wasn’t there because there was no person. You probably told him to keep trying, to go to lots of different places, where there was nobody either. But it was for his wife, after all. And so he did. That way he’d have no alibi for the murders, and we’d end up finding him in a bad part of town with a chunk of money in his pocket. And when we showed up that night, you pretended to be whacked out. You’d probably already been given the gun and stashed it behind the closet wall.”

The whole time Decker was talking Gardiner’s eyes kept widening and her jaw kept falling.

Decker continued, “I can only imagine the look on your old man’s face in prison when he ran into that scumbag Karl Stevens. And Stevens tells him what his ‘little star’ did to her own father.” He took a moment to gaze around at the beautiful room.

“I hope it was worth it, Mitzi. But I can’t possibly see how it could be.”





Chapter 58



THE HOUSE.

The rain.

Decker sat in his car and watched his old home from across the street.

The gloom of the night was actually brighter than what he was feeling.

He had told himself that he could live in either the past or the present, but he couldn’t do both.

Which do I choose? It should be an easy decision. So why isn’t it?

His case was at a dead end, in more than one way. Gardiner was the key and it didn’t look as though she was going to cooperate. Unless Rachel Katz regained consciousness with a willingness to help them, Decker wasn’t sure they would ever get to the truth.

So he had come here. Back to where many things had begun for him.

He saw the lights on in the front room. Someone would pass back and forth every so often. The little girl he’d seen. Then her parents.

The Henderson family. Really just starting out in life, like Decker and his family had once done. Building dreams and burnishing memories that would last a lifetime for all of them.

His last Christmas with his family had been a memorable one. Decker had gotten a couple days off, and thankfully no one had decided to murder someone else that close to the holiday.

They had gone to see Molly perform in her school play. It had been a Christmas version of Peter Pan. Molly had played Wendy. She had worked on her lines for two weeks, reciting them to whichever parent was around to listen to her, barging in on Decker when he’d been shaving, or even dressing.

She had carried it off without a hitch, helping others to perform their roles too because she’d apparently memorized everyone else’s lines as well.

Great memory.

She didn’t get that from her dad. Before his injury Decker had been pretty normal with his recall. And he couldn’t imagine he could pass on the elements of a traumatic brain injury to his kid.

He sat next to Cassie in the audience that night watching their little girl act her heart out, surprising him with little things, tiny nuances that she seemed to instinctively add to her performance. She might have grown up to be a great actress.