Walk the Wire (Amos Decker #6)(2)

The skin covering her face had been cut from the back and then pulled down, coming to rest on the exposed bone of her chin. Her skull had been sawed open and the top part removed and laid to the side of her head. The revealed cavity was empty.

Where the hell was her brain?

And her chest. It had been apparently cut open and then sewn back together.

He glanced at the compact dirt around the body. His brow screwed up when he saw the distinct marks on the ground there. They seemed familiar to him. Next moment he forgot about these traces and slowly sank to his knees as it occurred to him where he had seen such suture patterns on a human chest before.

It was called a Y-incision. He had seen it in numerous TV cop shows and movies. It was the proverbial cut-up body on the slab in the morgue, only he wasn’t in a morgue. He was in the middle of expansive, unblemished North Dakota without a coroner or TV show in sight.

A postmortem had been performed on this unfortunate woman.

Hal Parker turned to the side and threw up mostly bile.

The soil was no longer pristine as the skies opened up and the rain began to pour down.





“NORTH DAKOTA,” murmured Amos Decker.

He was sitting next to Alex Jamison on a small Embraer regional jet. They had taken a jumbo 787 to Denver, where they’d had an hour layover before boarding the far smaller aircraft. It was like going from a stretch limo to a clown car.

Decker, who was six-foot-five and weighed nearly three hundred pounds, had groaned when he’d watched the small jet maneuvering to their gate, and groaned even more when he’d glimpsed the tiny seats inside. He’d had to wedge into his allotted space so tightly that he doubted he would need his lap belt to keep him safe in case of turbulence.

“Ever been there?” asked Jamison. She was in her early thirties, tall, superbly fit, with long brown hair, and pretty enough to be repeatedly stared at by men. A former journalist, she was now an FBI special agent. She and Decker were assigned to a task force at the Bureau.

“No, but we played North Dakota State in football once while I was at Ohio State. They came to Columbus for the game.”

Decker had played college ball for the Buckeyes and then had an abbreviated professional career with the Cleveland Browns before a devastating injury on the field had left him with two conditions: hyperthymesia, or perfect recall, and synesthesia, meaning his sensory pathways had comingled. Now he could forget nothing and saw things such as numbers in certain colors and, far more dramatically, dead bodies in an unsettling shade of electric blue.

“Who won?” asked Jamison.

Decker gave her a heavy-lidded glance. “You trying to be funny?”

“No.”

He shifted about a millimeter in his seat. “It used to be called D-I and D-II when I played. Now it’s FBS and FCS.” When Jamison looked puzzled he added, “Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision. Ohio State, Alabama, Clemson, Michigan, LSU, they’re all FBS schools, the top tier, the big boys. Schools like North Dakota State, James Madison, Grambling, Florida A&M, they’re FCS schools, or the second tier. Now, North Dakota State has gotten really good as of late. But usually, when they play each other it’s a rout for the FBS schools.”

“So why schedule them?”

“It’s an easy win for the top tier and a big payday and TV exposure for the other squad.”

“But it’s not a particularly good game to watch?”

“It’s always a good game when you win. And if the score is a runaway, the starters get to sit the bench after the third quarter or maybe even the first half. When I was a freshman that’s how I got to play. When I was a starter, I appreciated the extra rest a blow-out got me.”

“Doesn’t make sense to me. One team slaughtering another for money.”

“It really only made sense to the school boosters and the NCAA bean counters.”

Jamison shook her head and gazed out the window as they descended beneath the dark, thick clouds. “Looks stormy down there.”

“It’s basically hot with humidity through the roof for the next couple of days, with a bad thunderstorm, falling temps, and wicked wind pretty much guaranteed every evening. But then it won’t be long before the blizzard season sets in and this place looks like Antarctica.”

“Great,” said Jamison sarcastically.

“But look on the bright side.”

“What’s that?”

“You won’t have to do your daily workout for the next couple days. You’ll lose two pounds of water just walking to the car. But after that you’ll have to fatten up for the winter.”

The plane shed more altitude. Working against heavy headwinds and unruly patches of air, the jet felt like it was a pebble skipping across rough water. Jamison gripped her armrests and tried to breathe deeply as her stomach lurched up and down. When the plane’s tires finally hit the asphalt and bounced to a landing on the runway, she slowly released her grip and pressed a hand against her belly. A jagged spear of lightning appeared off in the distance.

“Okay, that was fun,” she said breathlessly before eyeing Decker, who looked, if anything, sleepy. “That didn’t bother you?” she asked.

“What?”

“The turbulence!”

“It wasn’t a big deal,” he said offhandedly.