He stared once more at the locker’s contents.
The bloody notebook and other items that had been on the floor next to Watson’s body had been taken by the police along with her remains. But not the stuff in the locker. No, not that. That was all still there. And it was in decent shape because her body had mostly shielded the contents from the shotgun blast.
He grabbed the stack of items, went back to Classroom 144, and sat down. He opened the first book and went through it page by page. He went through all the textbooks, looking for marginalia, notes, sketches, anything.
He had gone through three of her lined notebooks and had reached the nineteenth page of the fourth when he stopped looking.
Debbie had drawn a picture on this page. It was a good sketch, actually. The girl had possessed talent.
But Decker was far more focused on the subject of the drawing.
It was a man in full camouflage gear.
With a big heart drawn right next to it.
Chapter
21
DECKER HAD SHOWERED, changed his clothes, carefully combed his hair, and put on his most professional expression. He believed that the folks sitting opposite him deserved nothing less than that.
Debbie Watson’s mother and father stared back at him. The dad was a small, mousy man in his midforties, with a little scrap of mustache above his thin top lip. He had a stunted right arm, the malformed hand hanging from the elbow.
He looked like a freight train was bearing down on him.
Debbie’s mom was chain-smoking. The ashtray in front of her was filled with butts. Nicotine’s ability to rob the blood of oxygen had whittled fine lines prematurely around her mouth and deeply and unflatteringly chiseled a face that had probably not been pretty even in youth. Her forearms were veiny and darkened and spotted, probably from lying out during the summer in the hammock Decker had seen strung between two trees in the small side yard. The mom didn’t look like she’d seen a freight train. She looked as though someone had sucked her soul out. And the smell of the liquor easily crossed the width of the scarred coffee table set between them.
On Decker’s right, Lancaster was perched on the couch like a cat on a ledge. Her features were tight and serious and hunkered down and had been ever since Decker had showed her the drawing of cammie man in Debbie’s notebook. She occasionally looked lustfully at Beth’s cigarette, as if waiting for an invitation to pull out her own smokes.
They had not shown the sketch to the FBI or anyone else. They had decided to keep it to themselves for now. Decker had said, and Lancaster had agreed, that before anything was released publicly they needed to talk to the parents. If the sketch was unconnected to the murders, then they didn’t want Debbie’s family to suffer unnecessarily. In the world of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the Watson family would be sliced and diced to such a degree that no matter what exculpatory facts were revealed later, the truth would never be able to rise above the earlier electronic tsunami.
Decker had prefaced his questions with a lot of disclaimers. He had waited until the Watsons were fully prepped before showing them the sketch. When their gazes had held on the image, both had recoiled and then stiffened like they’d been electrocuted.
Decker saw them both outlined in a creamy white. For him death was blue, while white represented despair. When he looked at himself in the mirror for a full year after his family’s murders, he had figured he was the whitest white man in the whole world.
“Can you think of a reason why Debbie would have drawn these images?” asked Decker quietly. He pointed first to the cammie figure and then the heart. “Was she seeing anyone?” he added. The heart seemed to indicate this was a possibility. Even in the twenty-first century a heart drawn by a young woman next to the image of a man probably meant exactly what it had always meant throughout time.
George Watson shook his head, his mustache trembling along with the rest of him. His stunted arm swung next to his torso. Decker wondered how many jibes the man had endured over his life for his unusual appendage. That abnormality had probably defined everything about him, not because it should but because sometimes the world and the people in it could be so cruel.
Beth Watson didn’t shake her head. She nodded slightly and both Decker and Lancaster immediately focused on her.
“Who was he?” asked Lancaster.
“Never knew,” said Beth haltingly. “I mean, she never brought anyone home that we didn’t know.”
“We’re interested in anyone she might have brought home,” said Decker.
“No, I mean those were boys. You said this person was big. The paper said six-two, couple hundred pounds or more. Debbie never brought anyone home bigger than her father.”
George cleared his throat and said ruefully, “And I’m not even five-eight. Had my first growth spurt in tenth grade and never had another.” Then he fell silent, looking perplexed and a bit appalled that he had bothered to offer up triviality in the face of such tragedy.
“And they were all boys from school,” said Beth. “One of them’s dead too, in fact. Like my poor Debbie.”
“Which one?” asked Lancaster, her pen poised over her pad.
“Oh, well hell, I never thought about that. I just…I just thought she had some sort of God complex with the guy. But I don’t think my Debbie would have been hanging out with some Hey-soos Mexican,” she added in an offended tone. She wiped her nose and smoked her cigarette. “I mean, moms always know, even if their daughters don’t believe they can know stuff. Debbie certainly thought we were clueless.” She gave a sideways glance at her husband. “And some are clueless. Really clueless.”
Hubby removed his hand from her shoulder and dropped it between his legs, like a dog doing the same with its tail. He might have trousers on, thought Decker, but he clearly didn’t wear the pants in this family.
Decker flicked a glance at Lancaster. “Online posts?”
She nodded. “We’ll get all of it.”
“So she never said anything about this person? Nothing?”