Decker wasn’t sure if the guy was going to lose it again, but he figured probably not, not with his team all around.

“Well,” said Bogart, “it would have taken a real police uniform to fool Lafferty anyway. These guys probably understood that.”

This made Decker feel even guiltier, which was obviously the other man’s intent. A staggering body blow without one physical punch thrown.

“Do you have the uniform?” asked Decker.

“Evidence bag in the truck.”

“Can I see it?”

They pulled the bag.

Bogart said, “The uniform and cap have already been examined for traces. There was nothing usable.”

But Decker wasn’t checking for that. He was probing the pants near the cuff. About six inches from the bottom of the pants he found what he was looking for.

He pointed it out to Bogart.

“Holes?” said the FBI agent.

“From pins. Hemming pins.”

“Hemming pins?”

“I’m six-five with exceptionally long legs,” explained Decker. “The guy who wore this had to take the pant legs up about half a foot. Otherwise Lafferty would have noticed the uniform was not his. I was slimmer back then, but I’m sure the guy had to cinch the waist tight and maybe pin it in the back. The shirt the same.”

He examined the shirt and found two pinholes in the fabric near the center of the back panel. “Here and here. And the guy could have rolled the cuffs over and buttoned them to account for the difference in arm length. And a strip of padding in the cap makes a large cap fit a medium head.”

“So a much smaller man?”

“About five-eleven. And thin.”

“Lancaster told me what you found at the school. Platform boots for height and some sort of contraption to make the shooter look big in the upper body.”

“Like football shoulder pads and padding for the thighs. Made a five-eleven and lean man look much bigger.”

“We found nothing on the email trail. IP went nowhere,” Bogart said.

“Not surprised.”

Decker looked down at the name on the uniform’s chest.

Decker.

The man in blue. The man he used to be.

Then he saw something else. It was faint, but he also knew it was fresh.

“Look at the badge,” he said.

Bogart did so. “Is that an…?”

“It’s an X. Someone has marked an X on the badge.”

“What might that represent? To signify Lafferty’s murder?”

“I don’t know.”

He handed the uniform back to Bogart. The FBI agent took it and then gazed at the activity going on inside the storage unit.

“How come you kept all this stuff?”

Decker looked up and said slowly, far more to himself than Bogart, “It’s all I had left.”

Bogart glanced at him, sympathy flitting across his features.

Decker must have noticed this, because he said, “No reason to feel that way. You make choices. And you live with them.”

“You didn’t choose to have your family murdered, Decker.”

“I think the man who did it believed the choice was all mine.”

“That’s truly sick.”

He closed the door behind him and they walked down the steps, across the street, and over a few blocks to a coffee shop that occupied a small niche between two larger stores, one of which was boarded up and the other one not far from that fate.

“Whole town is going down the tubes,” observed Jamison as they passed the shuttered store. “Before long I’ll have nothing to write about except bankruptcies and foreclosures.”

They got their coffees and sat at a small table near the back. Decker watched as she spooned sugar into her cup.

“What do you want to talk about?” he asked bluntly.

“I am sorry about the story, Decker. In retrospect you didn’t