Cammie man had gone to the Watsons’ house and written on that wall in code disguised as a musical score. That he was sure of. He didn’t know what the message said, and he didn’t know what the man had needed from Debbie. Yet out of all the students at Mansfield, why ally himself with her? There must be a reason. A good one.
His phone buzzed. It was Lancaster.
“The Bureau thinks they broke the code. It was some sort of substitution cipher. Pretty simple actually. Well, actually, they’re certain they did crack it.”
“How can they be certain they did?”
“Because of what the message said.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense, Mary. What did it say?”
He heard her release a long breath that seemed filled with apprehension.
“It said, ‘Good job, Amos. But in the end it won’t get you where you want to go, bro.’”
Chapter
23
I’M AN “ACQUIRED savant.”
More precisely, I’m a high-functioning acquired savant.
Decker was lying in his bed in his one-room home at the Residence Inn. He was not sleeping. He could not sleep.
Orlando Serrell.
Orlando Serrell was also an acquired savant, having been hit on the head by a baseball when he was ten. Ever since, he had come to possess extraordinary abilities in calendrical calculations, precise memories of weather on any particular day, as well as the near-total recall of where he was and what he was doing on any given day.
Daniel Tammet.
Daniel Tammet had suffered a series of epileptic seizures as a small child. He came out of that nearly fatal experience with one of the greatest minds of the century, able to recite pi out to over twenty-two thousand places and learn entire languages in a week. He had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and also saw numbers and other things in color, as Decker did.
Decker had studied everything he could find about savants who had not been born with their abilities but had acquired them after some event, whether an injury in Serrell’s case or a prior medical condition in Tammet’s.
There weren’t many savants in the world, and Decker had been totally unprepared to join their ranks. When LeCroix leveled him on that football field, the doctors who had extensively examined him later came away with the conclusion that the injury had done two things to his brain.
First, it had opened up channels in his mind, like unclogging a drain, which allowed information to flow far more efficiently. Second, it had caused other circuitry in his mind to intersect, providing him the ability to see numbers in color.
But this was only speculation. Decker had come to believe that doctors today knew only a bit more about how the brain really worked than doctors a hundred years ago.
Decker had woken up in the hospital after the hit and looked over at his vitals monitor with all the numbers skipping across it. He had seen his heart rate, 95—the same number on his football jersey—represented as violet for the nine and brown for the 5. Before his injury he didn’t even know what the color violet was. And the numbers had swelled huge in his head, tall and massive. He could see every detail of them. They were like living things.
He remembered sitting up in bed, the sweat pouring off him. He thought he was going insane. He had rung the nurse’s bell. A doctor was called and Decker had stammered out what he was experiencing. Specialists were called in. Many months later, and after his lengthy stint at the research facility outside Chicago, the consensus was that he was now officially an acquired savant with hyperthymesia and synesthesia abilities. The injury on the field had ended forever his football career, but had given him one of the most exceptional brains in the world. All these years later he recalled the names and backgrounds of every doctor, nurse, scientist, technician, and other practitioner who had seen him, and there were over a hundred of them.
He could have been written up in scholarly journals and there could have been a great deal of media attention surrounding what had happened to him, the odds being somewhere around one in a billion. But he had not allowed any of that to happen. He had not seen himself as a prodigy. He had seen himself as a freak. For twenty-two years of his life he had been one sort of person. He had been ill-prepared in the span of a few minutes to involuntarily become someone else entirely. To become the person he would one day die as. It was like a stranger had stepped into his body and taken it over, and he could do nothing to get him out.
A squatter for life is inhabiting my mind. And he happens to be me.
For every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. Well, in his case the outgoing, gregarious, prankish but driven young football player had become reserved, withdrawn, and socially awkward. He no longer related to the great many things that human beings spent a good deal of time over: small talk, little white lies, emotionally nuanced venting, gossip. He could not understand sympathy or empathy. He was not concerned with others’ feelings. Their pain and their grief. It was like these things bounced off his new and improved brain, never making a dent. By making him much smarter, the hit had robbed him of the things that made everyone human. It was as though that was the payment demanded. He’d had no choice in accepting or not.
He did not even care to watch sports anymore. He had not seen a football game since his injury.
Marrying Cassie had really saved him. She knew his secret. She shared his anxieties. Without her, Decker doubted he could have turned his life around, found a new career as a policeman, and then thrived as a detective, turning to the pursuit of justice his new and vastly improved mind. And though he had never been able to be as affectionate with Cassie as he would have before the hit, he cared for her, deeply. He would have done anything for her. They even laughed about his inability to connect more as a human than as a machine. But Decker knew that both of them wished he could.
Whenever he held his daughter, Decker could think of nothing but her, as though his monster of a mind was mesmerized by this little person who liked to cuddle with her huge father—a bear and its cub. He would stroke her hair and rub her cheek, and though the recollection was fuzzy, like watching an old TV with a coat hanger for an antenna, it was like he could remember being what he used to be more vividly than at any other time.
It was as though his new mind had allowed an exception for these two people, enabling him to be a bit closer to what he once was.
But only for those two.
Now he was alone.
And just a machine forevermore.
And he had some prick taunting him. Some sick monster who had killed his family and then turned his sights on Mansfield High School. And if the graffiti on the wall of his house had not convinced him, the coded message had put all doubt to rest.
The shooters were one and the same.
And his family had died because of him. He had known all along that this was possible, even probable. But that little bit of uncertainty had actually been a good thing, allowing him to believe there was a chance that he had not been the motive in their slaughter.
Now the uncertainty was gone. And with absolute clarity came terrible, demoralizing resignation. And a sense of guilt that had hit him harder than even Dwayne LeCroix had.
At 5 a.m. he rose, showered, dressed in his suit, and stood in front of the small mirror in a bathroom that was about the same size as he was. In the reflection he saw pops of light and colors, numbers soaring across the glass. He closed his eyes and the picture did not change. It was not on the glass, it was all inside his head. It was said that savants, particularly those diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, were drawn to very narrow slices of interest: numbers, history, a certain field of science, or languages. Decker did not know what his narrow slice was supposed to be. He didn’t know if the hit by LeCroix had given him Asperger’s. He didn’t know if that was even possible, and he had never been officially diagnosed with the condition.
All he knew was that he could never forget anything. His mind attached colors to things that were not supposed to have them. He could remember what day of the week a particular date in the last hundred years fell on. His mind was a puzzle all put together, but somehow still jumbled, because he understood none of it. It was just who he was now. And it had scared the hell out of him from day one.
Yet with Cassie next to him, he had managed it. Without her, without Molly who had given him so
mething to think about beyond his own lifetime, Amos Decker had become once more a freak. A Jekyll and Hyde. Only Jekyll was gone and would not be coming back.