ECKER WENT BACK to his room and pulled out his phone. He didn’t like having to pay for a phone that had Internet access, but it was like having a huge library and an army of research assistants on the cheap. Hechecked the news feeds. They must have a lockdown on the Leopold arrest, because he found nothing. When he searched the name online he got a few hits but obviously it was other people only with the same name.

The guy had walked in and copped to three homicides. Even if he did plead insanity, he was looking at a lifetime inside. Was he the real deal? Had he done it? The cops should be able to tell pretty easily. Decker knew they had held back many details from the public about the crimes. They would interrogate Leopold, if that was his real name, and quickly determine if he was the guy or lying for some reason.

If he was the guy what would Decker do? Try to thwart the criminal justice system and kill him? And then end up in prison himself? But if he wasn’t the guy, well, that offered up possibilities too.

Right now he could do nothing. Nothing constructive, at least. Leopold would be arraigned and formally charged, or let go, depending on the outcome of the interrogation. If he were kept locked up there would be a trial, or maybe not if the guy pled, which most defendants did, either because they were poor and had no money for a decent attorney or they were guilty or they were both. Rich guys always fought it out, especially with jail time in the equation. They had a lot to lose.

But the prosecution wouldn’t have to offer a plea. They might want to try this sucker for their own professional gain. If so, Decker would be in the courtroom every day. Every minute. He wanted to see this guy. Smell this guy. Size him up.

He lay back on the bed. He looked like he was sleeping, but he was far from it. He was remembering. He was thinking back to what he once was. And what he was now. He thought about this often, even when he didn’t want to. Sometimes, most of the time, the decision wasn’t up to him. It was up to his brain, which, ironically enough, seemed to have a mind of its own.

* * *

I am Amos Decker. I’m forty-two years old and look at least ten years older (on a good day, of which I haven’t had one in four hundred and seventy-nine days), and feel at least a century older than that. I used to be a cop and then a detective but am no longer gainfully employed in either occupation. I have hyperthymesia, which means I never forget anything. I’m not talking about memory techniques where you can teach yourself to remember things better, like the order of a pack of cards using association tricks. No, with me it’s just a turbocharged brain that has somehow unlocked what we all have but never use. There aren’t many hyper-Ts—my shorthand—in the world. But I’m officially one of them.

And it seems my sensory pathways have also crossed streams so that I count in colors and see time as pictures in my head. In fact, colors intrude on my thoughts at the most random times. We’re called synesthetes. So I count in color and I “see” time and sometimes I also associate color with people or objects.

Many people with synesthesia are also autistic or have Asperger’s syndrome. Not me. But I no longer like to be touched. And jokes don’t really register with me anymore. But that may be because I don’t ever intend to laugh again.

I was once normal, or as close as humans get to that state.

And now I’m not.

* * *

His phone buzzed. He looked at the screen. He didn’t recognize the number, but that meant nothing. In drumming up PI work he had left his phone number a lot of places. He didn’t want to focus on work right now, but then again, he couldn’t ignore paying clients either. If he got kicked out of this dump for nonpayment it was back to cardboard. And winter was coming. And while he had a lot of fat on him to keep warm, he would always take a firm roof over paper products.

“Decker,” he answered.

“Mr. Decker, I’m Alexandra Jamison with the News Leader. Can I ask you some questions about the recent development in the case involving your family?”

“How’d you get this number?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“Second time I’ve heard that phrase today. Don’t like it any better this go-round.”

“Mr. Decker, it’s been sixteen months. You must be feeling something knowing that the police have finally made an arrest.”

“How do you know they have?”

“I work the police beat. I have contacts. Solid ones that told me a suspect is in custody. Do you know any more than that? If you do—”

Decker hit the end button and her voice was cut off. The phone immediately rang again, and he turned it off completely.

He hadn’t liked the press when he was a detective, though they could be useful in small measures. However, as a PI he had no use for them at all. And they would get no story or help from him about the case “involving” his family.

He left his room and caught a bus at the corner and rode it to a second bus, which he took all the way downtown. There were a few skyscrapers mixed in with a bunch of other buildings of low and medium height, some in good shape, others not. The streets were well laid out on a tight grid of right angles and straight thoroughfares. He hadn’t spent much time downtown. Crime, the serious crime at least, was either on the north side of town or in the suburbs. But the precinct where he had worked, and where the holding cell was for arrestees, was right here, smack in the center.

He stood on the street and stared across at a building he had walked into every day for a very long time: PrecinctNumber 2. It was actually Precinct Number 1, because the old number 1 had burned down. But no one had taken the time to redo the numbers. Probably not in the budget.

It was named after Walter James O’Malley, a chief of distinction some forty years ago. He’d dropped dead outside a bar with his mistress clinging to his arm. But that had not stopped them from naming a building after him, which proved conclusively that adultery did not really harm one’s legacy. Even if it killed you.

His old digs were on the third floor. He could see the one window he would stare out, when he wasn’t looking at Lancaster, who sat directly opposite him in the cramped quarters. The holding cells were in the basement and on the side facing this street, which meant that Sebastian Leopold was barely fifty feet away from him.

He had never been this close to his family’s alleged killer. Yet maybe he had, when he’d apparently dissed this guy at the 7-Eleven.

He turned away when he saw two plainclothes and a uniform that he knew. Though he had changed a lot since he’d left the force, he doubted they could miss him. Stepping into an alley, he leaned against the wall. His anxiety level was riding high. Headaches came and went. His brain grew tired because it just never stopped. Not even when he was asleep. It was as though his subconscious was actually his conscious. For a man who never forgot anything it was difficult for him to remember who he used to be. And how he had gotten to be what he was now.

He closed his eyes.

* * *

This “gift” came to me when I was all of twenty-two years old. I was a middling college football player who walked on to an NFL team carrying only fair ability, but a ferocious chip on my shoulder. I stepped on the field for the first game of the season after playing my butt off during the preseason and surviving the final cut. I’m on the kickoff team. My job is simple: Sacrifice my body to create mayhem and holes in the return team so other guys can make the stop. I run my ass down the field. I’m about to make mayhem. I’m running so hard that snot is flying from my nose and spit from my mouth. I’m being paid more money than I’ve ever made in my life. I aim to earn it. I’m about to lay some dude out, stone cold out.

And that’s all I remember. Dwayne LeCroix, a rookie out of LSU, was five inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than me but apparently a force to be reckoned with, because he laid me out on that field with a hit I never saw coming. The dude blew me up, as they say in the NFL. He would be out of the league in four years with both knees devoid of cartilage, his left shoulder pared down to nothing but bone on bone, and his bank account overdrawn. He was currently residing in a max prison in Shreveport for crimes committed against his fellow humans, and he would die there one day either soon or distant. But on that day he walked away, fist pumping and sauntering like the cock over the hens, while I lay on the field unconscious.

And after that collision nothing for me would ever be the same.

Not a damn thing.