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AMOS DECKER WOULD forever remember all three of their violent deaths in the most paralyzing shade of blue.
Decker stared down at the face that was white and lifeless, the blackened dot in the middle of her forehead to be his final memory of her, a grammatical period at the very end.
The hit was the only thing he had never remembered. Ironic, since it was the catalyst for his never forgetting anything else.
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.
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.
The collision changed everything about me, because it essentially rewired my brain. So I died, twice, and then came back, essentially as someone else. And for the longest time I thought that would be the most awful thing that would ever happen to me. And then came that night and those three bodies in neon blue, and the gridiron blindside dropped to a distant number two on the list of my personal devastations.
Decker’s mind had already flown forward six moves. It was like he was playing chess and they were playing checkers.
Amos Decker sat there for a minute and then rushed back to his room, locked the door, closed all the curtains, lay on the bed with the pillow over his face to block out all the remaining light, and succumbed to the beast devouring his vastly altered mind.
A true migraine. Followed by Coke the next day.
Results in the real world came from slow, dogged work, compiling facts and building conclusions and deductions based on those facts. And a little luck never hurt either.
Small observations can lead to large breakthroughs.
It was based on witness accounts, which Decker knew were unreliable; forensic evidence, which he knew was not nearly as flawless as TV made it seem; hunches, which were just that and nothing more; and, lastly, common sense, which might just be the most accurate and helpful of the bunch.
Orphan facts, he liked to call them. There was no one to claim ownership because they were lies.
