by Allen Eskens
“You ready?” I asked.
“Let's go meet Dan Lockwood,” she said, putting the car in drive.
We parked in front of the house, walked up the front sidewalk together, and rang the doorbell. A middle-aged woman answered the door. Her face was prematurely aged from smoking cigarettes, the smell of which hit us like the slap of a glove. She wore a turquoise tracksuit and blue slippers, and her hair looked like a wad of burned copper wire.
“Could we please speak with Dan Lockwood?” I asked.
“He's out of town,” she said, her voice thick and low as if she needed to clear her throat. “I'm his wife. Can I help you?”
“No,” I said. “We really need to speak with Mr. Lockwood. We can come back—”
“Is this about his ol’ man?” she said. We had already started to turn from the door, but stopped in our tracks.
“You're referring to Douglas Lockwood?” I said, trying to sound official.
“Yeah, his ol’ man, the one that's missing,” she said.
“As a matter of fact,” Lila said, “that is why we're here. We were hoping to speak with Mr. Lockwood about that. When do you expect him back?”
“He should be home pretty soon,” she said. “He's on his way back from Minnesota as we speak. You can come in and wait if you want.” She turned, walking back into her house, pointing to a brown vinyl couch. “Have a seat.”
An ashtray on the coffee table teemed with cigarette butts, a few were Marlboro, but most of them were Virginia Slims. “I see you're a Marlboro fan,” I said.
“Those are Dan's,” she said. “I smoke Slims.” Lila and I exchanged a glance. If Mrs. Lockwood left the room for even a second, we could simply pick up our DNA sample.
“You said Mr. Lockwood was in Minnesota?” I said.
“You guys look awfully young to be cops,” she said.
“Um…we're not cops,” Lila said, “we're from a different agency.”
“You mean like social service or something like that?” Mrs. Lockwood said.
“Did Dan go to Minnesota to look for his father?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Headed up there when he heard that his dad was missing. He left the day of that big storm.”
I looked at Lila, confused by what Mrs. Lockwood said. “Did Dan go up to Minnesota before or after the storm?” I asked.
“Friday, just before the storm hit. He got snowed in up there. Called me a few hours ago saying he was on his way back.”
I went over the math in my head. Doug Lockwood kidnapped me on Friday. The storm strengthened that night while I hid in the hunting cabin. I weathered the storm through Saturday and walked to the farmer's house on Sunday. As far as the police in Minnesota knew, Doug Lockwood wasn't missing until Sunday.
“Just so we're clear,” I said. “He told you his dad was missing before he went up?”
“No,” she said. “He got a phone call on Friday about…oh, what time was it? Late afternoon—I can't remember exactly. Was all freaked out and said he has to go up to the ol’ man's place. That's all he said, and out the door he went.”
“How'd you know that Doug Lockwood is missing then?” Lila asked.
“On Sunday I received this call from some cop. Wanted to talk to Dan. I told him Dan wasn't home. So he asks who I was and have I seen Dan's ol’ man lately. I told him no.”
“Was the cop a guy named Rupert?” I asked.
“I'm not sure,” she said. “Could be. But then that bitch of a stepmom of his calls here,” she said, pursing her lips.
“Stepmom? Danielle Hagen?” I asked.
“Yeah. She ain't talked to Dan in years. Probably wouldn't spit on him if he was dying of thirst. She called him Sunday to give Dan shit.”
“What all did she say?” I said.
“I didn't actually talk to her,” she said. “I thought it might be that cop again, so I let it go to the answering machine.”
“What was her message?” Lila asked.
“Oh, let's see…she says something like…DJ, this is Danielle Hagen. I just wanted to tell you that the cops were here today looking for that piece-of-shit father of yours. I told them I hope he's dead. I hope—”
“Wait a second,” I said, interrupting her. “I think you got that backwards. You mean that she called to tell you that DJ was missing.”
“DJ's not missing. His ol’ man's missing. Doug's missing.”
“But…but,” I stammered.
Lila picked up where I stumbled. “But, Doug is DJ,” she said. “Douglas Joseph. His initials are DJ.”
“No, Dan is DJ.” Mrs. Lockwood looked at us as if we were trying to convince her that day was night.
“Dan's middle name is William,” I said.
“Yeah, but his dad married that bitch Danielle when Dan was a little kid. She liked to be called Dani, thought it made her sound like a tomboy. And since there couldn't be two Dannys in the family, she made everyone call her Dani and call him Danny Junior. After a while they just called him DJ.”
My head began to swirl. I'd been wrong about everything. Lila looked at me, her cheeks pale, her eyes telling me what I already knew—we were in the living room of Crystal Hagen's murderer.
“Well, here's Dan now,” Mrs. Lockwood said, pointing at a pickup truck pulling into the driveway.
I tried to think, to come up with a plan, but all I could hear was the cursing of my own thoughts. The truck passed by the window and rolled to a stop in the driveway beside the house. The driver's door opened, the setting sun casting enough light for me to see a man dressed and built like a lumberjack and with a military haircut step from the truck. I looked at Lila, beseeching her with my eyes, hoping that she could think of an escape.
Lila stood up as if a current of electricity had coursed through the cushion under her butt. “The forms,” she said. “We forgot to bring the forms in.”
“The forms,” I repeated.
“We left the forms in the car,” she said, tipping her head toward the front door.
I stood up beside Lila. “Of course,” I said, as both Lila and I started backing toward the door. “Will you excuse us? We…um…have to get the forms from the car.”
The man rounded the corner of the house, heading up the sidewalk toward the front porch. Lila walked out the door and down the three porch steps, almost running into Dan Lockwood. Lockwood paused at the bottom of the steps, his face frozen in surprise, waiting for someone to explain why we were walking out of his house. Lila said nothing, no greeting, no explanation; she walked past him, not even making eye contact. I followed, attempting to do the same, but I couldn't help but look at him. He had his father's face—long, pale, rough. His thin eyes watched me, narrowing to look at the bandage on the side of my head and then at the abrasion on my neck.
We picked up our pace as we headed down the sidewalk toward Lila's car.
“Hey!” he called after us.
We kept walking.
“Hey you!” he called again.
Lila climbed into the driver's seat and I jumped into the passenger seat. Only then did I turn to look at Lockwood, standing at the bottom of his porch, not sure of what he'd seen. Had Doug told him about the whiskey bottle? About the belt? Is that why he looked at me so carefully? Lila drove away while I watched behind us to make sure Lockwood didn't follow.
“Danny killed his sister,” Lila said. “When Doug and Danny both lied about being at Doug's car dealership, I thought that Danny was lying to protect his father, but it was Doug who lied to protect his son. And the diary—”
“Danny was eighteen that fall,” I said. “That's what Andrew Fisher told us. Danny was an adult in the eyes of the law.”
“He was eighteen and Crystal was fourteen. That's the rape Crystal wrote about.”
“Christ, that's what Doug was talking about,” I said, rapping my hand across my forehead. “That night when he tried to kill me, when he was talking all crazy and spouting Bible passages—I thought he was just being a sick basta
rd, confessing to molesting Crystal. But he was talking about protecting his son. He knew that Danny killed Crystal. He told the cops that Danny was with him when Crystal was murdered. He wouldn't have lied about the alibi unless he knew. He's been protecting Danny all these years. When I showed up at Doug's house with the decoded diary, he tried to kill me to protect Danny.”
“The call,” Lila said. “The one Danny got on Friday—”
“That had to be Doug calling Danny, to let him know about me,” I said. “Doug must have called him after he thought he'd killed me—to figure out what to do with me, with my body.”
“It's been Danny behind everything all along,” Lila said with a shudder. “I've never been so close to a murderer before.” Her eyes lit up with an epiphany. “Jesus, I bet he's the one who burned Doug's house down—to destroy any trace of Doug's DNA.”
“What? But—”
“Think about it,” she said. “You go to Doug's house believing Doug's the murderer, that it's Doug's DNA under Crystal's fingernail. When you escape, Danny knows that you'll bring the cops looking for Doug. They'll get his DNA from the whiskey bottle or something in the house. But Doug's DNA won't be a match. It'll be close; it'll be a male relative of Doug.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Danny destroys all traces of Doug's DNA by burning his house so that we'd go on believing Doug's the killer.” I let the pieces of the puzzle fall into place for a moment before I was struck by the next horrifying step. “But he can't get rid of all of Doug's DNA unless—”
“Unless he gets rid of Doug,” Lila finished my thought.
“He kills his own father? That's insane,” I said.
“Or desperate,” Lila said. “What would you do to avoid dying in prison?”
“Damn.” I tapped my fingers against my thigh. “I should have grabbed a cigarette butt before we left. We were so close. I could have reached out and picked one up.”
“I panicked, too,” Lila said. “When I saw that truck pull in, I freaked.”
“You freaked?” I said. “What are you talking about? You got us out of there. You were amazing.” I pulled out my cell phone and started digging through my pockets.
“What're you doing?” Lila asked.
“Max Rupert gave me his private cell number.” I shoved my hands deep into each of my pockets as if his card might have somehow shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. “Crap!”
“What's the matter?”
“It's on the coffee table at the apartment.”
Lila hit the brakes, pulling onto a side road. “We gotta go back,” she said.
“Are you out of your mind?”
Lila put the car in park and turned to me. “If we're right, then Danny burned down his dad's house and maybe even killed his own father just to stay out of prison. His next move will be to burn down his own house and disappear. He'll hightail it to Mexico or Venezuela or someplace and it'll take years to find him—if ever. If we can get a sample of his DNA, it'll match what they found on the fingernail. There'll be no question about it. The cops might eventually hunt Lockwood down, but in the meantime we can get Carl's conviction overturned. But we have to act now. We have to get his DNA.”
“I'm not going in there, and I'm sure as hell not letting you go in there.”
“Who said anything about going inside,” she smiled, putting the car back into drive. “All we're gonna do is pick up some garbage.”
The sun had dropped low in the west, leaving the avenues and alleys of Mason City lit with a mixture of street lamps and Christmas lights. Our plan was simple: we would drive down the alley behind Lockwood's house one time with our lights off, our eyes scanning the windows and doors. If we saw the least hint of movement in the house, we would keep driving, head back to Minnesota, and report what we'd found to Max Rupert. If, however, the night stayed silent, and we saw no sign of Lockwood, Lila would park the car behind the neighbor's garage. I would slip out, sneak up the path using my best ninja stealth, and steal the top garbage bag.
I unlocked my door as we entered the mouth of the alley, Lila's little car struggling against the dips and traps of the snow and ice. We passed behind his neighbor's garage to view the back yard of the Lockwood house, the darkness broken only by a thin light falling from the kitchen window. I strained to see any movement behind the shadows cast by the ambient glow of the neighbor's Christmas lights.
We passed the property, and seeing nothing to stop our folly, Lila stopped her car behind the next garage and covered the dome light with her palm. I clicked open my door, slid out, and crept back up the alley to the path Mrs. Lockwood had shoveled between the house and the alley. I paused one last time at the beginning of the path and listened. I heard nothing beyond the slight whistle of wind.
I stepped onto Lockwood's property, a thin layer of fresh snow crunching under my feet. My pace remained slow and cautious, as if I were walking a tightrope. Thirty feet…twenty feet…ten feet. I could almost touch it. Suddenly, the blast of a car horn cut through the cold December air about a block away and stopped my heart for a beat or two. I didn't move—I couldn't move. I stood perfectly still, expecting a face to appear at the window. I prepared myself to run back to the car, envisioning a footrace with a murderer. But nobody came; nobody peeked out.
I gathered my wits and took that last step. The lid of the can sat off kilter on top of the top trash bag. I lifted the lid carefully and laid it in the snow. Enough light filtered from the window above me to see the neck of a garbage bag. I raised it slowly, like a jewel thief avoiding motion sensors, my reflexes sharp, my balance steady, and my eye sight…well, a bit lacking.
I didn't see the beer bottle leaning against the top of the bag until it glinted in the thin light as it tumbled from the top of the trash can. It spun end over end, hit the bottom wooden porch step, bounced, spun some more, and fell to the sidewalk. It smashed into a thousand tiny bits, announcing my presence with authority.
I turned and ran down the walkway, clutching the bag of rubbish with a death grip in my right hand, glass and tin clanking inside the bag like a junkyard wind chime. I reached the junction of the path and alleyway just as the back porch light burst to life. I hit the ice in full stride, my feet shooting out from under me, sending me sprawling across the alley, my hip and elbow exploding in pain from the fall. I stood up and ran the short sprint to the car, the garbage bag held tight in my hand.
Lila hit the gas as soon as my ass hit the seat, not even waiting for the door to close. Her tires spun on the ice and the back end of the car slid back and forth, nearly hitting the nearby garage. A shadowy figure, silhouetted against the floodlight above Lockwood's back door, ran down the walkway toward us. Lila's tires caught a thin strip of gravel, breaking the spin and moving us down the alley and onto the street, leaving the shadow of Dan Lockwood behind us.
Neither of us spoke until we passed beyond the city limits. I kept watch behind us, expecting to see the headlights of Lockwood's truck closing in. They never appeared. By the time we reached the interstate and headed north, I had relaxed enough to peek into the garbage bag. There, on the very top, next to an old ketchup bottle and a greasy pizza box, were at least twenty Marlboro cigarette butts.
“We got him,” I said.
We had Lockwood's cigarette butts, his DNA, the last piece of an ever-changing puzzle. The DNA from one of those butts would match the DNA on Crystal Hagen's fingernail. Everything was coming together to prove that Daniel Lockwood—Danny Junior, DJ—was the man who killed Crystal Hagen all those years ago. It all fit.
As we drove north on Interstate 35, making for the Iowa-Minnesota border, we remained vigilant, exiting the interstate twice just to make sure no one was following us. We would wait and watch as the headlights passed us. Only then would we merge back onto the interstate. Soon we crossed into Minnesota, pulling over in Albert Lea to get some gas and food. We switched seats to give Lila a break from driving. As we pulled back onto the interstate, my cell phone rang with the theme from
Pirates of the Caribbean, the ringtone I had assigned to Jeremy's number. This was the first time that Jeremy had ever called me, other than when we were practicing. A shiver ran up my back.
“Hey, Buddy, what's up?” I answered.
There was no response. I could hear him breathing on the other end, so I spoke again.
“Jeremy, you okay?”
“Maybe do you remember what you told me to do?” Jeremy spoke with more than his normal hesitation.
“I remember,” I said, my voice dropping into a deep valley. “I told you to call me if anyone tries to hurt you.” I felt my hand grow tight around my phone. “Jeremy, what happened?”
He did not respond.
“Did someone hit you?” I asked.
Still no response.
“Was it Mom?”
Silence.
“Did Larry hit you?” I asked.
“Maybe…maybe Larry hit me.”
“God dammit!” I held the phone away from my mouth as I cursed through clenched teeth. “I'll kill that son of a bitch.” I took a deep breath and placed the phone back against my ear. “Now listen to me, Jeremy. I want you to go to your room and lock the door. Can you do that for me?”
“Maybe I can,” he said.
“Tell me when you've locked the door.”
“Maybe the door is locked now,” he said.
“Okay, now take the pillowcases off your pillows and fill them with your clothes. Can you do that for me?”
“Maybe I can,” he said.
“I'm on my way there now. You wait in your room until I get there. Okay?”
“Maybe you're coming from the college?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I'm almost there already. I'll be there in no time.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Pack your clothes.”
