Crazytown (The Darren Lockhart Mysteries) (3 page)

It was true. While on duty, Lockhart had seen methed-out parents put their baby in an oven thinking it would dry a wet diaper. He had seen kids shot by adults as punishment for spraying them with a squirt gun, all in broad daylight. He’d seen wives who’d been violently beaten and raped by their husbands. His duty required of him that he might have to see torture and malice worse than anything the Marquis de Sade could have fathomed and then go explain it to the next-of-kin.

Lockhart finished his habit of fiddling with his tie and moved his hands to his shirt cuffs. “Chief, I have no doubt that you want to find the killer, but for you, he is the person who killed a boy you know. It will make the investigation more difficult especially if we find out some things you never wanted to know, which is highly possible.”

“What kinds of things?” Donaldson finally stopped rubbing his swollen feet and ankles and began to put his sock back on.

“It was a murder, Chief Donaldson, so we must investigate each and every lead. To do that, we are going to have to go digging into people’s lives. If that means finding things out about the… wait, how many people are in the town? Did the sign say 642?”

Donaldson leaned back in his chair and raised his eyebrows. “Probably something like that.”

“It will be important for the actual investigation. How many people are there in this town, officially speaking?”

“Officially?” The chief looked nervous. “Officially, we’re not really sure. The census guy said over 700 a few years back, but he wasn’t sure of our town limits. Records would show about 640, but people come and go a lot around here. No real way to be sure at any given time how many people actually live here. Sometimes people just leave, and other times they just show up again.”

Lockhart rubbed the back of his neck in the hopes that it would help to relieve a little of the tension that was piling up. “Well, let’s say there are 642 people in the town. That means we have to get into 642 lives. Are you ready for that?”

The chief nodded as he tied his shoe with a frayed lace that was missing its aglet.

Lockhart took a seat across from him. “All I want is to find a killer and make sure he’s forgotten by history. Can you please let me see your current report? After that, I’ll need to have a look at the crime scene.”

chapter 3

Lockhart looked out the window of the cruiser with an almost childlike wonderment. Immediately outside of the Crayton city limits was a sea of green; forest enveloped the road on either side. The last time Lockhart had been in Minnesota, he had spent all of his time in north Minneapolis, a different sort of forest entirely. Here, there was nothing but rows and rows of trunks and branches, a woven maze of timber that immediately felt intimidating and confining, as if it knew secrets that it didn’t want to share with anyone. Lockhart’s comfort was in concrete, asphalt and steel. He felt defensive being in a place so foreign.

Out of the corner of his eye, Lockhart could see the chief turn to look him up and down. “Ever been to Minnesota?”

Lockhart kept looking out the window. “Yeah, about fifteen years ago.”

“Ever been up this far north?”

Lockhart was confused by the question. “No. Why do you ask?”

“You just have that look of awe that first-timers get up here. You strike me as the kind of guy who hasn’t had much occasion to venture into the woodlands very much.”

The chief had made a surprisingly astute observation, a far better one than Lockhart would have assumed he could. This gave the agent a bit of reassurance—at least more than he had when he’d first seen the elderly cop scarfing down bran flakes, staring at a no-news newspaper, and shoving his gout-puffed ankles into his dirty socks. “Well, my investigations tend to keep me working in larger cities.” Lockhart smiled. “The places where I work usually have regular police stations, not repurposed houses.”

The chief returned a you-got-me-there half-smile. “Yeah well, that house has been around a long time, even since before there was much of a town to speak of. So when stuff started getting built up around it and the owner was elected as the make-shift sheriff at the time, it just made sense to designate the place as the sheriff’s office. Course, the official sheriff for this county is up in International Falls, so my position got the puffed-up title of chief of police and the house was just handed down with the job.”

“Wait…you live there?”

The sheriff’s head tilted in disbelief, as if suggesting anything to the contrary would make absolutely no sense. “Why not? It just makes more sense so I’ll be there in case there’s an emergency.”

The sheriff was right; it made sense in a way Lockhart hadn’t expected. The fact was that Lockhart hadn’t had much of anything in the way of expectations for Crazytown, right from the moment it wouldn’t show up on his GPS, and his initial impressions were far from strong, but the chief seemed to be more than capable of controlling the town. Lockhart just wondered how well the old silverback could handle a homicide investigation. Little did he know that he was about to find out sooner rather than later.

Lockhart shifted in his seat. “Why did you leave the crime scene unsupervised? It was my understanding that the local agents left under the assurance that the scene would be maintained for my investigation.”

The chief nodded his head forward, and Lockhart saw dozens of cars and trucks lining the road. “You think anyone is going to interfere with a crime scene with all that protection?”

Among all the cars and pick-up trucks on the roadside was a news van from some Bemidji television station. There was no way to avoid the press, especially considering the severity and rarity of the crime in such an under-populated part of the state. Fortunately there was no reporter in sight; perhaps they were in the van or off filming a report, because what happened next was something Lockhart was glad wouldn’t appear on the ten-o’clock news or—God forbid—YouTube.

Lockhart’s eyes widened in horror, and he fumbled to unbuckle his seat belt. The car had barely slowed below twenty MPH before Lockhart was out the door and in a full sprint. A line of men and women stretched into the woods, all milling around, talking and sipping steaming drinks from travel mugs. Many had rifles slung over their shoulders, like some modern-day militia. At the sight of the sprinting Lockhart, a few made motions to their guns. He yanked out his badge and yelled, “Federal agent! Get the hell out of the way!” as he ran right past the horde.

Chief Donaldson followed behind in his car hollering out the window, “Damn it! Put those guns away or I’m gonna take them from you!”

Lockhart followed the trail of people about 100 yards into the woods and never once broke pace as he ducked and dodged to avoid the branches that reached out like demonic fingers, tearing at his body and face. He stopped hard and fast when he reached the area that was sectioned off with yellow police tape. By then, he was in a full sweat, causing his designer suit to stick to him in even the most personal of places. He had scratched his face on a branch, and there was sap all over his tailored suit. Mud caked his shoes and sloshed onto the hem of his pants, but for once, he didn’t care. He couldn’t think of anything other than the crime scene—or what used to be the crime scene.

All around the tape were signs of dozens of visits by amateur investigators. There were footprints in every conceivable pattern and shoe size, as well as broken branches everywhere. Within the tape were even more footprints, along with some cigarette butts. It was horrific, to say the least. Lockhart felt a strange mix of confusion and rage, so the sound of the approaching police chief was more of a target than a relief. Thus, Lockhart’s next words came out with heavy, billowing breaths, rendering them inaudible.

“What?” the chief asked.

“What did you do?”

“What are you talking about? We just sectioned off the area. The feds from Bemidji came in and took their samples, and we photographed the area. We’ve all seen TV, Agent. We know the routine.”

Lockhart turned to face Police Chief Donaldson. He chewed on his lip and forced himself to breathe slower, through his nose. “How many murderers or serial killers have you caught? You think this is television? That this will be wrapped up in under a day by some lab tech with a lot of black lights? This isn’t freaking CSI, and you don’t solve murders by taking advice from CBS!” Lockhart turned back to the taped-off scene and put his hand forward, delicately, as if he were afraid he might get a shock from the surrounding area. Then he turned to walk back to the car.

The chief called after him, “Hey, aren’t you even going to look at the scene?”

Without turning back, Lockhart responded, “What’s the point?”

chapter 4

Lockhart sat silently in the patrol car, chewing his lower lip, a habit he had picked up after quitting smoking years earlier. He sat there stewing for a long time as he waited for the police chief to talk with several of the people there. Each one, in turn, cast a less-than-subtle glance in Lockhart’s direction. His phone rang, and the number that appeared on the caller ID interrupted his mood. “Hi, mom,” he said, his voice gentle and even.

The first words out of her mouth were, “Your father hasn’t come home yet. I sent him out for milk over an hour ago.”

Lockhart took a deep breath. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’m sure he just got distracted. You know Dad. He probably stopped to watch a game.” Only once had Lockhart ever had the nerve to remind his mother that his father, her husband of thirty-four years, was dead and that she had Alzheimer’s. He had been on a stake-out and was impatient. Though she could never remember it, he could never forgive himself for the reaction it created. Given the alternative, lying had just become easier.

“Oh, of course,” her voice lightened to almost a sing-song twinkle. “I bet the Redskins are playing. Oh, that man and his sports.”

It made no difference that it was Tuesday. In his mother’s world, the one his hushed mouth had helped to create for her, it was always Sunday. His father was always out getting milk or eggs or sugar, and his mother was always waiting eagerly for him to return. Lockhart had taken some small solace in the fact that she was trapped in a time that he could deal with. In her mind he was fresh out of the academy, so he barely had time to talk. Likewise, his visits, as regular as he could make them, were always a welcomed surprise.

Since her grim diagnosis a year prior, her memory had seemed to dwindle down to a small window in time. It was hard for Lockhart to see her like that, always waiting in limbo for a husband who would never walk through her doorway again. Therefore, at least three times a week whenever he was in Washington DC, he visited her in the nursing home. They would talk for hours, rerunning the same conversations they’d had a hundred times. It was the only steady thing that Lockhart had in his life. Sometimes he wondered who really needed who more.

Eventually, Donaldson made a slow shuffle back and sat down behind the wheel, but when Lockhart didn’t move or say a thing he asked, “What did we do that was so wrong?”

The phone slowly turned around and around in Lockhart’s hands. He didn’t answer for several moments, and when he did, his words came out in quiet, monotone fashion. He snapped back from being a rookie agent with a proud mother to a special agent on a homicide investigation, with a mother who was slowly dying from a degenerative disease. “It’s a process for me—a very specific process. This is all I do. My job is to hunt down the worst people on American soil.”

Lockhart didn’t have time for a personal life. The things he saw on a regular basis were so violent that he had mandatory weekly counseling to assess his competence and his “capacity to deal with the mental hardships of the job,” as his therapist put it. It was also required that Lockhart have monthly drug screenings, forcing him to piss in front of another adult to verify that he was not trying to cheat. “Chief, I don’t go to city council meetings. I don’t file graffiti reports or bust kids for smoking dope. I hunt and catch killers. You don’t have to like me. You don’t even need to respect me, but you have to respect the job I am here to do.”

The chief sat there glaring at Lockhart, who continued to stare straight ahead. The agent couldn’t wrap his mind around how poorly the scene had been handled. A kid—presumably a good kid with a real future in front of him—had been brutally killed, and they let any yokel with a shotgun wander up and down to take a look.

“Take me to see the parents of the victim.”

“Um…” the Chief stuttered. “They just lost their son.”

“You know, I think we got off on the wrong foot.” Lockhart took a deep breath to calm himself. His scene was gone and he needed to get past that if he was going to be of any good to the investigation. “So, in an effort to expedite this all, I’ll play wet nurse for you one more time and one time only. Grieving people are terrible liars. Neighbors are scared, as scared as the guilty people. Scared people will tell you secrets about their friends and neighbors that they don’t tell God, all in the hopes of getting someone else arrested so they can feel safe again. And somewhere in those hundreds of useless pieces of information will be something that will reveal to us how or why that boy had to die. Now, if you want some motivation to get past your own hang-ups with my being here, I can clue you in on the penalty for interfering with a federal investigation. Otherwise, just drive.”

After that, they rode in silence, the chief’s white-knuckled, thick fingers locked firmly at two and ten o’clock. The man appeared tense and made no attempt at eye contact or further conversation. Lockhart took it for pouting and was content go the rest of the way without saying a word.

He did what he could to get the sap off his suit, but it mostly just smeared in sticky patches, and that only served to annoy him further. To distract himself from his annoyance and frustration, he pulled his phone and earphones out of his breast pocket. He scrolled through his music playlist until he found Pat Benatar’s 1982 album “Get Nervous”. By the time she was going to “Fight it Out,” the police cruiser pulled up to a gravel driveway. There was a mailbox at the head of the drive with the name “Weber” painted crudely in flaking and chipping white paint, revealing the gray, rusted metal beneath.

It wasn’t a farm, but they had a horse stable; a couple of equine were grazing in the pasture. Their tails lazily swatted at insects as the morning sun shone down on their massively muscled hides. Lockhart had only had one grizzly opportunity in the past to see horses up close and he was taken by their sheer size and mass. Nevertheless, they were beautiful, majestic animals that seemed to live their lives without care. While they were just a short distance away, their owners grieved an unimaginable pain that no one should ever have to endure.

Lockhart swung his car door open and stepped directly onto a putrid pile of brown mush, far too big to have been left by a dog. He swore under his breath and did his best to clean the bottom of his shoes by dragging them across the grass. For the remainder of the walk to the door, he kept his eyes down, on the lookout for more lawn mines that he had no desire to step in. The chief, on the other hand, seemed to have far more experience and side-stepped with a sixth sense, never taking his eyes off the door. Lockhart could only assume that the chief himself, or else the deputy that Lockhart had yet to meet, had broken the horrifying news to the parents.

Crayton Chief of Police John Donaldson’s shoulders were square, his chest puffed out at attention. For once, he looked official and poised, like a different man from their first encounter. However, as soon as the door opened, Lockhart could see him deflate slightly. His eyes falling on the tear-glazed face of the middle-aged woman before him brought the Vietnam veteran down a peg. He almost appeared to wince at the sight of her.

Lockhart could smell smoke as soon as the door opened and Mrs. Weber’s face showed the damage of decades of exposure. Her skin was dark from spending untold days in the sun, either at the garden or with her horses. She wore a plaid, sleeveless shirt, and her arms were long and wiry, touched with a bit of muscle. Her hair was auburn and desperately needed to be combed, though she had haphazardly pulled it back into a sloppy excuse for a ponytail. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. “Did you find who did it? Do you know who killed my boy?” Her voice sounded stern, far more powerful and authoritative than her tears would have suggested.

“Uh, no, ma’am…Mrs. Weber,” The Chief seemed to stammer out.

“John Donaldson, you’ve never once called me ‘ma’am’ or ‘Mrs.,’ so don’t you dare start now.”

“I’m sorry, Laura.” His eyes stayed averted to the ground.

“Don’t you be sorry. There’s too much of that around here as it is. Just find who killed my boy and make them pay.” She turned her attention to Lockhart. “Who’s this?”

Lockhart introduced himself. “Special Agent Darren Lockhart, FBI, ma’am.” He showed her his badge and identification.

Laura Weber didn’t look impressed. “Then you are going to find who killed my son?” she asked without missing a beat.

“I’m going to try.” Lockhart never promised success—not anymore.

“Well, don’t come back till you have.”

She started to close the door, but Lockhart put his palm firmly against it.

Mrs. Weber looked at his hand, then the chief, as if Lockhart had just tried to accost her.

“Mrs. Weber,” Lockhart continued, “to find your son’s killer I need to ask you a few questions.” It was a difficult part of the job. Lockhart knew how hard it was for anyone to talk under such traumatic circumstances, but he had already lost his crime scene, and he needed to get whatever answers he could as soon as possible, before anything ran cold in anyone’s mind. Crimes were seldom solved in twenty-four hours, but the evidence and information gathered in that time, while all the wounds were still fresh, was what would eventually solve them. More so, whether they knew it or not, the parents were default suspects whenever a child was killed or found dead.

Laura Weber acquiesced, stepped backward, and motioned the two men into the house. Inside was a modest home, if not a poor one. The cheap wood paneling on the exterior was cracked and flaking from enduring snow and rainstorms for who-knew-how-long, and the interior didn’t fare much better. Most of the furniture looked like it had been purchased secondhand, perhaps from a thrift store or garage sale or maybe even picked up off the side of the road. All of the wooden surfaces, genuine or faux, were scratched with deep grooves and clouded with streaks and dust. The couch where two twin boys sat, around eight years old, was covered with stains and cigarette burns. Second-hand smoke hung like a gray blanket around the ceiling. The two boys wore matching crew-cuts and tank-tops. They had large, almond eyes like their mother. There were several family pictures on the walls; six people dressed in their Sunday best: the parents, the twins, Michael, and their daughter, who looked to be around twenty-five. All the children had the same almond eyes as their mother.

Lockhart scanned the room further and discovered that the carpet was thick brown shag, even more outdated than his taste in music, matted down in several spots, probably from furniture that had rested there too long without being moved for vacuuming. There were a few religious pictures and crucifixes hung here and there, as well as something he had seen in far too many impoverished homes: a big-screen HDTV sitting right in the middle of the destitution.

The twins had their almond eyes glued to a cartoon that Lockhart didn’t recognize. In an overstuffed recliner, slightly tilted, sat the man Lockhart correctly presumed to be Laura’s husband. Michael Weber Sr. was around forty-five years old, and he was sitting there as if he was in no mood to put any effort into anything. He wore a soiled green John Deere shirt, and his long, stringy brown hair lay flat on his head. A full beard covered his mouth. He had the hard, resentful look of a man who hadn’t been blessed with the life expected. Lockhart was not thrilled by this, especially when combined with the religious decorations on the walls; bitterness and religion did not make for easy interviews.

“Mr. Weber?” Lockhart asked.

Weber nodded, but he didn’t bother standing to greet him.

Lockhart showed his badge again. “Special Agent Lockhart, FBI.”

“Yeah, I heard.” His tone did nothing to instill confidence in Lockhart. Poverty and trust in government officials rarely made good bedfellows, and he was instantly sure this was no exception. “What do the feds want with the bastard who killed my boy?”

The twins turned and looked at their father, then to Lockhart, as if echoing their father’s demand for an answer.

“Boys,” Laura interrupted, “why don’t you go play in your room while we talk to Chief Donaldson and his friend?”

“But, Mom…” the two whined in unison.

Lockhart knelt down near the couch. “Hi, guys. My name is Darren. I need to talk to your parents about a few things in private, if it’s okay with you—but only if it’s okay with you, because I can see you are both big, strong boys, way tougher than I ever was. Good thing your shirts don’t have sleeves. With all those muscles, your arms probably wouldn’t fit!”

The two boys smiled, nearly blushing.

Lockhart looked up at Laura. “I mean, what do you feed these boys? Bet they could bend metal bars.” He looked back at the boys and they flexed their still-undeveloped arms, and then willingly disappeared from the room with a shared giggle.

“You have good-looking boys, Mr. and Mrs. Weber,” Lockhart complimented.

“You didn’t answer my question,” said Michael Sr.

“Your son was killed in a federal forest, sir, meaning that the crime occurred in an FBI jurisdiction. I’m here to head the investigation into your son’s murder.”

“I watch TV. Where’s your partner,” Michael Sr. pried.

Lockhart resisted the desire to roll his eyes. “I don’t have a partner, Mr. Weber.”

“Why not? You one of those renegade agents, makin’ your own rules and breakin’ everyone else’s?” His tone was thick with sarcasm.

Lockhart felt no desire to continue down the road with him. “Mr. Weber, have you or your family received any threats or noticed anyone suspicious?”