The Life We Bury (22 page)

Dan Lockwood lived in the older, blue-collar section of Mason City, Iowa, a block north of the railroad tracks in a house that blended in with every other house on the street. We drove past it twice, double-checking the house number with what we found on the Internet. After the second pass, we drove through the alley behind his house, bouncing over potholes, dodging snow drifts, and looking for signs of life. We saw a garbage can overflowing with white trash bags standing guard next to the back door of the house. We also saw that someone had shoveled a path through the knee-deep snow connecting the house to the alley. We made a mental note and continued on for a few blocks to park and go over our plan one last time.

We had stopped at Walmart on the drive down and picked up a paternity test kit, which had three cotton swabs, a specimen envelope, and instructions on how to scrape skin cells from the inside of the cheek. Lila had the kit in her purse. We decided to be straightforward. We would go to Dan's house, ask him about any male relatives alive back in 1980, and then ask him to let us swab his cheek. If that failed, we would go to plan B—follow him around until he spit out his gum or something like that.

“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 bastard, 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.”