Crazytown (The Darren Lockhart Mysteries) (13 page)

Chapter 25

On the sixth day of the investigation, Lockhart was in the main office of the Bemidji agency, eating Chinese take-out for dinner while he went over background checks with the other agents. As eager as he was to put the case to rest, Lockhart was far more interested in the beef and broccoli he was eating and Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok” that played on his headphones as in the files that sat before him. He had, however, spent the better part of the day going over Chief Donaldson’s past with some interest.

As the Chief had said, he had done two tours in Vietnam: two years with the U.S. Army and then back home to Crayton. He married not long after returning and remained with her for almost thirty years until she passed away from a stroke at the age of forty-nine. He had worked part-time for the Crayton, Black Duck, and Northhome police forces until his promotion to Crayton police chief in 1990. There was nothing in his past to suggest that he would have been involved in the death of Mikey Weber.

Lockhart tapped his chopsticks against the front of his teeth as he thought. The chief had been absent-minded enough to allow the crime scene to be soiled. He hadn’t been particularly forthcoming with information and was defensive about the initial line of questioning Lockhart had started down when he’d first arrived in Crayton. And there was something more. At the Weber house, when he’d spoken with Mrs. Weber in hushed tones like he had, there was something that Lockhart couldn’t quite put his finger on. He hated that feeling.

Just then, the coroner came in. “Ask and ye shall receive,” he said, holding a file folder aloft. He handed the file folder to Lockhart, who slowly removed his earplugs and finished chewing his mouthful of food before he opened the file containing the results of the toxicology report.

“Alcohol?” Lockhart asked as he scanned the report. “Mikey was drinking?”

The coroner nodded. “We didn’t think to test him when he first came in, given his age, but the results are official. We even got the brand.”

Lockhart’s mind flashed to the Weber’s living room. Black Bear Whiskey.

In an instant, Lockhart was out of his chair. He shouted instructions to the agents in tow. He called the two men that made up Crayton’s paid law enforcement community and told them to be ready to go out to the Weber house. “Make sure you’re armed, but wait until I get there before you breach.” He instructed the other agents to have a high-risk entry team ready on standby, just in case.

There was only a trace of alcohol in Mikey’s system, but it was enough to pull his father in for more questions. Lockhart couldn’t help but think of his own father, who gave him a shot before he talked about Vietnam. Did Michael Weber give his son a drink of Black Bear before killing him? Lockhart wouldn’t put it past him. He also wouldn’t risk what might happen if they came across an intoxicated man who owned several rifles, especially if that man felt backed into a corner.

Lockhart asked Agent Her make the drive to the Weber house as he rode shotgun—literally. For the duration of the drive, Lockhart loaded and unloaded the bullets from his extra magazines. He was antsy and mad and needed something to occupy his mind and hands. There was something Lockhart had missed about Weber and it pissed him off. The man had been completely disinterested in cooperating with the investigation, but Lockhart had dismissed it as Mr. Weber just being a prick and hadn’t pegged that as a sign of guilt. The scene just didn’t match up with Weber as the killer. It wasn’t the first time Lockhart’s instincts were wrong, but it felt more personal this time.

It was dark by the time the car containing Lockhart and the three other agents crept up to the Weber driveway. The chief and deputy rode in their own car close behind. Behind the police car was a tactical van carrying a squad of high-risk entry officers from Bemidji, dressed in full tactical gear and bearing automatic weapons, just in case Weber did something ill-advised.

Only a sliver of silver hung in the air. There were no streetlights and only a couple of lights were on in the house. Lockhart went back to the tactical van and told them to position themselves to cover the sides and back of the house and be sure to wear their night-vision goggles. The woods were far too immense and dense for a foot chase.

Lockhart wanted it all to be easy: to walk up to the front door, ask Weber to leave, and take him to the station for questioning. That was what he wanted, but it was not what he actually expected to happen. Again, Lockhart took out his gun, checked the clip, replaced it, racked the slide to put a bullet into the chamber, and turned off the safety. He didn’t want to provoke Weber, but he remembered what the chief had said about the armaments of the local population and a background check revealed four rifles and two handguns registered in the man’s personal arsenal. None of the handguns matched the caliber of the murder weapon, but that wasn’t to say he didn’t have more.

Lockhart took a deep breath. The chill of the night air made the skin on his face feel tight. The moment Lockhart took a step toward the house from the car, it happened.

The Weber house burst into flames.

Chapter 26

Lockhart ran with purpose. His eyes searched the house through the flames that danced and leapt from the windows, licking at the sky. He shouted for the tactical team to check in on their radios: none of them had been injured in the initial blast. He ordered them to get the horses clear of the house and check if anyone could be seen inside.

Through the smoke, a figure appeared, exiting the front door just in time before the fire closed off the doorway completely. It was Mrs. Weber. She coughed horrible, rasping coughs as she collapsed on the front lawn.

Agent Her swept the woman up in a fireman’s carry across his shoulders and carried her a safe distance from the house.

She kept trying to speak, to no avail, so Agent Her spoke for her instead. “Is anyone still inside?”

She nodded.

“How many?”

She held up three trembling fingers.

“Jesus,” Lockhart said, and before anyone could stop him, he’d circled around the house to the back patio. There were flames by the door, but Lockhart didn’t hesitate. Paying the risk no attention, he ran up to the rusted, stained patio furniture and grabbed a chair with both hands. In one fluid motion he spun with the chair in his hands and launched it like an Olympic hammer toss. The chair crashed through the sliding glass door, and he dove into the blaze.

Immediately, Lockhart’s senses were overloaded. His skin and eyes hurt from the heat and smoke. His nose and mouth filled with the soot and thick black smoke that floated around the room. The shifting fire roared in different corners of the house, and he had trouble determining what he saw through the slits of his eyes. The ominous cracking and splitting of wood made it sound like the house would collapse at any moment. He almost couldn’t hear the muffled cries of the twins in the room next door.

Lockhart held his hands in front of his face, an attempted reprieve from the intense heat. Adrenaline carried him forward, and he kicked in a door when he heard voices coming from behind it. It was stupid and could have gotten him killed if there had been a backdraft, but he couldn’t stop himself. There, in the room, were the twins, curled up together in the middle of the floor, hugging each other as if they were in the arctic cold, trying to protect each other from the death that that threatened to claim them.

Special Agent Darren Lockhart scooped the boys up without a thought, his muscles tensed and pressed beyond their known limits by the fear that surrounded him. He pushed through the fire as he cradled the boys against his body and hit the open air with a cold shock. Two tactical officers appeared from the darkness like two angels clad in black and took the boys from Lockhart’s exhausted arms. Lockhart followed them to the end of the driveway less than a minute before the roof collapsed.

Sirens howled like beacons in the night. A fire engine arrived, but due to the relatively remote location, there was little they could do to put the fire out. The firefighters jumped to action with Pulaski’s in hand, a combination of an ax and a hoe used to clear a large path in a big circle around the house so the blaze could be contained. The problem was that there was a propane tank on the property that provided the gas to the house. The risk of an explosion was too high to hope that the inferno could be successfully contained, so the fire crew had to call in for air support in the extinguishing efforts. Though, it would take several minutes for the helicopter to arrive.

Lockhart waited on the back of the fire engine and breathed deeply from an oxygen tank. His eyes were raw and swollen from the smoke and fire. His chest hurt from smoke inhalation, and he was covered in a coat of black soot. The twins had been taken by emergency services to the county hospital for evaluation with their mother. Before they left with an escort from Chief Donaldson, who would also keep an eye on her for suspicion of aiding and abetting, Mrs. Weber told the agents that Mr. Weber was still inside the house when the fire started. There was no way to know if he was still inside or if he had run off.

Lockhart heard a firefighter’s radio crackle to life and announce that the helicopter was a minute away. Then, out of the corner of his eyes, he saw something moving out in the forest. His face still burned, and he had trouble focusing his eyes, but there was definitely a shape in the tree line. Lockhart pushed the mask away from his face and took a few steps toward the woods, but the figure moved away. When Lockhart got to where the figure had been, he saw no one.

Agent Her yelled for him to clear the area as the incoming helicopter was about to drop its load of extinguisher.

Lockhart looked up and heard the whoop-whoop-whoop of helicopter blades grow louder. As he turned to avert his eyes, he saw that there were two foot prints in the mud with the toes facing his own. The footprints were perfectly smooth, as if the shoes had no tread at all.

Lockhart ran from the area and yelled as well as he could for the fire department to call off the helicopter, but no one listened. Suddenly, where there had only been a fire surrounded by a backdrop of green, there was only pink illuminated by the sliver moon. The house, trees, and whatever prints had been there, were covered in what the fire service called “sky Jell-O,” chemicals that very effectively snuffed out the fire that used to be the Weber house—not to mention Lockhart’s newest evidence.

Chapter 27

Lockhart stayed on the scene as firefighters made sure the fire was fully extinguished and that there was no gas leak. He helped them scour through the cotton-candy rubble by the light of portable construction lights. Over a dozen men walked gingerly over what were the burnt remains that crunched only slightly, like damp potato chips under their feet. The wet smell of burnt wood filled every fiber of cloth and every pore of skin.

By the time the sun began to rise, most of the searchers had gathered around the coffee urns that had been fetched by the deputy. The site itself still radiated warmth, but exhaustion was inevitable and particularly dangerous; anywhere a foot was placed, there was risk of stepping into a pit.

Lockhart walked through the woods, a cup of steaming coffee in hand and his eyes on the ground. There was no sugar or cream available for his coffee, and even its black bitterness couldn’t overpower the churning left in the pit of his stomach.

The ground was covered in pink Jell-O and a trail of footprints that made the property look like the entrance to Candyland. His prints were the only ones close to the forest, and the rest remained nearer to the confines of the property. There were no prints where he had once stood before the fire was put out in one giant pink blanket.

From over his shoulder, he heard a shout. Firefighters crowded around a pile of pink and black debris. Agent Lockhart walked up and saw a body coiled amongst the ashes. The skin had started to flake off like chipping paint, and the arms and legs were curled into a fetal position, the common fate of a burnt body. There was no official way to identify the body without dental records, but Lockhart knew it was the body of Michael Weber Sr.

The corpse was lifted into a black coroner’s bag, and the finality of the sound of the zipper being pulled closed resonated within Lockhart. He stood there and watched the scene investigator van disappear down the road.

The chief sidled up to Lockhart. “So, that mean the case is closed?”

The fire chief said they found some fertilizer residue, evidence of a homemade bomb. Weber had done a tour in Desert Storm, where he likely picked up the know-how to make an explosive device. There were certainly plenty of excuses for him to own manure, so such a purchase wouldn’t set off any alarms.

“What do you think?” the police chief continued. “He gets scared that we are getting too close to him, so he decides to take himself and his whole family out, like one of those religious fanatics?”

Lockhart shrugged. He had no real answers, and as much as it frustrated him, none of his investigation had yielded solid results. The only evidence that pointed to a specific suspect was now worthless, since that suspect was nothing more than a chunk of charcoal. The death would probably be ruled a suicide, though suicide by bomb inside one’s house was usually reserved for warzones.

He left Agent Her in charge of the scene and went back to the bed-and-breakfast. The house was empty when he walked inside, which served Lockhart well. As much as he liked Joy and Jill, he didn’t want to feel happy. He wanted to call in his preliminary report and go home. He wanted to forget everything about the investigation, Jack the Shooter (if he ever existed), and Crayton—Crazytown—Minnesota.

Lockhart was lying down when he phoned his report in to Director Chalmers. While he heard himself spitting the report to Chalmers, Lockhart felt ridiculous. He knew that the whole thing had been a colossal waste of time.

“Well,” the director said, his tone flat and even-tempered, “what’s your next course of action?”

Lockhart was confused. “Actually, sir, I planned on catching the next flight back to D.C.”

Silence.

“Why don’t you stay there for a couple of days, Special Agent Lockhart? Take a little time off. I know it has been a while since you’ve taken a vacation.”

Time off? In Crayton? “All due respect, sir, I’d like to get back to the office.”

Another gut-tightening pause.

“Agent, you’ve had an impressive career…”

Lockhart felt a wave of ice-cold needles roll across his skin at the word “had”.

“You have been on some intense investigations over the last few years, and it is the recommendation of your therapist that you take some time off.”

“Well, sir, with all due respect to the shrink, I—”

The director cut him off. “I agreed with his assessment, Special Agent Lockhart. Take some time. Relax. Go fishing. After you’ve had a few days off, we will evaluate what the next step in your career will be. Until then, I am turning the official investigation over to Agent Her of the Bemidji office. It seems he is more than capable of finishing up the investigation for you.”

Click.

The line went dead, along with a part of Lockhart. He had been flagged during his latest evaluation, and they had cause to pull him from active duty. He was sure they’d had their suspicions all along, but clearly they had not received the report until recently, or else he never would have been assigned as the lead investigator on a homicide. It was shameful, and if anything had gone to court, even a public defender could have had a field day with him.

His higher-ups had waited to see if he would mess up and give them reason to pull him from the field. That mess-up came in the form of a report that read like bad airplane literature, with more holes in it than facts: no motive, no witnesses, no hard evidence and an agent with a theory likened to Jack the Ripper. His career in the field was over, if not his career as an FBI agent altogether.

And, to top it all off, he was in Crayton fucking Minnesota.