Crazytown (The Darren Lockhart Mysteries) (10 page)

Chapter 19

At ten a.m., the streets of Crayton were empty. Closed signs hung in all the windows, and there wasn’t any movement other than leaves and the occasional squirrel. Every person in the town was crowded into the gymnasium of the Crayton K-12 School.

It became quickly apparent that space would be at a premium as people crammed against collapsed bleachers. Banners and posters crumpled and tore against the constant fidgeting of bodies. The deputy had the good idea to extend the bleachers so people would have a chance to see over one another instead of the constant shove and the occasional hop from people in the back rows, demanding to see regardless of their tardiness.

As Special Agent Lockhart sat at the table, what unraveled in front of his eyes could only be summed up with one word: debacle. The chief had been right to warn the agent that the whole thing would be a mess. People shouted at Donaldson, they shouted at Lockhart, and they shouted at each other. They were a self-consuming fire that Lockhart hoped would exhaust itself sooner rather than later. To their credit, the chief and deputy tried their best to keep things brief.

Each person tried to talk over the voice of the person next to them. Their family’s safety was important. It was a simple statement that was met with malice, as it was taken that people thought their family’s safety was more important than anyone else’s. It went on and on like that. Picking out one voice was like deciphering what was being said at a Pentecostal church. The noise didn’t even sound English, but a jumble of slang, cursing and veiled threats, spoken in angry tones and hurried remarks.

The chief did his best to maintain the meeting and quiet the crowd to somewhere between a dull roar and an annoyed murmur. Eventually, they were all able to establish that they couldn’t force adults to adhere to a curfew without making people feel like they were being treated as suspects. However, it was agreed upon that anyone under the age of eighteen was not to be seen out in public, in the streets or the woods, after sundown. It was emphasized that the carrying of weapons, even with permits, was not recommended, and any lapse in judgment resulting in injury or death would be met with severe punishment. Fear was no excuse, though it would most likely be the defense of anyone breaking the rules.

Over two hours of primarily shouting later, Lockhart, Donaldson, and Lind stood outside the school, keeping an eye out for anyone who might still be agitated and riled up after the meeting.

“That went well,” Lockhart said sarcastically as he enviously watched Freddie light a cigarette.

“Actually, I thought it did. You haven’t been to a lot of small towns, have you?” Donaldson asked.

“Does Nashville count as a small town?” asked Lockhart.

Donaldson laughed and started to walk down the parking lot back to his cruiser. “People here will get mad over just about anything. Two things we have plenty of around here are ammo and opinions. The American Way, right?” He chuckled. “People seem mad, but at least it wasn’t violent. They got some answers. It’s all we could do.”

“I suppose you’re right, Chief,” Lockhart conceded.

The three men drove back to the police station. Lockhart looked at his watch and exited the cruiser, heading straight to his rental car.

“Where are you off to now?” Chief Donaldson asked.

“Duluth. I need to follow up with the college classes Mikey took.”

“What’s the connection there?” Deputy Lind asked.

“Technology. You wouldn’t believe what kids share over the Internet. I have a tech waiting to look into his online accounts. I’m going to talk with the professor whose classes Mikey was auditing. I need you and the deputy to talk to his friends…and go together. See if he had been acting strangely or talking to anyone online.”

“You want us to find out if a teenager was acting strange?” the chief asked with a cock-eyed smile.

Lockhart shrugged. “Do your best. I’ll be back later tonight.”

Chapter 20

The trip back to Duluth was far shorter than his first trip, the one from Duluth to Crayton. Lockhart took the opportunity to call into his director for a status report. There wasn’t much to report, though the coroner and agents from the Bemidji agency had sent in the information from the autopsy and bar fight video; his superior didn’t seem concerned. Lockhart had been pulled off of investigations after just days when there were no results. There was always something more important, something more high profile that needed immediate concern. Prior to being assigned to Crayton, Lockhart had been working leads on a new series of murders involving children being abducted by a suspect known only as The Taker. Since the reports had turned nothing up, Lockhart suspected he would be reassigned to continue his previous investigation.

But he was wrong.

“Do you have any preliminary suspects?” Assistant Director Chalmers asked.

“The main suspects have to be the parents, sir. Standard procedure dictates to investigate the immediate family, particularly in the case of a younger victim. Neither parent seems to be particularly motivated to assist with the investigation.”

“I see. Anyone else?”

Lockhart went through his mental notes. “Off the record, sir?”

“Off the record?” Chalmers repeated. “If you don’t see fit to include it in your report, then so be it.”

“The deputy, Fredrick Lind.”

“Why’s that?”

Lockhart’s face tightened at the thought of Lind. “I don’t know, sir. It’s just a feeling. He has a temper and a direct relation to the family. He’s engaged to the Weber daughter, the victim’s older sister. He seems quite defensive regarding his fiancée.”

There was silence on the other end of the line and Lockhart spent the next several minutes explaining why he allowed someone with a relation to the family to continue to take part in the investigation. Director Chalmers seemed apprehensive, but he left it to Lockhart’s discretion. In the end, Lockhart was instructed simply to proceed as normal.

The conversation left Lockhart disconcerted. He wasn’t sure if the directive was suggestive of his current importance—or lack thereof—to the department or if there was something more to the investigation than they were letting on. Perhaps there were those within the Bureau who were starting to buy into his Jack the Shooter theory.

When Lockhart drove over the hill into Duluth from the woods, it was as if the city appeared out of thin air. There it was, nestled in front of a backdrop of a sea-sized lake. Lake Superior, true to its name, wasn’t just on the horizon; it was the horizon. It filled the agent’s field of view in all its panoramic glory and still it was easy to forget exactly how big it was. Somewhere around 10 percent of the all the freshwater in the world was right there in front of him. It was an impressive sight, even for someone who had spent extensive periods of time on the East and West Coasts. There, as far as the eye could see, an endless field of blue.

In fact, Duluth basically existed because of Lake Superior. It was a city built on a port, and it survived by playing temporary home to college students and haven to a bevy of tourists.

The UMD campus sat about halfway down the hill to the lake, toward the north end of Duluth which, for some reason that Lockhart couldn’t figure out, people kept referring to as “East Duluth.”

Lockhart had a bit of difficulty finding available parking around the campus and was ten minutes late for his meeting with Mikey’s physics teacher, Professor Hubert Mendez. By the time he found Professor Mendez’s office amongst what turned out to be something of a maze of inter-connected buildings and hallways, Mendez was packing papers into a shoulder bag. Lockhart knocked on the frame of the open office door. “I apologize for my tardiness, Professor. I didn’t take a lack of available parking into account when I left this morning.”

Professor Mendez looked over the top of his glasses at Lockhart as he brushed strands of hair from his forehead to the side of his already awful comb-over. He was a short man, but he didn’t carry himself like a man bothered by his stature or lack thereof; had the look of a man that knew exactly how smart he was. There was smugness about him, the culmination of self-confidence and insecurity. He wanted people to think he was as sure of himself as he thought he was, and it was plain to see simply by the nearly OCD way in which he was packing his bag that he was the type of man that rarely accepted anything short of precision. “I’m on my way to a class. You can talk as we walk,” he said, not interested in Lockhart’s parking excuse.

The professor walked at something of a fast shuffle and remained two steps ahead of Lockhart as they made their way down the twisting hallways that seem to continually shift from old to new architecture. The school itself had grown stages at a time as the class sizes increased. It was obvious that even the hard blows the North Woods economy had taken due to the decrease in iron ore production made no impact on how many students wanted to attend school in Minnesota’s port city.

“I really must be going, Mr. Lockhart. I have a class.”

Lockhart skipped to catch up and hear what the professor was saying as his voice was largely lost in the click-clack of his perfectly shined shoes on the stone tile floor and the constant murmur of traveling students. “Professor Mendez, I need to talk to you about a student who was taking one of your online classes, Michael Weber Jr.”

“So I heard from whomever it was that called to make this appointment you were late for,” the professor huffed, though he did not bother to turn his head as he said it. “I have an Advanced Physics class to teach, and I…wait, did you say was taking one of my classes?”

“Yes, Professor. Michael Weber is dead.”

Mendez immediately stopped and turned. “What?”

“He was killed three days ago. I’m a bit surprised you haven’t heard of this on the news or at least from someone at the school.”

The professor stuttered to answer, “Uh, well, I…I don’t really have much interest in current affairs. I have a great deal of work to do between my classes and own research grants.”

“No one in your department heard about this? No one has said anything?” Lockhart asked, doing his best to sound skeptical.

“Michael was just auditing the classes. He wasn’t on our official class lists. Also, we are only a couple of weeks into the semester. I can’t imagine anyone would have drawn the connection.” Professor Mendez took a few steps over to the brick hallway wall and leaned his back against it. He let his bag fall from his shoulder to the floor. “My God,” he said to the floor. “Why?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out, Professor. I’m hoping you can help me.”

The professor’s gaze remained fixed on the ground. “I don’t understand. I never met Michael Weber, so why talk to me?”

“Have you ever met Michael Weber’s parents?”

The professor let out a long breath and told Lockhart he had met the Webers the previous January, at their insistence, right after Mikey had enrolled to audit the class. They had demanded (their word for it) the chance to speak with him before letting Mikey sign up for the classes, even though he would be taking them over the Internet and would never actually set foot on the Duluth campus. Mendez recalled that the mother had seemed pleasant enough, but the father seemed to take everything out of context. “Not only did he seem completely against the classes, but the man seems a bit arrogant, as if he knows even more than me or the rest of the faculty here. It was absurd. He kept trying to spout information he had heard from one place or another to make it seem like he had some grasp on Physics. He had none. If anything, it made him look less intelligent and far more boorish.” Mendez also vaguely recalled Lisa Weber’s name from an intro class, but he couldn’t place her face. He speculated her parents had probably mentioned her name during their conversation. He wrapped up his quick-winded speech by making sure Lockhart knew that he had never personally met Mikey.

“That’s fine, Professor, but is there anything you can tell me about Michael Weber as a student?”

Mendez smiled for a brief moment, the first time since Lockhart had met him. “For extra credit on a test last week, I asked questions such as why theories like cold fusion and time travel are impossible. Well, Michael argued they are possible. His assumptions are wrong, of course, but Michael was adamant and wrote me several e-mails to that effect, though he never actually provided me with any sort of equation or empirical proof to support such outlandish claims.”

Lockhart wrinkled his nose in confusion. “Humor me, Doctor. Why are cold fusion and time travel impossible?”

Professor Mendez stood up straight again and looked at his watch. He picked up his bag again and resumed walking. “Simply speaking, cold fusion is fusion that can happen at room temperature, the primary issue being the repulsion of like-particles. The reason fusion is hot in the first place is because fusion reactions don't happen unless there is enough kinetic energy to get the protons close enough to fuse.”

Lockhart didn’t really follow but seemed to remember things like that in movies he had seen so he moved on. “And time travel?”

The professor laughed out a strange, snickering sound. “Well, it makes for good movies, I suppose. However, it’s been disproven by some of the most advanced minds in the world, even recently.”

“How so?”

“Recent research indicates that a single proton cannot move faster than the speed of light. Therefore, time travel cannot be possible. The theory being that if faster than-light travel is possible, special relativity theory suggests that there would be some inertial frame of reference in which a signal or mass would be moving back in time.”

“Okay,” Lockhart said, barely keeping up. “In that case, how did Mikey think that he would be able to do any of that?”

“That’s the strange thing. Michael never really had an answer. The young man had a unique mind. When we teach students math and science, we teach them A to B to C. We expect them to show us how they got to the answer, and that showing their work is just as important as the answer itself.”

“And how was Michael different?”

“Well, Michael’s grades in algebra made it easy for people to assume that he was just an average student at best. However, if you look at his actual tests, he always got the right answer. It was simply as if he didn’t really care about how he got there.”

Lockhart jotted notes down as he struggled to keep up with the professor. It was such a strange shuffle that Lockhart would have felt more comfortable just jogging along. “You mentioned his ‘average’ grades, Professor. How did he come to audit college-level classes if he wasn’t a standout student?”

Mendez slowed for just the briefest of moments and flashed a smile over his shoulder. “Actually, that was a bit of fate, if you will pardon my use of an abhorrent term. The science teacher at his school was my doctoral advisor.”

“One of your old professors teaches K-12 sciences in Crayton?”

Professor Mendez nodded. “Yes. His name is Dr. Walter Heath—quite a brilliant man, really, but something of an anomaly in the field as well. He enjoys asking questions more than getting answers. This makes him an excellent teacher, but not exactly the type desired amongst the faculty of major universities.”

Lockhart knew—from friends that had taught—that college professors, particularly at the state and private universities, were expected to devote a large amount of their time to research. He had once heard that less than 20 percent of a college professor’s time involved teaching classes and holding office hours. “So,” Lockhart said as Professor Mendez finally started to slow his pace, “Dr. Heath recommended Mikey for the classes?”

“That’s right,” Mendez said as he stopped at a lecture hall doorway and finally turned to face his visitor. “Now, I’m very sorry, but I have to a class to teach. Please feel free to contact me any time, outside of class hours of course. You can get my information from the department secretary. I am sorry about Michael, and I am happy to help in any way I can.”

Lockhart shook Mendez’s hand and thanked him for his time as they parted company. He hung around a few minutes outside of the lecture hall and listened in on the class, trying to get an idea of what sort of classes Mikey was a part of. Within a few minutes, he realized that teenager or not, the boy was studying things that were vastly beyond his own understanding. Besides, he needed to get back to Crayton. Dr. Heath would need to be questioned.