The Life We Bury (18 page)

I watched over him as he slept, and I wondered how many more days he had left—how many more hours. I wondered how much time I had left to do what I needed to do.

When I got home, I pulled Max Rupert's card out of my wallet, the one with Professor Boady Sanden's name on it, and placed a call. Professor Sanden sounded nice on the phone and made time to see me the next day at 4:00. My last class on that Tuesday was economics, and I didn't get out until 3:30. If I had known that the lecture that day would be verbatim from the textbook, I would have skipped class and gotten to Hamline University sooner. By the time the bus dropped me off in St. Paul, I had nine blocks to go and only six minutes to get there. I ran the first seven blocks and walked the last two with my coat open, letting the cold winter breeze evaporate my sweat. I arrived at Professor Sanden's door exactly on time.

I expected the law professor to be old, with receding gray hair, a bowtie, and wearing a camel's-hair jacket, but Professor Sanden met me at the door to his office in carpenter-blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and loafers. He sported a thin beard, had a touch of gray in the temples of his otherwise brown hair, and shook my hand with the grip of a construction worker.

I had brought the folder of materials with me—the one that I'd shown to Detective Rupert. Professor Sanden cleared a space on his cluttered desk and offered me a cup of coffee. I liked him right off. I didn't tell Professor Sanden that Carl had been paroled from prison, remembering how that information stunted Max Rupert's enthusiasm. I didn't want Professor Sanden dismissing my argument simply because Carl was no longer in prison. I started my presentation with the photos of Lockwood's window. “Interesting,” he said.

“It gets better,” I said, pulling the diary pages out of the file, laying them out in front of him, leading him through the progression of
diary entries, explaining how the prosecutor used them to paint a false picture and convict Carl Iverson. Then I showed him the deciphered entries, with the name of the killer spelled out. He cocked his head and smiled as he read about DJ.

“DJ: Douglas Joseph. That makes sense,” he said. “How did you figure out the code?”

“My autistic brother,” I said.

“Savant?” Professor Sanden asked.

“No,” I said. “Just lucky. Crystal Hagen had a typing class that fall and she based her code on that sentence…you know, the one that has every letter of the alphabet in it.”

Professor Sanden rolled back through his memory. “Something about a lazy dog, right?”

“That's the one,” I said. “That was her code: her enigma machine. Once we discovered the key to the code, the answer appeared in black and white. The way we figure it, Doug got Danny to go along with the lie about them being at the dealership. Danny hated his stepmom, and we know that the marriage was rocky. Maybe Doug told Danny that he was covering for something else.”

“Like what?” Sanden asked.

“According to Andrew Fisher, Crystal's boyfriend at the time, Mr. Lockwood used to go to strip clubs behind his wife's back,” I said. “Maybe Doug got Danny to go along with the lie because Danny thought he was protecting his dad from getting in trouble for something like that. Besides, no one suspected Doug. The police locked on to Carl Iverson right away. Everyone thought Carl did it.”

“It makes sense that it was the stepfather,” he said.

“Why's that?”

“He was close to her—in the same house. They're not related by blood, so he can justify his impulses toward her. He used the secret that he discovered to gain power and control over his victim. One of the keys to being a successful pedophile is to isolate the victim, make her feel like she can't tell anyone. Get her to believe that it'll destroy her and her family, that everyone will blame her. That's what he was doing.
He starts with the glasses, using the threat of that crime to get leverage over her, to get her to touch him. Then he has her do more, crossing each new boundary with small steps. The sad thing here is that Crystal's salvation, her learning that she could turn the tables on her stepfather, ensured her death. There was no way he would let her have that kind of power.”

“So how do we get this guy?” I asked.

“Were there any bodily fluids in evidence? Blood, saliva, semen?”

“The medical examiner testified that she was raped; they found traces of semen inside her.”

“If they still have the sample in evidence, we might be able to get DNA. The only problem is: this was thirty years ago. They didn't have DNA evidence back then. They may not have saved the specimen, and if they did, it might be so deteriorated that we can't use it. Moist specimens don't store well. If a bloodstain stays dry the DNA will last for decades.” Professor Sanden punched the speakerphone button and dialed a number. “Let's just give Max a call and see what he has over there.”

“Boady!” Boomed the voice of Max Rupert. “How's it hanging?”

“You know me, Max, still fighting the good fight. How about yourself?”

“If I get another murder case, I'm gonna kill somebody,” he said, laughing.

“Max, I got you on speakerphone. I'm here with a kid named Joe Talbert.”

“Hi, Joe.” The words popped out of the speakerphone like we were old friends.

“Hi…Detective.”

“I've been looking at Joe's evidence here,” Professor Sanden said, “I think he has something.”

“You always do, Boady,” Rupert said. “I brought our file up from the basement and took a look through it.”

“Any fluids?” Sanden asked.

“The girl's body was burned in a tool shed or garage or something like that. Her legs were mostly burned off; the fluids in her had boiled.
The lab could ascertain the presence of sperm, but the sample was too far gone to get anything beyond that. The killer was a non-secretor, so there was no blood in the semen. As far as I can tell, there were no slides preserved. I called the BCA, and they don't have anything either.”

“BCA?” I said.

“Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Professor Sanden said. “Think of it as our version of CSI.” He turned his attention back to the phone. “No blood stains? Saliva?”

“Every shred of her clothing burned up in the fire,” Max said.

“What about the fingernail?” I said.

“Fingernail?” Professor Sanden sat up in his chair. “What fingernail?”

Suddenly I felt as if I were part of the conversation. “The girl's fake fingernails. They found one on Carl Iverson's back porch. Doug must have put it there to frame Carl.”

“If the victim lost her fingernail during a fight, there may be skin cells on it,” Sanden said.

“There's no fingernail in the file,” Rupert said.

“It'll be in the B-vault,” Sanden said.

“B-vault?” I asked.

“It's where the court stores evidence that's been admitted in trials,” Sanden said. “This is a murder case, so they'll have kept it. We'll send a runner to get a swab from Iverson and get a court order to have the fingernail tested. If there is DNA on that fingernail, it'll either prove Iverson's guilt or give us ammunition to reopen the case.”

“I'll fax the evidence inventory sheet over for your motion,” Rupert said.

“I appreciate the help, Max,” Sanden said.

“Don't mention it, Boady,” Max said. “I'll get it ready.”

“See you at poker Friday?” Sanden said.

“Yep, see you then.”

Professor Sanden cut the connection. I thought I understood what would happen next, but I wanted to confirm it. “So, Professor Sanden—”

“Please, call me Boady.”

“Okay, Boady, if this fingernail has skin cells on it—they can get DNA from that?”

“Absolutely, and probably some blood as well. It sounds like it's been kept dry. There's no guarantee they'll find DNA, but if they do—and it's not Carl Iverson's—we should have enough here with the diary and stuff you found to get our foot in the door and maybe vacate his conviction.”

“How soon will we know?”

“We're probably looking at four months to get the DNA test back, then a couple more months to get into court.”

My heart sank and I dropped my head. “He doesn't have that long,” I said. “He's dying of cancer. He may not be alive in four weeks, much less four months. I need to exonerate him before he dies.”

“Is he a relative?”

“No. He's just some guy I met. But I need to do this.” Ever since Lila broke the code, the memory of my grandfather in the river had been visiting me in my sleep, kicking through my mind whenever I let my thoughts rest. I knew that nothing I could do would change that past, but it didn't matter. I needed to do this. For Carl? For my grandfather? For me? I didn't know. I just needed to do it.

“Well, that may be tricky.” Professor Sanden tapped his fingers on the desk as he thought. “We could use a private lab, which might be faster than the BCA, but even with that, there's no guarantee.” He tapped some more. “I can try and pull in some favors, but don't get your hopes up.” He frowned at me and shrugged his shoulders. “I guess, all I can say is, I'll do what I can.”

“Short of the DNA test, is there anything we can do, maybe just with the diary?” I asked.

“The diary is great,” he said, “but it won't be enough. “If this Lockwood guy jogged into court and confessed his sins we could move faster, but short of that, all we can do is wait for the DNA results.”

“Confession…” I said the word quietly to myself as a thought began forming, a dark and reckless thought, a thought that would
follow me home and poke at me with the persistence of a petulant child. I stood and reached across the desk to shake Boady's hand. “I can't thank you enough.”

“Don't thank me yet,” he said. “A lot of stars have to align for this to work.”

For the next few days, as I struggled to catch up on homework in my other classes, I remained distracted by two thoughts that turned in my head, flipping back and forth like a tossed coin. On the one side, I could wait. Professor Sanden had pulled the chocks out from under the wheels of Carl's case and things were moving. The fingernail would be sent in for DNA testing. If Crystal fought with her attacker, the DNA would belong to Doug Lockwood, and that evidence, along with the diary, would exonerate Carl. But that path would take time—time that Carl Iverson didn't have. I saw Professor Sanden's efforts as a Hail-Mary pass at best. If he could not get the DNA results back in time, Carl would die a murderer—and I would have failed.

On the other side of that flipping coin lived a rash idea. I needed to know that I did everything that I could to help Carl Iverson die an innocent man in the eyes of the world. I could not stand by and watch him die a murderer knowing that I might have changed that. This was no longer about getting an A on my project. It wasn't even about my naive belief that right and wrong should balance out in the end. This had somehow become about me, about when I was eleven and watched my grandfather die. I could have done something, but I didn't. I should have at least tried. Now, faced with the choice to act or to wait, I felt I had no choice. I had to act. Besides, what if there was no DNA on the fingernail? Then all the time spent waiting would have been wasted.

A thought as small as a strawberry seed began to grow in my mind, a seed accidentally planted there by Professor Sanden. What if I could get Lockwood to confess?

I turned on my laptop, searched the Internet for the name Douglas Joseph Lockwood, and found a police blotter announcing his arrest for DUI and another site with the minutes from a County Board of Commissioner's meeting where a Douglas Joseph Lockwood had been given
notice of being a public nuisance for having junked cars on his property. Both websites gave the same address in rural Chisago County, just north of Minneapolis. The DUI entry gave his age, which fit. I wrote the address down and laid it on the kitchen counter. For three days I watched it pulse like a beating heart while I talked myself into—and out of—tracking down Doug Lockwood. Finally, it was a weatherman who tipped the scale.

I turned on the news to have some background noise while I did homework, and I heard the weatherman announce that a record snowfall was on its way to bitch slap us—my words, not his—with up to twenty inches of snow. The talk of snow made me think of Carl, how he yearned to see a big snowstorm before he died. I wanted to go see him, to see the joy in his eyes as he watched the snow. I decided that before I went to see Carl, I would track down Douglas Lockwood and take a shot at getting him to confess.

I approached my plan to meet Douglas Lockwood the way someone might approach a sleeping bull. I paced a lot, thinking and rethinking the idea and trying to screw up my courage. My legs twitched as I sat in my classes that day. My mind drifted, unable to pay attention to the lecture.

I went to Lila's apartment after class, to tell her about my decision to drop in on Lockwood and maybe to give her a chance to talk me out of it. She wasn't home. My last act before I left was to call Detective Rupert. My call went to voicemail, and I hung up and put my phone in my backpack. I told myself that I would simply drive out to Lockwood's house—drive past it to see if he still lived there. I could then report back to Rupert, although I strongly suspected that Rupert would not care enough to act on what I learned. He would want to wait for the DNA results. He would go by the book and get nowhere until after Carl Iverson was dead. So, armed with my digital recorder, my backpack, and absolutely no semblance of a plan, I headed north.

I listened to loud music on the drive, letting the songs drown out my doubts. I tried not to think about what I was doing as the six lanes of blacktop turned into four lanes, then two, and eventually I turned onto the gravel road leading to Douglas Lockwood's house. In the thirty minutes it took me to drive there, I went from skyscrapers and concrete to farm fields and trees. Thin gray clouds draped across the late-afternoon sky, and the weak December sun had already started its descent in the west. A light drizzle had turned to sleet, and the temperature dropped sharply as a northerly wind heralded the coming of the winter storm.

I slowed as I passed Lockwood's place, an old farmhouse that
leaned with age and had wood siding rotting from the ground up. The grass in the front yard had not been mowed all summer, looking more like a fallow field than a lawn, and an old Ford Taurus with a sheet of plastic for a back window sat decaying in the gravel driveway.

I turned around at a field entrance just past the house and doubled back. As I neared his driveway, I saw a figure move in front of a window. A chill ran through me. The man who killed Crystal Lockwood walked freely on the other side of that window. A spike of anger boiled up inside of me as I thought about the stain of Lockwood's sin infecting Carl's name. I had told myself over and over that this was going to be a simple drive into the country, a recon mission to find a house. But deep down, I always knew that it would be more than that.

I pulled into Lockwood's driveway at a crawl, the gravel crunching under my tires, my palms sweating where I gripped the steering wheel. I parked behind the busted-down Taurus and turned off the engine. The porch was dark. The interior of the house appeared gloomy as well, the only light coming from deep inside. I turned on my digital recorder, put it into my shirt pocket, and walked to the porch to knock on the front door.

At first, I saw no movement and heard no footsteps. I knocked again. This time a shadowy figure emerged from the lighted room in the back, turned on the porch light, and opened the front door.

“Douglas Lockwood?” I asked.

“Yeah, that's me,” he said, sizing me up and down as if I had stepped across some no-trespass line. He stood maybe six-foot-two, with three days' worth of stubble covering his neck, chin, and cheeks. He reeked of alcohol, cigarettes, and old sweat.

I cleared my throat. “My name's Joe Talbert,” I said. “I'm writing a story on the death of your stepdaughter, Crystal. I'd like to talk to you if I could.”

His eyes went wide for a split second then narrowed. “That's…that's all done with,” he said. “What's this about?”

“I'm doing a story about Crystal Hagen,” I repeated, “and about Carl Iverson and what happened back in 1980.”

“You a reporter?”

“Did you know that Carl Iverson got paroled from prison?” I said, trying to distract him and make it sound like my angle was Carl's early release.

“He was what?”

“I'd like to talk to you about it. It'll only take a couple minutes.”

Douglas looked over his shoulder at the torn furniture and stain-covered walls. “I wasn't 'specting company,” he said.

“I only have a few questions,” I said.

He muttered something under his breath and walked inside, leaving the door open. I stepped through the doorway and saw a living room strewn knee deep in clothes, empty food containers, and crap you might find at a bad garage sale. We had taken only a few steps into the house when he suddenly stopped and turned to me. “This ain't a barn,” he said, looking down at my wet shoes. I looked at the piles of junk cluttering the entryway and wanted to debate the point, but instead, I removed my shoes and followed him to the kitchen to a table covered with old newspapers, debt-collection envelopes, and about a week's worth of crusty dinner plates. In the middle of the table, a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's stood out like a holiday centerpiece. Lockwood sat in a chair at the end of the table. I took off my coat—careful to keep the recorder in my shirt pocket out of Lockwood's sight—and draped my coat over the back of a chair before sitting down.

“Is your wife here?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I'd just spat on him. “Danielle? That bitch? She ain't been my wife for twenty-five years. She divorced me.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“I ain't,” he said. “It is better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome woman. Proverbs 21:19.”

“Okay…I suppose that makes sense,” I said, trying to find my way back to my topic. “Now, if I recall, Danielle testified that she was working the night that Crystal was killed. Is that right?”

“Yeah…What's that got to do with Iverson getting out of prison?”

“And you said that you were working late at your car dealership, correct?”

He tightened his lips together and studied me. “What are you gettin' at?”

“I'm trying to understand, that's all.”

“Understand what?”

It was about here that my lack of planning made itself known, the way a single piano key left out of tune will blare its presence. I wanted to be subtle. I wanted to be clever. I wanted to lay a trap that would pull Lockwood's confession from him before he knew what had happened. Instead, I swallowed hard and threw it out there like a shot put. “I'm trying to understand why you lied about what happened to your step daughter?”

“What the hell?” he said. Who do you think you—”

“I know the truth!” I yelled the words. I wanted to stop any protest he had before the words formed in his throat. I wanted him to know that it was over. “I know the truth about what happened to Crystal.”

“Why you…” Lockwood gritted his teeth and leaned forward on his seat. “What happened to Crystal was God's wrath. She brought that on herself.” He slammed his hand on the table. “‘On her head was the name, a mystery: Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes and of earth's abominations.'”

I wanted to pitch back into the fray, but his Bible-verse outburst confused me. He was spitting out something he had probably been telling himself for years, something that eased his guilt. Before I could correct my bearings he turned to me, his eyes on fire, and said, “Who are you?”

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a copy of the diary pages. I laid them in front of Doug Lockwood with the coded version on top. “They convicted Carl Iverson because they thought Crystal wrote these diary entries about him. Do you remember the code, the numbers that she had in her diary?” He looked at the diary page in front of him, then at me, then back at the page. I then showed Lockwood the deciphered version, the ones that named him as being the man forcing Crystal to have sex. As he read the words, his hands started to tremble. I watched his face turn white, his eyes bulging and twitching.

“Where did you get these?” he asked.

“I broke her code,” I said. “I know she was writing about you. You were the man making her do those things. You were raping your stepdaughter. I know you did it. I just wanted to give you the chance to explain why before I go to the cops.”

A thought passed behind his eyes, and he looked at me with a mixture of fear and understanding. “No…You just don't understand…” He reached toward the center of the table and picked up the bottle of Jack Daniels. I tensed up, waiting for him to swing at me, prepared to block and counterpunch. But instead, he unscrewed the top and took a big drink of the whiskey, his hand shaking as he wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve.

I had hit a nerve. What I said had knocked him against the ropes, so I decided to push it. “You left your DNA on her fingernail.” I said.

“You don't understand,” he said again.

“I want to understand,” I said. “That's why I came here. Tell me why.”

He took another big drink from his bottle, wiped the traces of spittle from a corner of his mouth, and looked down at the diary. Then he spoke in a low, trembling voice, his words coming out monotone and rote, as if he were uttering thoughts that he meant to keep to himself. “It's biblical,” he said, “the love between parent and child. And you come here, after all this time…” He massaged the sides of his head, pressing hard on his temples as though trying to rub out the thoughts and voices that clattered in his brain.

“It's time to make this right,” I said. I greased the skids the way I had seen Lila coax information out of Andrew Fisher. “I understand. I really do. You're not a monster. Things just got out of control.”

“People don't understand love,” he said, as if I were no longer in the room. “They don't understand that children are a man's reward from God.” He looked at me, searching my eyes for a hint of understanding—finding none. He took another drink from the bottle and began to breathe heavily, his eyes rolling up behind a pair of flittering lids. I thought that he might pass out. But then he closed his eyes and spoke again, this time, reaching down and pulling the words from some
deep dark cavern inside his body. His words oozed out, viscous and thick, like old magma. “‘I do not understand my own action,'” he whispered. “‘For I do not do what I want…but I do the very thing I hate.'” Tears filled his eyes. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the neck of the whiskey bottle, holding on to it like a life preserver.

He was about to confess, I could feel it. I carefully glanced down at the recorder in my shirt pocket, making sure that nothing covered the tiny microphone. I needed to get Lockwood's words in his own voice admitting to what he had done.

I looked up just in time to see the whiskey bottle before it smashed into the side of my head. The blow sent me reeling off my chair, my head hitting the wall. Instinct told me to run for the front door, but the floor of Lockwood's house began to curl like a corkscrew. My damaged sense of balance threw me to the left, tossing me into a television. I could see the front door at the end of a long, dark tunnel. I fought against the spinning of the room to get there.

Lockwood hit me in the back with a pan or chair—something hard—knocking me to the floor, short of the door. I made one last all-exhausting lunge. I felt the door handle in my hand and threw it open. That's when another blow caught me in the back of the head. I stumbled off the porch, landing in the knee-deep grass, the darkness swallowing me as if I had fallen down a well. I floated in that darkness, seeing above me a small circle of light. I swam for that light, fighting against the abyss that pulled me down, forcing myself to regain consciousness. Once I reached that light, the cold December air filled my lungs again, and I could feel the frosted grass against my cheek. I was breathing. The pain in the back of my head punched through to my eyes and a trickle of warm blood dribbled across my neck.

Where had Lockwood gone?

My arms were stones: useless limbs propped unnaturally at my side. I focused all my energy and consciousness on moving my fingers, willing them to wiggle, then my wrists, then elbows and shoulders. I drew my hands under me, my palms on the cold ground, raising my face and chest out of the weeds. I heard movement behind me, around
me, the sound of grass brushing against denim, but I could see nothing through the haze.

I felt a strap, like a canvas belt, wrap around my throat, drawing tight, cutting off my breath. I tried to push off the ground, to get to my knees, but the blows to my head had disconnected something. My body ignored my commands. I reached behind me, feeling his knuckles tightening in a desperate grip as he pulled on the ends of the belt. I couldn't breathe. What little strength I had left drained from my body. I felt myself falling back into that well, back into that endless darkness.

As I went limp, a wave of disgust flashed through my mind, disgust at my naiveté, disgust at not seeing the man's tight grip on the bottle for what it was, disgust that my life would end quietly, unceremoniously, lying face down in the frozen grass. I had let this old man—this whiskey-soaked child molester—beat me.