Home for the Haunting(74)

“Excuse me?”

“Etta mentioned that people would bang on that big knocker on the front door, then run away.”

“You’re here to talk about kids playing doorbell—’scuse me, knocker ditch? I don’t know; nobody likes a nark. Why?”

“I just wondered . . .” Time to fess up about the ghosts or change the subject. I was a chicken; I chose the latter. “Etta tells me you’ve really turned your life around . . .” I trailed off, afraid to say “in prison” since it seemed so weirdly damning, even though it was stating the obvious.

“Yeah, well, it’s sort of a last chance, if you know what I mean. In here, you don’t have a whole hell of a lot of choices, and it sure does show a person how fu—’scuse me—freaking stupid he was on the outside. I had a lot of help; the pastor in here, he . . . well, he helped me see me how I lost my way. Now I reach out to dumbass kids like I was, help ’em turn their life around. I’m a living example of what they don’t want to happen, if they have any smarts at all.”

“That’s a great thing to offer, though. You could really improve people’s lives.”

He nodded. “Knowing that, doing something for kids, that’s the only thing that gets me through the day. That and the dog training.”

“Dog training?”

“This program brings dogs in here, and we raise ’em and train ’em so they can get adopted by good families. They’re mostly mutts nobody wants, not fit for human company when they first arrive. I don’t have to tell you, there are a few obvious parallels ’tween them and us.”

Again with the killer smile. I couldn’t help think what Etta had said, that as a boy Dave had a good heart. That if only he’d had someone to care for him, perhaps things would have turned out differently. I admired that he hadn’t once denied what he’d done, or tried to blame it on anyone.

“I adopted a stray dog,” I said, “but he’s not very trainable.”

“They’re all trainable, if you give it time and patience. On the outside it’s hard to find those traits. In here, we got nothin’ but time. Speaking of time, you been here fifteen minutes and I get the feeling you still haven’t asked me the question you came here to ask me. You didn’t brave the walls of this place just to ask me about some thirty-year-old house fire.”

Now it was my turn to blush. “No, I . . . I wanted to ask you about what happened with the Lawrences. That night.”

He shrugged. “I just told you—that whole thing blew me away. They always seemed like a perfect family.”

“You were nowhere near the place that night?”

He shook his head. “I was living with a cousin out in the Richmond by then.”

“I, um . . .”

He looked over at Zach, and they exchanged a “what’s her problem?” look over my head. “You might as well come out and ask me,” he said. “I’m in here, behind the glass. What am I gonna do?”

I took a deep breath, then jumped in. “I hear you go by the nickname Duct-Tape Dave?”

His blue eyes, so friendly and open an instant ago, shuttered as though a shade had been drawn. They were flat and hard, and I was very glad he was behind bars. Or glass.

“Duct-Tape Dave is the reason I’m in this hellhole for the rest of my life.”

“Are you saying . . . ?”

“Yes. I was Duct-Tape Dave. Big macho nickname, right? I thought I was a big deal; had me some firepower, and I made homemade silencers to make myself look like a big shot. I never killed anybody, though, until that one night—drug deal gone bad. But you want to know something? I got nightmares about it, still. Guy I killed? He was scum, just like me. Still and all, I took his life, and ain’t nobody supposed to take a human life ’cept God.”

“So, just to be clear”—I mentally braced myself for his answer—“you didn’t go over to the Lawrence house that night, for any reason?”

“Are you kidding me? You’re accusing me of killing off that family? What, have you been talking to that detective, I forget his name? He always thought I knew more than I was telling about the Lawrence family. Hounded me for years; he was the one collared me for the real crime I committed. But he’s the one got me into the dog training program, so I can’t hold too much of a grudge against him.” He put his palm up to the glass, the phone in the crook of his neck, and pulled down the neck of his orange jumpsuit to show me his tattoo of a cross. “I swear on all that is holy, on my faith in Christ, that I never hurt one hair on the head of anyone in that family.”