The Breathtaker (10 page)

Charlie sat behind his desk, hands resting on the navy-blue blotter. “That doesn’t make me any braver than the next guy.”

“Maybe not.” Rick took a seat in the armchair in front of him. “But it sure makes you braver than me.”

“I haven’t looked at these yet.” He opened the manila envelope one of his patrol officers had dropped off earlier that afternoon and slid out an inch-thick stack of photographs. Riffling through them quickly, he said, “These were taken by various news crews and storm-chasers yesterday afternoon. See if you recognize any of the—” His breath hitched in his throat as he spotted a photograph of his father’s ’51 Loadmaster pickup truck. It was just a blur, speeding past the damage site, but Charlie felt the hairs on his scalp bristle like a cold morning. No, wait, it was perfectly innocent; his father had already explained that he’d been on a chase ride yesterday. He’d participated in the cleanup. He’d stolen a watch…

“Something wrong?”

“No. Nothing.” He tucked the picture into a desk drawer, then handed the rest over to Rick. “See if you recognize any of these vehicles.”

Rick accepted the stack. “You know, Chief, this is for the most part an articulate, well-educated bunch. I just want to state that for the record.”

“Duly noted.”

“Okay, here goes.” He started thumbing through them. “Okay, this guy’s a hard-core chaser. I’ve seen him just about everywhere. His name’s Paul something or other… I’ll think of it in a minute. This Ranger belongs to a kid who’s truly witless—a rich kid who’s got nothing better to do than get in everybody’s way. Preston J. Hale, he’s from Kansas City. Hm. This vehicle I don’t recognize… That one, either…”

Charlie flicked his ballpoint pen open and shut. “Were you in Promise yesterday?”

“Yeah.” He glanced up. “We were out collecting data.”

“You and Willa?”

He nodded.

“Did you take any photographs?”

He shook his head. “I don’t like having a camera between myself and the storm, Chief. It’s like wearing a condom.”

Charlie smiled.

“We work as a tag team, but sometimes we split up. Different data has to be collected from the same storm, so we alternate who gets the van. She got the van. I took my GMC Sierra. You need all-wheel drive, since you never know what kind of rough terrain you might find yourself in.” Charlie had seen Rick’s truck parked in the driveway tonight, a black GMC Sierra virtually bristling with antennae. “I came to within five miles of it, Chief. I was heading east on the 412 when the storm became very HP-ish. That means there was high precipitation, including hail, on the rear flank downdraft. I turned up Wichita Avenue and was trying to reach the nearest flank when I crested a hill and saw this nice stovepipe drifting toward the northeast.”

“Then what?”

“It lifted back into the clouds and dissipated. So I continued heading east on the interstate, through Cleo Springs and Ringwood, where I tried to intercept another one before dark. But the RFD surge looked pretty bad, so I turned tail and called it a night.” He cocked his head. “You were disappointed when I picked up the phone today, weren’t you?”

Charlie smiled but said nothing.

They eyed one another uneasily.

“She’ll be sorry she missed this.” Rick shuffled through the remaining photographs. “Okay, this blue Mustang belongs to a weekend chaser, a woman named Becky Callahan. Ah… Conrad Holzman. He’s from Tulsa. He’s an okay guy, a regular chaser, very knowledgeable. These, I have no idea. This one’s an engineer, he might be from Utah.” He drummed his fingers on the top photograph, the only one left in the stack—a blurry image of a white van speeding toward the distant funnel cloud. “Okay, Jonah Gustafson. You wanna pay close attention to him.”

“G-u-s-t-a-f-s-o-n?”
Charlie wrote it down on his yellow legal pad.

“Foul temper. Doesn’t watch his speed. Very competitive. Likes to divert other chasers away from a good storm.” He leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “Scary-looking dude. I don’t know what he does for a living or where he’s from. There’s nothing blatantly wrong with him, Chief, I just don’t like him. Nobody does. He keeps to himself mostly. A real loner.”

Charlie nodded. “Describe him for me.”

“Six one, six two. Thin. Emaciated, actually… like a shirt hanging on a fence post. Always wears the same greasy-looking ‘Night Train’ baseball cap.”

Charlie jotted it all down.

“And he’s hardly ever sober.”

“Any scars or tattoos?”

“I never get that close.”

“And you have no idea where he’s from?”

Rick shook his head, then set the photographs aside. “Can I ask you something? Do you honestly think that a storm-chaser has time to stop and commit murder?”

“You’re the expert. You tell me.”

He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “It’s conceivable, I suppose.” He drew a sharp breath through his teeth. “It’d be totally freaky if one of the guys I knew was a cold-blooded killer… except for Jonah Gustafson. That would make a weird kind of sense.”

Charlie folded his hands on the desktop. “What do you think of Boone Pritchett?”

Rick shrugged. “He likes to core-punch. He goes chasing at night. That’s fucked-up, but it takes a certain amount of skill.”

“How are you at this prediction thing?”

“Me?” Rick shrugged. “Better than most.”

“Have you ever predicted with any accuracy when and where a tornado was gonna drop down?”

He snorted. “Yeah, sure. It’s hard on the morning of the same day to predict the mesoscale influences that’re gonna arise later on, but I’ve seen a few guys do it thirty-six hours ahead of time. They’re either clairvoyant or geniuses.”

“Which guys?”

“The only people I know who’re that good on a consistent basis are Jonah Gustafson, Conrad Holzman and Willa.”

The skin around Charlie’s mouth puckered. “Willa?”

Their eyes met. “She’s got it all, doesn’t she, Chief? Brains. Beauty. Balls.”

He tried to decipher the message between the lines:
I was here first. She’s mine. Beat it.

“Next time we’re out in the field, we’d be glad to take you along.”

“Can I go, too?” Sophie begged from the doorway, her smile a little too eager for Charlie’s comfort. “Can I? Please?”

“Okay, Holly Golightly,” he said, getting up. “Let’s get those dishes done.”

12

J
AKE WHEATON
was doing 50 in a 35-mph zone, just driving around in his Chevy pickup truck, waiting for ten o’clock to roll around. He had an appointment with an ounce of marijuana. Now he spotted Lester Deere’s Chevy Blazer in the rearview mirror as it roared up the road behind him. “Yeah, yeah, I see you, Ossifer Stupido.”

Hitting his flasher, Lester edged into the empty lane, then drove parallel to Jake’s truck and gestured for him to pull over.

Jake raised his beer can. “Cheers, motherfucker.”

Lester eyeballed him through the window.

“What?” Jake said. “I can’t hear you!”

Lester sped ahead and fishtailed directly in front of him.

“Shit!” Jake slammed on the brakes and felt his nose collapsing as his face hit the steering wheel. The tires of his pickup truck slid over the road as he swerved to a stop. He sat for a dazed instant, ankle-deep in beer cans, when suddenly Lester opened the door, reached inside the cab and plucked Jake out by his flannel shirt.

“You fucked her?” he screamed, punching Jake in the gut, and he curled double with a
whoosh
of air. “You fucked her, you lying son of a bitch?”

Jake wanted to vomit from the pain.

“What’s that, cocksucker? You say something?” Lester’s fist moved like a whip.

Jake rocked back on his heels, a searing pain registering across his jaw. He cupped his chin and swayed on unsteady legs. “No, no, no…”

“Don’t you lie to me, Jake!” Lester stood panting, his eyes crazed. “Did you fuck her? Did you? Because it’s all over the station house.”

“No!”

“Don’t lie to me, boy.” He bunched Jake’s collar in his meaty fists and squeezed. “Are you lying to me?”

Jake was afraid to look into that face, something raw and wild flickering behind those beady eyes. “Yeah, okay,” he admitted, cringing. “Just that once, though, Lester, I swear to God…”

The older man let out a terrible roar and cracked Jake’s jaw with a solid left hook.

The boy went flying across the road and landed on his back, all the breath leaving his lungs with a guttural hiss. When he woke up, he was staring at the night sky with its millions of stars. Dazed and wondering.

Lester kicked him in the ribs. “Don’t you dare breathe a word of this, understand? Not one word,” he screamed. “You hear me, loser? Huh?”

Jake groaned and spit blood. He rolled over and tried to crawl away, but a heavy foot came down on the back of his neck, forcing his face into the dirt.

“Not one word,” he screamed again. “You hear me?”

“Yes.”

“What’s that?”

His chest felt as knotted as old rope as he tried to breathe. “Yes, sir,” he gasped. “I won’t.”

“You won’t what?”

“Breathe a word. I swear.”

Lester rolled him over and got right in his face, eyes ticking back and forth like a stenographer’s fingers. “Don’t you even think about ratting me out,” he hissed. “That would be a very dangerous thing for you to do.”

“I won’t,” he promised, his fear and loathing deepening.

“You and me? We don’t know each other.” Lester hocked a wad of spit in Jake’s face, then got back in his truck and drove off in a cloud of dust.

13

T
HE FOLLOWING
night, Charlie got a call from Sheriff Jimmy L’Amoureux. “We’re exhuming the bodies tonight,” he said, “just in case you’re interested.”

“Tonight?” He glanced at the ceiling in the general direction of Sophie’s room. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“It’s now or never, Chief. You interested? Or should I call the relatives and tell them it’s off?”

“No, I’m interested. I’m heading out the door.”

It was a long drive back to the dreary little town of Wink, Texas, with its ghost roads and cracked sidewalks. Charlie fiddled with the radio dial, trying to find a station loud enough to mask the rumble of the burned-out valve, while the cones of his headlights poked into the night and lightning flickered in the distant mesquite-flecked hills. He took the Drury exit off the four-lane onto a road that ran straight as a ruler. After a few more monotonous miles, he pulled up in front of a cemetery on the underpopulated side of town, its rusty wrought-iron gate spelling out
REST HAVEN PARK
. It didn’t look like a park. You could see emergency lights glowing through the headstones.

Sheriff L’Amoureux met him at the gate. His uniform was faded from repeated washings, and he wore a thick leather belt with a solid silver buckle inlaid with Montana agate. “You a whiskey man?” he asked.

“I don’t drink hard liquor,” Charlie said, getting out. “Well, I do, but I hate myself in the morning.”

“I figured, so long as we’re digging up dead people, we might as well have some coffee and whiskey waiting for us back at the coroner’s office.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Rest Haven Park was a tangle of blackjack and pitted turn-of-the-century headstones. A cold dampness tickled the back of Charlie’s throat as they stumbled over countless unmown ditches clogged with ground cherry and discarded beer bottles. Their dueling flashlight beams slashed through the cemetery, illuminating limestone angels whose wing tips had been broken off by vandals and solemn declarations etched in granite: “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

“Next of kin lives across county lines,” L’Amoureux said, daubing at his slick upper lip with his forefinger and thumb. “They didn’t want to attend. Can’t say as I blame them.”

They stumbled down an incline onto a paved road, where the asphalt was crisscrossed with skid marks from local kids doing wheelies and doughnuts. They crossed the road into the newer part of the cemetery, where the Keels had been buried over a year ago, and found their modest headstones after a few minutes of confusion.

No grass grew on or near the graves, as if out of deference to the dead. Both stones held the same death date—March 31. The grave sites had been sadly neglected. An old funeral wreath lay on its side in front of Matthew Keel’s headstone, and a damp pink teddy bear was collecting mold in front of Audra’s. Two dried brown roses stuck out of the dirt in front of each granite slab.

Now an arc of light swung crazily through the air, and Charlie spun around. A bulldozer was driving up the road toward them, its headlights piercing the darkness, a cloud of diesel smoke blowing back from the engine.

“Ed Olson, the contractor,” L’Amoureux said.

Ed had the kind of slack-jawed face that was made for drooling. He parked the bulldozer by the side of the road and stepped down from the cab. The bulldozer’s bucket teeth were the size of a man’s fist. Short and stooped with thick iron-gray hair, Ed spent the next few minutes going over his instructions with L’Amoureux before he hopped back in the cab and ground the gears.

Charlie stepped back while the engine burped and the bulldozer rolled methodically back and forth in its tracks like a hesitant bull elephant. Illuminated by two bars of fluorescent light, the push-arm swung like a giant feeler and the bright yellow blade bit into the earth.

Light flared as two more vehicles approached the scene from a distance over the rain-washed streets, headlights barreling toward them and playing across their faces. First came a dirty white pickup truck, driven by a middle-aged woman with orange bubble hair. She hit the brakes and fishtailed to a stop, mist rising from her tires.

“I brought the shovels, Jimmy,” said the woman, getting out of the truck and slamming the stubborn door hard.

“Bonnie’s our caretaker,” L’Amoureux explained.

She came ambling toward them on spiky heels, carrying two heavy-looking shovels, while a black Mustang pulled up the rear. The driver hit the horn and started the wild dogs barking.

“Then there’s Hodge, our town coroner.”

An obese man wearing Big Boy jeans got out of the Mustang and lumbered toward them. He had a round face with owlish eyes and a handshake so full of good intentions it required two hands to execute. “Hey, Jimmy, how ya doin’?”

“Can’t complain, Hodge. This is Charlie Grover, the one I was telling you about. Hodge Rogers, our town coroner.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Big hearty handshake. “Pretty bleak night for this sort of thing, huh? Hey, Bonnie! Hey, Ed!”

“Hey, Hodge,” came the uniform response.

Hodge drew himself up proud, double chin tripling. “Gosh, Jimmy, you got me tossing and turning. What’s all this about missing teeth and flying debris?”

“Chief Grover’s the man with the questions.”

Hodge turned to Charlie and used his coarse, powerful voice to assert himself. “I didn’t miss a thing last year, honest injun. You won’t find any stray teeth inside those mouths or any other weirdness. Mark my words.”

“You’ve gotta play the long shots,” Charlie told him.

“Sure, why not? Everybody’s got their own agenda. Forget about the trauma inflicted on the family, right?”

“They aren’t even here, Hodge,” L’Amoureux said.

Hodge made a gesture of dismissal.

A big yellow moon like a saucer of milk suddenly broke through the clouds, and Charlie tried to ease the growing soreness in his left arm by rotating his shoulder cuff. That sometimes happened, fresh pain shooting out of the old scars.

L’Amoureux had a powerfully built body, like a small bus, and he, Charlie and Ed did most of the heavy lifting. Even with the winch, it took them several hours to get the two coffins out of their graves and over to the morgue.

It was a short ride back into downtown Wink. Charlie pulled up in front of an ancient wind-battered building and parked behind the sheriff’s corroded radio car, its blue beacon casting spooky, leaping shadows. The gate gave with a rubbery squeak. He crossed a lawn where the grass was packed like a mat, as if a lot of people had traipsed through recently. In the distance, you could hear the shrieks of local kids playing pickup games of baseball. He checked his watch. Nine o’clock on a Friday night. Sophie was out with her girlfriends. She had a midnight curfew, and he hoped to be home by then. He turned down a dark alleyway bracketed by heavy scrub, where a row of bur oaks grew above the fence line. In the breaks between clouds, he could see hopeful pockets of glittering stars.

Around back, a posted sign read
KEEP OUT OR YOU MAY BE SHOT
. The gray frame exterior needed a new coat of paint. The curtains in the downstairs windows were drawn shut. A bead of sweat trickled down Charlie’s neck as he scaled the back porch and knocked on the rusty screen door.

“C’mon in,” L’Amoureux said in a hushed voice, as if they were entering a library.

In the narrow hallway, a dank refrigerated smell assaulted Charlie’s nostrils. Austere portraits of long-dead county officials lined the walls, and the naked overhead bulb burned dustily. They took a narrow set of stairs down into a dimly lit basement, where the stand-alone fan moved the foul-smelling air from corner to corner. Down here in the morgue, it stank of something soft and decaying in the walls.

The sealed caskets were stained with red clay and had to be pried open. Soon the room reeked of decomposition. The bodies were dressed in their funeral finest and seemed to be remarkably well preserved. Audra Keel wore tiny gold studs in her ears and clutched a bouquet of withered daisies. Her skin was covered with a fine sprinkling of powdery white mold. A tall, big-boned woman, she wore a pink skirt and white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Matthew Keel was three inches shorter than his wife, his blue suit neat as a pin, his black hair shaved close to his scalp.

Hodge spent the next thirty minutes going over the Keels’ dental charts. Breathing huskily as if he were exerting himself, he pried each victim’s jaws open and traced the fillings along the gum lines, ran dental tools over eroded tooth surfaces. He judiciously charted the victims’ teeth with trembling hands, then finally turned to L’Amoureux and said, “Nobody’s missing any molars or premolars, except for their wisdom teeth. These mouths are in the same condition as their records indicate prior to death.”

“Thanks, Hodge,” L’Amoureux said, pouring himself a cup of coffee and lacing it liberally with whiskey.

“You’re welcome.” He looked at Charlie hard. “You still want to re-autopsy?”

Charlie could feel his body slumping under the weight of this revelation. No replacement teeth meant no murders had been committed. “No, let’s call it a night,” he said.

The three of them gathered around Matthew Keel to lift him back into the coffin when Charlie felt a rough texture on the back of the corpse’s hand. “Wait,” he said, turning it over. There were yellow abrasions with a parchmentlike translucence raking across Matthew’s knuckles. “What’s this?”

“Hm,” Hodge said, bending close. “Those look like scrape marks to me. They’re usually produced postmortem.”

“What do you mean?” L’Amoureux said.

“These type of scrape marks occur after a victim is dead, when a body is dragged across a floor.”

They eyed one another uneasily, and then Hodge logrolled Matthew onto his side. After working the jacket and shirt away from the body, he found similar-looking scrape marks on the corpse’s back.

A long silence followed.

“I think we should re-autopsy,” Charlie said.

Hodge turned to L’Amoureux. “Your call, Jimmy.”

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

The atmosphere inside the morgue grew more oppressive as the victims were undressed and re-autopsied. Hodge opened up each corpse like a dissected frog, snipping sutures and poking around inside plastic bags full of internal organs. He probed old wounds and reexamined X rays, while the sharp fumes rising from the chest cavities made their eyes water. “If you theorize that this was a homicide—
if,
I said—then you’ve got multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen. Autopsy report says impalement with two chair legs, a baluster and a fence strut. There’s a picture of the debris sticking out of the bodies… I don’t know, hard to tell. We’d have to examine the originals, but I believe they’re all gone. Isn’t that right, Jimmy?”

“I didn’t see any need to keep them.”

“I had my hands full with the dead and injured,” Hodge said defensively. “We lost the town clerk and his wife, my church organist, three young people. Three beautiful members of the next generation. Heck… these look like defensive wounds to the hands and arms. How’d we miss that, Jimmy?”

“Damned if I know.”

“It could’ve been caused by flying debris.” He continued with the internal exams.

Charlie picked up the old autopsy reports and studied the pictures: The injury to Audra Keel with the strut of a picket fence was particularly obscene. The penetrating end had been driven into the victim’s chest wall, pushing the shirt fabric into her flesh and tearing through muscle and body cavity.

“These are Matthew’s X rays.” Hodge held one up to the light. “Impact abrasion over the right supraorbital ridge. Also a hematoma, a large focal collection of blood on the right cheek. Scalp bruises visible.” He tossed the X rays down on the countertop and snapped off his latex gloves. “Blunt trauma to the head, multiple stab wounds. I don’t know, chalk it up to a house falling down around their heads.” He crossed his arms. “And you’ve still got no so-called replacement teeth.”

The seed of an idea took root. “Maybe the tornado caught him by surprise,” Charlie said. “It was a direct hit on the house, right?”

L’Amoureux blinked.

“Maybe his forecast was a little off that day. Maybe the tornado interrupted him right in the middle of the ritual and he couldn’t complete the task at hand. The ritual with the teeth? What if he had to get out of the house before the tornado hit?”

“That still leaves us with no definitive proof.”

Charlie rubbed his forehead, trying to think.

“I say we call it a night,” Hodge grumbled.

“I agree,” L’Amoureux said. “The relatives gave their permission to re-autopsy, and that was it. We’ve gotta put these bodies back where they belong.”

“Okay, wait.” Charlie bit his lower lip. “What would you do if you got interrupted in the middle of something?”

“I dunno. Go back and finish the job later?”

“Exactly.”

“So?”

“Got any sieves?”

It was half past eleven by the time Bonnie the caretaker returned with a box of assorted sieves—a flour sifter, two colanders, a strainer, a sugar shaker and a deep-fry basket. They sifted through the graveyard dirt, searching for any object smaller than a marble. Any bicuspid, eyetooth, molar, premolar, incisor or milk tooth would do. The theory was that the killer had visited the cemetery one bleak night after the funeral and planted a tooth in the soil above each grave. Another long shot, but you had to play the long shots.

Around midnight, it stopped spitting rain, but the sky still quivered with lightning. L’Amoureux drank from a bottle of Black Jack while Charlie and the pinch-mouthed contractor went to work, loosening dirt clods with their shovels, sifting through shifting heaps of dirt. They created first one pile, then another. Before long, Charlie began to feel a tingling sensation at the base of his spine. Deeply located, it began as a painless spasm, then the muscles around it started to stretch and pull.

“Pass the bottle,” he said.

“If I could choose how I was born,” L’Amoureux said, “I’d choose erupting out of the deep ocean floor in a hiss of molten rock…”