The Breathtaker (18 page)

12

T
HREE DAYS
later, Sophie went to visit Boone at the hospital. He lay in bed with his eyes closed, and whenever his ventilator paused, she would hold her breath and count the seconds before he resumed breathing again. “Brain-dead” meant no gag reflex, no blink reflex. Nurse talk. They said a lot of things.
“It’s best to be realistic in these instances. The odds are against him, statistically speaking.”
They flitted from bed to bed, ministering to the sick, checking patients’ charts and making scary pronouncements. She didn’t want to hear it. She would think only positive thoughts today.
He will open his eyes and smile at me…

Her grief came and went in little bursts. The bright sunshine streaming in through the slatted blinds gave her hope. She sat curled in a chair she’d pulled up to the bed and clutched Boone’s moist, limp hand. She remembered when her mother was in the hospital. Sophie had missed her like crazy, but when she came home two weeks later, Sophie couldn’t help feeling awkward and distant. Almost angry. It was only later that she realized her reluctance to get close to her mother was because she didn’t want to have to say good-bye to her.

But she’d had to say good-bye, anyway. And then everything changed. The world got darker. Nobody seemed to care. Nobody understood what she was going through. Not even her best friend, Katlin, who could only talk about Sophie’s grief for so long before she started to fidget or change the subject.
“You have to get over it. You’ve gotta move on.”
That was Sophie’s hardest lesson—that people didn’t like to wallow in other people’s misery, no matter how much they loved you.

But Boone was different. He listened to her talk about her mother for hours. He was the only person in the world who seemed to understand what she was going through, and because of their friendship, Sophie was disappointing people right and left. Her father had grounded her for two weeks; her girlfriends were acting narrow-minded. They didn’t like anyone who wasn’t on a college track, even though America was supposed to be a classless society.

Supporting her chin on her forearm, Sophie watched Boone as he slept. He had the complexion of a child—rosy and wrinkle-free—and a head of exquisitely combed hair. Usually his hair stuck up like a bunch of middle fingers, but his mother had been to the hospital that morning and combed his hair like that—slicked back, smoothed behind his ears like a little boy’s. She’d also left a box of his possessions at the foot of the bed—his Game Boy and skateboard, a bunch of video games with ominous-sounding names like
Doom
and
Resident Evil
. As if he needed toys more than his mother’s love. She was probably in some bar right now, getting plastered. Sophie’s heart went out to him. He’d had to learn to live in a motherless world, just like her.

Now a freckle-faced nurse came into the room and snapped the blinds open, sunlight knocking against Sophie’s eyelids.

“How is he?” Sophie asked, blinking away the glare.

“No change yet,” the nurse said, reading his chart and adjusting his IV line. “But the pressure on his brain has started to drop.”

“Is that good?”

“Maybe. Don’t get your hopes up.” She checked his heart rate, fluffed his pillows and left.

Sophie’s stomach muscles tensed, and she fell weakly back against her chair. Maybe death wasn’t as bad as people thought it was. Maybe death was like falling asleep in the middle of the day. Maybe you melted slowly in the sun, like an icicle, all your molecules dispersing into the sun-warmed, buoyant air. Maybe death was a feeling of completeness and fullness. She sat staring blandly ahead, lost in thought, when Boone’s hand suddenly stirred in hers.

She shot forward in her chair. “Boone?”

He responded by fluttering his eyelids.

“Nurse!” she screamed. She squeezed his hand and could feel the bones underneath the skin, tendons and muscle. She waited in the ticking silence for him to react. “Boone?”

He wiggled his fingers, and she suppressed a giggle.

“I love you,” she said.

His face lurched into something like laughter.

She felt it twist inside her.

He opened his electric-blue eyes.

13

W
HERE THE
hell is Lester?” Charlie said, storming out of his office.

Sergeant Hunter Byrd glanced up from his desk. “No idea, Chief.” Beneath the fluorescent light, his curly red hair was looking coppery, as if it might have chemicals in it.

“How many messages have you left on his machine?”

“Three.”

“Do me a favor and leave another one, okay? Tell him to get his butt in here for a friendly interview.”

“Friendly?”

“You don’t like that word, ‘friendly’?”

Hunter shrugged and picked up the phone. “No, boss. Friendly’s fine.”

“I’ve got the Rideouts’ autopsy results,” Mike interrupted.

“My office.”

They went into his office, where Charlie sat behind his desk and rattled the ice in his plastic cup. He could feel a nagging tension deep within him. They hadn’t seen or heard from Lester in three days, and Charlie was worried that an affair wasn’t the only thing his assistant chief might be hiding.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Mike said as he sat with his legs crossed, red tie dangling from his jacket pocket. “How come ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’? The song playing on the Rideouts’ stereo?”

Charlie shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“Think about it, Chief. The killer could’ve chosen any song out of hundreds. I went through their rather extensive album collection. Why not ‘Little Things Mean a Lot’ by Kitty Kallen or ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ by the Everly Brothers?”

Charlie put his cup of ice down. His desk was a confusion of paperwork. They’d collected enough material on the triple homicide to fill over a dozen binders. An electric fan rotated noiselessly on the ceiling, stirring the papers below. It was a beautiful day out, strong afternoon sunlight streaming through the slatted blinds, but nothing could ease the disquiet he was feeling. “What’re you getting at, Mike?”

“I think it means something. That record, those lyrics. ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’ Think about it, Chief.”

The soft hairs on the nape of his neck prickled, all his random fears crowding in on him at once.

“This is a brilliant, in-your-face sociopath. He’s trying to see how much he can reveal about himself without getting caught. I think it’s all part of his sick game plan.”

“So you think the perp knows me? Is that what you’re saying?”

Mike shrugged. “‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’ Who else could that be directed at?”

Charlie tugged at this unpleasant thought.
Lester Deere, Boone Pritchett, Jake Wheaton, Jonah Gustafson.
Not a good list. They must have interviewed over a hundred storm-chasers who’d been photographed near the scene of the crime that day, but so far they were drawing blanks. Most of the interviewees had alibied out. The public, the press, his superiors, were all demanding immediate action, but Charlie had nothing to offer them. Nothing at all. On his desk was an autopsy photograph of Danielle, and he turned the picture over so he wouldn’t have to look at it.

“Maybe he knows
of
you, boss,” Mike mused. “Maybe he saw your picture in the paper and decided to send you a message. I dunno. I just have this sinking-in-the-gut feeling that he chose that record on purpose.” His face was slick with sweat. “There’s a reason for everything. A twisted one, but a reason nonetheless.”

Charlie lifted a brooding glance out the window. The parking lot was jammed with cars, heat rising off the asphalt. He and his men had meticulously matched the Peppers’ injuries to the bloodstains they’d found inside their house and had deduced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the killer was right-handed. They’d been able to piece together a scenario from the lab reports, photographs and blood spatter trajectories. The killer had first attacked Rob Pepper in the front hallway, clubbing him in the chest, forearms, abdomen and head. A second blow to the head knocked him unconscious. The killer then attacked Jenna Pepper with the same weapon—a knotted log they’d found on the property—landing vicious blows to her head, chest and forearms, and finally rendering her unconscious. Both victims left matted sliding marks on the hallway walls and the red-and-green-patterned hallway rug from where they’d tried to crawl away.

In the meantime, Danielle fled into the kitchen, where the killer followed her, delivering one tremendous blow to the back of her skull. Severely injured, she somehow managed to scramble out into the living room and hide behind the piano (they later found dust balls in her hair). He plucked her out of her hiding place and landed a paralyzing blow to her forehead, then dragged all three victims upstairs to the master bedroom, where, with unimaginable ferocity and savagery, he did his worst work. The perpetrator had to be relatively strong, Charlie thought, completely fearless and absolutely lacking in any conscience or remorse. It was a monstrous act of madness, full of risk and defiance, and it made no sense whatsoever.

Mike opened the folder. “Birdie and Sailor Rideout, ages fifty-four and fifty-six respectively. Bloodstains match the victims’ ABO. Defensive cuts on the arms and hands, blunt trauma to the head. Impalement injuries were both full-body and partial-body thickness, fixed in place…” He glanced up. “It goes on. I’ll just give you the broad strokes.” He skim-read the next few pages. “Says here they picked up some interesting soils and botanicals from the scene. Insulation fibers, asbestos fibers and minute traces of plaster. The trace is very old, about a century. Nothing matches with the house, though.”

“That’s no good. It could’ve blown in from other areas.”

Mike’s pinstriped shirt stretched across his chest as he tipped his chair back. “No blue-black wool fibers, Chief. Just some white cotton ones.”

Charlie shrugged. “That’s so common it’s useless.”

“All the hairs they recovered from the drains leading into the main sewer line belonged to the victims, but there were several unknowns on the premises. Two strands of medium-length brown Caucasian hair, one short blond Caucasian, one short black Caucasian and one medium-length white Caucasian.”

Charlie frowned. It made him think of his father, for some reason. Medium white hair.

“Also several black rabbit hairs.”

“Rabbit?”

“According to the state lab.”

“Did the Rideouts own any rabbits?”

“Not that I know of. That’s why it piques my interest.” He paused to turn the page. “They found a single green carpet fiber in Birdie Rideout’s hair, and blue jean fibers underneath her fingernails.”

“That won’t give us anything. Blue jean fibers are as common as white cotton. Useless to the case.”

“Now we come to the teeth,” Mike said, clutching at the report with his short fat fingers. “Female vic’s upper right canine was extracted and replaced with an as-yet-unidentified tooth. Male vic’s lower left incisor was replaced in a similar manner.”

“The teeth,” Charlie said, rattling the ice in his plastic cup. “That’s our link. That’s what’s gonna bring us and the killer together.”

“I agree.”

“Do me a favor. Ask McNeese if he’d loan us those teeth for a little while, would you?”

“Sure.” Mike flipped through the rest of the report. “No sexual assault. No semen. No rearranged clothes that might indicate rape. No eyewitnesses. No reports of any suspicious activity. No incriminating latents. That about wraps it up.”

Charlie could feel a slow, steady pulse in his neck. “What about the Peppers? Anything new on that front?”

“Besides a million nut calls?” Mike cracked a smile. “Everybody’s got a theory. Everybody’s developed extrasensory perception all of a sudden.”

“Any word on Gustafson?”

“Yeah, we got an address.” He clunked his chair forward, the soft underbelly of his chin vibrating. “I was gonna go over there and talk to him in person, since he refuses to acknowledge our phone calls.”

Charlie stood up. “What’re we waiting for?”

On their way out, Hunter stopped them. “Chief? There’s some lady on the phone… insists on talking to you personally. Says it’s about the case.”

“Meet you outside,” Charlie told Mike, then took the phone from Hunter. “Hello?”

“Chief Grover?”

The line made a clicking sound.

“How can I help you, ma’am?”

“I wanted to report something about those murders that happened last month.”

“Yes? I’m listening.”

“Well,” she said in a thick Texas drawl, “when I was a little girl, we had a tornado here in Dime Box, Texas. An F-2. Oh, it was bad. Mama, Dickie and me hid in the closet. It was right under the stairs, so we thought we’d be safe. That was a terrible day, I don’t know if you remember… but half the town got blown away.”

Charlie furrowed his brow. “Yes?”

“So there we were, huddled inside the closet, scared out of our wits, when I peeked out the door and saw this little person moving around inside our house. I thought it was an elf… I thought we had an elf in the house… but now I think it must’ve been a little boy. He wandered through the front hallway. A little boy of about… oh, I don’t know. Five or six years old?”

Charlie frowned. It didn’t make any sense.

“After the tornado roped out, there were no elves or little boys to be found, of course. I figured I must’ve been dreaming. But we discovered to our amazement that our silverware was gone. Our TV set was gone. The radio was gone. I mean, you understand, we were close to the damage path, but the house was still standing, and those items were missing as if by magic. As if someone or something had come into the house and plucked them out of existence. I just wanted you to know…”

“Well, ma’am. I appreciate the call. I sincerely do.”

“I don’t know. Maybe the wind blew everything away. But I can’t seem to get that day out of my head.”

“I’ll take it under advisement. Thanks for calling.”

“No, thank you, Chief Grover,” she said. “Thank you and your men for doing such a wonderful job.”

“I wish I deserved that,” he said, and hung up.