The Breathtaker (25 page)

13

T
HE FOLLOWING
day, Charlie shuffled his feet restlessly over the carpet and stared at the photograph on his desktop—a picture of his father’s gray Loadmaster pickup truck speeding past the damage site. It was one of those humid, overcast days where your hair kept sticking to the back of your neck and you had a rubbery grip on things. He felt hunched. Tense. This was the question: After the old man quit drinking thirty years ago, where had he placed all his pent-up rage?

Mike came to the doorway. “About the evidence we collected from Lester’s house,” he said. “Cocaine residue, an unregistered gun. We’re tracking his whereabouts this past month, reviewing phone records and ATM withdrawals… Before April fifteenth, he made numerous calls to Jenna Pepper. After April fifteenth, he called Jake Wheaton and Boone Pritchett on several occasions.”

Charlie tugged on his lower lip. “We’ve gotta find Pritchett.”

Mike nodded. “So I’m assuming Lester got his drugs from local dealers in exchange for his silence. Then Jake and Boone distributed it throughout the high school.” He shifted uncomfortably in the doorway. “I would’ve trusted Lester with my life. Shows you just how much I know.”

Charlie nodded miserably. “What d’you got there?”

Mike tapped the folder in his hand. “They found some unaccounted-for tire impressions in the Lakes’ driveway and sent them to the state lab for analysis. Sheriff Dorsey just sent us the results. They’ve narrowed it down to a full-size pickup truck riding on a set of brand-new Michelin tires.”

Charlie took a careful breath. His father drove a full-size pickup truck. He was a Michelin kind of guy. He’d just purchased a brand-new set of tires. A pixel of anxiety formed in the pit of his stomach. “That would eliminate Gustafson,” he said.

Mike glanced up.

“Gustafson drives a van… riding on a set of Goodyear tires.” A cold certainty rose in his gut. “What if he’s telling the truth, Mike? What if the Debris Killer stole Gustafson’s gloves and planted the evidence just to throw us off?”

Mike paused a beat, then said, “Anything’s possible.”

His shoulders sagged. He rubbed his tired eyes. “My father owns a full-size pickup truck,” he said, holding up the blurred shot. “He just bought a set of Michelin tires.”

Mike’s nostrils quivered. “Yeah? So?”

“We were poor as dirt when I was growing up. Mama was a real pack rat. Our house was so knee-deep in garbage even the social workers were afraid to come in. The fire marshal figured that the fire started down in the basement, where all the rags and newspapers and kerosene lanterns were…”

Mike was stopped like a clock.

“But I’ve been thinking… what if it wasn’t an accident? What if my father started the fire?”

“This is just mental exhaustion talking, Chief.”

“He wears a peacoat every chase season. Blue-black wool. He’s right-handed. He’s a storm-chaser.” He slumped way down on his spine. “There’s a history of violence, Mike. He wears a size eleven shoe, that’s in the ballpark. A medium-length white hair was found at the Rideout residence. Those teeth… did you know my father wore dentures?”

“Listen, Chief, it’s a sad fact.” Mike stood solid and unsmiling in the doorway. “Your dad was a real motherfucker. He may even have done something criminal in the past, but you don’t want to overreact.”

The wind picked up, toying with the miniblinds. It was going to rain this afternoon and spoil Lester’s funeral.

“He keeps a bunch of woodworking tools out in the barn,” Charlie went on, looking down at the blurred shot of the Loadmaster. “If you only knew what I know about him…”

Mike couldn’t mask his skepticism. “Listen, it should be easy enough to verify. We’ll compare the tire treads, see if they match up. We can compare hairs and fibers, too. Relax, boss. It won’t be the first time we barked up the wrong tree.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “A crazy thought.”

“You should talk to him, though. Sounds like you need to get a few things off your chest.”

Charlie checked his watch. “Funeral’s in one hour,” he said. “We’d better get moving.”

14

S
EVERAL HUNDRED
people showed up for Lester Deere’s funeral. His parents were pillars of the community, and nobody wanted to believe the worst about their son just yet. After the eulogy, a long train of cars drove across town to the cemetery, where Charlie and his father followed the other mourners through the graveyard. Isaac wore an ash-gray Stetson and a shapeless brown raincoat over his cheap black suit. “When I die, Charlie, feel free to dispense with the formalities and just scatter my ashes into the eye of a storm.”

“You don’t want a funeral, Pop?”

Scowling, he looked around the cemetery at the other mourners. “
Pfft.
I can do without all the good intentions and bad hairdos.”

A black king snake was coiled on one of the gravestones, enjoying the last few rays of afternoon light before the sun slipped behind the clouds. It was starting to look serious out, the cumulonimbus piled along the horizon for miles, a bilious force rolling in from the southwest.

Charlie removed his hat and let the wind play with his thinning hair. “We need to talk, Pop.”

“Talk?” His father eyed him skeptically. “What about?”

“A few things that need clarifying.”

The old man was sucking on something—a cough drop or a piece of hard candy—holding it in his mouth like a sour secret. “I’ve got this theory about you,” he said. “Wanna hear it?”

Here it comes.
“It’s a free country.”

“Remember that snot-nosed kid who used to torment you all the time?” Isaac said. “All those names he called you? Burned-All-Over Grover, Charbroiled Charlie… I wanted to shoot the little redneck son of a bitch.”

It was a startling admission coming from him, the closest thing to warmth Charlie had felt in years. He could smell the sulfur in the oncoming storm. Lightning flared, and an indigo cumulus tower emitted a low rumble of thunder.

“My theory goes like this. You’ve been waiting your entire life to get even.” He tapped Charlie’s chest with hostile insistence. “Now’s your chance to get even for all those years of torment… all those years of feeling so out of control. Look at you, Charlie, you’re the goddamn chief of police. As the guy in charge, you get to be the moral arbiter of the whole damn town. You get to push people around, throw people in jail, harass anybody you want to… including your old man.”

Charlie shoved his hands angrily in his pockets. “And why would I harass you, Pop?”

His leathery face caught the last burnished rays of light before the sun disappeared permanently behind the clouds. “For things I may or may not have done in the past.”

“Like what? Like beating Mama senseless?”

“I’m no monster, Charlie. Don’t make me out to be one.” He turned his cold, wet eyes toward the crowd. “You have no idea what your mother and I went through. You don’t even have a clue…”

Years of anger rippled through him. Muscle memory. A violent image unfurled before his mind’s eye with sickening clarity—his father’s spit-flecked face and that shriek of a mouth. “Service is starting,” he said flatly.

They joined the other mourners at the grave site. Sam Deere wore a lively tie and a bitter smile; Tammy Deere looked so outraged, so heartbroken, Charlie wanted to fold her in his arms like a wounded bird.

“We gather in this restful place to honor a good cop and a loving son,” Reverend Cavenaugh began. “Lester Deere walked like a man, and we were all proud of him…”

The clouds broke just then, and dozens of black umbrellas mushroomed in the rain. Fifteen minutes later, after they’d lowered the casket into the ground and said their final farewells, Lester’s parents approached Charlie with bruised faces, their eyebrows arcing out in bewilderment. He groped for something inspiring to say, all the tired old clichés exploding inside his head at once. Lester’s favorite topic had always been himself, and yet, right when he needed it the most, Charlie couldn’t dredge up a single anecdote upon which to base a few consoling words. “We were proud of him,” he said, taking their hands. “He was a good cop and a good friend.”

“You’ll clear him of these charges, won’t you, Chief?”

He uttered a few false words of consolation, and they accepted these crumbs with immense gratitude, which was more than Charlie deserved. He walked away, sick of himself. Sick and tired of the heartache. Grief flattened you like a freight train, and sometimes the only answer was a tall bottle and a short glass. He knew from experience that, just as the pain was about to heal over, something else would come along and trigger another memory—the rainwater smell of your mother’s hair, a stranger’s hiccup reminding you of your baby sister’s laughter—and the bounce would leak right out of your step again.

The air was dripping with rain. He took off his hat, lifted his face to the sky and let the rain come down on him. He could feel himself drifting momentarily out of his own skin… but then he heard the chirp of rubber on asphalt and turned in time to see the back of his father’s Loadmaster pickup truck disappearing into the mist.

Charlie jogged across the ruddy, blooming clover, past an uprooted flower bed and into the cemetery parking lot, where he hopped into the only undercover car the department owned—a squeezed-lime Chevy Cavalier—and put it into gear. He shot out of the lot after the old man, dogging those cardinal-red taillights through the driving rain. He caught up with the Loadmaster on a long ribbon of blacktop, windshield wipers flapping furiously. This was crazy.
His father, guilty of murder?
Absurd. Raindrops flurried out of the mist like a thousand doubts. Isaac had been a bad man once, yes; but hadn’t he repented? Hadn’t he suffered? Charlie was wrong to doubt him. Wrong to suspect him of anything worse than petty theft.
The watch.
Then again, what better alibi than that you were at the scene of the crime that day, along with dozens of other storm-chasers? And what better way to avoid your son’s questions than to put him on the defensive?
I have this theory about you…

The road dipped gently, then climbed in imperceptible increments past rolling green fields of grazing Angus into the vast open areas south of town, where so little appeared to exist. Was his father right? Was his entire career about getting even? Why hadn’t he stayed in Tulsa? Why join the police force in the first place?
Because he wanted to find out the truth… the truth about what’d happened that night… the night of the fire… wondering his whole life… burying his doubts year after year…

Charlie chased the wink of taillights, careful to keep at least thirty yards between himself and his father at all times in order to avoid detection. He sped past feedstores and tractor agencies, his deepest fears mounting as he spotted an oily black trash bag in the back of the flatbed. As the trash bag fluttered in the wind, he couldn’t help thinking about the killer’s M.O. He’d brought the pieces of flying debris with him to each of the crime scenes—chair legs, balusters, splintered fence struts. How? In a trash bag in the back of his pickup truck?

The Loadmaster slowed to a crawl, then turned down a winding road leading to the town dump. Charlie could feel the heat of his body as he tapped his foot on the brakes and followed suit. They passed a chain-link fence, beyond which mounds of ash grew at a glacial pace on either side of the road, and the air grew fetid with the smell of rotting fruit and smoldering furniture. They came to a large clearing, where the Loadmaster pulled over and parked with a squeak of rubber. Charlie watched from a safe distance as his father got out of the truck, snagged the trash bag, carried it down an embankment and disappeared from view.

He cut the engine and got out. A cold stinging rain hit him in the face and streaked down his neck. He grabbed a rain slicker from the backseat and headed after Isaac, the heat of his body steaming off his clothes. Beyond the low smoldering hills, he could see the wheat fields pitching in the wind. The wheat moved like water, rumpling and crumpling before each great marching sheet of rain.

A haze of burning rubbish stung his eyes as he approached the truck. A cursory glance revealed nothing. The fenders and hood were peppered with hail dents; the Michelin tires were brand-new. A stack of wet newspapers sagged against a plastic picnic cooler in the back of the flatbed beside a toolbox and a rusty shovel. Charlie had no legal authority to search the truck, since his reasons fell short of the legal requirements of probable cause. Without a search-and-seizure warrant, you couldn’t search a vehicle or take anything from it without the owner’s consent. Motor vehicle searches traditionally caused serious problems in court, so you had to limit your search to whatever you could see through a window.

There was nothing in the front seat but storm-chaser gear. No bloodstains, wipe marks or weapons, as far as he could tell. A bolt of lightning crashed and burned away the shadows as he crested the embankment and looked down at the top of his father’s Stetson. The old man seemed to hesitate a moment before he dropped the trash bag down the sloping hillside. Charlie watched as the oily black bag tumbled down the incline, then came to a sluggish halt, trapped in the legs of an old piano stool. Now that it was officially abandoned property, anybody could pick it up and look through it.

“Dad?”

His father turned with great surprise.

“What’s in the bag?”

The old man squinted up at him, rain spattering his face and making him blink. “None of your damn business!”

“Pop?” Charlie’s eyes narrowed as he proceeded down the slippery hillside. “I don’t need a warrant to look in the bag.”

“What’d you do,” he barked,
“follow me here?”

15

C
HARLIE’S ACCELERATING
heart rate primed his body to the peak of alertness as he trekked down the slope, slipping over potato peelings and coffee grounds and ignoring the dark thoughts crawling around inside his skull. “What’s in the bag?” he repeated.

“None of your damn business.”

“Step aside, Pop.”

His father’s eyes grew raw and wild. “You go to hell!”

Charlie edged past him down the incline, then kicked the bag open with the toe of his boot, and out spilled dozens of bottles—vodka, whiskey—stinking of fermented grains. They tumbled slowly downhill, clinking into one another. Charlie turned with an anguished stare. “Since when did you start drinking again?”

Isaac looked away, a deep flush crawling up his neck. “I never stopped.”

A mosslike silence followed as they stared at one another the way two children do sometimes. Then the old man glared malevolently and shook him off. Charlie could smell the storm coming, a metallic odor like wet copper. There was a strange hurricane-like warmth to the air.

“I’m going to ask you something,” he said slowly, “and I want a straight answer.”

His father’s face was laminated with sweat.

“What happened on April fifteenth?”

He looked visibly affronted. “You know damn well where I was that day. I already told you.”

Charlie nodded. “What about May eleventh?”

“That storm front produced four tornadoes over three states, if you’ll recall. I didn’t get any further south than Ardmore and Durant. I was chasing junk all night long.”

“Can you prove you weren’t in Texas that night?”

“How am I supposed to prove a thing like that?”

“Did you stop for gas, food or lodging? Talk to any other storm-chasers?”

“What you mean is…” His father held his eye. “Am I a cold-blooded killer? That’s the real question, isn’t it?”

It sounded absurd, coming from his lips. Charlie had an urge to grab him, hug him, hang on tight. He was afraid of his next question. A lump formed in his throat, while all around them, low fires glowed in the distant mounds of ash. “Well?” He swallowed hard. “Are you?”

Isaac’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I’ve been called plenty of things in my life, Charlie. I may be one sorry son of a bitch, but I sure as hell don’t have enough ice in my veins for that sort of hobby.”

“I want to believe you, Pop.”

A mist of wrinkles crept across his face as he frowned. “Screw you.” He wrapped his musty old raincoat around him and started back up the incline, but Charlie hooked him by the arm, spun him around.

“What happened the night our house burned down?”

Isaac’s stubborn face closed like a fist. “You don’t wanna go there.”

Charlie squeezed the deep muscles of Isaac’s arms until he flinched, until he sucked in air through his false teeth. “You’re not leaving until you tell me what happened.”

Isaac jerked away and straightened his rumpled raincoat, then settled his hat more squarely on his head. “I had my dreams,” he said angrily. “Big dreams, Charlie. I was gonna see the world. Join the Coast Guard. Boats, the ocean… that’s what got my juices flowing. But in a fit of bad timing, Adelaide got herself pregnant.”

Charlie could feel his pulse ticking in the thin skin of his temples, while bits of trash spun in snaky gusts of wind and the sound of the rain deepened in tone.

“We got caught in the act. It was a shotgun type of thing. I honestly did love her, but marriage? Now, there’s a commitment.” The skin around his eyes screwed tight as he focused on his son. “You remember your mother’s condition, don’t you?”

Charlie drew back. “What condition?”

“Nerves, they called it. A nervous condition. Remember how insufferable she could be? How awful full of herself? There’d be days when she wouldn’t get out of bed to boil water. Then other times, she’d be bouncing off the walls, juggling a hundred different things at once.”

Charlie felt a frantic activity going on inside his head, like a million flies trapped in a jar.

“When she hit those heights or sank to those lows, you couldn’t reason with her.” He rubbed his jaw. “Times like that, I’d make my getaway. Let her wallow in her own misery, I figured. I didn’t realize just how sick she was. That’s the way it is with mental illness. You think a person’s trying to needle you on purpose. You think they’re in control of their emotions…”

Charlie’s clothes grew clammy, while the rain brought with it the cold down their necks.

“It became a vicious cycle,” his father said with absent, haunted eyes. “She’d get depressed, I’d go out drinking. I’d go out drinking, and she’d get depressed. Then one day, I don’t remember why…” He licked his lips, his wet pink tongue sliding along the withered skin. “I’m ashamed of this part. One day, I believe I may have pushed her over the edge.”

Raped her, you mean, you deluded bastard.
Charlie tried to swallow, but there wasn’t enough spit in his mouth to go around. The old man’s eyes seemed very far away, lost in the milky fog of memory.

“Your mama achieved an awful sort of vengeance that night. Self-destructive and terrible. I never cried. It was too awesome. The authorities never suspected arson. They said it was due to faulty wiring and too much junk down in the basement. Kerosene lanterns and overburdened outlets. I never corrected them. Why should I? We needed the insurance money. Why should we be punished for what that poor, tormented soul did?”

“Liar!”
Charlie lunged at him, and they did a slow pirouette to the ground, where they tumbled over the trash, a scramble of arms and legs. They rolled downhill over pockets of smoldering rubbish until they hit bottom, where bluebonnets sprouted from the ash. Grabbing his father by the collar, he screamed, “You fucking liar!”

The old man’s Stetson blew away in the wind, and he gazed up at Charlie with desperate eyes. “The last thing I knew, I’d fallen asleep on top of her. And when I woke up… all this smoke was pouring into the room. So thick you could hardly breathe. I got out of bed and ran to the door, and there she was… hair sticking to her cheeks. Flames shooting up the stairs behind her. Awful. There was nothing in her eyes… not a hint of recognition, Charlie. She just looked at me and walked away, and that’s the last I ever saw of her.”

Charlie could smell lemons and a faint whiff of booze on the old man’s breath, and it sickened him. Oldest trick in the book. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? He wrapped his hands around his father’s neck and squeezed, his heart drubbing with hatred.

“Charlie…”

He choked the words off at the back of the old man’s throat, arms pulsing with fury. He drew his breath in hitches, while Isaac tried desperately to break his grasp. His lips turned blue. He wriggled around beneath Charlie—so weak and insignificant. That hideous, twisted face. Those dilated nostrils. A quick thought: Charlie could snap his neck. He could choke the breath right out of him.
What’s the sound of nothing? What’s the sound of nothing, you little bed wetter?
His hands ached as he squeezed tighter.

Stop it, you’re killing him…

Charlie gave a sudden leap inside and stumbled to his feet. Humiliated. Furious. Hands trembling with this newfound knowledge. How terrible to discover your own basest instincts. Horrible, horrible. He looked at the sky ribbed with clouds, at the nearby hills where the mesquite and blackjack had been scorched from the burning trash.
Self-control. Hold on.

“Charlie?” his father gasped, some massive struggle going on behind his eyes. The cowboy hat was gone, white tongues of hair licking at his withered cheeks. “Help me up.”

Charlie pulled him to his feet. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he said in a husky whisper. “You stupid bastard, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Charlie, seriously… would it’ve helped?”

They stood wrapped in tangled strings of air, a dark knowledge passing between them. A halting strangeness to the air.

When his cell phone rang, Charlie felt the pain in his head like a bundle of knife points. “Hello?” he barked into the receiver.

“Charlie?” came a hesitant female voice. “It’s me, Peg. Listen, I’m at your place now…” She sounded vaguely out of breath, and he could picture her leaning against the kitchen counter in her blue and yellow jogging suit, even though she’d never gone jogging a day in her life.

“What is it, Peg? I’m right in the middle of something.”

“Sophie isn’t here. She’s supposed to be, but she isn’t.”

A nervous shiver straightened his spine.

“We were supposed to go shopping this afternoon. It was all arranged.”

He avoided his father’s eyes. “You checked out back?”

“Out back, upstairs, downstairs. I found a note.”

“What kind of note?”

“It says she went storm-chasing.”

“Storm-chasing?” he almost shouted. “All by herself?”

“It just says she went storm-chasing. Period.”

He could feel the heaviest kind of apprehension, the kind that only visits you when something totally unexpected happens. “Did she take the car?”

“No, it’s still parked in the driveway,” Peg said irritably. “And I gave up a bridge game for this.”

Fear trilled like an alarm bell inside his head.
Boone Pritchett.
She must’ve gone storm-chasing with Boone Pritchett. His leg was broken, so he wouldn’t be the one driving. Sophie had left the Civic parked at home. Boone’s casino-pink pickup truck was totaled, but his father owned a full-size rust-red pickup truck that Charlie had pulled over many times. Sophie knew how to drive a stick. Would she honestly do that? He knew she was mad at him, but would she disobey him like that and leave a note? Was she that completely lost to him?

“Stay put,” he told Peg. “Call you right back.” He hung up and dialed Willa’s number at the wind facility but got the machine instead. Impatiently he tried her on her cell phone.

Isaac hovered restlessly nearby. “What is it, Charlie? What’s going on?”

He got Willa’s voice mail and left a message. “Hey, it’s me. Call me on my cell soon as you get this.” Then he dialed Rick Kripner’s cell phone with clumsy fingers.

“Yello?”

“Rick? It’s Charlie Grover.”

“Hey,” Rick said warmly. “What’s up?”

“I think my daughter’s in a bit of trouble. She went out storm-chasing without my permission, she was grounded… I think she might’ve gone off with Boone Pritchett,” he said with the faintest tremor in his voice. “I need to find her right away.”

“Hm. They’re probably headed west,” Rick said.

“West?”

“A red box just went up for East Texas this afternoon.”

“What’s a red box?”

“Tornado watch. It means conditions are favorable.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Where’s Willa?”

“Inside the boundary-layer tunnel doing wind inversions.”

“Would you tell her I called?”

“Yeah, sure. Is there anything I can do?”

“Maybe. Are you going storm-chasing this afternoon?”

“Actually I’m on the road right now. Why?”

“Okay, good. Could you keep an eye out for her?”

“Sure, what’s the vehicle?”

“A rust-red Ford pickup truck with Oklahoma plates.”

“Gotcha. I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Call me if you spot it?”

“Absolutely.”

He hung up. Eyes frantic.

“Is Sophie in trouble?” Isaac stood blinking the rainwater out of his eyes. “Are you gonna let me in on this thing, or what?”

He pocketed his cell phone. “Come on.” He grabbed the old man by his musty-smelling raincoat and hauled him back up the hill.

“Where in the blazes are we going now?”

“You’re taking me storm-chasing, Pop.”