The Breathtaker (3 page)

2

T
HE WIND
stiffened as Charlie stepped out of his cruiser, bits of leaves and debris flying into his face. He was way out in the middle of nowhere at the tail end of Shepherd Street, facing Rob Pepper’s ruined farmstead. Most of the buildings had been scoured off their slabs—barn, stables, henhouse, toolshed. Huge thirty-foot I-beams were tossed around like straws. The big shady trees that’d once shielded the property from the noontime sun had blown over. The Peppers’ pickup truck had rolled across the street and slammed into an overturned clothes dryer. Large areas of winter wheat had been stripped bare, and dead hogs and wind-plucked chickens littered the landscape—Chester White, Berkshire, Spotted Poland China. All blue-ribbon winners.

Only the Peppers’ house stood intact amid the chaos. Charlie stepped gingerly over broken tree limbs and a Tupperware bowl twisted wildly out of shape, then paused to study the white frame house beneath the overcast sky. This slab-on-grade farmhouse was similar to many others in the area, without any basement to take shelter in. The tornado had narrowly missed it, coming to within an eighth of a mile. Some of the windows had blown out, the chimney was toppled and part of the roof was gone; but the structure had withstood the kind of pressure that’d knocked almost everything else down. How had that happened? He rubbed his forehead. He’d heard of multivortex tornadoes before, and it made sense. A single tornado might occasionally contain two or more small, intense subvortices orbiting around its center; these vortices, forming and dying within seconds, were the cause of most of the narrow, short swaths of extreme damage that arced through the tornado’s tracks.

“Chief?” Assistant Chief Lester Deere said from the front porch. “I think they’re dead up there.”

“What?”

“The Peppers.”

He noticed the mud on Lester’s clothes, the blood on his hands. Lester was the kind of guy who had a problem with life’s little rules; he was always late for work and full of excuses. Today, on his day off, he wore the flannel shirt and denim jeans of a ranch hand. Now in his post-football years, his stomach pooched out and his big square body was topped off by an unruly mop of sandy blond hair that he gelled almost too carefully in place.

“They’re all dead up there,” he repeated mindlessly, his bloodshot eyes not quite focusing. “I’m in shock. Look at my hands. I can’t stop shaking.”

Charlie glanced at Lester’s bloody hands. “What d’you mean, they’re all dead? The house is still standing. What happened?”

“Go see for yourself.” His voice was so constricted you wanted to find the choke control and ease up.

The front door wasn’t locked. The interior of the house was so dark it took a few moments for Charlie’s eyes to adjust. The hairs on the nape of his neck shivered as he inhaled the sharp, coppery scent of blood. He aimed his flashlight into the chaos of the front hallway. The mail table and coatrack were overturned, pictures were off the walls, broken glass was everywhere.

He proceeded slowly forward, his flashlight beam raking across the rose-covered wallpaper. A few picture frames still clung tenaciously to the walls: innocent candids of the Peppers one Christmas Eve; of Rob Pepper carving the Thanksgiving turkey; of Danielle and her mother dressed as Raggedy Ann and Andy some long-forgotten Halloween. In the center of the hallway was a bundle of couch cushions and a soggy mattress, a bunched-up sleeping bag, a broken radio on the floor and a flashlight whose batteries still worked, light playing off the floorboard. He took a closer look at the mattress and saw bloodstains. He found a pool of blood on the floor, then saw the drag marks leading toward the stairs.

Taking the stairs two at a time, he followed the drag marks down the hallway into the master bedroom, where he paused in the doorway to catch his breath. There was a huge, gaping hole in the ceiling, where the rafters, roof and part of the wall had been torn away. He could see the gray, overcast sky and the backyard from here. The bedroom was a mess—broken glass, overturned furniture, everything covered in mud. One of the tornado’s vortices must’ve ripped through the roof, like a fairy-tale giant taking a bite out of a gingerbread house.

The Peppers’ teenage daughter was huddled in a corner behind the queen-size bed, her arms curled protectively around herself. Danielle Pepper had been impaled by flying debris—shattered glass from the broken windows, splintered pieces of wood. Gruesome. Horrific. There was penetrating trauma with what looked like a splintered chair leg and the bloody strut of a picket fence.

Charlie squatted in front of her and felt for a pulse. Her skin was waxy and translucent, at the beginning stages of lividity. Her open eyes did not react to light, although the corneas were clear. He observed in her stiffened jaw the beginning stages of rigor mortis. She reminded him of Sophie, and that made him cringe. Her long red hair was done up in ponytails, and when he wiped the mud off her face, he could see deep bruises over her right eye and cheekbone.

The world swam for an instant as Charlie stood up and took a step backward. He glanced around the master bedroom. The mattress was missing from the bed and the box spring was wet with rain. He heard an odd creaking sound. It was coming from somewhere above him. There was an explosion of splinters as something came crashing through the ruined plaster over his head, and a scream lodged in his throat as he leaped away.

Rob Pepper’s torso was dangling from the ceiling like an upside-down jack-in-the-box. He was stuck like a pincushion with flying debris—face, neck, chest. The bottom half of his body remained lodged in the crumbling plaster while the upper half swung hideously back and forth.

Charlie dragged his hand across his mouth, the fear crowding in on him. Everything stood still for a moment. The house was shaking with wind, and he suddenly wondered if the structure was stable. Maybe it had sustained more damage than he’d initially thought. He backed away from the bodies and almost tripped on an overturned rocking chair. He caught his balance and pivoted, then found himself on the edge of a precipice, floorboards jutting into nothingness.

Jenna Pepper had been flung into a nearby tree by the wind, her body nestled in a bed of tangled branches just a few yards from where he stood. She was a petite woman, five foot two, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet. Her sleek dark hair was cropped short, and she wore faded Levi’s and a peach-colored pullover top, no shoes or socks on her slender feet. Charlie swallowed hard at the sight of the mahogany bedpost protruding like the hilt of a knife from her neck. She had penetrating injuries to her chest with what looked like a staircase baluster, and the bloodstains on her pullover were like scattered red roses. Squinting hard, he thought he could detect defensive wounds to her hands and forearms.

Something stirred in him. The old-fashioned roller shades flapped in the wind as he walked back over to where Rob Pepper dangled from the rafters. Charlie reached for his hands and turned them palms-up. There were defensive wounds to his forearms, standard slash marks from a knife or a blade.
Drag marks in the hallway leading up the stairs…

Charlie got on his portable and said with some urgency, “Lester? I want you to cordon off the area.”

“Some of the rescue workers just pulled up, Chief.”

“Send them away. Access to the area is being restricted. Post a man at either end of the street. If anybody asks, tell them we’re having problems with gas leaks.” He stared into Rob’s eyes—unfocused eyes that seemed to be retracted into infinite regret. “Lester? Did you get all that?”

“Are they dead?”

“Yeah,” he said with wonder, “they’re all dead.”

3

T
HAT NIGHT
, military men in green jeeps patrolled the streets, while TV trucks cruised the ruins in search of anything poignant or shocking they could put on the eleven o’clock news. Volunteers with chain saws helped clear the debris from the roads so that the gas company crews could check for damaged lines. Most of the cops on duty that day didn’t go home when their shifts were over, and the town’s fire crew worked all night long to contain the sporadic fires. Meanwhile, the screams of ambulances and police cars never let up.

Around 8:00
P.M.
, the temperature dropped and a cold driving rain pummeled the town. A thousand residents left their unheated, unlit homes for the warmth of the Red Cross shelters, where volunteers served up free meals of pork ribs from Babe’s Bar-B-Q and the works on Texas toast from the Roadside Diner. At the damage site, people stood around in amazement in the freezing-ass rain, while a pea-soup fog tinted with the fiery glow of the strobing emergency lights settled over everything. Men passed around paper bags, talking softly among themselves, while housewives with no homes to go back to traded drags off cigarettes and prowled through the rubble in an attempt to salvage whatever valuables they could before they were ordered away for good. Prayers were said. Those little bargains you made with God.
Please let it be over with. Let this be the worst of it.

Local TV anchors shoved microphones in Charlie’s face and followed him around relentlessly wherever he went. He tried to answer their questions as best he could while keeping his suspicions about the crime to himself. It was such huge news he didn’t want to be wrong about it, didn’t want to make a fool of himself on national TV. He would wait until after the autopsies were done to make an announcement, until he knew for certain what they were dealing with.

“Those parts of town with underground electrical lines will regain power first,” he told reporters outside the police station, his voice hoarse from reiterating a thousand details. “Those homes and businesses served by aerial lines should take a little longer. Part of the problem is moving huge piles of debris out of the way. We need more volunteers with bulldozers and tractor-trailers, if you could get the word out.”

“Chief? Can you confirm the number of dead so far?”

“We have it at six.”

“What about financial aid for the victims?”

“A representative from FEMA will be here tomorrow to help with the recovery.”

“Chief? Why is Shepherd Street closed off to traffic?” asked a reporter whose darkly challenging looks told you he’d get to the bottom of things, with or without your help.

“We’re checking out some damaged gas lines in the area,” Charlie lied, referring to a yellow legal pad so covered with notes he could barely read his own writing. “There are nine-hundred-plus people staying in shelters tonight, three dozen National Guard troops requested. We had approximately twenty minutes of warning, which helped keep the death toll low, compared to what it might’ve been. The fire department has completed its search for bodies and survivors in the Black Kettle subdivision, and the cadaver dogs have been called off. You can reach the courthouse all night long. Somebody’ll be there to keep you posted.”

He turned to leave, but a well-groomed anchorwoman from KVMX stepped in his path. “What about the rumors, Chief? We keep hearing rumors that one of today’s tornado victims has met with foul play.”

“I have no comment at this time.”

“Chief!” He was pummeled with questions as reporters scrambled after him. “The helicopter cam shows a cordoned-off area on Shepherd Street. Care to comment?”

“I’ll have more to say tomorrow morning. G’night, folks.”

“Chief? Chief?” News crews surrounded his vehicle, preventing him from leaving until a few of his men chased them off. Charlie stepped on the accelerator, all those ghostly faces in his headlights’ glare clamoring for enlightenment. A sudden gust of wind rammed into the car, and the taste of whiskey lingered on his lips.
Bad idea. One of the reporters could’ve smelled it, and then what?
An hour earlier, he’d changed his shirt at the station house and had taken a few covert swigs from the bottle of Mr. Daniel’s the dispatcher kept in his desk drawer. Now he passed through downtown with its rain-slicked streets and flat-faced brick facades, thinking how baffling this case was. Jenna, Rob and Danielle Pepper had sustained defensive wounds to the hands, forearms and face. There were drag marks leading up the stairs from two or more bodies, and Danielle had scrape marks on her arms and mud on the back of her clothes, indicating that her body had been dragged. He wouldn’t know about the other two until the medical examiner arrived on the scene and gave them permission to move the bodies. It sent shivers cascading across his scalp. Their last homicide case had been six months ago, a drug killing. The last tornado to hit Promise, Oklahoma, was in 1924.

He took a right onto a poorly paved road, his headlights wrapping across the twisted landscape. Some people came out of their nightmare childhoods to become priests or criminals; Charlie had become a cop. He held a criminology degree from the University of Oklahoma and had done his police training in Tulsa, where he’d walked a beat for several years before returning home. This town of 22,000 had its share of bad guys and a serious drug problem, mostly pot and amphetamines. He’d worked with informants, prostitutes and junkies. He’d taken on three thugs in a gun battle once—a classic check-your-shorts moment. He’d worked robberies, jackrollings, shootings and cuttings. You carried a big stick, depending on which neighborhood you were in. Charlie had even killed a man once—nothing he was proud of. Five years ago, an unemployed mill worker had taken his own children hostage. Trained in hostage negotiations at the University of Oklahoma, Charlie’d almost talked the distraught man into surrendering, when the perp suddenly turned the gun on his four-year-old daughter and Charlie was forced to shoot him dead. He’d gotten decorated for it, but he still had nightmares over it.

Now he nodded at the National Guard standing post at the entrance to Shepherd Street. He’d stationed as many patrol officers as he could spare around the scene of the crime, stationed even more officers along Main Street and other areas of business in order to discourage civil disobedience. A handful of his men were out canvassing the Peppers’ neighborhood, going door-to-door in search of any eyewitnesses who might’ve seen or heard something suspicious that afternoon.

The crime scene was a virtual dead zone, full of the glow of headlights and the sound of gas generators. Half a dozen detectives and officers in double gloves and protective Tyvek-type shoe covers were inside the house now, processing the scene and collecting trace evidence. Despite the heavy fog, a tireless news helicopter circled overhead, and Charlie hoped they’d run out of fuel soon and leave.

Around midnight, the helicopter finally flew away. Reports were coming back that the town was by all accounts quiet now, most of its citizens holed up in their own homes, if they still had a home. The rain stopped around 3:00
A.M.
, and the sky blew clear, the stars came out. Exhausted but resolved, Charlie and his men continued to gather physical evidence from the primary scene until around 5:00
A.M.
, when Roger Duff, the medical examiner, came to take the bodies away. Charlie was about to accompany him over to the morgue when Duff told him, “Go home and hug your daughter, Charlie. These bodies’ll keep.”

It was 5:30
A.M.
by the time he turned down Red Bud Road. The rising sun hit him in the eyes and lit the fine hairs of his knuckles so that they glowed translucent. His throat was hoarse from nonstop talking. His clothes were streaked with mud, his fingernails black with grime. All he wanted to do was lie down and close his scratchy eyes, but he wouldn’t be getting any sleep for the next forty-eight hours, at least.

As he parked in the driveway, Charlie was disheartened to discover that the flag had been wrenched from its place by the front door and twisted, pole and all, around the branch of a dogwood tree. The tornado had left its imprint everywhere like a colorless poison. Pink and white bits of insulation littered the front yard, along with a multitude of roofing shingles. Envelopes were scattered everywhere.
Nice to see the mail’s being delivered.
The clear blue sky made him feel blotted out. He looked at the peeling white frame house with its dark green shutters and sighed. At least nothing important had blown away. Some of the siding was damaged and tree limbs were scattered over the grass like abandoned croquet mallets, but the house itself remained intact. His daughter was safe and sound. The April air was bracing. As he crossed the yard, a swallow careened in front of him, snapping at invisible bugs.

Charlie half expected to hear Maddie’s honeyed voice as he opened the front door.
Sweetie?
But there was no familiar greeting, no hug. Not the warmth of her body, not that ugly flannel robe the color of gravy she’d worn the last few months of life. Beautiful Maddie, smarter than him, better than him.
The doctors had tried every available option, but when all else failed, they suggested implanting irradiated rods in her head. Irradiated rods that would presumably kill off the cancer cells, blast them all to hell along with half her brain. Sophie wasn’t allowed to visit Maddie in the hospital during the procedure, since it was far too dangerous, and Charlie could only stay for fifteen minutes a day. But Maddie, his lovely dying wife, had remained inside that specially outfitted room for over a week, those rods in her head emitting dangerous doses of radiation. Surely it had done more harm than good…

The front hallway smelled of burned toast. The polished floorboards creaked in the same places they always had; only Maddie was gone. He missed her most when he got home from work. Pictures dusty with neglect lined the hallway walls, and he paused to straighten one out—a youthful Maddie smiling down at him, her eyes two crescents of amusement. He frowned, letting the sadness and guilt wash over him. If he held perfectly still, it would be gone soon.

“Charlie?” Peg Morris said, popping out of the kitchen and cinching her blue kimono shut. “Oh my gosh. You scared the bejesus out of me!” Peg had swooped in to fill the void after Maddie’s death with her rumpled maternal instinct and tattered blue silk kimono, cigarettes and God knows what else bulging from the pockets. She was Maddie’s second cousin and lived across town, but she spent an occasional night at their place whenever Charlie had to work late. She had no children of her own and had taken Sophie under her wing, and for that, Charlie would be eternally grateful.

“Thanks for looking after her, Peg.”

“Oh please, don’t even mention it.” She had penny-colored hair and a mole beside her mouth that wasn’t pretty. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer, Mr. Man. How about some French toast and bacon?”

“I don’t have time to even contemplate breakfast, Peg.”

She had a laugh like watered-down Scotch. “What about coffee? You got time to contemplate that?”

“Love a cup.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Some major damage. A few people died.”

“Mary Jo Crider, Rob and Jenna Pepper, Danielle, John Payne, and Bill Rowley. Oh my gosh, when we first heard about it on the radio, we couldn’t believe our ears.” She shook her head in shock. “You hear about tornadoes all your life, but you never think it’ll happen to you.”

“How’s Ben?” he asked, remembering Peg’s boyfriend.

“Lost a few horses, but we all survived, didn’t we?”

He paused on the stairs. “Can you stay tonight?”

“Sorry, Charlie. I promised Ben.”

“Yeah, sure. Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure something out.” He took the stairs two at a time, then knocked on the
DISASTER AREA
sign taped to his daughter’s door. “Sofe? You awake?”

“C’mon in,” came her groggy voice.

Entering his daughter’s room with its peach-colored walls, ivory curtains and vanilla oak floor was like diving into a pale pool. Disaster area was right—there were dirty clothes everywhere you looked, magazines and soda cans, CDs and cosmetics. Her room looked like the inside of a Dumpster, but she knew exactly where everything was. Sophie was curled in a fetal lump beneath her bedcovers. She slept with her fists squeezed shut, as if she were clinging to a thin rope of consciousness.

“Hey there, jelly bean.”

“Dad!” She sat up and gave him a hug. “I was so worried about you!” She had her mother’s widely spaced eyes and sensual mouth, same mixture of innocence and self-reliance. She had Maddie’s long cinnamon-colored hair and porcelain skin with that rich pink color to her cheeks; but make no mistake about it, she was her father’s daughter. Stubborn, methodical, same worry line between her eyes. At five foot seven, she was taller than most of her classmates but had fortunately inherited none of her father’s innate awkwardness. She was blessed with Maddie’s athletic grace and moved like liquid mercury. “Phew, you reek,” she said, clamping her pillow over her face.

He ran his fingers over his beard bristle. “I was just about to take a shower, thanks a lot.”

“Take a nice long one, okay? With lots and lots of soap,” she said with a muffled giggle. “You’re staying for breakfast, right?”

“Can’t.”

She removed the pillow and looked at him, disappointment in her eyes. “Dad… I need some face-to-face time with you.”

“Yeah, well. I need face-to-face time with you, too.”

“So?”

“How’s tonight sound? I think I can get away.”

She frowned. “‘Think’ isn’t good enough.”

“Lemme see what I can do. C’mere.” He wrapped his arms around her again and gave her a lingering hug, needing to know that she was okay. If she’d been left relatively unscathed by yesterday’s events, then he could get back to work and quit worrying.

“The whole house was shaking like a leaf,” she told him. “You could hear hail bouncing off the metal cellar doors. Peg and I were like, ‘What was that? What was that?’ We were jumpy as hell. I was so scared at one point I thought my heart was going to burst.”