The Breathtaker (13 page)

“Hello?” she said, feeling the blood rush from her head.
Whoosh.
She had to sit down. “Charlie? It’s me, Willa Bellman… Listen, would you like to go chasing today?”

Charlie hesitated. “Now?” The line was staticky.

“Now’s as good a time as any, yeah. Sky looks ripe. How’s one o’clock sound?”

There was a long pause.

“Look, the satellite images are terrific.” She could feel her heart thumping in her chest. “Dew point’s risen from mid-forties to mid-sixties. We’re expecting a T-box in western Oklahoma this afternoon due to an easterly component of surface winds north of the frontal boundary…”

He laughed. “What’d you just say?”

“It was English.”

“Plains English maybe.”

“You’re pretty funny for a cop.”

“You’re pretty funny for a wind-whatever-you-are.”

“Wind engineer.” She smiled happily. “So… okay? One o’clock? I’ll pick you up?”

“Sounds good.” He gave her the directions and she wrote them down, fingers cramping around her pencil.

“Okay,” she said, hanging up and looking around. Feeling slightly absurd. Had she just promised him a chase ride before she’d even consulted with Jacobs? Was she losing her mind?

Rick pushed his wire-rim glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “So? He joining us?”

“Yeah. Okay. So here’s the plan. I’ve gotta go plead my case with Jacobs. You prep the ratmobile.” She fished out her keys and tossed them.

Rick caught them one-handed.

“Okay, Ricky?”

“I’m right behind you, Lucy.”

She couldn’t help grinning as she headed for the door.

3

M
IKE ROSENGARD
stood in the doorway in his neatly pressed suit, his moist eyes drooping at the corners. “Good news?” he asked, noticing Charlie’s lingering smile.

“Looks like I’m going storm-chasing this afternoon.”

His best friend and conscience glanced out the windows. “Mama Nature’s in a dark mood today. You don’t want to cross her.”

“I figure I’d snag a few more license plates. Talk to some chasers. Get the lay of the land.” He pinched at his lip, then eyed the manila envelope in Mike’s ink-stained hands. “Good news, I hope?”

“We finally got those lab reports back, Chief. Blood’s been verified as the victims’ ABO.”

“Including the drains?”

“Drains and traps, blood spatter, smears and stains.”

That wasn’t helpful. “What about fingerprints?”

Mike slid a stack of paperwork out of the envelope and took a seat. “Of the ninety-three latent prints we pulled from the scene, eighteen were ID’d as belonging to Rob Pepper, twenty-one to Jenna, twelve to Danielle, and several dozen others attributed to friends, relatives and detectives at the scene. They weren’t able to lift any latents off the wooden implements.”

“So he never took his gloves off?”

“Looks like it.”

Charlie glanced around his corner office, everything reminding him of the weeks he’d spent combing through the tedious details of the case. Witness reports, crime scene photos, empty coffee cups, stuffed-to-the-gills memo baskets. You had to have great powers of patience to live with a case like this. What they needed was more of everything—more manpower, more funds for overtime, more resources, more luck. “What about hair evidence?” he asked.

“We got tentative matches for Jenna, Rob and Danielle,” Mike said. “Plus one blond unknown and seven brown unknowns of varying lengths.”

Charlie shook his head. “Even if we matched them to the perp, it wouldn’t hold up in court. Tornado could’ve deposited the trace inside the house, blowing it in from other areas.”

Mike scanned the rest of the report. “No hair roots. So a DNA match is out.”

Charlie knew that, as far as hair evidence was concerned, no forensic examiner could determine with complete certainty whether or not a specific hair came from the head of one individual to the exclusion of all others without DNA evidence, and the only way to obtain DNA evidence was from a hair root or adhering follicular tissue. “So lemme get this straight. We’ve got no blood, no prints and no suspects.” He searched the ceiling for answers. “I’m tempted to run it by a psychic.”

“How come most psychics never suspect you’re a cop?”

He smiled thinly. The miniblinds rattled in a strong gust of wind. Through his office window, Charlie had a lovely view of the patched parking lot and a hand-painted billboard for Bernie’s septic tanks. Nestled in the granite bowels of the courthouse, the police station consisted of four cramped holding pens, a squad room that doubled as a lunchroom and a dispatcher’s desk cornered into the roll-call room. Charlie’s office on the first floor was jammed to the rafters with cardboard boxes and dusty duty rosters. The wastebaskets were emptied only once a week due to budget cuts.

“Okay, then there’s this.” Mike handed him a photograph of a partial shoe impression—pale purple in color from being treated with diaminobenzidine.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Those guys at the state crime lab are relentless,” Mike said. “You know that pile of shattered glass in the kitchen? They pieced it all together like a jigsaw puzzle—it’s called fracture matching—and found this partial print. Pretty nifty, huh? Turns out to be a popular brand of jogging sneaker, left foot. The lab techs couldn’t come to an agreement about the size, though.”

Charlie nodded. “There’s no consensus?”

“They’re guessing it’s between size ten and eleven, male. They’d have to compare it to a suspect item to be absolutely sure, though. That’s the only way they can get an accurate read.”

“You mean the suspect item we don’t have?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.” He laughed ruefully, then took his handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his brow. His face was florid and porous. “How come this case makes me sweat more and you sweat less?”

Charlie smiled. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Are you kidding? I toss and turn all night long, and then, just as I’m about to nod off, the pounding begins.”

Charlie knew what he meant. Mornings began with the sound of pounding hammers. Bright and early, before the birds were up, the growl of bulldozers announced the arrival of the roofers, plumbers, builders and remodelers. A third of the town looked like a war zone with its bonfires and stripped trees, its piles of debris spray-painted
FOR SALE—FIXER-UPPER
. There were so many yard signs you would’ve thought it was an election year. People were fleeing the area in droves as the damage estimates continued to climb. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had released grim county-wide figures: 137 single-family homes had been destroyed, another 420 homes had experienced some form of damage; 65 out of 760 farms were in ruins. In Promise, the water tower, crushed like a beer can, had fallen across the road and washed away an entire chicken farm. Damage was estimated to be $40 million and rising, and every day was Casual Day at the loan adjustment department.

“I left the city,” Mike said, “because in Boston, all you could see was your neighbor’s back door. Out here, you get to see clear to the horizon. But now that same horizon scares the shit out of me.”

“Just don’t head for the hills like the rest of them.”

“Are you kidding? We’re gonna tough it out. We’re Rosengards.”

Charlie smiled as he handed the photograph back. “What else you got for me, Mike?”

“You’re gonna like this one, boss. Fibers found on the victims’ clothes.” He pulled another lab report out of the envelope. “Numerous blue-black wool fibers cross-transferred between all three victims.”

“Jump-start my heart.” Quickly but intently Charlie perused the report. “So we’re looking for a blue-black woolen item of clothing? Gloves, sweater, scarf… a ski mask, maybe?”

Mike frowned. “Kind of warm out to be wearing wool, don’t you think?”

“It wasn’t all that warm on April fifteenth. Before the storm hit, it was fairly muggy out, but then it dropped precipitously.”

“Still, who’s gonna be wearing wool with those kinds of temperature swings?”

Charlie could feel the day’s tension pinching the back of his neck and rubbed his knotted muscles, his skin slipping too easily over the bones.
He should’ve known something was wrong before Maddie fell ill. All the signs were there—headaches, nausea, confusion, nightmares, insomnia. Signs of a brain tumor. “It’s the flu,” she’d insisted. “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. It’ll pass.” But it hadn’t passed. Bad news came like that, accompanied by signs. And all the while, he’d felt a creepy sense of foreboding he shouldn’t have ignored.

“We door-to-doored within a three-mile radius and tapped out.” Mike’s eyelids fluttered like moth wings. “No stranger sightings. No suspicious vehicles.”

“What about Conrad Holzman?”

“He’s got a rock-solid alibi, Chief.”

“Jonah Gustafson?”

Mike rubbed his eye and studied the tip of his finger. “He’s got a couple of DUIs, an attempted rape charge going back to ’81. We got a phone number, but he isn’t returning our calls.”

Charlie’s fingers twitched on the blotter. “Keep on it. I wanna talk to him.”

“I saved the best for last.” Mike plucked another lab report out of the pile and scanned its coffee-stained pages. “They found semen inside Jenna Pepper’s vagina, and it wasn’t Rob’s. It was somebody else’s. A secretor. AB-positive.”

Charlie caught his jaw in his hand and ran his fingers over his beard bristle. “What about the girl?”

He scanned another sheet of paper. “It says, ‘No tears or bruising. No vaginal penetrating wounds. No seminal fluids in or on the body. No sperm detected underneath the microscope.’ Her hymen was intact. I’m glad for that.” Mike shrugged off his uneasiness; nobody liked thinking about the dead girl. “Regarding Jenna, they should have the DNA results soon.”

“Lemme see.”

He handed it over.

Charlie studied the report. He’d initially expected both female victims to show signs of rape, since overkill-type injuries such as these—multiple stabbings or cuttings to the body—were suggestive of sexual motivation. “No tears or bruising with Jenna, either. No evidence of sexual injury or sexual mutilation. Just seminal fluids in the body.” He shrugged. “How soon can we expect to get DNA results?”

“About a week.”

“Can you put a rush on it?”

“Lemme talk to Art Danbury.” He grinned. “I got something else for you, boss.”

Charlie glanced up. “You’re full of surprises today.”

“Guess who’s in the interview room?”

“What is this, Twenty Questions?”

“Jake Wheaton.”

He scowled. “He came in voluntarily?”

“Arrested for possession. Got a minute?”

“Are you kidding?” Charlie stood up. “Let’s go see to his discomfort.”

4

J
AKE WHEATON
sat staring at his hands. He wore a hooded sweatshirt, jeans and a cheap pair of walking shoes.

“What’s your shoe size?” Charlie asked him.

“Huh?”

“Shoe size. Come on.”

Jake shrugged. “Ten and a half. Why?”

Charlie took the seat opposite, while Mike stood over by the window and drew the blinds shut. The room was small and unpleasant. Just a table and chairs, an overhead bulb and a hardwood floor. That was it.

“I wanna call my dad,” Jake said. Some of his long dark hair stood up in individual strands, thick with gel, and there were dark circles under his eyes.

Charlie nodded. “First let’s talk for a minute.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Listen to me, Jake. You got busted for possession. We can make that go away.”

He looked up, whirling slivers of doubt in his eyes.

“You interested?”

“In what… some kind of a deal?”

“Maybe.” Mike nodded. “If you’re nice and cooperative, we could make it go away.”

“Nobody’s taken any statements yet,” Charlie said.

The boy tugged on his hoodie, pulling the fabric out and wiping his greasy chin with it. “I should talk to my dad first,” he said. “Don’t I get a phone call or something?”

“We’re offering you an opportunity.”

“Listen to him,” Mike said. “He’s treating you fairly.”

“Think about it,” Charlie said. “This is your future we’re talking about.”

The room swelled with silence.

Jake studied Charlie critically, as if he were a mirror. “What do you want me to do?”

“Tell us about Jenna Pepper.”

His eyes grew remote. After a pause, he said, “Yeah, okay.”

“You’re willing to tell us everything? Who she was involved with? Times? Dates? Details?”

The boy hung his head. “Yeah, I’ll narc on my friend.”

Charlie and Mike exchanged a glance. “What friend?”

5

S
OPHIE GROVER
sat on the low retaining wall behind the high school and took another swig of diet cola.

Boone Pritchett was looking at her with eyes so blue they seemed stolen from a bag of marbles. His motorcycle boots were dyed white, and he kept his wallet on a chain. “Come storm-chasing with me, Sofe,” he pleaded.

She felt a bubble of laughter in her throat. The backs of her red high-tops tapped out an erratic rhythm against the cement blocks of the retaining wall while she listened to an old jazz tune playing on Boone’s ugly plastic boom box. “My father doesn’t want me hanging out with you,” she said. “He thinks you’re a bad influence.”

“Maybe I am.”

She eyed him sideways.

“I like to buck the system. What’s wrong with that?”

There were spiderwebs all over the retaining wall, gossamer webs littered with bits of leaves and dead insects.

“C’mon,” he said. “Be adventurous for once.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve never cut school in my life.”

“Ha. They won’t even miss you.”

She smiled nervously at him. Across the street, a bobbing line of sparrows sat on a phone wire, and beyond the phone wire was the western skyline. There were dark streaks in the clouds. It was going to rain.

“See that high cirrostratus?” he said. “That’s the air we want. It’s gonna be an outbreak day, I can feel it.”

“Yeah?”

“Everything’s in place. You’ve got heat, humidity and colliding air masses, that’s all you need. Time to grab some cash from the ATM and gas up.”

“Seriously, Boone. My father would kill me.”

“How’s he gonna find out?”

She looked at him. “I’d be reported absent.”

“Nah. I know every trick in the book. What’s your next class?”

She laughed. “Will you stop?”

His teeth were slightly crooked in front like a little kid’s, and whenever he smiled, his whole face lit up—eyes and everything—and he became a different person. Not so tough. “You can play by the rules all your life and be miserable,” he said. “Or you can follow your dreams and come with me.”

It was tempting. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds for a moment, and Sophie tilted her head to absorb its fleeting warmth. She could hear lockers slamming shut behind them, lunchtime almost over.

“Hey,” he said, putting out his third cigarette, “your dad just pulled up.”

She opened her eyes. Her father was parked in the lot next to Boone’s casino-pink pickup truck. He got out and headed toward them, his face stern beneath the brim of his police hat. He had worry wrinkles on his forehead, one wrinkle for every year Sophie had been a teenager, he liked to joke. She hated his habit of hiding his scarred left arm around behind his back; it made her feel overly protective of him.

“Dad?” she said, standing up.

“Hi, honey.” He gave Boone a hard look but continued to speak to her. “You off to class now?”

“Yeah, I was just leaving.”

He glanced at the cigarette butts at their feet. Boone started to back away from them.

“Hold on there, partner,” her father said. “We need to talk. Got a minute?”

“Yes, sir.”

“See you later, Sophie.”

“Okay, Dad. I’m going to class now. Bye.” She slipped inside the shadowy building, then stood watching them through the glass doors. Her father gestured toward the parking lot, and he and Boone strode across the asphalt to Boone’s truck, where he rested his hand protectively on the hood. She watched them for a long puzzled moment, wondering if anyone else in school could hear her heartbeat. So thunderous now.