The Breathtaker Read online

  “You got me.” The little man shrugged. “Forks and spoons in a blender? What d’you think that’s supposed to mean?”

  Charlie eyed the woman’s rhinestone-framed eyeglasses, now bloodied and cockeyed. “Who were the victims?”

  “Birdie and Sailor Rideout.” McNeese sucked noisily on his front teeth. “They’re farmers and he’s also a bricklayer. He’s the quietest man in town, and she bakes a mean pecan pie. They raised four kids, all solid citizens. My little girl goes to school with one of their grandchildren. Sailor and me are distantly related. Great-great-whoever-he-was.”

  A cat leaped at the window screen, clawing desperately for a pawhold, and Charlie felt the fright at the base of his spine.

  “Shoo,” McNeese said, going to chase it away.

  Seized by a grotesque feeling of complicity, Charlie moved closer to the staging area and studied the tautly stuffed cushions, the box of tissues on the coffee table, the roller shades that didn’t quite roll up all the way. Several clocks disagreed about the time. The windowsills were covered with the kind of ancient stone tools you might pick up in the back fields—broken pottery and arrowheads. Remnants of past civilizations. Sailor’s arm muscles appeared to flex for an instant, making the gooseflesh burn across Charlie’s scalp. An illusion created by crisscrossing flashlight beams. He leaned in close and could detect a suspect redness around Sailor’s mouth. Birdie’s jaw was slightly swollen.

  “Tell your coroner to check the victims’ teeth,” he told the sheriff. “And you’ll want to seal your findings. I’d like a copy of your autopsy report, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, partner. I have no ego.”

  The TV set was positioned directly in front of the victims. You could tell by the rug impressions that it had been moved recently. A few feet behind the Zenith was an upright vacuum cleaner, plugged into the same wall outlet. Charlie aimed his flashlight beam over the dusty set with its assorted collectibles on top—ceramic cows and cheery-looking toadstools with blissful, hand-painted smiles. The vacuum cleaner was a large brown Hoover, standing upright on the Oriental rug. Punched into the opposite corner was a pine bookcase clutching a large collection of vinyl record albums. At the center of the bookcase was a Pioneer stereo system with two medium-size speakers pointed out into the room.

  Charlie ignored the pieces of talk floating around him as he focused on the scene. The homicides were blatantly obvious this time, which meant that the killer’s M.O. was changing. A scary thought. He was becoming bolder. Charlie looked at the vacuum cleaner. Had the perp caught Birdie Rideout in the middle of her vacuuming? He doubted it. Most of the blood evidence was back in the kitchen, where the initial attack had taken place. So why stage the scene like this? Because he was playing God. Because the victims were his dolls, his playthings. He could do anything he liked with them.

  Charlie sensed the killer was calm, methodical. He had all the time in the world. He wasn’t afraid of severe weather. He was in his element. He was taunting the police. Bad guys watched TV, too. Bad guys read the papers. As he went over the details in his head, he felt separated from the others by a film of heightened awareness as thin and trembling as the membrane of a bubble.

  Suddenly there was a loud bang, and full power was restored to the neighborhood, every lightbulb and electronic appliance in the house kicking on at once. Charlie yanked his .38 from its holster and held it tight against his trouser leg, while competing mechanical screams assaulted his ears: the blender grinding away in the kitchen; the silverware dancing around inside the electric mixer like a train wreck; the food processor whistling like shrapnel; canned laughter swelling and crashing from the TV set; the vacuum cleaner whining and careening across the rug. And throughout all the noise and confusion, Charlie thought he could hear a low, sweet song playing on the turntable.

  Gooseflesh stood up on his arms. He held his gun loosely, trying to stem the awful tide of fear that rose like bile in his throat. His clothes absorbed his terrorized sweat as he glanced around at the others, frozen like a herd of deer in the proverbial headlights. The speaker volume was turned down low, as if the killer had wanted to whisper in their ears this 1950s rendition of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by the Platters. The moment burned inside Charlie’s gut like a hot coal. He toyed with the trigger. The entire house was vibrating like a lung. Even the dead couple looked sharp and alert.

  Wet with sweat, he turned to Mike and said, “Okay, now. That’s exactly the reaction he wanted.”

  11

  SOPHIE WORE an oversize football jersey to bed. Her face was bruised and covered with little nicks, and her arms were wrapped in bandages. It broke his heart. “She’s nice,” she said, looking up at him with narrowed eyes, as if she were peering at him from the bottom of a well. “Ms. Mysterioso.”

  He smiled and nodded. Long strands of damp hair clung to her forehead, and he smoothed them away with his thumb. “Get some sleep,” he said.

  She turned to face the wall, and he could tell she was still nursing a sullen grievance against him.

  “Want the door open?”

  “Nope. G’night.”

  He closed the door and walked through the empty house, then draped his jacket over the arm of the sofa and went into the kitchen for a beer. The refrigerator whined and rumbled. It would probably break down one of these days. If it did, he wouldn’t be able to fix it. He was happily ignorant of all things mechanical—electrical wiring, mechanical tinkering. A great disappointment to his father, whose only response to Charlie’s announced intention of becoming a cop was a blank, fixed gaze.

  Now he worked two beers out of the cardboard container and joined Willa on the back porch, where the air was cool and dense, the stars twinkly bright. Today’s clouds were mostly gone. They sat on the creaky wooden swing in the faint glow of the bug zapper, and he felt both weightless and heavy at once.

  “You okay?” she asked. “You look all squeezed out.”

  “I was accused of being a bigot today.” He rubbed his face hard, then leaned forward on his elbows. “Thanks for looking after her.”

  “No problem. She’s a great kid.”

  “She takes after her mother.”

  “Oh, I can see a little bit of her father in her, too.” She kicked off her mud-covered clogs and rested her bare feet against the painted wooden floor.

  He smiled. “She’s her own person, that one.”

  “At Sophie’s age, I had zits, no boobs and a skateboard that I worshiped. I was the weird girl in school. I used to draw penises in the margins of my English assignments, then spend the rest of class erasing them before we handed our papers in.”

  He leaned back in the swing, making it rock just a little. It felt good to be smiling. Her long black hair shimmered in the purple light of the bug zapper, and he could make out the outline of her breasts beneath the bulky pullover sweater.

  She put the beer bottle to her lips and tilted her head, revealing the sandy underside of her chin. He could see the swallowing mechanism of her throat, her Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. She waited an appropriate beat before she said, “So what happened today?”

  “A double homicide in Texas.” The corners of his mouth grew pinched. “Nice people. Not an enemy in the world.”

  “How old?”

  “A couple in their fifties.” He could hear the honking of the wild geese, a haunting sound. A magnificent sound. He loved the wildness of the Oklahoma night. He loved how it embraced them—surrounded by darkness, the porch light stopping at the edges of the driveway.

  “Were they killed the same way as the others?” she asked in a tremulous voice.

  “Yes.”

  He could see her struggling to keep her emotions in check.

  “It could be somebody you know,” he said.

  She was peeling the label off her beer bottle. “One of the storm-chasers I know?”

  “I’m going to FedEx you some pictures in the morning. I’d like you to look at them and tell me if you recogniz
e any of the vehicles we haven’t been able to identify yet. Would you do that for me?”

  “Sure.”

  He could feel the beer’s coolness passing through the glass into his fingertips. “I’m not trying to scare you.”

  She looked into the darkness and shivered. “Most of the chasers I know… they’re a very passionate bunch. They love severe weather. They’d drive thousands of miles for maybe five minutes’ worth of tornado-watching, and they’d do it in a heartbeat.”

  He gazed beyond the reaches of the porch light into the great mystery of the night. Somewhere out there, in the vast landscape of the plains, was a man who defined himself by the deaths of others. “The tornado came to within three hundred yards of the house this time. How can he be so accurate?”

  She thought for a moment. “He must be playing at a whole other level. He’s mastered it, Charlie. He’s a dozen moves ahead of everybody else.”

  “What would he have to have in his head?”

  She shrugged. “Either an unusually sophisticated understanding of radar principles, Doppler velocity interpretation and pre-storm environment, or else…”

  “Or else what?”

  “A brilliant instinct. He’s plugged in.”

  He glanced at her. They didn’t speak. He could hear the wind playing through the trees, the gentle shush of the leaves. She traced her finger in the hollow of his palm, and it stirred him. He tried to imagine the place where she grew up and pictured a red-dirt town, a run-down house and a bunch of unruly kids; she was the Texas tomboy in pigtails, waiting for it to rain. Always with one eye on the sky.

  “It’s such a cliché,” she said. “The Butterfly Effect. You’ve heard of it, right?”

  “A butterfly flaps its wings in China, and the next day there’s a tornado in Oklahoma.”

  She nodded. “The world’s weather is extraordinarily sensitive. One region influences another. You can’t control it. You can’t predict it in a global sense. I hope to visit China one of these days and watch that butterfly flap its wings. I want to see the genesis of our tornadoes.” Her hand grew warm in his. “It’s a real mystery, how something so subtle and beautiful can lead to so much devastation.”

  Charlie assessed the lovely structure and economy of her features as they sat together, gently swinging.

  Her eyelids drooped sleepily. She glanced at her watch. When she let go of his hand, he felt naked. She slipped her feet back into her clogs and stood up. “I really should be going, Charlie.”

  He tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “Been a long day.”

  She put down her half-finished beer and absently jiggled her keys in her hand. “Maybe we could have dinner sometime?”

  “Great.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll call you.” He leaned in for a kiss.

  They kissed for a long time, until finally she pulled away. She drew a deep breath and smiled. “You will call me,” she decided.

  He laughed. “Come on, Hiawatha. Lemme walk you to your car.”

  12

  THREE 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

  WHERE 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 t
he 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.