The Breathtaker Read online

  “Does your dad ever hurt you?” he asked the oldest boy. “Does he ever spank you?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. He had light blond hair and blue eyes, was pretty as a girl, but whenever he opened his mouth, you could see the rot.

  “Does he use his hand or a belt?”

  The boy shrugged. “Both, I guess.”

  Charlie eyed them with tremendous sympathy, wanting to protect them from harm. They wore baggy corduroy pants, dark blue hoodies and baseball caps that kept their unruly hair in check. “Mind if I took a look at your back?” he asked the nine-year-old, then caught the others’ furtive glances. “Just a peek?”

  The boy’s mouth grew pinched. He got off the bed and walked over to Charlie, then turned and raised his hoodie and T-shirt. There were old scars on his back—pale pink, about the size of two fingers making a peace sign.

  “Where’d you get these?”

  “We were just foolin’ around. I fell on a fence or something.”

  “Or something? You’re not sure?” It was exactly the kind of lie Charlie used to tell. “Okay, siddown.”

  He went back to his brothers. “Can we go home now?” he asked plaintively.

  Charlie took a patient breath. “You guys are gonna have to stay here for a while.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s better this way.”

  The seven-year-old rolled his tongue around inside his cheek. “How’d you get them?” he asked, pointing at Charlie’s scarred left arm.

  Charlie glanced down. “Those are second- and third- degree burns from a fire.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “The second-degree burns were extremely painful. The third-degree burns didn’t hurt because the nerves’d been destroyed. So your father never pulled any teeth out of your head?”

  The boys looked at one another and seemed confused by his question. “No,” the nine-year-old said.

  “He never helped your teeth come out? Any of you?”

  “Yep, he did,” the littlest one admitted.

  “Shut up,” his older brother said, “if you ever wanna see Dad again.”

  Charlie held the five-year-old’s eye and said, “How’d he help your teeth come out?”

  He pointed inside his mouth. “Pulled ’em wiff a pair of pliers.”

  A shiver crawled up Charlie’s spine.

  “He was just helping you because that tooth was hanging on for dear life,” the nine-year-old said. “And I don’t think we should talk about this anymore.”

  “One more question…”

  “Dad says we don’t have to talk to the police,” he said angrily. He turned to his brothers. “If you say another word, I’m gonna make sure Dad finds out, understand?”

  Charlie let it go, and they talked sports for a while. The boys liked baseball best. They liked the Sooners and Greg Dobbs. They said their mother had left them one fine spring day and had never come back.

  “And you haven’t seen her since?” Charlie asked.

  They shook their heads.

  “Not even a phone call?”

  The nine-year-old’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I think she must’ve forgotten all about us by now.”

  They hadn’t been able to locate Gustafson’s wife. By all accounts, she’d disappeared several years ago, vanished without a trace. Jonah hadn’t been charged, since there was no body. No evidence of foul play. But it raised suspicions. The whole thing stank, and Charlie decided he was going to work very hard to find out exactly what’d happened.

  He drove back to the house to talk to Jonah, but he was busy on the phone, trying to get his kids back. Jonah’s criminal defense attorney met Charlie out in the front yard. They stepped gingerly over broken toys as they approached one another.

  The lawyer, Andrew Findale, had so many hair plugs his scalp looked like a doll’s head. He wore a tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses, and his eyes had the edgy, irritable look of a midlife-crisis male. “Jonah doesn’t want to talk to you right now,” he said, enunciating each syllable. “Jonah feels betrayed.”

  “The guy’s a piece-of-shit drug dealer and God knows what else,” Charlie told him angrily. “You tell him I’m gonna make sure his kids stay safe.”

  He drove into the dying sun, so tired he could barely think straight. Then his cell phone rang. “Hello?”

  “Dad?” It was Sophie. “You’re late.”

  19

  WILLA BELLMAN lived three towns over. Thirty-five minutes away. She’d given him the directions—past the Rocket Roadside Diner, straight through the heart of town, take your first left down a winding country road.

  The house was like something out of a storybook—picket fence, flower garden, cats curled up on the porch. The barbecue was in the backyard—paper lanterns, smoke rising from the grill, chunks of red meat slathered in barbecue sauce. Charlie was surprised to find Rick Kripner standing in front of the grill with a beer in one hand and a spatula in the other. He wore baggy shorts and a T-shirt that said “Dryden Tech Rules!”

  “Hey, Chief.” They shook hands. “How’s it going with the case? Any progress?”

  “We’re moving forward,” Charlie said, unwilling to share his uneasiness, his deepening suspicion that they just might have the killer in their sights.

  “Beer?” Willa was looking painfully sexy in a red halter top and prewashed jeans, those dangly silver earrings drawing his focus back to her face.

  “What?” she said, laughing.

  “Just enjoying the view.”

  “You don’t have a clue what you’re getting yourself in for, do you?” she said with a teasing smile.

  “You made it!” Sophie galloped over like a colt and wrapped her skinny arms around him. She was looking better, the cuts on her face and neck almost healed, her arms still speckled with little scabs. “Rick was telling us these great stories… something about chickens… you tell it!” she said, turning to Rick.

  “Some chickens get so stressed out when a tornado touches down,” he explained, “that their feathers come loose and blow away. It’s called flight molt.”

  Sophie wrinkled her nose. “What about the other thing, the thing with the frogs?”

  “Tornadoes have been known to pick up hundreds of frogs and carry them off. Bullfrogs. Fish. Once in Colorado, thousands of dead ducks dropped out of the sky. It was literally raining ducks. During that same tornado, a tie rack with seven ties was carried forty miles by the wind, and all the ties stayed on the rack.”

  Awe was set in Sophie’s face like a flower pressed between two pages. She nibbled on her lower lip, and some of her rose-colored lipstick stuck to her front teeth. Charlie understood why she’d been so preoccupied with bad weather lately. Two words—Boone Pritchett. Boone was recovering nicely from his coma, and Charlie suspected that he and his daughter had been carrying on a secret dialogue via the phone and Internet. Several times he’d walked in on Sophie, and she’d instantly cupped her hand over the mouthpiece and waited for him to leave. He decided to let it go. He sensed that the more he forbade this friendship, the more likely she was to fling herself into Boone’s tattooed arms.

  “Remind her how dangerous a tornado can be, would you please?” Charlie said.

  “Dad,” she groaned. “Would you quit worrying?”

  “I need help with the cooler, handsome,” Willa said, and they went inside together. The kitchen held the rich aroma of blueberry pies steaming on the countertop. Charlie helped her move the cooler of beer and sodas back outside, then they sat at the picnic table together, while Sophie and Rick attended to the charcoal grill.

  “I want to apologize for all the obnoxious things I may do in the future,” Willa said, sucking on a beer.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I’m one of those overachievers who can really grate on people’s nerves. I can’t help it. So I like to say my sorries up front.”

  Charlie smiled. “Let me get this straight. You’re such an overachiever you even stockpile your a
pologies?”

  “Now you’re getting the picture.”

  He laughed, then glanced at Sophie and Rick, deep in conversation. “You invited him?” he asked, trying to phrase the question as innocuously as possible.

  “Not me,” she said. “Sophie.”

  His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Sophie invited him?”

  “Yep.”

  He grinned.

  “Why?”

  “Nothing. It’s just… I always sense something edgy between Rick and me whenever it comes to the subject of you.”

  She laughed. “Aw, c’mon. He’s like a brother to me.”

  “Does he know that?”

  She leaned in for a quick kiss. They seemed a bit shy around one another tonight. The sun had fallen beneath the rim of the world, and he was enjoying the way the sunset’s amber light glinted off her wet lips. She looked so beautiful he didn’t know where to rest his gaze.

  His cell phone rang just then, killing the moment. It lay on the picnic table between them.

  “Aren’t you going to answer that?” she asked.

  “Not important.”

  She snatched it up. “Hello? Just a second.” She handed it over. “For you.”

  He rolled his eyes and took it.

  “Something’s up.” It was Mike.

  “I do actually have a life, you realize.”

  “Yeah, right. You and me both. Lester’s gone missing.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been on the phone with his parents. They’re very concerned. The mayor is concerned.”

  “Jesus…”

  “Nobody’s seen him in three or four days. Parents, uncles, cousins. They’ve been calling all around. They’re in a panic. What d’you want me to do?”

  Glancing skyward, Charlie spotted the start of the evening, the planet Venus. Stars twinkled, planets didn’t. “Send somebody over to his house to check it out.”

  “Tyler just got back. The house was in slight disarray, but that’s nothing unusual for Lester. Plus his truck is gone.”

  “All right, put out a BOLO to all county sheriffs’ units and highway patrol. I doubt it’s serious. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”

  20

  THE FOLLOWING morning, Charlie and Mike took a ride over to Lester Deere’s property to have a look around. He lived way out in the boonies, where you could hear the metal roofs of the barns ticking in the heat of the day. On this cloudless May morning, Charlie’s eyes watered from staring at the shiny skin of the police car and the ribbon of hot asphalt beyond. It was the kind of gorgeous spring day that winnowed the wind and left the sky cloudless, the prairie grasses stirring and undulating on either side of the road.

  They pulled into a bumpy driveway, clumps of tall grass brushing underneath the fenders of the cage car. No trees grew around the white frame two-story house. There was a satellite dish on the roof and speakers set out in the front yard. Swallows dipped and glided from a nearby barn, and the walkway was terraced with flagstones.

  They climbed the rough wooden porch planks past a trio of webbed aluminum chairs arranged to face the rising sun. “Lester?” Charlie thumped on the door with his fist. “Hello? Anybody home?”

  No answer. They went inside.

  The house was dense with the stench of stale beer, and a warm wind blew the lacy curtains out. They walked past a mountain of empties in the living room, scattered pizza boxes and dirty laundry.

  “Must’ve been some party,” Charlie said, kicking an aluminum can out of his way.

  They checked the lower floor for signs of a struggle. The kitchen walls were painted as blue as a summer’s day. They found no evidence of foul play—no blood spatter on the walls or bloodstains on the floor, no overturned furniture.

  The living room had a comfy lived-in feel. There was a videotape in the VCR, all played out. Charlie ejected it. Pirates vs. Tigers. Lester liked to replay his glorious football moments. He could be both smug and self-effacing at the same time, the kind of guy who constantly lived in the past—high school jock, senior vice president, ladies’ man. Just like all the other towel-snappers Charlie had butted heads with over the years. Just like Hoyt Bledlin…

  As he wound his way through the house, Charlie tried not to think about good ol’ Hoyt, his primary tormentor in elementary school, junior high and high school. Right after the fire, Charlie’s hair had fallen out, and it took a long time for it to grow back. Sitting in his third-grade classroom had been particularly tough. “Hey, Mount Baldy! Hey, Telly Savalas!” Sitting there feeling the contractions in his leg because the scarred skin didn’t grow as fast as the rest of his body did. Hearing those taunting whispers. “Contaminated. He’s contaminated, don’t go near him.” Hard to ignore when you were eight years old. And then in high school, Hoyt’s favorite trick had been to toss lit matches in Charlie’s face. He also enjoyed lighting firecrackers behind his back to see just how high he’d jump. “Hey, Burned-All-Over! This remind you of something?” Hoyt would crinkle cellophane in Charlie’s ear, making him think of the fire. Good ol’ Hoyt, dead and gone, stuck a vacuum cleaner hose in his mouth five years ago after a final drinking binge. But the pain he’d caused still lingered.

  Upstairs, they moved quickly through each room. The bureau drawers in Lester’s bedroom had been yanked open, clothes strewn about. His wallet, service weapon, off-duty gun and watch appeared to be missing. Lester never went anywhere without that watch, a two-hundred-meter, depth-tested, impact-resistant, digital-drive waterproof Eagleton.

  “I got a bad feeling about this,” Charlie said. “He was supposed to come in for an interview. I wanted to formally eliminate him as a suspect.”

  Mike squinted in disbelief. “You think he fled?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’s there to hide? So he had an affair with one of the vics, so what? That doesn’t make him guilty of murder.”

  “Let’s subpoena the phone records.”

  Mike’s eyes grew intense. “Why would that idiot go and do a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He let out a sigh. “What’re we gonna tell the mayor?”

  Charlie shook his head. It wasn’t his day.

  KNEE-DEEP IN JUNE

  1

  SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Toby Lake shoved the dirty laundry into the washing machine, sprinkled in soap, snapped the lid shut and switched it on. His mother was out buying groceries, and the day was getting strange. First cold, then muggy, now these dark streaks along the horizon. He shivered and put on the sweater his mother had knitted him last fall during her Mrs. Brady phase. The washing machine began to tremble like it always did, and he thumped on the ka-chunking lid with his fist.

  He slipped on his headphones and went back into the living room, where he flopped down on the sofa. A sudden gust of wind stirred the gauzy white curtains, and he sat up and raised his headphones again. “Duke?” he said, looking around for the dog. “Here, boy!”

  That clumsy, nearsighted black Lab was probably out back chasing prairie dogs. He pulled the brim of his Texas Rangers cap down low over his eyes and tapped his foot to the beat of an Eminem song. On TV, a news anchorman in a power suit was yacking about the impending storm. Everything was always the Tragedy of the Century with those guys. He raised his headphones and listened for a second. “Here to tell us more about tornadoes and the kind of damage they can cause, we turn to…”

  Just then the power went off.

  “Yow,” he breathed, getting up from the sofa and going over to the window, where the curtains billowed against his face. It was raining hard. The glass held the steam from his breath, and he wiped it clean with his hand. He could see strokes of lightning on the edges of the cattle pasture. At the end of all the big farms in Wolf Pass, Texas, was their lonely little farmstead, where the highway ended and the back roads turned to gravel. No way did he want to become a farmer like his old man. He wanted to go into broadcasting.

  Now the front door blew open, and Toby r
an across the room to close it. The door kept flapping open in the wind, and he became obsessed with pushing it shut. Finally the latch connected with a click, and he leaned against the door, breathing hard. “Duke?” He stood hugging himself. The house was too dark for midafternoon. He caught a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye and turned, then stood looking around uncertainly. Hadn’t he just seen someone walking into the kitchen? Shit. He must’ve been hallucinating.

  Toby picked up his aluminum baseball bat. “Hello?” He gripped the bat and walked slowly toward the kitchen doorway. “Anybody in here?” He stood for a puzzled moment in the doorway, but all he could see were the table and chairs, the refrigerator, the pine china cabinet. “Wuss,” he muttered, shaking it off. He could be such a pussy sometimes.

  He felt the blow against his head, swift and furious, then stood in total shock. “Oh God…” Blood ran down his face as he staggered backward into the living room, where, in a blind panic, he dove behind the sofa. He crouched there for endless seconds, shivering in terror, while outside a fistful of hailstones peppered the roof and the wind made an unbearable whistling sound. He crouched among Duke’s chew toys, inhaling dust balls, then heard the dog yelping outside.

  “Duke?” he screamed.

  Something struck the back of his head, and the bat went flying out of his hands. Now a fist was dragging him kicking and screaming out of his hiding place, dragging him by the roots of his hair. He thrashed and screamed and finally broke loose; but then another blow impacted his forehead and his eyes filled with blood. He screamed and flailed at shadows. Whirled around. Staggered out the door, into the back field, where the blue alfalfa grew and those fleshy, fawn-colored mushrooms burst in bunches from the tangled ditches.

  “Duke!” he screamed, blinking the blood out of his eyes. He stumbled over the busted fence and stood in the cow pasture. In the distance, he could see a shopping cart inching its way up the road in fits and starts. All the tall blond wheat seemed to be whistling one note. The birds were clumped under the trees, and his hair blew practically sideways in the wind. He looked up at the blackened sky and saw white prairie blossoms shaking down like snow.