The Breathtaker Page 7

“Upstairs, vacuuming for hairs and fibers.”

  “Is Hunter watching him? I don’t want a single fiber slipping through our fingertips this time.”

  “Yeah, boss, he’s been riding Lester’s ass all morning.”

  Charlie headed for the stairs. Lester could be sloppy when it came to evidence collection, and Charlie could tell it pissed him off that he didn’t have his superior’s full and complete confidence, but that was just the way it was when you were a lazy-assed bastard with one foot in your glorious football-hero past. The tension between them had been escalating lately, ever since Lester’s promotion a year ago. Mike had been the top contender for the position of assistant chief, but then, wouldn’t you know it, politics had reared its ugly head. Turned out Lester was related by blood to the mayor. Charlie wanted Mike for the job; Mayor Whitmore wanted Lester. Guess who won? Charlie didn’t like having his arm twisted, and now resentment bloomed on both sides.

  Upstairs, the floorboards creaked with oldness. He found Lester in Danielle’s bedroom, with its hand-painted cornflower motif and eastern-facing windows. On sunny days, this was probably the cheeriest place in the house. Lester sat slouched on the bed with his back to the door.

  “Lester?”

  He stood up, minivac in hand. His eyes were bloodshot, as if he hadn’t been sleeping very well lately. “Hey,” he said.

  “Jesus, Lester… can I count on you?”

  He frowned. “Of course, Chief.”

  “Just do what Hunter tells you to, okay?”

  His face grew resentful. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Stuffed animals decorated the unmade bed—the cheap kind, made in Taiwan. Charlie scrutinized the extensive porcelain doll collection, their solemn eyes assessing him in turn. There was a Plexiglas cube of photographs on the messy desktop, pictures of Danielle at Bible camp. She wore a “Jesus Luvs U” T-shirt and squinted into the bright sunshine with a worry-free smile. There was a stack of rock and roll tapes next to a boom box on the bedside table, and Charlie studied these items, his breathing growing shallow. Some presence had been inside this room recently, he was sure of it. A stranger had entered the room and straightened out that stack of tapes. A crazy thought, but one he couldn’t shake. The stack was too precise to be the handiwork of a teenage girl.

  “Did you touch those tapes, Lester?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He greeted this thinly veiled admonition with a strained smile. “No, boss. Why?”

  “Vacuum the area very carefully for hairs and fibers. And don’t touch the tapes. Tell Mike to dust them for latents. Understood?”

  He frowned. “Why don’t you trust me, Chief?”

  In the silence that followed, you could hear the generator chugging out in the backyard.

  “Where’d the blood come from?” Charlie asked him in turn.

  “What blood?”

  “On your hands yesterday, when I got here. You had mud on your clothes and blood on your hands.”

  “I must’ve touched the body… the girl, Danielle.” He shrugged. “I know you’re not supposed to touch anything, but I had to make sure she was dead, Chief. I might’ve touched the mattress, too.”

  Charlie nodded slowly.

  “Okay, so I fucked up. I know you’re not supposed to touch anything, but I didn’t know they were all dead at the time.”

  “But you did by the time I arrived.”

  “Huh?”

  “When I walked into the bedroom, I saw Danielle’s body in the corner, but I didn’t see Rob. Rob came crashing through the ceiling while I was just standing there.”

  “I saw him, Chief. The ceiling was gone, and I was looking up at the roof with my flashlight, and I saw a body up there in the rafters. I also saw Jen—… Jenna in the tree.” His eyes grew hard, as if he’d never laughed a day in his life. “Jesus, it was horrible.”

  “What were you doing here yesterday, anyway?” Charlie asked. “Wasn’t it your day off?”

  “I was out chasing,” he said defensively. He looked tired. “I was heading north on the interstate, and there were these thunderheads right over me… and I remember thinking at one point, ‘Wow, look at all those leaves flying around.’ Only they weren’t leaves, they were tires or tree limbs and shit. Then I saw this car doing doughnuts across a field… and I’m thinking, ‘Holy fuck. This is it. This is how I’m going to die.’ I must’ve hit a hundred. I took the Shepherd Street exit, that’s how I got here.”

  “So you turned around and drove back here?”

  “East on the 412. I got off at the Shepherd Street exit and saw this mess. I stopped and tried to help. Thought I could…” He shook his head, his soft-lashed eyes full of regret and of something else. Something Charlie couldn’t quite put a finger on.

  “You knew the Peppers, right?”

  He gave an abrupt nod. “I heard about Jake Wheaton,” he said. “I’d like to be in on the interview.”

  “Mike and I will handle it.”

  “I’d like to be there,” he insisted.

  “We’ll see.” Charlie patted him on the back, deciding to set his questions aside for now. “Make the day count.”

  “Where’re you off to, Chief?”

  “To talk to a wind expert.”

  9

  THE WIND Function Facility was nestled in the subbasement of the Environmental Sciences Laboratory at Dryden Technical College in Montoya, Oklahoma. Charlie entered the bulldozer-yellow lobby and took a freight elevator down two flights, then wound his way through a series of gray-carpeted corridors toward the branching test sections—the tow tank facility, the missile launcher chamber, the wind tunnels. The air down here was chilly and dry, a strange hum emanating from the walls due to the building’s many generators.

  “Watch your step,” Rick Kripner said as they entered the wind-tunnel section together. In his early thirties, Rick had the kind of stiffened stride that suggested a disciplined upbringing and a terminally distracted look. Like most science geeks, he collected pens the way a dog attracts fleas. They’d met twice before, and each time, Rick had been exceedingly friendly and knowledgeable about tornado preparedness, but he wasn’t the person Charlie was there to see.

  “She won’t be long,” Rick said. “Ten minutes maybe. We’re doing a dry run-through.” He spoke softly as he patted his lab coat pockets, searching for something. “This way, Chief.”

  They navigated a narrow passageway lined with pipes and electrical cables toward the back of the facility, where a huge constructed metal wind tunnel stood on twenty-foot stilts beneath the sixty-foot ceiling. Charlie spotted at least two other tunnels inside the warehouse-sized facility—the place was enormous—before he followed Rick up a white-painted ladder and into a glass-enclosed control room.

  Rick took a seat behind the console and started fiddling with the control knobs. “Mind closing the door?”

  Charlie shut it, and the hum grew instantly muffled. He took a seat in one of the cold metal folding chairs and looked around. The wind tunnel had observation windows all along its side, and he could see Willa Bellman quite clearly now through the glass. She was standing in the test section, tinkering with a scaled-down replica of a high-rise building. She wore an extra-small white T-shirt beneath the obligatory lab coat, black ballet-type shoes and khaki trousers with short silver zippers over each pocket and horizontally down each cuff. Unusual. He liked her unusual taste.

  “Guess who’s here?” Rick said.

  “Be right with you,” Willa answered without looking up, and Charlie realized that the two-way intercom was on.

  “Take your time,” Charlie told her, his voice making a slap-back echo off the concrete.

  Lithe, pretty, in her early thirties with porcelain skin and curious blue eyes, Willa had a head of coiling black hair and a bone structure so well defined she reminded Charlie of some rare breed of cat. Six months ago, they’d spent an entire afternoon together inside the field laboratory, discussing tornado emer
gency procedures. The field lab consisted of a 150-foot-high meteorological tower and a data acquisitions room, where they’d worked together in such close quarters he was able to memorize some of her smells—strawberry shampoo, peppermint breath mints, a mothball-tinged sweater so stiff it could probably stand on its own.

  “I saw you on TV this morning,” Rick said.

  Charlie nodded but kept his expression flat.

  “Those people were murdered?”

  “I can’t go into any details.”

  “Yeah, I hear you.” He tilted back in his chair. “I don’t know how you do it, Chief, being around dead bodies all the time. I’d get queasy if somebody got a nosebleed.”

  He shrugged. “Just part of the job.”

  “Is this part of the job? You coming here?” He leaned forward. “Because I’d be happy to help out. If there’s anything you need to know about tornadoes, I’m your guy.”

  Charlie was used to overeager citizens wanting to help. Glancing at his watch, he said, “So tell me about these wind tunnels.”

  Rick nodded at the glass. “You’re looking at one smooth, sweet machine. Airflow’s created by a B-39 aircraft propeller housed inside the drive section there. Wind speeds can reach up to one hundred and twenty miles an hour, and we can replicate all sorts of atmospheric quirks… thermal inversions, air stratifications, you name it.”

  Across the ten-yard divide, Willa was trying to shake the model apart, a growl rising in her throat. “Arrghh! Fuck!”

  “Easy,” Rick told her. “We’ve got company, remember?”

  “How’re those pressure taps responding?” she asked.

  He typed a command into his computer. “The answer is they’re not.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nada. Zip.”

  “Jesus loves me,” she muttered under her breath.

  Charlie smiled, hating the sensation of grease blossoming on his forehead. Six months ago. Why hadn’t he called?

  “I’m not happy with these taps,” she said. “Not happy at all.” She made a few adjustments to the northern facade of the model, then heaved a frustrated sigh. “What’re we gonna do about this, Rick?”

  “I dunno. Have Gordo redo them?”

  “I am sick and tired of waiting around for Gordo to get his act together! There’s at least a hundred taps missing. I wanted this to be as precise as possible.” She picked up the model and shook it.

  “Careful. You could lose an eye with that thing.”

  She released the tower and, kicking off her shoes, crossed the floor in her stocking feet. “This is fucking futile!”

  “Temper, temper.” He switched off the two-way intercom and leaned back in his seat. “She’s a perfectionist. Her data’s solid, but it slows the whole process down. It wouldn’t matter, except that we’re on a tight deadline with this one particular grant. I can just hear Jacobs now. ‘Vat d’you mean, she didn’t complete ze test?’ ” He patted his pockets again. “Where are you, keys?”

  “Jacobs?” Charlie said, watching Willa exit the test section and descend the metal ladder. She’d left her shoes back inside the wind tunnel.

  “Yeah, Professor Jacobs. The guy who runs this zoo.”

  Willa burst into the control room, eyes alert, cheeks rosy. “Oh, hi,” she said. “Hello, Chief.” She shook his hand. “Long time no see.”

  “Charlie,” he corrected her.

  “Okay, Charlie. Ha. My friend Charlie the policeman.” She gave him a wide, wry smile, then tossed a leather briefcase on the console table. “Do me a favor, Rick?” she said, pulling out a messy stack of folders. “Finish these missile impact stats for me? I’m falling so far behind it ain’t pretty.”

  He leaned precariously back in his chair. “Only if you’ll cover for me on Friday.”

  “Yeah, absolutely.”

  “Deal?”

  “Friday.”

  He took the folders from her—quite a bit of material—and cradled them in the crux of his arm.

  “Missile impact stats?” Charlie repeated.

  “We’re testing a new line of product,” she explained. “We get clients coming in here all the time, wanting certification for their aboveground tornado shelters and safe rooms. This one’s called Schott Industries…”

  “More like Schitt,” Rick muttered.

  “Yeah, exactly. You are so witty today.” She laughed, then gave Charlie such an earnest look his heart skipped a beat. “Seriously, this product should never go on the market, Charlie. It’s supposed to protect consumers from every type of wind hazard known to man, but I swear to God, a mouse could fart on it, and poof.”

  “Feminine, ain’t she?” Rick said proudly.

  “We’re basically the last line of defense.”

  “There you are, you weasels.” Rick scooped his crowded key chain off the console. “Right in front of me.”

  “Where’re you going?” Willa asked him.

  “I’ll be in my office, in case anybody’s interested. Eating my tuna sandwich, buried under a mountain of paperwork.”

  “Quit pissing and moaning,” she said. “You get Friday off. Oh, I almost forgot! I need those by five, that okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s doable.” He turned to Charlie. “Nice to see you again, Chief.”

  “You, too, Rick.”

  Rick left the control room, and suddenly they were alone together. There was a brief but noticeable awkwardness between them, which she handled lightly and he handled heavily. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He stuffed them in his pockets, then tipped back in his chair until it bumped into the wall.

  “Want a cola?” She twisted her curly black hair into a French knot, stray tendrils clouding her ears—ears as curved and pearly as the inner wall of a moon shell. “We call it our antisleeping tonic around here.”

  “Yeah, I could use some of that.”

  She opened the minifridge, scooped out two aluminum cans, popped the tops and handed him one. Their fingers touched, briefly, and he realized that her eyes were gray, not blue. As gray as dusk, without any specks or highlights. He figured a person could get seriously lost in those dusk-soaked eyes.

  “I was there yesterday,” she told him. “In Promise.”

  This nudged him back to reality.

  “I was chasing garbage storms up north when I stopped for gas and could barely open my door against the wind.” She shivered and cinched her lab coat tighter. “I could feel that icy chill that told me I was north of the cold front and needed to get south enough to feel that strong southern wind on my face. To see it collide with the cold front. I got there just in time. It had a classic barber-pole appearance. I’d guess it was an F-3. There was F-3 damage, for sure.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty bad.”

  “We heard about the murders. What a terrible day you must’ve had.” She nodded with a gentle warmth. “How’s your daughter?”

  “Fine, thanks,” he said. So she remembered their conversation from six months ago? That was promising.

  “My mother died when I was twelve,” she said. “That can be tough on a girl.”

  “She’s handling it pretty well.”

  “Trust me, Charlie. She’s not.” Except for her eyes, her face was still. “So what brings you here this morning?”

  “I’ve got a few weather questions for you.”

  She frowned and slunk way down in her chair. “Shoot.”

  “I need to know if a storm-chaser can predict with any accuracy when and where a tornado’s going to touch down.”

  She frowned. “If we could predict exactly where a tornado was going to drop, it wouldn’t be half as fun. That’s why we’re called chasers, Charlie. We love the action. We love the game.”

  “So it’s a guessing game?”

  She tilted her head to drink, Adam’s apple jutting like the whitened knuckle of a flexed finger. “Meteorology’s an imperfect science, but Mother Nature will drop a few clues. For example, the more organized a storm, the more likely it is to
become severe. And since tornadoes often accompany severe weather, you make that your first goal. To find yourself an organized storm.”

  “How would I go about doing that?”

  Her face fell into relaxed lines. “You get up early and listen to the weather forecast.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No.” She smiled. “Next you’d go on-line and check out the computer-model forecasts. You’d study the analysis charts to see how the air patterns have set up. Then you’d check out the satellite pictures and radar images and create your own forecast.”

  “How, exactly?”

  She settled her limbs on the plastic arms of her chair, hands dangling, fingers curled under. Cat’s paws. She was relaxed as a cat around him. “Okay, back to basics,” she said. “You need three things to create a tornado, Charlie. Sufficient moisture, dynamics to lift the air, and jet streams to help create rotation. Any truck stop nowadays will have a table phone where you can hook up your laptop and download all sorts of weather information. Anybody can go on-line and check out the surface and upper-air patterns, but you have to know enough about weather to make sense of it. So you review the hard data first. Then you assess the sky with your own eyes once the chase begins.”

  “Okay, so let’s say I’ve got my preliminary forecast. Then what?”

  “Then you position yourself under a severe storm and wait.”

  “Just wait?”

  “You stay. You watch.”

  “And? What am I looking for, exactly?”

  She giggled. “You say ‘exactly’ a lot.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah.”

  He smiled.

  She smiled. “Wall clouds. Towers. Anvils. You’re looking for instability, motion, rotation. Sometimes the sky’s so hazy you can’t see your own hand in front of your face. Other times, there are so many boundaries out there it’s almost impossible to decide which way to go. You could make a case for any direction. But if you get lucky and spot something interesting, then you plot an intercept course.”

  “That’s what Captain Kirk always says.”

  She laughed. “Am I confusing you?”

  “A little.”