The Breathtaker (6 page)

Now here they were, the two of them. Father and son. Complete strangers. He wanted to leave. They’d said all there was to say. The only thing left was a bit of awkwardness, his father’s hesitant, roundabout request for money. Simply to get it over with, Charlie said, “So you want me to write you a check?”

Isaac grew instantly annoyed. “If I wanted your help, I’d’ve asked for it.”

“Okay, Pop. No big deal.”

His father pointed an arthritic finger at him. “Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

“Do what?”

“Treat me like a charity case. I’ll let you know if I need your goddamn help.”

“All right already.”

“And don’t you go flipping me off, either!”

“I’m not flipping anybody off. Jeez, Pop. Forget I even mentioned it.”

All gin blossoms and spite, Isaac drained the rest of his root beer in one long swallow. “Six dead. Six dead. That’s all they ever talk about. Nobody bothers to mention the fact that hundreds were injured, and sometimes you might as well be dead.”

Charlie took a moment to study his father’s profile—the long straight nose he’d inherited, those prominent veins in his neck, the height and breadth of that cagey forehead, the poker-player eyes. Would his own eyebrows turn as white as snow and sprout wings? Would he get those sagging jowls? Would his knuckles swell with arthritis? That was when he noticed the expensive-looking wristwatch with the silver sectioned band on his father’s wrist.

“Is that new?”

“What, this?” He glanced at the watch face. “I helped a family out yesterday. They were grateful.”

“They gave it to you?” He eyed him skeptically.
Picked it up in the mud, you mean.
“Which family was this?”

“Don’t remember.”

Charlie’s mouth grew tight. “You don’t remember their names?”

“I don’t think they said.”

He put his root beer down and stood up. “I’ve gotta go.”

Isaac glared at him as if he were some kind of insect floating in his soup. “Why do you treat me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like somebody not to be trusted.”

“Did I say anything?”

“You don’t have to say anything.” He shifted in his seat and tugged at the baggy crotch of his pants. “Boy oh boy, you are one slick citizen.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re saying you don’t believe me about the watch? That people can’t be grateful anymore? That folks can’t show a little gratitude?”

“And you don’t even remember their names?”

“I said no, maybe it sounded like a yes.”

He looked around, disgusted. “Sophie was worried about you, so I dropped by to make sure everything was okay.”

Isaac’s frown melted at the mention of his granddaughter’s name. He shook his head and chuckled softly. “She was? She was worried about her ol’ grandpa?”

“Yeah. She tried calling you, but the lines were down.”

“My angel.”

“She wants to talk to you. Give her a ring.”

“Is she okay?”

“See you later, Pop.”

He spread his hands palms-down on the chair arms and raised himself up threateningly. “Charlie, is my granddaughter okay?”

“That should’ve been your first fucking question,” he said as he walked away.

7

T
HE INSTANT
he got back in his car, Charlie’s police radio sputtered to life. “Yeah?” he answered irritably.

“Chief?” It was Hunter. “We found a phone number written on a napkin tucked inside Jenna Pepper’s purse. No name, just a number. Wanna give it a shot who answered?”

“Don’t tease me, Hunter. Tell me.”

“Jake Wheaton.”

“What?”

“You want us to go over there?”

“No, I’ve got this one,” Charlie said, dropping the mike back in its retainer and speeding off.

The Wheatons lived across town on a plot of beaten-down earth littered with automobile carcasses. All the old buildings on the run-down farm were marred with graffiti, and Charlie wasn’t sure what they grew there. He only knew that plenty of drug deals took place in the trailer park across the street.

He found Jake Wheaton in the driveway, bent over a chromed-up Chevy pickup truck that looked about ready for the junkyard. The nineteen-year-old held a flashlight in his mouth while he tightened the timing belt with his thin, greasy fingers.

“Jake?”

The flashlight dropped out of his mouth and he caught it one-handed. He gave Charlie a witless grin. “Hey there, Officer Friendly.” He was stoned or drunk or both, his eyes two road maps of swollen capillaries.

“Got a minute?”

“What for?”

“Just a few questions.”

“Sure, okay.” His tongue was pierced by a steel rod, and he was so underweight he was nothing but bones. His tattoos were actually quite beautiful—skinny black bands around his upper arms, mystical symbols decorating those meatless forearms. Jake’s long hair was tucked behind his ears, and he wore an oversize black T-shirt and jeans that’d been accidentally-on-purpose splotched with bleach.

“You’ve heard about the Peppers, right?” Charlie said, and Jake nodded. “Wanna turn your engine off for me?”

The avocado-green pickup truck idled in a puddle of gasoline and racing oil. Jake went to turn it off, then slumped down behind the wheel and lit a cigarette.

“No smoking.”

The boy put it out.

Charlie waited for him to crawl back out of the vehicle, but he didn’t. “What’re you doing?”

“Just chillin’.” He tapped his fingers on the padded steering wheel.

“Get out.”

The boy obeyed, then stood evasively before him in the driveway.

“You’ve heard how the Peppers died in the tornado?”

“I saw it on TV, yeah.” He dropped his head. Inhaled. Exhaled. “That’s a bad way to go.”

“You knew them?”

“Sure. Danielle.” He nodded. “And my girlfriend has Ms. Pepper for life studies.”

“Life studies? Did you know her personally? Ms. Pepper? Or just through your girlfriend?”

He squinted. “What d’you mean?”

“Did you and Jenna Pepper have some kind of personal relationship is what I’m asking.”

Jake kept his reaction flat and glanced up the street. “She let us eat whatever her students baked that day. French fries, burritos. Stuff like that.”

“So you’d get to sample the goods after class?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“And you’d chat with her a little?”

His eyebrows lifted in unconvincing innocence. “That’s right.”

“What’d you two talk about?”

“Who, me and Ms. Pepper?”

“Yeah, you and Ms. Pepper.”

He shrugged. “Just stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Life and shit… and there was this one time when she took me for a ride in her Pontiac.”

“Oh, yeah? When was this?”

He squinted, as if it were written on the air between them. “About six months ago.”

“Six months? So this was an after-school type of thing?”

“Yeah, after school.”

“And?”

“And what?”

They looked at each other significantly.

“Where’d she take you? Ms. Pepper.”

“Out to the country. We went looking for pumpkins.”

“Pumpkins?” Charlie repeated.

“Yeah, I was helping her buy these pumpkins for school. She was gonna teach her students how to bake pumpkin pie from scratch. We bought a ton of ’em and filled up the trunk.”

“Anything else happen while you two were out looking for pumpkins?”

His eyes filled with resentment at being asked such a question. “Like what?”

“Like… I dunno. Like how come we found your phone number inside her purse?”

“Okay.” He rubbed his eyes and seemed aggravated.

“Why would she have your phone number, Jake?”

He squinted, trying to think. “I dunno.”

“No?”

He shook his head.

“Jake… you smile an awful lot.”

He screwed up his face. “Yeah? So?”

“You like teeth in general?”

“What?”

“It’s just a question.”

“Do I like teeth?”

“Just tell me why she has your phone number in her purse.”

He shrugged, very little going on behind those eyes. At least it seemed that way.

“Might as well spill it,” Charlie told him.

After a moment of dogged resistance, the boy’s shoulders collapsed and he admitted, “She took me looking for pumpkins, and then we made out.”

“You made out?”

“Yeah.”

“You and Ms. Pepper? You and the life studies teacher?”

“Yeah. Seriously.”

“Did you go all the way?”

“All the what?”

“Did you have sexual relations with her?”

“No, we were… no.”

“You two made out when you went looking for pumpkins? Did you ever see her again after that?”

“Twice. We saw her twice.”

“We who?”

“What?”

“You said ‘we.’ ‘We saw her twice.’”

“I said ‘I.’ I saw her twice.”

“Was there somebody else involved?”

He didn’t answer. He just looked down at his shoes, a filthy pair of work boots with the laces trailing in the dirt.

“Jake?”

“I think I’ve said enough.”

“You wanna come down to the station with me?”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet.”

He didn’t look upset or angry or anything. He just got back in his pickup truck and gunned the engine.

“Where were you yesterday afternoon?” Charlie asked, leaning against the roof and looking at him through the rolled-down window.

Jake switched on the radio. A rap song was playing, and he rocked his head violently to the beat. He’d probably scrambled his brains doing that.

“I might want you to come down to the station house later on and clarify what you just said,” Charlie told him.

Jake sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“You’ll cooperate?”

“I’ll think about it.” He tapped his hand on the door in farewell.

8

C
HARLIE FINISHED
out the morning by holding a press conference to announce the homicides and trying to answer reporters’ questions as best he could. The news spread like wildfire throughout the reeling community, and Charlie knew there would be a run on dead-bolt locks at the hardware store and bullets at the gun shop.

By noon, hundreds of curiosity-seekers had converged on the area. The Institute for Disaster Studies was mapping out the damage path, while FEMA’s assessment team attempted to assign an F-scale rating. Over three dozen homes in the Black Kettle subdivision had been destroyed, another 150 had major damage and five hundred people were still without electric power. The damage path ran across several hundred acres of central-pivot irrigation pipes, where the hopeful green of April had given way to vast expanses of brown.

Back at the morgue, Charlie and Duff extracted the rest of the flying debris from the bodies and carefully examined it before sending it off to the state lab for further testing. There were eight pieces of weaponized debris altogether. “Let’s hope we pull a print off one of these,” Duff said.

Next Charlie drove to Shepherd Street, where the
rat-a-tat-tat
of the gas-powered generator reached his ears before he even stepped out of his car. He went around back, where part of the roof lay in pieces on the Peppers’ backyard and the few trees that remained standing held shredded debris in their upper, leafless branches. Swiping off his sunglasses, he opened the kitchen door.

Mike Rosengard looked up. “Hiya, Chief.”

“Mike? What are you doing here?”

“Finding lots of smooth glove prints, for one thing.” He leaned over the sink, his features narrowed to a single point of interest as he brushed Chinese-blue fingerprint powder over the faucet and handles. He had a forehead like polished granite and thick dark hair with a streak of premature white, like a worry that emanated from a specific part of his brain. He wore the requisite suit and tie, neatly pressed. “Whoever did this knows crime scene procedure. Fuck. I hate that.”

“Sours my already tenuous mood.”

“I heard about the teeth. Hunter filled me in.”

“Did he tell you about the debris and everything?”

“Debris, teeth, the whole nine yards.”

Charlie could hear the melancholy sound of the wind as it whistled through the rafters.

“I know you said to take the week off, Chief, but what am I supposed to do? Sit around and twiddle my thumbs while all this is going down?”

Eleven years ago, Mike had moved here from Boston, where real things happened. Real crimes, not these penny-ante drug busts and B&Es and domestic disputes where people were constantly changing their stories. Charlie often worried that his best detective might become bored with only half a dozen homicides a year; but now it looked as if they had the type of mystery a Boston cop could really sink his teeth into.

“Where are you and Jill staying?” Charlie asked.

“My brother-in-law’s house. We had to discuss who parks where, when to take a shower. I feel like I’m living in a dormitory.” He scratched his forehead, leaving a daub of blue ash in the center like a third eye. “I tried to keep the boys quiet last night, but Sammy wouldn’t stop crying. Still, I can’t complain, Chief. We’ve got a roof over our heads and three hots a day. We’re just grateful to be alive.”

“Anything I can do,” Charlie told him. “Anything at all.”

“Thanks, boss.” He straightened out his arms, and Charlie noticed that the sleeves of his gray suit were about an inch too short. The tie was blue with green polka dots. Mike smiled. “What can you do? You’ve gotta laugh.”

“I can loan you a few ties. I doubt the suits will fit.”

“Ties I’ll take,” Mike said. “This is about the most conservative one my brother-in-law has.”

“So the perp wore gloves?” Charlie said.

“Which means the crime was premeditated.”

“Multiple stab wounds, that’s rageful. That’s personal.”

“So he knew the victims?”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“Premeditation, combined with the viciousness of the attacks, indicate that the perp might’ve known his victims.”

“It’s a possibility.” Charlie opened the refrigerator and stood inspecting its contents: Tupperware containers with indeterminate leftovers, a plate of hardened hash browns, a slice of lemon meringue pie covered in aluminum foil. He closed the door, then noticed the refrigerator magnets—Oscar the Grouch, Smiley Face with a bullet through its forehead, a glow-in-the-dark “Earth from Space” magnet. They were symmetrically placed, except for a space in the center where it looked like one was missing. He tucked this bit of information into a corner of his brain. “Soon as you catch your breath,” he said, “I want you to call your buddies over at the National Weather Service and get us some pictures of yesterday’s storm.”

“Good idea,” Mike said. “All those storm-chasers with their digital cameras.”

“Local TV, too. They had their people out there in droves trying to catch the twister on tape. Maybe we’ve already got the bad guy’s chase car on film, only we don’t know it yet.”

Mike nodded. “Make and model. License plates.”

“At least we can snag some more witnesses.”

Sunlight glinted off the broken glass on the windowsill. The tree branch had ripped the curtains, with their simple pattern of forward and backward horses, and the plaster around the window frame had cracked and twisted off. The kitchen countertop was warped from where a wave of mud and rain had crashed through. Charlie could picture Rob Pepper out in the backyard, pruning the trees with his extendable pruner and bow saw. He’d been an easygoing, hardworking guy whose ambition extended no further than his own property line, whereas Jenna seemed to long for more from life, always with that faraway look in her eyes. Charlie wondered: Did Rob know she was cheating on him? With a teenager, no less?

Above the back fields, a red-tailed hawk flapped and swooped erratically through the air. “You can get to the highway pretty quickly from here,” Charlie said.

“From the railroad tracks to the highway, the road passes maybe half a dozen farmsteads, all set back from the road.”

“Which explains why nobody saw anything unusual. No suspect vehicle. No suspicious activity.” He took a swift breath. “Duff says it isn’t all that hard to make a wooden knife. He explained the process to me.”

“That was the murder weapon? A wooden knife?”

Wooden knives, daggers, shivs, pikes, spears, stakes…
a new term would have to be invented. “We found eight pieces of flying debris that’d been weaponized. Staircase balusters, chair legs, fence posts, you name it. These were very skillfully done. If we hadn’t carefully examined each piece, we might’ve missed it.”

“Yeah, but… can you actually penetrate the human body with a wooden blade?”

“Duff thinks the victims were unconscious first. That would make it easier. Then you just avoid all the bones and keep stabbing away until you find an entry.”

Mike put the fingerprint brush down. “What kind of a sick fuck are we dealing with here?”

Charlie pressed his thumbs against his temples. “The X rays showed blunt trauma. Fractures, lacerations, abrasions. We figure he rendered the victims unconscious with a blow to the head… but it’s the stab wounds that ultimately killed them. Jenna died of airway obstruction, the others bled out.”

Mike’s eyes grew round with wonder. “What’d he use to knock them out with? A board? A baseball bat?”

“Duff found wood chip fragments with uneven, irregular edges in some of the defensive wounds.”

“Wood chips?”

“Maybe from a log.”

He frowned thoughtfully. “A log with a knot at one end can act like a weighted club. The knot provides a natural weight to give it better swing.”

Charlie nodded. “Could still be on the property.”

“Do you realize what this means?” Mike looked at him. “It means he brought the weapons with him. It means he knew that a tornado was going to drop down out of the sky yesterday afternoon. Somehow he fucking knew.”

“Do another grid search of the property. Let’s look for a log with blood or brain matter adhering to it.” Charlie could barely grasp the significance of this statement and sighed heavily, as if he’d been holding his breath. “Where’s Lester?” he said.

“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.”