The Breathtaker (17 page)
I
T WAS
dark by the time they arrived at the crime scene, red and blue beacons from the local radio cars greeting them with an eerie, strobing silence. Power was out all over Dogtooth, Texas, due to downed electrical lines, and the house was veiled in a gray haze. Charlie could feel his pulse ticking in his throat as he and Mike climbed the porch steps together, their shadows jumping away from their flashlight beams.
The interior of the house was pitch-black. Charlie’s body gave an involuntary twitch as he shone his light over the once-bright wallpaper in the front hall, with its muddy boots and coat hooks strung with limp rain ponchos. He got a whiff of the ’70s in the daisy decals covering the cellar door and the purple-painted handrail leading up to the second floor, a string of lights from last Christmas wrapped around the banister, all that fun and color ending in blackness at the top of the stairs. He noticed that a couple of balusters were missing, like the grotesque gaps in a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. When the wind slapped the screen door shut behind them, they both jumped.
“Holy shit.” Mike looked at him and grinned foolishly.
A gruff voice sounded in the dark. “Don’t touch anything.” It was coming from the open doorway at the end of the front hall. They walked through a narrow vestibule and turned a corner into a rather large living room, where none of the furniture matched. The woodwork was all mahogany and oak with fluted pilasters, and the air smelled stale and slightly humid, and of something vaguely familiar. Something that stood Charlie’s hair on end.
“You Grover?” Sheriff Chester McNeese was on the delicate side, a little man with something big working around inside of him. His pale hair was shaved close to his scalp, and he had a vividly pockmarked face and a nasty habit of sucking on his front teeth.
“Sheriff.” Shaking hands in the dark felt oddly intimate. “This is Detective Rosengard.”
“How do.” McNeese shook Mike’s hand. “Rosengard, is that Jewish?”
“Yeah,” Mike said, going through his little ritual. “I’m the only Jew in Oklahoma.”
“Well, hey. I ain’t no Bible-slappin’ man myself. I have great respect for all religions.”
Mike smiled thinly. “Amen to that, brother.”
“Behind you,” McNeese said, and they swung around.
Charlie fell silent as he stared at the grisly scene. Two lifeless bodies were propped side by side on a worn rawhide sofa, their mouths ajar, their eyes suspicious. The man wore flannel pajamas and a George Hamilton tan that made his lips look almost white. The woman had her legs curled underneath her wide hips, so that she tilted slightly toward the man. She wore green stretch pants and little white shoes, and both of them appeared to be in their mid-fifties. He had a half-smoked stogie in one hand, and she looked like a freeze-dried apricot. Some of the impalement injuries were partial-body thickness; others were full-body thickness, with both an entry and an exit wound. Miscellaneous pieces of wood stuck out of them at odd angles, to freakish effect.
Charlie winced, his scars prickling with sympathy pain.
“I figure it’s your guy, right?” McNeese said, the tremolo in his voice betraying the fear he failed to mask. He kept one hand on his holstered gun. “The one in all the papers?”
Charlie nodded grimly. It hit him in the solar plexus. The killer wasn’t trying to disguise the murders anymore. The victims were just sitting there on the sofa. He was taunting them openly now.
“Twister touched down three hundred yards north of here,” McNeese told them. “The damage path was seven miles long. It hit a trailer park. That’s where we’ve been focusing most of our attention since last night. Three dead, countless injured. Broken bones, head injuries. People walking around just wailing, their clothes torn to shreds. We didn’t find these two until late this afternoon, when a concerned neighbor came calling.” He paused to scratch his head, and you could hear the sound of fingernails on dry scalp. “If this ain’t the craziest damn thing…”
“Not a lot of blood spatter in the living room,” Charlie said. “No disarray or overturned furniture.”
Mike glanced at him in silent acknowledgment.
“Nobody thought to look here,” McNeese went on. “The house wasn’t hit. We were up all night fighting fires and digging out survivors. My cousin’s dead. I’m still in shock about it.”
Charlie tracked a trail of blood droplets and sliding marks across the Oriental carpet into the kitchen, where all the refrigerator magnets and recipe cards had slid off the door and landed in a puddle of blood. The teakettle was cool to the touch. A mug of tea, now at room temperature, sat on the oak table. The telephone notepad had doodles all over it. On the floor, walls and ceiling was an inordinate amount of blood spatter.
And then something different. A small parade of kitchen appliances was lined up on the pink Formica countertop—a food processor, blender, electric can opener, a coffeemaker and an electric mixer. Each appliance was plugged into a wall outlet, and inside the blender, food processor and electric mixing bowl were dozens of pieces of silverware—forks, knives, spoons.
Charlie took a puzzled breath, then lowered his flashlight beam. The blood on the floor had been cleaned up in places—he detected wipe marks on the linoleum. He found the mop standing upright in a metal bucket in the pantry. If they sprayed the floor with luminol, he predicted, a circular pattern of blood would emerge on the linoleum, left there by the bottom of the bucket.
Back in the living room, three sheriff’s deputies were milling around in the dark, processing the scene by flashlight. The mood was sober. Charlie swept his light over the bloodstained rawhide sofa. “What’s the deal with the silverware?” he asked McNeese.
“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.”
S
OPHIE 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 recognize 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.”