The Breathtaker

by Alice Blanchard

  “Maybe he knows of you, boss,” Mike mused. “Maybe he saw your picture in the paper and decided to send you a message. I dunno. I just have this sinking-in-the-gut feeling that he chose that record on purpose.” His face was slick with sweat. “There’s a reason for everything. A twisted one, but a reason nonetheless.”

  Charlie lifted a brooding glance out the window. The parking lot was jammed with cars, heat rising off the asphalt. He and his men had meticulously matched the Peppers’ injuries to the bloodstains they’d found inside their house and had deduced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the killer was right-handed. They’d been able to piece together a scenario from the lab reports, photographs and blood spatter trajectories. The killer had first attacked Rob Pepper in the front hallway, clubbing him in the chest, forearms, abdomen and head. A second blow to the head knocked him unconscious. The killer then attacked Jenna Pepper with the same weapon—a knotted log they’d found on the property—landing vicious blows to her head, chest and forearms, and finally rendering her unconscious. Both victims left matted sliding marks on the hallway walls and the red-and-green-patterned hallway rug from where they’d tried to crawl away.

  In the meantime, Danielle fled into the kitchen, where the killer followed her, delivering one tremendous blow to the back of her skull. Severely injured, she somehow managed to scramble out into the living room and hide behind the piano (they later found dust balls in her hair). He plucked her out of her hiding place and landed a paralyzing blow to her forehead, then dragged all three victims upstairs to the master bedroom, where, with unimaginable ferocity and savagery, he did his worst work. The perpetrator had to be relatively strong, Charlie thought, completely fearless and absolutely lacking in any conscience or remorse. It was a monstrous act of madness, full of risk and defiance, and it made no sense whatsoever.

  Mike opened the folder. “Birdie and Sailor Rideout, ages fifty-four and fifty-six respectively. Bloodstains match the victims’ ABO. Defensive cuts on the arms and hands, blunt trauma to the head. Impalement injuries were both full-body and partial-body thickness, fixed in place…” He glanced up. “It goes on. I’ll just give you the broad strokes.” He skim-read the next few pages. “Says here they picked up some interesting soils and botanicals from the scene. Insulation fibers, asbestos fibers and minute traces of plaster. The trace is very old, about a century. Nothing matches with the house, though.”

  “That’s no good. It could’ve blown in from other areas.”

  Mike’s pinstriped shirt stretched across his chest as he tipped his chair back. “No blue-black wool fibers, Chief. Just some white cotton ones.”

  Charlie shrugged. “That’s so common it’s useless.”

  “All the hairs they recovered from the drains leading into the main sewer line belonged to the victims, but there were several unknowns on the premises. Two strands of medium-length brown Caucasian hair, one short blond Caucasian, one short black Caucasian and one medium-length white Caucasian.”

  Charlie frowned. It made him think of his father, for some reason. Medium white hair.

  “Also several black rabbit hairs.”

  “Rabbit?”

  “According to the state lab.”

  “Did the Rideouts own any rabbits?”

  “Not that I know of. That’s why it piques my interest.” He paused to turn the page. “They found a single green carpet fiber in Birdie Rideout’s hair, and blue jean fibers underneath her fingernails.”

  “That won’t give us anything. Blue jean fibers are as common as white cotton. Useless to the case.”

  “Now we come to the teeth,” Mike said, clutching at the report with his short fat fingers. “Female vic’s upper right canine was extracted and replaced with an as-yet-unidentified tooth. Male vic’s lower left incisor was replaced in a similar manner.”

  “The teeth,” Charlie said, rattling the ice in his plastic cup. “That’s our link. That’s what’s gonna bring us and the killer together.”

  “I agree.”

  “Do me a favor. Ask McNeese if he’d loan us those teeth for a little while, would you?”

  “Sure.” Mike flipped through the rest of the report. “No sexual assault. No semen. No rearranged clothes that might indicate rape. No eyewitnesses. No reports of any suspicious activity. No incriminating latents. That about wraps it up.”

  Charlie could feel a slow, steady pulse in his neck. “What about the Peppers? Anything new on that front?”

  “Besides a million nut calls?” Mike cracked a smile. “Everybody’s got a theory. Everybody’s developed extrasensory perception all of a sudden.”

  “Any word on Gustafson?”

  “Yeah, we got an address.” He clunked his chair forward, the soft underbelly of his chin vibrating. “I was gonna go over there and talk to him in person, since he refuses to acknowledge our phone calls.”

  Charlie stood up. “What’re we waiting for?”

  On their way out, Hunter stopped them. “Chief? There’s some lady on the phone… insists on talking to you personally. Says it’s about the case.”

  “Meet you outside,” Charlie told Mike, then took the phone from Hunter. “Hello?”

  “Chief Grover?”

  The line made a clicking sound.

  “How can I help you, ma’am?”

  “I wanted to report something about those murders that happened last month.”

  “Yes? I’m listening.”

  “Well,” she said in a thick Texas drawl, “when I was a little girl, we had a tornado here in Dime Box, Texas. An F-2. Oh, it was bad. Mama, Dickie and me hid in the closet. It was right under the stairs, so we thought we’d be safe. That was a terrible day, I don’t know if you remember… but half the town got blown away.”

  Charlie furrowed his brow. “Yes?”

  “So there we were, huddled inside the closet, scared out of our wits, when I peeked out the door and saw this little person moving around inside our house. I thought it was an elf… I thought we had an elf in the house… but now I think it must’ve been a little boy. He wandered through the front hallway. A little boy of about… oh, I don’t know. Five or six years old?”

  Charlie frowned. It didn’t make any sense.

  “After the tornado roped out, there were no elves or little boys to be found, of course. I figured I must’ve been dreaming. But we discovered to our amazement that our silverware was gone. Our TV set was gone. The radio was gone. I mean, you understand, we were close to the damage path, but the house was still standing, and those items were missing as if by magic. As if someone or something had come into the house and plucked them out of existence. I just wanted you to know…”

  “Well, ma’am. I appreciate the call. I sincerely do.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the wind blew everything away. But I can’t seem to get that day out of my head.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement. Thanks for calling.”

  “No, thank you, Chief Grover,” she said. “Thank you and your men for doing such a wonderful job.”

  “I wish I deserved that,” he said, and hung up.

  14

  JONAH GUSTAFSON lived between two freeway ramps somewhere east of Tulsa. He had medium-length brown hair, big knotty joints and a slightly manic look in his eyes. He sat on a plastic-covered couch while the setting sun streamed in through the old-fashioned windowpanes. He wore jeans, a leather vest and no shoes on his dirty feet, which Charlie guessed were size elevens. There was a framed moonscape on the wall behind him, and Charlie noticed that his hands shook as he hand-rolled himself another cigarette.

  “Thanks for agreeing to talk to us,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  Out in the driveway sat a gleaming white van polished so spick-and-span it might’ve burned a hole in your eyes if you stared at it for too long. Charlie could hear children playing in the back bedrooms.

  “You got kids?” he asked.

  “Three boys. Three hellions.” Jonah wouldn’t look at him
directly. He was working on a tall bourbon and soda and could barely lift the glass to drink.

  Charlie gave a disengaged nod. The boys were yelling at one another, the sound of their voices looping drowsily toward him like bees. “We’ve been talking to other storm-chasers who were in the vicinity of Promise on the fifteenth. Anything you could tell us would be much appreciated.”

  “Just routine, huh?”

  “Strictly routine.”

  Jonah had thick white scar tissue where a right eyebrow should be. “What d’you wanna know?”

  “Where were you that day?”

  “I started out in Ponca City.”

  “Kansas?”

  He nodded. “Local Skywarn nets were heating up, so I signed in, flipped on the portable and saw two tornado warnings shooting up southwest of me. The Nexrad summary and local Doppler radar confirmed this. So I swung around, and before I knew it, there was this ting and tang off the hood. And I’m thinking to myself, so far so bad.”

  “By bad, you mean good?”

  “Yeah, good.” He grinned. He drank. He blew out a thin ribbon of smoke. “Bad always means good.”

  Charlie glanced around the living room. The place was plain and simple. No plants, no curtains, no amenities. Just crumbling roller shades, squat discount furniture and lots of handmade cabinets and bookshelves. “You do your own woodworking?” he asked.

  “Hell, yeah. I built that kitchen table out of particleboard. See my CD holder? I made that. See the entertainment center over there? I could make you one for fifty bucks plus material. Hey, what’s going on back there?” he barked over his shoulder. He picked up the glass in his right hand and smiled apologetically. “My wife stranded me. Three kids, and one of ’em ain’t even mine.”

  Charlie gave a calculated nod. The perp was right-handed. Unknown brown hairs had been found at two of the crime scenes. Size eleven shoe, that was in the ballpark.

  “She used to come chasing with me all the time, my wife. We met during a hailstorm. We ran around like a couple of kids and took a bunch of hailstones home with us. Popped ’em in the freezer. Six months later, my wife served hailstone cocktails at our wedding.” He took a drag of his hand-rolled cigarette, inhaling the unfiltered smoke deep into his lungs. “First thing she ever said to me was, ‘A white van? Why white?’ White gets dirty as shit. But hey, that ain’t nothing a little core-punching won’t fix, you know? A good driving rain is better than any car wash. Fucking gorgeous, my wife. She had some ass on her.”

  “What happened?”

  “The bitch ran off with a grease monkey.”

  “No, I mean… on the fifteenth?” Charlie said.

  “Oh. Right.” His narrow triangular face made him seem both crafty and stupid at once. “So I headed back to Oklahoma, where the storm appeared to be back-building. Dome and anvil were really crisp. The northern flank had a nice tower to it, and the northwestern flank was punching through to the stratosphere… incredible explosion.”

  “So you were in Promise that day?” Mike said.

  He nodded. “South of downtown. Next thing I know, I’m in heavy rain and the concrete is rumbling beneath my wheels. Rumbling like an earthquake. I figure I’m about to get eaten alive. Things can change so damn quick, you know? I saw it surge across the highway. It blew over a semi. Then all of a sudden, this moderately large piece of house falls from the sky directly in front of me.” He leaned forward, his whole body tensing. “I abandoned my position. That debris was starting to track towards me.”

  “You left the area?”

  “Hell, yeah. I floored it out of there, no kidding.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “There was another tornado warning down around Burns Flat and Reydon, down around there. Did you know they have a Twister Park in Burns Flat? Now, that’s a sad fact.”

  “Were you anywhere near Shepherd Street on the fifteenth?” Charlie asked, and Jonah gave him a bloodless look.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You didn’t happen to drive by the Pepper residence that day?” he said in an emotionless voice.

  Jonah’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I don’t like where this is leading. These insinuendos.”

  “Would you mind if I took a look around?”

  “Yes, I would.” He sounded affronted.

  Footsteps. “Dad?” A small boy stood in the doorway, two of his front teeth missing. That got Charlie’s attention.

  “C’mere, you.” Jonah drew the boy close, his boxer shorts showing above the waistband of his jeans as he hugged his son tight.

  The boy turned to stare with deep hostility at Charlie. He glared at his shiny badge. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Chief Grover. What’s yours?”

  Jonah’s eyes lit with sudden recognition. “Grover? Any relation to Izzy Grover?”

  Charlie nodded. “Yeah, that’s my father.”

  “Man, there goes one hard-driving dude.” Jonah had a cackling laugh. “That guy can be criminally dangerous, you know? Tailgating and bullying little Japanese imports out of the way. Who cares who’s at fault? The dude needs a hug desperately. Him and his mangy old jacket.”

  The hairs on the back of Charlie’s neck bristled like a cold morning. He pictured his father pulling that old peacoat of his out of mothballs. “We’re talking about Isaac Grover, right? Sixty-two years old? White hair?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Make a mistake and he’ll gleefully flatten you into a pancake under that sorry-ass pickup truck of his.”

  Charlie felt an uneasiness floating in his stomach. His father took that old navy-blue peacoat out of mothballs in the fall and wore it as late as June sometimes. The dark blue peacoat. Something registered. Blue-black wool fibers.

  “Izzy Grover, man, and his piece-of-shit Loadmaster. Last time we pulled out the engine, he’d blown out a rod bearing and ruined the crank. That thing has a gazillion miles on it. He’d better get it rebuilt one of these days. One of these days soon.”

  Charlie could sense his own shifting consciousness like a change in air pressure. “Thanks for your time,” he said, and stood up.

  15

  MUD SPATTERED the wheel wells of his police car as he took the snaking curves past the First Baptist Church and the dead pecan grove toward his father’s house. He pulled into the long driveway and parked, then sat in his car with the engine ticking and stared at the recently mown lawn, the black-limbed trees. The house in the moonlight frightened him. Instead of comfort and warmth, he saw danger. He saw pain.

  He stepped out of the car, heart leaping to his throat, and shot up the porch steps. “Hello?” He knocked on the front door. When nobody answered, he went over to one of the porch windows and peered inside.

  His father was planted on the living room sofa, dozing in the flickering blue light of the TV set. He slept like a still life. Charlie rapped sharply on the windowpane, and the old man jerked awake.

  “Pop? We need to talk.”

  He got up from the sofa with a sleepwalker’s groping gait. “Charlie?” he said. “Is that you?”

  After a moment, the screen door squealed on its hinges. “What’re you doing here?” he asked groggily.

  Charlie studied the way the porch light hit his father’s head, outlining the skeletal shape of his skull—that broad brow, the gaunt cheeks, those miserly lips sinking over the toothless gums—and suddenly realized what it was he’d been avoiding all this time. His father was right-handed; he wore a size eleven shoe; he was an avid storm-chaser; he was a temperamental man with a violent past. His Loadmaster pickup truck had been photographed in the vicinity of the crime scene on April 15, and a single white hair—medium-length, Caucasian—had been found at the Rideout residence. And now there was the peacoat. Blue-black wool. His father? Ridiculous.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Isaac said. “C’mon in.”

  Charlie stepped inside the house, its walls enveloping him in a musty cloak of oldness. He couldn’t enter his father’s house withou
t clenching into a defensive posture. He had dozens of pale scars on his back, scars shaped like blades of grass made years ago by a leather strap. The body remembered everything, even when the mind forgot.

  “Something to drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  The living room was neat and tidy, with little islands of furniture grouped together. The molding was plain, the woodwork dark, the rooms small and boxy. There were no comforting touches—no flowers, no pictures, no books. Just a bucketful of pennies and stacks of old magazines, some scanner equipment and a TV set that turned people’s faces purple.

  Charlie paused. The CD player was new. So was the laptop. “Where’d you get those?” he asked.

  “Down at Dirty Ed’s. They’re used. That okay with you?”

  The laptop was open on the coffee table. On screen was a satellite picture of a rotating cloud mass. Charlie froze with a look of sniffing suspicion. “Since when do you go on-line?” he asked. “I thought you hated all the bells and whistles?”

  “Shows how much you know,” Isaac snorted. “That’s basic chaser gear… laptop, GPS, cell phone. I also bought some brand-new tires for my truck. Is that okay with you?”

  There were miles between himself and his father. Epochs of misunderstanding. “We need to talk, Pop.”

  “What about?”

  “Where’d you get the watch?”

  His mouth grew defiant. “I already told you.”

  “Yeah, right. How about the truth this time?”

  Isaac slid the metal watchband up his wrist, hiding it underneath the sleeve of his orange sweatshirt. “Like I said, this nice couple…”

  “Gave it to you, I know. What are their names?”

  His father stared at him fiercely.

  “Dad… I know you stole it.”

  His mouth grew hard. “Get out of my house.”