The Breathtaker (23 page)

6

C
HARLIE DROVE
past strip malls and welding shops out into open countryside, where a chorus of crickets repeated its lulling refrain. He came to a fork in the road and threw the car into the turn, hitting a pothole so hard he almost sprained an ankle. These little county roads got practically no traffic. They weren’t high-priority, so they got run-down and stayed run-down.

Boone lived with his parents on the bad side of town, where dire poverty had a tendency to turn family member against family member, where most of the calls they got were either domestic or drug-related. Charlie told himself to remain calm. Steady, steady. It was, after all, his fault. He’d raised too innocent a daughter. She didn’t judge. She was open and honest and trusting. Nowhere near cynical enough. Boone Pritchett was as transparent as glass to everyone else but her. She’d been raised in rarefied air.
All his fault.

Now he parked his car on the side of the road and got out. Beyond the barbed-wire fence with its No Entry sign was something too wild to be called a meadow. Amid the tall grass and flapping trash was Boone’s wrecked pickup truck, a casino-pink accordion. Parked in the driveway behind it was the full-size rust-red pickup belonging to his dad. Charlie had pulled Eddie Pritchett over a number of times for various misdemeanors and DUIs.

Now he opened the creaking gate and crossed the wild, overgrown yard toward the one-story house, where he knocked on the door. “Police! Open up!”

The boy answered, something mocking and malicious going on behind his eyes. “What do you want?” he snarled.

Charlie crooked a finger. “Step outside.”

“What for?”

“We need to talk.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“Not yet.”

Staring at him with fixed blue eyes, Boone said, “Then I don’t have anything to say to you.”

Charlie chopped his fist vertically into Boone’s nose, and he dropped like a sack of grain. Grabbing the boy by his hooded sweatshirt, Charlie dragged him out the door and across the weed-choked lawn.

Boone howled and clutched his nose, blood leaking through his fingers. He stomped his feet in an effort to slow Charlie down, but that only deepened Charlie’s resolve.

“Looks like you need more dancing lessons there, partner.” Charlie stood him upright. They were illuminated by the sweep of passing headlights and a gossamer glow cast by the corner streetlamp. Bunching up the hoodie in his fists, Charlie said, “If you see my daughter again, you’re a dead man.”

The boy’s teeth were flecked with blood. “So I’m not supposed to mess with you because you’re some big bad dude? Throwing sucker punches?
Pfft
… get real.”

Charlie grabbed him by the ears and snarled with perfect concentration: “This is real simple. You won’t be seeing Sophie anymore. Got it?”

The boy’s voice grew shrill. “What’d I ever do to you?”

“It’s not what you did to me, you worthless jag-off. It’s what you plan on doing to my daughter.”

“I’m not gonna do anything to her, you pervert.”

A big man loomed in the doorway, blotting out the light. “What the fuck is going on in my front yard?” Eddie Pritchett’s voice had the town in it; you could tell he was used to addressing the world in a belligerent drawl.

“I’m talking to your son,” Charlie said, sitting on his rage. “Stay back.”

“You can’t speak to a minor without the parent’s consent,” Eddie yelled from the doorway. His stringy hair looked like it should have leaves in it, and he tucked a few unruly strands behind his ears. He wore tight jeans, no shirt and a pair of fingerless gloves, and there were tattoos of skulls running up and down his body. “Either you arrest him, or get the hell off my property.”

Charlie’s eyes searched the inner recesses of Boone’s narrow skull. After a moment’s hesitation, he released him.

“Get your ass back inside, fool,” Boone’s father told him.

The wind riffled gently through the weeds as the boy retreated. Before stepping inside, he turned to Charlie and said, “I wouldn’t hurt a hair on her head.”

“I’m warning you.” Charlie pointed his finger for emphasis. “Go anywhere near her again, and I’ll come down on you like a ton of shit.”

“Those are intimidation tactics,” the big man said from the doorway. “You’ll be hearing from our lawyer!”

“Shut up.”

“Police brutality! We’re gonna sue!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Charlie muttered. “You got off light, you mutt.”

7

T
HE BALL
of Charlie’s thumb itched and his eyelids drooped sleepily. The caffeine wasn’t doing it for him anymore. Maybe if he injected it? He had a way of posing so that no one would suspect he was drifting off to sleep. He looked down at the paperwork on his desktop, one hand covering his forehead as if he were deep in thought. That way, he could close his eyes and nod off, just as long as he didn’t collapse in a heap on his desk.

“Knock, knock.”

Charlie jolted upright.

“You asleep at the switch again?” Mike asked with a laugh.

“Cut me some slack, Mike. I get less rest than a shark.”

“Join the club. So guess which song was playing on Toby Lake’s Walkman?”

Charlie shook his head.

“‘I’m on Fire’ by Bruce Springsteen.”

He made a gesture of dismissal, but it disturbed him deeply. “Coincidence,” he said. Outside his office window, heat shimmered off the asphalt, and the cottonwoods released a large flock of birds into the clear blue sky. “What’s the word on Lester?”

“We put out a BOLO on the Blazer. We’ve searched the area extensively around his house. We’ve shown his picture around the county and interviewed over a hundred friends and relatives. Still no clue as to his whereabouts.”

“He must be out there somewhere.”

“Now what do we do?”

Charlie gave a grunt of annoyance. They were overwhelmed with routine June stuff—sexual assaults, DUIs, burglaries, drug killings and now this. Lester had gone missing. It bothered him that the rest of the world wouldn’t cooperate and do nothing while they tried to solve their most important case. “What about the phone records?” he asked.

“Nick’s still working on it. Credit cards, too.”

“Okay. Let’s wait and see what he comes up with.” He wanted the familiar pattern of time back. A beer, a newspaper, his feet up on the coffee table. What a luxury that would be. “Is that Toby Lake’s autopsy report?”

“Injuries fit the pattern.” Mike took a seat and opened the file folder on his lap. “Blunt trauma to the head, defensive lacerations to both arms, impalement with a three-foot fence post…”

Charlie listened with a tight expectancy.

“Three smooth glove prints,” Mike went on. “No blood besides the victim’s ABO. No semen. No tool-mark evidence on either door. Just like a goddamn rerun.”

“Any trace?”

“We’re in luck.” He plucked out a page. “They found some microscopic dots on the victim’s socks and pant cuffs.”

“Microscopic dots?”

“A common plastic. Polyvinyl chloride, used in numerous products, from garden hoses to various household items. It says here, yellow microscopic dots.”

Charlie’s back stiffened. “Tiny yellow specks?”

Mike shrugged. “Says here, dots.”

“Around the ankles?”

“Socks and pant cuffs.”

The casters of Charlie’s chair squealed across the carpet as he reached for his phone. “Hunter? Get me the Tulsa P.D.”

8

S
ERGEANT DWIGHT
D. Harbuck of the Tulsa Police Department’s investigative unit had once been Charlie’s beat partner back in the bad old days. Since the Debris Killer case was multijurisdictional, they’d joined forces and were about to issue an arrest warrant together. Charlie’s friend D.D. was an order-loving man. He kept his uniform pristine and his thoughts pure. “I hope they fry his ass,” he told Charlie as they took a hard right into Jonah Gustafson’s driveway. “I’ll throw the switch myself, I don’t shiv-a-git. I’ve got no more patience for the slimy bottom of life’s barrel.”

A radio car pulled up behind them, and a pair of officers got out with their weapons drawn.

“You two go around back,” Harbuck told his men.

The suspect’s white van was parked in front of the house. Charlie patted his breast pocket where the arrest warrant was, then dropped his .38 down against his trouser leg, shielding it from view. He followed the sergeant up the rough porch steps, and Harbuck thumped on the door with his fist.

“Police, open up!” He didn’t wait for an answer, just kicked the door open and led the way inside with cocky vigor.

Sunlight poured in through the generous living room windows, painting everything a golden Vermeer hue. Harbuck moved swiftly down the hallway, making broad, dangerous sweeps with his .38 snub-nose. “Police! We’ve got you surrounded!”

Charlie’s weapon felt as cold as fog in his hands. He trailed Harbuck into the kitchen, where the teakettle was screaming and the other officers had the suspect surrounded.

Jonah Gustafson stood in front of the stove with his arms raised, a chipped Grateful Dead coffee mug clutched in one hand. “What the fuck?” he said, dumbfounded.

“How y’all doin’ this afternoon?” Harbuck holstered his weapon and twisted Jonah’s arms around behind his back. “You’re under arrest. Will somebody turn off the teakettle, please?”

One of his men reached for the stove.

“What am I being charged with?” Jonah asked with wide, annoyed eyes.

“Show him the warrant.”

Charlie dropped the target copy on the kitchen table, then removed the arrestee’s greasy “Night Train” baseball cap. Jonah was extremely thin and had medium-length brown hair.
Brown hair, Caucasian.
Charlie conducted a pat-down search and found cash dispersed throughout his pockets, an electronic pager and an Opus X Pyramid cigar from the Dominican Republic.

“You like this brand?” Harbuck said, pocketing the cigar.

“What the hell am I being arrested for?” Jonah cried. “You haven’t even told me yet.”

“A boy was killed on June ninth,” Charlie said. “In Wolf Pass, Texas. We found trace evidence linking you to the crime scene.”

“Me?” He looked deeply shaken.

“That yellow stuff on your gym bag.”

“Yellow stuff? What yellow stuff?”

“It’s called PVC. Polyvinyl chloride, a common household plastic. The state lab came up with a match for the trace. We found the same material on the victim’s socks and ankles from where the body was dragged.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. June ninth? I was home all day.” His brown hair was carefully parted down the middle and oiled flat, and he made a tremendous effort to come across as soft-spoken and cooperative.

“Can anybody corroborate your story?”

Jonah shook his head. “Look, I just wanna get my kids back. I’ve enrolled in a twelve-step program. I’m cleaning up my act… I’m cooperating here.”

“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” Harbuck said.

“No,” Jonah admitted. “I’m a dumb motherfucker.” His face looked like it was about to hatch. “Look, I didn’t kill nobody… C’mon, guys, this is ridiculous!”

“That’s funny, because you’re under arrest for first-degree murder.” Harbuck slapped on the handcuffs, ratcheting down tight.

Jonah squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh man… okay, look. I used to own a pair of yellow work gloves,” he said. “They were pretty old. White fabric… well, they aren’t so white anymore… with yellow plastic palms. But the plastic dried out and started to flake off, okay? I guess some of it must’ve come off on my gym bag. But I swear to God… I lost those stupid gloves months ago.”

“Lost them?” Charlie repeated.

“Yeah, two or three months ago, I swear to God. You know what? Fuck it. I wanna talk to my lawyer.”

Harbuck thrust his gnarled finger in Jonah’s face. “You piece of shit. Come out in the backyard with me.”

“That’s right, give me some excuse to sue the city!”

That was it; it was over. They searched the premises and gathered up the evidence—white powder residue on a triple beam scale, empty plastic Baggies, over a thousand in cash. Charlie rummaged through the closets and bureau drawers, looking for a blue-black item of clothing, but nothing fit the description. There were no detectable bloodstains inside the house. No green carpet fibers. The Chevy’s floor pads were maroon. They looked for the white gloves with the yellow palms, but couldn’t find those, either. Jonah wore size eleven sneakers, both Nike and Adidas. They bagged those. They bagged the woodworking equipment. They bagged as much as they could, then they hauled the suspect outside and negotiated him into the cage car.

Jonah started to rock back and forth inside the cage as if his brains were on fire. “This is bogus! I didn’t kill nobody!”

Harbuck popped the car into neutral and swung around. “Shut the hell up.”

“I ain’t no freaking murderer!” he screamed, the veins in his neck pumped up with blood. “You mindless shit-birds! Go ahead, take me downtown and arrest me! Ruin my whole life!”

Charlie’s cell phone rang. “Hello?”

“Chief?” It was Mike, shouting in his ear through a bad connection. “They found Lester’s vehicle…”

9

T
WENTY MILES
west of the Oklahoma-Texas border, a state trooper found Lester Deere’s bruise-colored Chevy Blazer parked behind an abandoned farmhouse, its windows broken down to the frames, its cut-stone walls crumbling to dust. Charlie navigated the grasslands toward the site, riding over a ridge and then edging back down, his police car tilting precariously before the front wheels slammed into a cattle trail. He parked and got out, then stood scanning the horizon. Vaporous cirrus clouds threw their soft shadows across the grasslands—lacy shadows moving swiftly over swell after swell of distant plains. The wind was so hot it felt like the gust from a blow-dryer. This land looked the way it always had, the way the buffalo and the rain and the wind had made it look—worn to a polished smoothness, like a stone at the bottom of a riverbed. You could drive a locomotive through the loneliness.

Now Mike came wading through the tall grass toward him. “I checked the immediate vicinity, boss. No extraneous tire tracks or footprints. You can see where he pulled off the road and parked in the weeds, but then the trail goes cold.”

“Let’s check it out.”

They descended a short rise together, then climbed again, flights of grasshoppers escaping from the weeds at their feet. They stepped gingerly down another incline before stumbling out onto a dirt road, where tangled vines of wild grape grew alongside the soft shoulders. Together they studied the tire tracks leading up to the site and found Lester’s Blazer angle-parked behind an ancient ruin, crests of bleached grass swelling against the crumbling foundation.

“No body damage,” Charlie said as they circled the vehicle together. “Doors unlocked. Keys are still in the ignition.”

“Which means he can’t be far, right?” Mike cupped his hands over the window. “Trip odometer’s set at three-thirteen.”

“It’s only a hundred miles from here to Promise.”

“No visible bloodstains on the seats or floor.”

Charlie stepped back, his uniform pants flapping around his ankles in the stiff breeze, and scanned the sagebrush ridges and distant rock outcroppings. He could almost picture dinosaurs wading through the ancient marshlands and getting stuck in the mud, their bones gradually turning to rock over millions of years. This land had originally taken its shape from the movement of the sea—the stacked trapezoid hills, the rolling restless prairie. Modern fossil hunters still found plenty of sea creatures trapped in the limestone—brachiopods and trilobites, the grain-sized fusulinids.

Now Charlie caught sight of a circling bird. In order to fool their prey, the local hawks had evolved to look like vultures, except that a vulture’s legs were gray, not yellow. Squinting hard, he watched the gray-legged bird swoop down and disappear behind a ridge.
Vultures.

He took off in a dead run, grass tassels hitting his kneecaps, and tried not to acknowledge the uncomfortable swelling in his gut that knew before he did what this meant. He couldn’t get enough oxygen into his lungs as he stopped at the crumbling edge of the cliffside and looked down at the sun-baked ground below.

“What is it?” Mike called after him.

Charlie felt a visceral fear in his gut. Two corpses lay facedown in the grass below. He scrambled down the slope, toes digging into the soft dirt, then slid the rest of the way, kicking up rocks and dust. He stumbled out into the clearing, where the vulture was busy plucking at the bloody pulp of a head.

“Git!” He waved his hands, and the vulture reluctantly hopped off the carcass and flew away, stirring the nearby grass with its wingbeats.

Mike stood above him on the cliff. Tight-lipped. Eyes grim. “Is that Lester?”

Charlie felt as if he’d been hit by a soft train. He knelt down next to the blond-haired corpse, the foul air around it smelling faintly of cordite. The back of the victim’s head was matted with blood and brain matter from where a bullet had plowed through, and a service revolver lay in the dirt next to his right hand. Nike sneakers, black leather belt, alligator shirt tucked into the waistband of a pair of brand-new-looking jeans. The Eagleton watch was still ticking. Charlie could feel his skull constricting around his brain, squeezing it like a grapefruit. With a shaky breath, he rolled the body over.

The sight of Lester Deere’s ruined face sent the horizon careening for a moment. Rigor mortis had come and gone; the flies had laid their eggs.
Dead a few days, at least.
He wiped his hand nervously across his mouth and tried not to gag, while a raw space opened up inside of him. He let the body fall gently back to its original position, then frisked the corpse for ID. He found Lester’s wallet in his back pocket, license and credit cards accounted for.

Mike stumbled down the incline toward him, kicking up puffs of Texas dust, then stooped to retrieve a dirty bill from the ground. He opened it up. “Look a that. A hundred-dollar bill.”

A knot of nausea rose in Charlie’s throat as he loosened his tie, then turned to gaze glassy-eyed into the distance. The prairie stretched for miles around them, with just an occasional set of tractor tires scoring the earth. He could see other bills scattered about, fluttering in the wind. A scissor-tailed flycatcher trilled nearby, and high overhead, the vulture worked its wings to catch the next gust of wind.

Charlie got a dreamy, suffocating feeling as he went to roll the other body over.

“Who’s that?” Mike asked.

“Jake Wheaton.” He stared down at the boy with a hooded expression. Jake’s face was fiercely doll-like, and he wore a T-shirt that said “Don’t Ask Me 4 Shit.” There was blood spiked across it. His eyes were open and his hands were fisted shut due to cadaveric spasming.

Charlie could feel the familiar tightening of his facial muscles, a physical reaction that occurred whenever he got upset or excited, blood rushing to the place where the scarring was heaviest from his undershirt catching fire thirty years ago. “Let’s cordon off the site and start a dialogue with the local law.”

“You think they killed each other over the money?” Mike asked, picking up hundred-dollar bills.

“I don’t know what the fuck I think anymore,” Charlie said, prairie dust gritting between his teeth.