Free The Breathtaker by Alice Blanchard Page A

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