Low Pressure

One of these days he just might work up the nerve to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. A few times, when he was really drunk, he’d played Russian roulette with it, but he’d always won. Or lost. Depending on how you looked at it.

It was a hot, breathless afternoon, the thick silence shattered only by the screech of cicadas. The shade found beneath the tin roof overhang on the porch provided little relief from the sweltering heat. Through the cypresses, the still surface of Caddo Lake looked like a brass plate.

The cabin in which he’d lived alone for fifteen years was situated on a densely wooded peninsula. The cove it formed looked dark and malevolent with its low canopy of moss-laden trees and viscous swamp waters. Few fishermen ventured into the uninviting inlet. Dale Moody liked it that way. Solitude had been what he was after when he’d bought the place, paying cash, filing the documents under a name he took off a hundred-year-old gravestone.

He sat down in his creaky rocker with the fraying cane seat, sipped the whiskey, drew on the cigarette, and enjoyed the reassuring weight of the loaded revolver resting on his thigh.

As he sat there, barely putting forth the effort to rock the chair, he asked himself, as he did most days, how his life might have been different if Susan Lyston hadn’t been killed that day. Would he have distinguished himself as a homicide detective, received commendations and handshakes from the mayor, stayed on with the Austin PD until he could draw full retirement? Would he still be married and have contact with his children? Would he know what his grandkids looked like?

But Susan Lyston had been killed on that dreadful Memorial Day eighteen years ago. The date not only marked her murder, it was also meteorologically significant. The first tornado to strike Austin in almost half a century had roared through the city and torn it all to hell, leaving destruction and death in its unforgiving path. One of the hardest-hit areas was the state park where the Lystons were hosting their annual company party.

The attendees had been having such a good time that few took notice of the threatening clouds beyond hoping that rain wouldn’t cancel the fireworks display scheduled for that night. Eventually, though, people became concerned about the premature dusk, the noticeable change in the barometric pressure, the supernatural stillness, and the greenish cast of the sky.

Parents started gathering up their children,

who had scattered to various areas of the park to take advantage of the games and activities organized by the Lystons. The face-painting lady packed up her pots and brushes. Band members stopped playing and loaded their instruments and speakers into their van to wait out the storm. Caterers put covers over their trays of potato salad and baked beans.

But these trifling safeguards were spitballs against a juggernaut. Even if there had been time to implement more safety precautions, experts later agreed that they would have done little or no good against a twister that was a mile wide and packed circulating winds of nearly two hundred miles an hour.

Austin was located south of the geographical band known as Tornado Alley, so many who lived there weren’t as attuned to the dangers as were their neighbors farther north. They’d seen pictures of devastation, sure. They’d watched films on TV and marveled at these most vicious and unpredictable offspring of Mother Nature.

But one couldn’t really be prepared for the power and the fury that a funnel cloud was capable of. It was something one had to experience to really know what it was like, and many who did experience it didn’t live to tell about it. Several fools ignored the warning sirens and went outside to watch the cloud. Two of those disappeared entirely. Nothing of them was ever found.

City-wide the death toll was sixty-seven. Nine of those casualties were recovered from the site of the barbecue at the state park.

Twelve hours after the storm, the city was still in a high state of emergency. All of Travis County was declared a disaster area. The entire police force was working search-and-rescue, along with the fire department, the sheriff’s office, the National Guard, the Red Cross, and a multitude of volunteers.

They had their hands full trying to reunite families, search for the missing and dead, convey the injured to medical facilities, restore law and order where looters were wreaking havoc, set up shelters for survivors whose homes had been demolished, and clear debris-blocked roads so emergency vehicles and public utility trucks could get through.

Around dawn the following morning, after a night spent in the midst of pandemonium, Dale had received a summons to the morgue, which, considering the state of things, was a major pain in the ass.

But he’d heeded the call. When he arrived, he’d been met by the chief ME, who’d looked frazzled and near exhaustion himself. His staff was overwhelmed by the number of bodies still being brought in, some in pieces, making identification a challenge that strained the objectivity of even the most hardened pros.

Leaving Dale even more puzzled as to why the doc had called for a detective to drop what he was doing and rush right over.

“We’re both busy, Detective, so I’ll make this quick. We’ve got a girl here, in her teens, whose body was recovered from the state park.”

“She was at the Lyston Electronics party?”

“She was a Lyston. Their daughter Susan.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m told her body was discovered under the branches of an uprooted tree. But the thing is, the reason I called for a detective, that’s not what killed her. The injuries she sustained during the tornado were postmortem.”

“Come again?”

“Cause of death was asphyxiation. She was strangled.”

“Are you sure?”

He’d shown Dale the cadaver. “The bruising here on her neck indicates strangulation. Where she was scraped and cut by the falling tree, she didn’t bleed. She sustained blunt trauma to several organs, which could have been fatal, but she was already dead.”

It had fallen to Dale to impart that news to her parents, who were already reeling from shock and grief over what they believed was a storm-related death. He’d watched Howard and Olivia Lyston shatter. Learning that their daughter had been murdered compounded their heartache a thousandfold.

Their tragedy had landed Dale Moody a murder case.

Combing the crime scene for evidence had been an exercise in futility, a joke. The tornado had ravaged the entire area. Trees that weren’t completely uprooted had been stripped bare of leaves, their naked branches ripped off and tossed to the ground like toothpicks. Investigators had to hack through the natural debris just to get to the scene of the crime. The area had also been trampled by first responders and panicked survivors searching for missing loved ones.