Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

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.

If the perp had planned it, he couldn’t have done better than to have an F-5 tornado sweep through the place where he’d killed Susan Lyston.

Dale and other detectives had tried to question everyone who’d attended the barbecue and had been in the vicinity at the time of the slaying. They’d interviewed as many as they could locate. But both the pavilion and the boathouse had been flattened. The gravel lot where over two hundred vehicles were parked had been turned into an apocalyptic landscape of twisted steel and shattered glass.

Consequently, dozens who’d narrowly escaped death had sustained serious injuries. Many were hospitalized with internal injuries, head trauma, compound fractures, cuts and contusions, and shock. It had taken weeks to track down and question everyone.

But in the meantime, Dale had grilled Denton Carter.

As the boyfriend with whom Susan had quarreled that morning, his name had gone to the top of the list of possible suspects. Right off, Dale and his team of detectives thought they had their man. The eighteen-year-old was a surly wiseass who had issues with authority. Dale heard that from faculty members of the high school from which Dent had graduated only the week before.

“He’s an intelligent kid,” a school counselor had told Dale. “He finished with a three-point-two GPA and probably could have done better if he’d wanted to. But that was the problem. He didn’t want to. Terrible attitude. The boy carries a big chip on his shoulder.”

Dale had discovered that for himself the first time he hauled Dent Carter in for questioning. After the vulgar language, Dale had put him in jail, thinking that a night in lockup might improve his manners. But the following day he had smirked at Dale and shot him the finger when he was released.

Dale had hated watching him saunter out, but he didn’t have any evidence with which to hold him. Not then, and not days later, after conducting a thorough investigation and repeated interrogations. The boy’s story never deviated from what he had initially told Dale. No one could testify to seeing him at the barbecue, and the old man from the airfield provided him with an alibi. Dale had had no choice but to let him go.

His interest had shifted to Allen Strickland.

Now, Dale hefted his pistol in his palm while mentally enumerating all the facts that had pointed to Strickland’s guilt. There had been enough to charge him. But there wasn’t a single, solid piece of hard evidence to prove that he’d killed that girl.

The ADA assigned to prosecute the case, Rupert Collier, an eager bloodsucker if ever there was one, had built a case out of circumstantial evidence. His summation had been delivered with the fervor of a tent revival evangelist. As though fearing hell for themselves if they didn’t convict, the jury had brought in a guilty verdict in under two hours.

Allen Strickland had gone to prison.

Dale Moody had turned to drink.

Eighteen years later, Bellamy Lyston Price had written a book that underscored every doubt Dale had ever entertained about what had happened in the woods that day just before the historic tornado.

And what made him mad as hell was that that damn book might conjure up doubt in the minds of others as well. The ending left a lot open to speculation. Readers might start wondering if maybe the criminal investigation had been sloppy, if maybe the ambition of the ADA had outdazzled that of the accused’s court-appointed defender, if maybe Allen Strickland hadn’t been the last person to see Susan Lyston alive after all.