Jeffery Deaver - The Bodies Left Behind

“The word is apostrophe P-H, ’phalting. As in ‘asphalt.’ It’s when kids run up behind a truck at a stoplight with their skateboards and hold on. That’s how Joey hurt himself.”

“He wasn’t in your school lot?”

“No, Mr. Boyd. One of our substitutes was on her way home. She saw him on Elden Street.”

“The highway?”

In downtown Humboldt, Elden was a broad commercial strip but once past the town line it returned to its true nature, a truck route between Eau Claire and Green Bay, where the posted limit meant nothing.

“She said the truck was doing probably forty when he fell. He’s only alive because there weren’t any cars close behind him and he veered into a patch of grass. Could’ve been a telephone pole or a building.”

“Jesus.”

“This needs some attention.”

I talked to him…

“It sure does, Mr. Raditzky. I’ll tell Brynn. I know she’ll want to talk to you.”

“Thanks, Mr. Boyd. How’s he doing?”

“Okay. Scraped up a little.”

He’s fine…

“He’s one lucky young man.” Though there was an undercurrent of criticism in the man’s tone. And Graham didn’t blame him.

He was about to say good-bye when something else popped into his head. “Mr. Raditzky.” Graham crafted a credible lie. “We were just talking about something yesterday. Was there any fallout from that scuffle Joey was in?”

A pause. “Well, which one?”

Lord, how many were there? Graham hedged. “I was thinking about the one last fall.”

“Oh, the bad one. In October. The suspension.”

Treading again blithely over a yellow jackets nest…Brynn’d told him there was a pushing match at the school’s Halloween party, nothing serious. Graham recalled Joey had stayed home afterward for a few days-because he hadn’t felt well, Brynn explained. But that was a lie, it seemed. So he’d been suspended.

The teacher said, “Ms. McKenzie told you the parents decided not to sue, didn’t she?”

Lawsuit?…What exactly had Joey done? He said, “Sure. But I was mostly wondering about the other student.”

“Oh, he transferred out. He was a problem, ED.”

“What?”

“Emotionally disturbed. He’d been taunting Joey. But that’s no excuse for nearly breaking his nose.”

“Of course not. I was just curious.”

“You folks dodged a bullet on that one. It could have cost you big.”

More criticism now.

“We were lucky.” Graham felt his gut chill. What else didn’t he know about his family?

A little pushing match. It’s nothing. Joey went to the Halloween party as a Green Bay Packer and this other boy was a Bears’ fan… Something silly like that. A little rivalry. I’ll keep him out of school for a bit. He’s got the flu anyway.

“Well, thanks again for the heads-up. We’ll have a talk with him.”

When they’d hung up, Graham got another beer. He sipped a bit. Went into the kitchen to do the dishes. He found the task comforting. He hated to vacuum, hated to dust. Set him on edge. He couldn’t say why. But he loved doing the dishes. Water, maybe. The life blood of a landscaper.

As he washed and dried he rehearsed a half dozen speeches to Joey about cutting school and dangerous skateboard practices. He kept refining them. But as he put the dishes away he decided the words were stilted, artificial. They were just that-speeches. It seemed to Graham that you needed conversation, not lectures. He knew instinctively that they’d have no effect on a twelve-year-old boy. He tried to imagine the two of them sitting down and speaking seriously. He couldn’t. He gave up crafting a talk.

Hell, he’d let Brynn handle it. She’d insist on that anyway.

’Phalting…

Graham dried his hands and went into the family room and sat down on the green couch, near Anna’s rocker. She asked, “Was that Brynn?”

“No. The school.”

“Everything okay?”

“Fine.”

“Sorry you missed poker tonight, Graham.”

“No problem.”

Returning to her knitting, Anna said, “Glad I went to Rita’s. She doesn’t have long.” A tsk of her tongue. “And that daughter of hers. Well, you saw, didn’t you?”

Occasionally his soft-spoken mother-in-law surprised him by letting go with a steely judgment like this one. He had no idea what the daughter’s crime was but he knew Anna had considered the offense carefully and come back with a reasonable verdict. “Sure did.”

He flipped a coin for the channel, lost and they put on a sitcom, which was fine with him. His team was toast this season.

THE FRANTIC YOUNG woman was in her midtwenties, face gaunt and eyes red from tears, her stylishly short, pixie-ish hair, dark red, now disheveled and flecked with leaves. Her forehead was scratched and her hands shook uncontrollably, but only partly from the cold.

It had been her panicked footsteps Brynn had heard, not those of an intruder, moving toward her through the brush.

“You’re their friend,” Brynn whispered, feeling huge relief that the woman hadn’t met the Feldmans’ fate. “From Chicago?”

She nodded and then gazed out into the deepening dusk as if the men were hot on her trail. “I don’t know what to do,” she said in a manic voice. She seemed childlike. Her fear was heartrending.

“We stay here for the time being,” Brynn said.

Times to fight and times to run…

Times to hide too.

Brynn looked over at the couple’s houseguest. She wore chic clothes, city clothes-expensive jeans and a designer jacket with a beautiful fur collar. The leather was supple as silk. Three gold hoops were in one ear, two in the other, a stud atop both. A sparkling diamond tennis bracelet was on her left wrist and a bejeweled Rolex on her other. She was about as out of place in this muddy forest as she could possibly be.

Scanning the forest around them, Brynn could see no movement other than swaying branches and herds of leaves migrating in the breeze. The wind was pure torment on her soaked skin. “Over there,” she finally said, pointing to cover. The women crawled a dozen feet away-to a cavity beside a fallen chinquapin oak in a snarled area of the forest, fifty yards from Lake View Drive and about a hundred and fifty from the house at number 2. When they’d settled into a nest of forsythia, ragweed and sedge Brynn looked back toward the road and the Feldmans’. No sign of the killers.

As if awakening, the young woman suddenly focused on Brynn’s uniform blouse. “You’re a policewoman.” She turned her gaze to the road. “Are there others?”

“No. I’m alone.”

She took this news without emotion and then looked at Brynn’s cheek. “Your face…I heard gunshots. They shot you too. Like Steve and Emma.” Her voice choked. “Did you call for help?”

Brynn shook her head. “You have a phone?”

“It’s back there. In the house.”

Brynn wrapped her arms around herself. It did nothing to warm her. She looked at the woman’s supple designer jacket. Her face was pretty, heart-shaped. Her nails were long and perfectly sculpted. She could have been on the cover of a grocery store checkout magazine, illustrating an article on ten ways to stay fit and sexy. The woman dug into her pocket and pulled on tight, stylish gloves whose price Brynn couldn’t even guess at.

Brynn shivered again and was thinking if she didn’t get dry and warm soon, she might pass out. She’d never been this cold.

“That house.” The young woman nodded toward 2 Lake View. “I was going to call for help. Let’s go there, let’s call the police. We can get warm. I’m so damn cold.”

“Don’t want to yet,” Brynn said. It seemed less painful to speak in abbreviation. “Don’t know where they are. Wait until we know. They could be headed there too.”