Jeffery Deaver - The Bodies Left Behind

Hart led Lewis around a pile of noisy leaves and they picked up the pace, staying in the thick of the forest for as long as they could.

A snap of branches behind them.

Both men spun around. Lewis readied the shotgun nervously. The visitor wasn’t human, though. It was that animal again, the one nosing in the grass earlier, or a similar one. A dog or coyote, he supposed. Or maybe a wolf. Did they have wolves in Wisconsin?

It kept its distance. Hart sensed no threat other than the risk of noise that might alert someone in the house. This time Lewis paid it no mind.

The creature vanished.

Hart and Lewis paused and studied the house for a long moment. There was no motion from inside. Hart thought he heard someone talking but decided it was the wind, which brushed over leaves and made the sound of a mournful human voice.

No light, no movement inside.

Had he been wrong in his guess that the cop had come here?

Then he squinted and tapped Lewis on the arm. A thin trail rose from the heating system exhaust duct next to the chimney. Lewis smiled. They eased closer to the house, under cover of thorny berry bushes that stretched from the woods nearly to the back porch. Hart carried his pistol with his trigger finger pointed forward, outside the guard. He held the gun casually, at his side. Lewis’s grip on the shotgun was tense.

At the back door, they stopped, noting the broken glass in the window. Hart pointed to the porch, at their feet. Two fragments of differing footprints, both women’s sizes.

Lewis gave a thumbs-up. He hooked the gun through his left arm and reached in through the broken pane, unlatched the lock. He swung the door open.

Hart held up a hand, whispered as low as he could, “Assume one of ’em has a weapon. And they’re waiting for us.”

Lewis gave another of his patented sneers, evidencing his low opinion of their enemy. But Hart lifted an impatient eyebrow and the man mouthed “Okay.”

“And no flashlights.”

Another nod.

Then, their gun muzzles pointed forward, they moved into the house.

Moonlight slanted through the large windows and gave some illumination throughout the first floor. They searched quickly. In the kitchen, Hart pointed to the drawers. A half dozen were open. He tapped the knife block. Several slots were empty.

Hart heard something. He held up a hand, frowning. Tilted his head.

Yes, it was voices. Women’s voices, very faint.

Hart pointed up the stairs, noting that his pulse, which had been a little elevated by the trek through the forest, was now back to normal.

STANLEY MANKEWITZ WAS eating dinner with his wife in an Italian restaurant in Milwaukee, a place that claimed to serve the best veal in the city. That was a meat that troubled both Mankewitz and his wife but they were guests of the businessman making up the threesome and so they’d agreed to come here.

The waiter recommended the veal saltimbocca, the veal Marsala and the fettuccine with veal Bolognese.

Mankewitz ordered a steak. His wife picked the salmon. Their host had the chopped-up calf.

As they waited for their appetizers they toasted with glasses poured from a bottle of Barbaresco, a spicy wine from the Piedmont region of Italy. The bruschetta and salads came. The host tucked his napkin into his collar, which seemed tacky but was efficient, and Mankewitz never put down whatever was efficient.

Mankewitz was hungry, but he was tired too. He was head of a local union-maybe the most important on the western shore of Lake Michigan. It was made up of tough, demanding workers, employed at companies owned by men who were also tough and demanding.

Which words also described Mankewitz’s life pretty well.

Their host, one of the heads of the national union, had flown in from New Jersey to talk to Mankewitz. He’d offered Mankewitz a cigar as they sat in a conference room in the union headquarters-where no-smoking ordinances weren’t taken seriously-and proceeded to tell him that the joint federal and state investigation had better be concluded, favorably, pretty soon.

“It will be,” Mankewitz had assured. “Guaranteed.”

“Guaranteed,” the man from New Jersey had said, in the same abrupt way he’d bitten the tip off his cigar.

Hiding his fury that this prick had flown from Newark to deliver his warning like a prissy schoolteacher, Mankewitz had smiled, conveying a confidence he absolutely didn’t feel.

He began spearing his romaine lettuce from the Caesar salad, dressing on the side but anchovies present and accounted for.

The dinner was purely social and the conversation meandered as they ate. The men talked about the Packers and the Bears and the Giants but delivered mere sound bites, aware that a lady was at the table, and everyone found the subject of vacationing in Door County or the Caribbean a more palatable topic. The New Jersey man offered his anchovies to Mankewitz, who declined but with a smile, as a wave of absolute fury passed through him. Hatred too. He’d decided that if their host ever ran for head of the national union Mankewitz would make sure his campaign sank like the Edmund Fitzgerald.

As the salad plates were noisily whisked away, Mankewitz noticed a man enter the restaurant by himself and shake his head curtly to the hostess. He was in his late thirties, with short, curly hair and an easy face and looked like a good-natured Hobbit. The man oriented himself, looking around the underlit and over-Italianized place, which was owned by Ukrainians and staffed by Eastern Europeans and Arabs. He finally spotted Mankewitz, who was hard to miss, being 230 pounds, with an enviable shock of silver hair.

They made eye contact. The man stepped back, into the corridor. Mankewitz took a slug of wine and wiped his mouth. He stood up. “Be right back.”

The labor boss joined the Hobbit and they walked toward the banquet rooms, tonight empty, down a long corridor, where the only other presences were effigies: pictures of people like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and James Gandolfino, all of whose signatures and endorsements of the restaurant in bold marker looked suspiciously similar.

Eventually Mankewitz got tired of walking and stopped. He said, “What is it, Detective?”

The man hesitated, as if he didn’t want his job title used under these circumstances. And Mankewitz decided that of course he didn’t.

“There’s a situation.”

“What does that mean? ‘Situation’? That’s a Washington word, a corporate word.” Mankewitz had been in a bad mood lately, unsurprisingly, which prompted the retort, but there wasn’t much edge to it.

The Hobbit said, without a fleck of emotion, “Up in Kennesha County.”

“The hell is that?”

“About two hours northwest of here.” The cop lowered his voice even more. “It’s where the lawyer in the case has a summer house.”

The Case. Capital C.

“The lawyer from-”

“Got it.” Now Mankewitz was concerned about indiscretion and cut the cop off with a wave before he mentioned Hartigan, Reed, Soames & Carson. “What’s the story?” Mankewitz had dropped the irritated act, which was replaced by a concern that was no act at all.

“Apparently what happened was there was a nine-one-one call from her husband’s phone. Went to the county. We’re monitoring all communication involving the players.”

The Players. In the Case…

“You told me that. I didn’t know they were checking all the way out there.”

“The systems’re all consolidated.”

How did they do that? Mankewitz wondered. Computers, of course. Privacy was fucked. As well he knew. “A call. A nine-one-one call. Go on.” Mankewitz looked at a smiling Dean Martin.

“Nobody seems to know what was said. It was really brief. And then it seemed to get rescinded.”