Jeffery Deaver - The Bodies Left Behind

Hart started forward. Just as he was about to kick in the bathroom door, though, he paused, cocking his head. He gestured Lewis back. “Wait,” he mouthed. He pulled a drawer out of a dresser and tossed it into the door, which snapped open.

Fumes poured from it. Their eyes stung fiercely and both men began to cough.

“Jesus, what is that?”

“Ammonia,” Hart answered.

“Like fucking teargas.”

Holding his breath, Hart flicked on the bathroom light.

Well, look at this.

The women had propped a bucket of ammonia on the top of the door so that whoever walked through would get drenched-and possibly blinded. Luckily the door eased shut by itself and tipped the bucket to the floor before the men arrived.

“A fucking trap.”

He imagined what it would’ve been like to get soaked with the chemical. The pain, unbearable.

Wiping his eyes, Hart slammed the door shut and scanned the bedroom. “Look.” He sighed. “It wasn’t them at all. That’s what we heard.” He pointed to a TV. The electric cord of the Sony was tied around the leg of the dresser and then plugged into the wall outlet. When Hart had tried to break in the door, he’d pushed the dresser inward about three inches, which had unplugged the TV-making it seem that the women had stopped talking and presumably were hiding in the room.

He plugged the cord in again. The Shopping Channel came on. “Women talking,” Hart whispered, shaking his head. “No music. Just voices. They set it up and went out the patio door and through the other bedroom. To keep us busy and give ’em time to get away.”

“So they waited in the woods, saw us go past and’re halfway to the county road.”

“Maybe.” But Hart wondered too if they’d made it seem like they were escaping to the highway when in fact they were hiding somewhere else in the house. He’d glanced downstairs earlier; the place seemed to have a large basement.

Yes or no? He finally decided: “I think we’ll have to search.”

Lewis replaced his pistol in his jacket and picked up the shotgun. “Okay. But let’s get the fuck out of here.” He was coughing. They pulled the dresser away from the door. But Hart paused, noticed something stuffed under a table. It was a pile of wet clothes. Of course, the cop would have changed after her swim in the freezing lake. Hart looked through the clothes. The pockets were empty. He examined the front of the shirt, the name tag, black and etched with white lettering. Dep. Brynn McKenzie.

She’d tricked him, sure, but Hart was pleased. For some reason he always found knowing the name of his enemy comforting.

MUTED GUNSHOTS FROM inside 2 Lake View Drive snapped like impatient fingers. There was a pause and then more shots followed.

Brynn and Michelle were approaching the Feldmans’ house, which was now completely dark. The air was thick with the smell of fireplace flames and loam and rotting leaves. The young woman had shut down again, sullen and resentful. She limped along more slowly, using a pool cue as a cane.

Brynn squeezed her arm.

No response.

“Come on, Michelle, we have to move faster.”

The young woman complied but was obviously distraught. She seemed put out. As if she were the only victim here. It reminded her of Joey’s attitude when Brynn insisted he do homework before playing computer games or text-messaging his friends.

As they neared the house Brynn was reflecting on the dispute she’d had with Michelle back at 2 Lake View after agreeing to put the furnace on.

But she’d done that simply to trick the men into believing they were hiding out in the house. She’d said to the young woman, “Come on. We’re going back to the Feldmans’ place.”

“What?”

“Hurry.”

Michelle, with her injured ankle and in shock from losing her friends, had begged to stay in the house at Number 2, hiding, even in the spider-filled basement, and waiting for the police. Acting like a bit of a princess, she’d resisted heading outside. She couldn’t understand why Brynn felt certain the men would circle back, rather than go on to Route 682.

But Brynn was convinced they would do just that. The drive to the highway was just a trick.

“But why?” the young woman had argued adamantly. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Brynn explained her logic. “From what you told me, I don’t think this was just a random break-in. They’re professional killers. That means they’re going to come after us. They have to. We can identify them. And that means we’re a link to whoever hired them. So they’re doubly desperate to find us. If they don’t, their boss is going to come after them.”

Brynn didn’t, however, tell her that there was another basis for her conclusion: the man named Hart. He wasn’t going away. She’d recalled how confident he’d sounded talking to her in the house. Unemotional and fully prepared to kill her without a second’s hesitation when she showed herself.

Hart reminded her of the surgeon who, in a perfectly even voice, explained how her father had died during exploratory surgery.

More chillingly, though, he reminded Brynn of her ex-husband. Hart’s look was the same as in Keith’s face once when she found him slipping a pistol she didn’t recognize into the lockbox in the bedroom. She’d asked about it and the state trooper had hesitated but confessed to her that fellow officers would sometimes pocket a weapon found at crime scenes, if it wasn’t necessary evidence. They’d collect them. “Just to have,” Keith had explained.

“You mean…you mean, to plant them on a perp-so you can say you shot him in self-defense?”

Her husband hadn’t answered. But he’d glanced at her with a look that was identical to Hart’s in that instant he rose from the foliage, holding his pistol and looking for a target.

There was something else in the glance too, Brynn decided. Admiration?

Maybe.

And a challenge too.

May the best person win…

Assuming the men would return to the house where she and Michelle were hiding, Brynn had set the TV to a shopping network, blocked the door with a dresser and rigged the power cord around the leg. Then she’d found a bottle of ammonia and poured it on the floor, alongside a bucket, to make it look as though she’d set a trap. That would make Hart and his partner wary, thinking she was willing to blind her pursuers-though in reality she would not risk hurting the homeowners or rescue workers later.

They’d grabbed a few other things, which they now carried: weapons. Each woman had a sock containing a billiard ball-like a South American bolo throwing weapon, which Brynn had learned about helping Joey with a project on Argentina for school. They also had Chicago Cutlery knives in their pockets, wrapped in sock scabbards, and Brynn carried a pool cue at the end of which was taped a ten-inch-long Chicago Cutlery carving knife.

Michelle had taken the weapons reluctantly. But Brynn had insisted. And the young woman had grudgingly agreed.

Then they’d slipped into the woods behind the house and turned north, back toward the Feldmans’ place, picking their way carefully through the boggy ground and using logs and rocks as stepping-stones to climb over the streams that ran to the lake.

Now, keeping under cover in the yard of her friends’ house, Michelle was staring south toward the gunshots. She muttered to Brynn, “Why did you want to come back here? We should’ve gone the other way. To the county road. Now we’ve got to go past them to get there.”

“We’re not going that way.”

“What do you mean? It’s the only way to the county road.”

Brynn shook her head. “I was on Six Eighty-two for nearly a half hour and I saw three cars. And that was at rush hour. We’d have to risk walking on the shoulder in the open for who knows how long. They’d find us there for sure.”