Jeffery Deaver: The Bodies Left Behind

Very private.

And very deserted.

Steven walked into the utility room, pulled aside the limp beige curtain and gazed past a cut-back crepe myrtle into the side yard. “Nothing. I’m thinking we-”

Emma screamed.

“Honey, honey, honey!” her husband cried.

A face studied them through the back window. The man’s head was covered with a stocking, though you could see crew-cut, blondish hair, a colorful tattoo on his neck. The eyes were halfway surprised to see people so close. He wore an olive drab combat jacket. He knocked on the glass with one hand. In the other he was holding a shotgun, muzzle up. He was smiling eerily.

“Oh, God,” Emma whispered.

Steven pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open and punched numbers, telling her, “I’ll deal with him. Go lock the front door.”

Emma ran to the entryway, dropping her glass. The olives spun amid the dancing shards, picking up dust. Crying out, she heard the kitchen door splinter inward. She looked back and saw the intruder with the shotgun rip the phone from her husband’s hand and shove him against the wall. A print of an old sepia landscape photograph crashed to the floor.

The front door too swung open. A second man, his head also covered with mesh, pushed inside. He had long dark hair, pressed close by the nylon. Taller and stockier than the first, he held a pistol. The black gun was small in his outsized hand. He pushed Emma into the kitchen, where the other man tossed him the cell phone. The bigger one stiffened at the pitch, but caught the phone one-handed. He seemed to grimace in irritation at the toss and dropped the phone in his pocket.

Steven said, “Please…What do you…?” Voice quavering.

Emma looked away quickly. The less she saw, she was thinking, the better their chances to survive.

“Please,” Steven said, “Please. You can take whatever you want. Just leave us. Please.”

Emma stared at the dark pistol in the taller man’s hand. He wore a black leather jacket and boots. His were like the other man’s, the kind soldiers wear.

Both men grew oblivious to the couple. They looked around the house.

Emma’s husband continued, “Look, you can have whatever you want. We’ve got a Mercedes outside. I’ll get the keys. You-”

“Just, don’t talk,” the taller man said, gesturing with the pistol.

“We have money. And credit cards. Debit card too. I’ll give you the PIN.”

“What do you want?” Emma asked, crying.

“Shhh.”

Somewhere, in its ancient heart, the house creaked once more.

“A WHAT?”

“Kinda a hang-up.”

“To nine-one-one?”

“Right. Just, somebody called and said, ‘This-’ and then hung up.”

“Said what?”

“‘This.’ The word ‘this.’”

“T-H-I-S?” Sheriff Tom Dahl asked. He was fifty-three years old, his skin smooth and freckled as an adolescent’s. Hair red. He wore a tan uniform shirt that had fit much better when his wife bought it two years ago.

“Yessir,” Todd Jackson answered, scratching his eyelid. “And then it was hung up.”

“Was hung up or he hung it up? There’s a difference.”

“I don’t know. Oh, I see what you mean.”

Five twenty-two P.M., Friday, April 17. This was one of the more peaceful hours of the day in Kennesha County, Wisconsin. People tended to kill themselves and their fellow citizens, intentionally or by accident, either earlier in the day or later. Dahl knew the schedule as if it’d been printed; if you can’t recognize the habits of your jurisdiction after fourteen years running a law enforcement agency, you have no business at the job.

Eight deputies were on duty in the Sheriff’s Department, which was next to the courthouse and city hall. The department was in an old building attached to a new one. The old being from the 1870s, the new from exactly one century later. The area of the building where Dahl and the others worked was mostly open-plan and filled with cubicles and desks. This was the new part. The officers here at the moment-six men and two women-wore uniforms that ranged from starched as wood to old bedsheet, reflecting the tour starting hours.

“We’re checking,” Jackson said. He too had infant skin, though that was unremarkable, considering he was half the sheriff’s age.

“‘This,’” Dahl mused. “You hear from the lab?”

“Oh, ’bout that Wilkins thing?” Jackson picked at his stiff collar. “Wasn’t meth. Wasn’t nothing.”

Even here, in Kennesha, a county with the sparse population of 34,021, meth was a terrible scourge. The users, tweakers, were ruthless, crazed and absolutely desperate to get the product; cookers felt exactly the same about the huge profits they made. More murders were attributed to meth than coke, heroin, pot and alcohol combined. And there were as many accidental deaths by scalding, burning and overdoses as murders related to the drug. A family of four had just died when their trailer burned down after the mother passed out while cooking a batch in her kitchen. She’d overdosed, Dahl speculated, after sampling some product fresh off the stovetop.

The sheriff’s jaw tightened. “Well, damn. Just goddamn. He’s cooking it. We all know he’s cooking. He’s playing with us is what he’s doing. And I’d like to arrest him just for that. Well, where did it come from, that nine-one-one call? Landline?”

“No, somebody’s cell. That’s what’s taking some time.”

The E911 system, which Kennesha County had had for years, gave the dispatcher the location of the caller in an emergency. The E was for “enhanced,” not “emergency.” It worked with cell calls too, though tracing them was a little more complicated and in the hilly country around this portion of Wisconsin sometimes didn’t work at all.

This…

A woman’s voice called across the cluttered space, “Todd, Com Center for you.”

The deputy headed to his cubicle. Dahl turned back to the wad of arrest reports he was correcting for English as much as for criminal procedure.

Jackson returned. He didn’t sit down in either of the two office chairs. He hovered, which he did a lot. “Okay, Sheriff. The nine-one-one call? It was from someplace around Lake Mondac.”

Creepy, Dahl thought. Never liked it up there. The lake squatted in the middle of Marquette State Park, also creepy. He’d run two rapes and two homicides there and in the last murder investigation they’d recovered only a minority of the victim’s body. He glanced at the map on his wall. Nearest town was Clausen, six, seven miles from the lake. He didn’t know the town well but assumed it was like a thousand others in Wisconsin: a gas station, a grocery store that sold as much beer as milk and a restaurant that was harder to find than the local meth cooker. “They have houses there?”

“Around the lake? Think so.”

Dahl stared at the blue pebble of Lake Mondac on the map. It was surrounded by a small amount of private land, which was in turn engulfed by huge Marquette Park.

This…

Jackson said, “And the campgrounds’re closed till May.”

“Whose phone?”

“That we’re still waiting on.” The young deputy had spiky blond hair. All the rage. Dahl had worn a crew cut for nine-tenths of his life.

The sheriff had lost interest in the routine reports and in a beer bash in honor of one of their senior deputies’ birthdays, an event that was supposed to commence in an hour at the Eagleton Tap, and which he had been looking forward to. He was thinking of last year when some guy-a registered sex offender, and a stupid one-picked up Johnny Ralston from grade school and the boy had the presence of mind to hit LAST CALL on his cell phone and slip it in his pocket as they drove around, the sicko asking him what kind of movies he liked. It took all of eight minutes to find them.