Jeffery Deaver - The Bodies Left Behind

“I hear that.”

“Carpentry’s my favorite.”

“Framing?”

“More furniture,” Hart explained.

“You make furniture?”

“Simple things.”

Measure twice, cut once…

“Like tables and chairs?”

“Yeah. Cabinets. It’s relaxing.”

Lewis said, “I built my grandmother a bed once.”

“A bed? Come on, let’s keep going.” They started walking again. “How’d you happen to build her a bed?”

Lewis explained, “She started going crazy, getting older. Maybe that Alzheimer’s thing, I don’t know. Or maybe she just got old. She’d walk around the house singing Christmas carols all year round. All the time. And she’d start putting up decorations and my mother’d take them down and then she’d be putting them up again.”

Hart picked up the pace.

“So she’s pretty flaky. And she starts looking for her bed. The bed she had with my grandfather. It musta got thrown out years ago. But she thought it was somewhere in the house. Walking all over the place trying to find it. I felt bad for her. So I found some pictures of it and made her one. Wasn’t all that good but it looked close enough. I think it gave her a good couple of months. I don’t know.”

Hart said, “Like ‘making’ a bed. Only you really did make one, not with sheets and blankets.”

“Yeah, I guess I did.” He gave a laugh.

“Why’re you in this line, Comp? You could be making union scale.”

“Oh, I’m in it for the money. How can you score big at sweat labor?”

“You score big doing this?”

“I score bigger. Now my mother’s in a home too. And my brothers, they contribute. I can’t do less than them.”

Hart felt Lewis’s eyes on him, like he wanted to ask about his family but remembered the story about the brother and the parents being dead.

“Anyway, I’m good at this. What I do. Hell, you heard my rep. You checked, right? People vouched for me.”

“They did. That’s why I called you.”

“Banks, payroll offices. Collection work, protection…I’ve got a talent for it. I got contacts all over the lakefront. How ’bout you, Hart? Why’re you in this fucked-up business?”

He shrugged. “I don’t do well working for other people. And I don’t do well sitting. I do well doing. Got that itchy gene.”

It suits me…

Lewis looked around. “You think they’re hiding?”

Hart wasn’t sure. But he didn’t think so. He had a feeling that Brynn was somehow like him. And he would rather move any day, keep moving, however dangerous it was. Anything rather than hiding. But he didn’t tell Lewis this. “No, I don’t. They’ll keep going. Besides, I saw some patches of mud back there. Prints in them.”

Lewis gave a crisp laugh. The sound had irritated Hart at first. Now he didn’t mind so much. The man said, “You’re the last of the Mohicans. That movie rocked… You hunt, I’ll bet.”

Hart said, “Nope. Never been.”

“Bullshit. Really?”

“Truth. You?”

Lewis said he hadn’t for a while but he used to. A lot. He liked it. “I think you would too. You seem like you know your way around here.”

“This isn’t the North Woods. That’d be different. We’re in Wisconsin. A state park. Just using logic.”

“Naw, I think you’re a natural.”

Hart was about to ask, “Natural what?” But froze. A shout, a woman’s voice, came to them on the wind. A shout for help. She was trying to keep it quiet, he got the impression, but he heard alarm, if not desperation. It was in the distance but not too far, maybe a quarter, a half mile up the Joliet Trail, the direction they were headed.

Another call, the words ambiguous.

“Same person calling?” Hart asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s go.”

Staying low, they moved forward as quickly as they dared.

“Keep a lookout. I don’t trust her. One of ’em screamed fake before, at the lake, don’t forget. Maybe they’re trying to sucker us in, wanting a fight. Maybe no guns. But they’ve got knives.”

Ten minutes later the men, keeping low and scanning the greenery around them, paused. Ahead of them the trail broadened and a smaller trail branched off to the left. The intersection was marked by a wooden sign, visible in the moonlight. An arrow pointed out a path that Hart had seen on GPS. It went west and north and, after circling a small lake, ended at a ranger station. From there a two-lane road led to the highway.

Hart gestured Lewis down into the bushes beside him. Scanning the surroundings. “You see anything?”

“Nope.”

Hart listened carefully. No more cries, no voices. Just the breeze, which hissed through the branches and made the leaves scuttle along like crabs.

Then Lewis touched his arm, pointed. Fifteen feet past the intersection was a dark wood fence with a sign that said, Danger. Black space behind it, where cliff dropped into ravine. “That tree there, Hart.”

“Where?” Finally he spotted it: A branch had broken off the tree beside the cliff. You could see the white wood below the bark.

“I don’t know if it’s a trick or not,” Hart whispered. “You go round there to the right. That bunch of bushes.”

“Got it.”

“I’m going to the edge and look around. I’ll be making some noise to give ’em a chance to make a move.”

“If I see anybody I’ll take her out. Shoot high, then low.” Lewis grinned. “And I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

For the first time that night Lewis looked confident. Hart, finally at ease with his partner on this difficult night, decided the man would do fine. “Go on. Stay clear of the leaves.”

Silently Lewis, crouching, crossed the path and slipped behind a stand of brush. When Hart saw he was in a good position to cover the area, he started forward, also low. Head swiveling back and forth.

He noticed in the distance, at the bottom of the ravine, what appeared to be the ranger station.

Holding his own weapon pointed forward, he moved to the sign. He examined the broken branch. Then peered over the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t see anyone. Took out his flashlight and shone it down into the night.

Jesus.

He stood, put the gun away. Called Lewis over.

“What is it?”

“Look. They tried to climb down. But it didn’t work.”

Peering over the edge of the cliff, they could see in the faint moonlight a ledge twenty feet below, at the bottom of a steep, rocky wall. One of the women, or maybe both, had fallen. On the ledge was a four-foot-long branch-the one that had broken off the tree beside them. And around it was a large smear of bright red blood, glistening under the flashlight.

“Man,” Lewis said, “she hit hard.” He tried to peer farther into the ravine. “Broke her leg, I’ll bet. Bleeding plenty.”

“They had to’ve kept going down. They couldn’t get back up, hurt like that. Or maybe there’s a cave. Behind the ledge. They’re trying to hide in.”

“Well, we gotta go after ’em,” Lewis announced. “Like hunting. You follow a wounded animal till you find it. No matter what. You want, I’ll go down first.”

Hart lifted an eyebrow. “Bit of a climb.”

“I told you-construction on the lakefront. Thirty stories up and I’m strolling around on the ironwork like it’s a sidewalk.”

NO. SOMETHING’S WRONG.

Graham Boyd rose from the couch, walked past Anna, who had switched from knitting to a large needlepoint sampler-the woman found peace and pleasure in transforming cloth of all kinds-and walked into the kitchen. His eyes glanced at a picture of his wife as a teenager, sitting atop the horse she’d later ride to win the Mid-Wisconsin Junior Horse Jumping Competition years ago. She was leaning down, her cheek against the horse’s neck, patting him, though her eyes were focused elsewhere, presumably on one of her competitors.