Jeffery Deaver - The Bodies Left Behind

Brynn made him tell her the story in depth. She was fascinated. Too fascinated, she’d decided later, utterly won over by the tough, quiet man.

Their first date involved a horror movie, Mexican food and lengthy discussions of calibers, body armor and high-speed chases.

They were married eleven months after that.

“So you married a cowboy?”

Brynn nodded.

Michelle added with a grimace, “I married my father, my therapist says… Anyway, what happened?”

Ah, what happened? Brynn managed to refrain from stroking her deformed jaw but couldn’t stop a compulsive memory: Keith, his face flipping instantly from rage to shock, stumbling back under the impact of the bullet, gripping his chest, as their brightly lit kitchen filled with the pungent smell of gun smoke from her service Glock.

“Brynn?” Michelle persisted softly. “What happened?”

Finally she whispered, “Things just didn’t work out… So, there I was, single again. I had Joey and my job-my mother was living with us then, so there was a built-in babysitter. I loved work. Had no plans to get married again. But a couple years ago I met Graham. Bought some plants from his landscaping company. They didn’t work out too well and I came back for more. He told me what I was doing wrong and then asked me out. I said yes. He was funny, he was nice. He wanted children but his first wife hadn’t. We went out for a while. And I found it was really comfortable. He proposed. I accepted.”

“Comfortable’s nice.”

“Oh, real nice. No fights. Home every night.”

“But…?”

Now she was touching her jaw. She lowered her hand.

Brynn grimaced. “A little time goes by and suddenly I’m working more assignments, longer hours, tougher jobs. Lot of domestics. And when I wasn’t doing that I’d spend time with Joey… He’d had some problems at school. That’s an issue, I don’t know if you heard? Children of law enforcers?”

Michelle shook her head.

“Statistically more behavior problems, psychological issues. Joey keeps getting into scrapes at school. And he can be a little reckless-he skateboards like a speed-demon. So I was focusing on my job and on Joey, and next thing I know Graham’s started going out to regular poker games.”

“But they weren’t really poker games.”

“Sometimes they were. But sometimes he wouldn’t go for the whole game. Sometimes he didn’t show up at all.”

One thing she didn’t share with Michelle was that when Tom Dahl asked her to drive to Lake Mondac earlier her first thought was: If I go, Graham can’t leave tonight. Can’t see her.

Thinking too: He didn’t answer his phone when she’d called from the car; had he gone anyway?

“You’re sure?” Michelle asked.

“Oh, there was an eyewitness. Saw them together.”

“Do you trust ’im?”

“Pretty much. It was me.” Brynn could picture the scene now. Outside of Humboldt. Driving in a detective’s car to a briefing on a meth lab situation. She’d seen Graham standing next to a blonde, tall, outside the Albemarle Motel. She was nodding, smiling. Brynn remembered it seemed like a nice smile. He was talking to her, head down, outside the motel, when he’d told Brynn that he was going to be twenty miles away on a job in Lancaster. At dinner that night he’d looked her in the eye and told her about the drive up to that idyllic vacation town, how the job had gone-offering a liar’s saturation bombing of too many details. Brynn knew all about that; she’d run plenty of traffic stops.

Seeing them at the motel, she’d wondered: Was it after or before they’d been to the room?

“What’d you say to him?”

“Nothing.”

“No?”

“I don’t know why exactly. Didn’t want to rock the boat for Joey. Splitting with Keith. Then another divorce. Couldn’t do that to him. And he’s such a good person, Graham is.”

“Aside from cheating,” Michelle said darkly.

Brynn smiled wanly. And echoed her earlier comment. “It’s not all his fault. Really… I’m pretty good at being a deputy. I’m not so good at this family stuff.”

“I think people ought to take more than a blood test when they get married. There ought to be a two-day exam. Like the bar.”

Brynn felt like she was in a movie, a comedy in which two sisters separated young are reunited: one who’d gone to live the high life in the city, one off to the country. And then they find themselves going on some trip together and learning that at heart they’re virtually the same.

Michelle paused. Then pointed ahead and to the left. “Careful. There’s a steep drop-off that way.”

They steered the safer route. Brynn realized that for the first time that night Michelle was walking in the lead…and she was content to let her.

“THERE THEY ARE.”

Compton Lewis touched Hart’s good arm and pointed through a gap in the trees. Two, three hundred yards away they could just make out in the moonlight the backs of two figures dressed in dark clothes. One limping along, using what looked like a pool cue for a walking stick.

Hart nodded. His heart tapped faster, seeing their quarry in clear view at last, not quite in range but close. And completely unsuspecting.

The men began to move toward their targets.

The Trickster had been at work again.

As they’d stood at the top of the cliff, the bloody ledge below, Hart had been debating fiercely with himself: Had the women really tried to climb down the rock face and make for the ranger station?

Or had they continued along the Joliet Trail?

Finally he’d decided that Brynn was faking. If either one of them had actually fallen and been hurt she would’ve done whatever she could to hide the bloodstain with dirt or mud. Leaving it exposed was an attempt to fool them, get them to head to the station.

Hart had turned the trick against them, though. He wanted Brynn to think she’d been successful, lull them into slowing down and growing careless. He didn’t know for sure if they’d have any view of the cliff face, but in case they did, he’d decided to sacrifice one of the flashlights. He’d tied it to a rope made out of Lewis’s cut-up undershirt and dangled it from a branch. The wind eased it back and forth close to the ledge, giving the impression they were searching for a way to climb down to the forest floor and pursue the women to the station.

The craftsman had surveyed his handiwork and he was pleased.

Then he and Lewis had continued fast over the trail.

But as to where the women had actually gone-that was up for speculation. It was likely they’d continued on the trail, which according to the GPS kept northeast for a ways-through nearly fifteen miles of woods. They wouldn’t have gone that way. Somewhere north of here they’d have to make a decision: they could go left off the trail, west, bypass the ranger station and find the road that led eventually to the county highway. Or they might go north, aiming for the Snake River, which would lead them either west to the interstate or east to the town of Point of Rocks.

But thanks to the scream-the wailing voice a few minutes before-he knew that they were making for the river. The earlier shout-from the intersection by the shelter-had been faked, of course, like the screams when the men were shooting at the canoe. But the second howling was real, Hart knew, since the women believed the men had climbed down the cliff and were miles away.

Hart and Lewis had left the trail too and moved in the general direction of the sound, picking their way slowly to avoid noisy leaves and branches, as well as the knife-sharp thorns and the steep drop-offs.

As for where the women actually were in this mess of woods north of the trail, they couldn’t say-until they found a clue. Lewis stopped, pointing to something white, lying on the ground. Small but very bright in the sea of blacks.