Jeffery Deaver: The Bodies Left Behind

“I guess I can take you,” Graham said.

Brynn put a stopper on her beer bottle. “Your poker game?”

Her husband paused, smiled then said, “It’ll keep. Anyway, with Joey being hurt, better to stay here, keep an eye on him.”

She said, “You guys eat. And leave the dishes. I’ll clean up when I get back. It’ll be a couple hours is all.”

“Okay,” Graham said. And everybody knew he’d clean up.

She pulled on her leather jacket, lighter weight than her Sheriff’s Department parka. “I’ll call when I get up there. Let you know when I’ll be back. Sorry about your game, Graham.”

“Bye,” he said, not looking back, as he eased the jackstraws of spaghetti into the boiling pot.

NORTH OF HUMBOLDT the landscape is broken into bumpy rectangles of pastures, separated by benign fences, a few stone walls and hedgerows. The sun was sitting on the tops of the hills to the west and shone down on the landscape, making the milk cows and sheep glow like bright, bulky lawn decorations. Every few hundred yards signs lured tourists this way or that with the promise of handmade cheeses, nut rolls and nougat, maple syrup, soft drinks and pine furniture. A vineyard offered a tour. Brynn McKenzie, who enjoyed her wine and had lived in Wisconsin all her life, had never sampled anything local.

Then, eight miles out of town, the storybook vanished, just like that. Pine and oak ganged beside the road, which shrank from four lanes to two. Hills sprouted and soon the landscape was nothing but forest. A few buds were out but the leaf-bearing trees were still largely gray and black. Most of the pines were richly green but some parcels were dead, killed by acid rain or maybe blight.

Brynn recognized balsam fir, juniper, yew, spruce, hickory, some gnarly black willows and central casting’s oak, maple and birch. Beneath the trees were congregations of sedge, thistle, ragweed and blackberry. Daffodils and crocuses had been tricked into awakening by the thaw that had murdered the plants in the yard of Graham’s client.

Although married to a landscaper, she hadn’t learned about local flora from her husband. That education came from her job. The rampant growth of meth labs in out-of-the-way parts of rural America meant that police officers who’d never done anything more challenging than pulling over drunk drivers now had to make drug raids out in the boondocks.

Brynn was one of the few deputies in the department who took the State Police tactical training refresher course outside of Madison every year. It included assault and arrest techniques, part of which involved learning about plants, which ones were dangerous, which were good for cover and which might actually save your life (even young hardwoods could stop bullets fired from close range).

As she drove, the Glock 9mm pistol was high on her hip, and while the Sheriff’s Department Crown Victoria cruiser had plenty of room for accessories, the configuration of bucket seat and seat belt in the Honda she was now driving kept the boxy gun’s slide bridling against her hip bone. There’d be a mark come morning. She shifted again and put on the radio. NPR, then country, then talk, then weather. She shut it off.

Oncoming trucks, oncoming pickups. But fewer and fewer of them and soon she had the road to herself. It now angled upward and she saw the evening star ahead of her. Hilltops grew craggy and bald with rock and she could see evidence of the lakes nearby: cattails, bog bean and silver and reed canary grass. A heron stood in a marsh, immobile, his beak, and gaze, aimed directly at her.

She shivered. The outside temperature was in the midfifties but the scene was bleak and chilly.

Brynn flicked on the Honda’s lights. Her cell phone rang. “Hi, Tom.”

“Thanks again for doing this, Brynn.”

“Sure.”

“Had Todd check things out.” Dahl explained that he still couldn’t get through on either of the couple’s mobiles. As far as he knew the only people at the house were the Feldmans, Steven and Emma, and a woman from Chicago Emma used to work with, who was driving up with them.

“Just the three of them?”

“That’s what I heard. Now, there’s nothing odd about Feldman. He works for the city. But the wife, Emma…get this. She’s a lawyer at a big firm in Milwaukee. Seems that she might’ve uncovered some big scam as part of a case or a deal she was working on.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know the details. Just what a friend in Milwaukee PD tells me.”

“So she’s maybe a witness or whistle-blower or something?”

“Could be.”

“And the call, the nine-one-one call-what’d he say exactly?”

“Just ‘this.’”

She waited. “I missed it. What?”

A chuckle. “Who’s on first? I mean he said the word ‘this.’ T-H-I-S.”

“That’s all?”

“Yep.” Dahl then told her, “But it could be a big deal, this case. Todd’s been talking to the FBI in Milwaukee.”

“The Bureau’s involved? Well. Any threats against her?”

“None they heard of. But my father always said those that threaten usually don’t do. Those that do usually don’t threaten.”

Brynn’s stomach flipped-with apprehension, sure, but also with excitement. The most serious nonvehicular crime she’d run in the past month was an emotionally disturbed teenager with a baseball bat taking out plate-glass windows in Southland Mall and terrorizing customers. It was a potential disaster but she’d defused it with a brief face-to-face, smiling at his mad eyes while her heart thudded just a few beats above normal.

“You watch yourself, Brynn. Check the place out from a distance. Don’t go stumbling in. Anything looks funny, call it in and wait.”

“Sure.” Thinking: as a last resort maybe. Brynn snapped her phone shut and set it in the cup holder.

This reminded her she was thirsty-and hungry too. But she pushed the thought aside; four of the roadside restaurants she’d passed in the last ten miles were closed. She’d check out whatever was happening at Lake Mondac, then get home to Graham’s spaghetti.

For some reason she thought of dinners with Keith. Her first husband had cooked too. In fact, he did most of the cooking in the evening, unless he was working second-shift tour.

She pushed the accelerator down a bit harder, deciding that the difference in response between the Crown Vic and the Honda was as noticeable as that between fresh Idahos and instant potato buds out of a box.

Thinking, as she had been, about food.

“WELL, BOY, YOU got yourself shot.”

In a downstairs bedroom of the Feldman house, shades drawn, Hart was looking at the left sleeve of his brown flannel shirt, dark to start with but darker now halfway between wrist and elbow from the blood. His leather coat was on the floor. He slouched on the guest bed.

“Yep, lookit that.” Tugging his green stud earring, skinny Lewis finished making obvious, and irritating, observations and began to roll up Hart’s cuff carefully.

The men had taken off their stocking masks and gloves.

“Just be careful what you touch,” Hart said, nodding at the other man’s bare hands.

Lewis pointedly ignored the comment. “ That was a surprise, Hart. Bitch blindsided us. Never saw that coming. So who the hell is she?”

“I don’t really know, Lewis,” Hart said patiently, looking at his arm as the curtain of sleeve went up. “How would I know?”

“It’ll be a piece of cake, Hart. Hardly any risk at all. The other places’ll be vacant. And only the two of them up there. No rangers in the park and no cops for miles.”

“They have weapons?”

“Are you kidding? They’re city people. She’s a lawyer, he’s a social worker.”