Jeffery Deaver - The Bodies Left Behind

“Recovered them. But no prints.”

“None?”

“Looks like they were wiped off, like the Ford. Wiped off with Windex.”

A faint laugh. “She did that when I went for the canoe… Brother, did she have me fooled.” Brynn rubbed a knuckle against a faint bump on her rebuilt jaw, as she often did when thoughtful or upset. The betrayal stung her deeply. And she said in a soft voice, “I was supposed to be one too.”

“What?”

“A body left behind. She was using me as bait. She didn’t have a sprained ankle at all. She was moving slow to draw the men close. And she tried to keep them following in our direction all night. She broke the Mercedes window to set off the alarm-probably as the men were heading toward the highway. And complained about putting on those boots, made a big deal of it. She was stalling, trying to get them closer to us. And who knows what else? She had some crackers. I’ll bet she dropped those.” Brynn laughed sourly, shaking her head. “Once, she had this outburst, screamed like a banshee. It was to let them know where we were. She was waiting for them to catch up. Then she’d shoot them in the woods. Me too.”

“Well, Brynn, why didn’t she, you know, just shoot you right up front?” Dahl asked.

“She needed me for insurance maybe, or to help her get out of the area. Most likely use me to help her kill them.”

Aware that Graham had fallen silent, his jaw set, large hands clasped together.

Brynn told Tom she’d better go and asked him to call her if they found anything at all.

They disconnected and she turned to her husband to give him a summary of what had happened. He closed his eyes and rocked back. “That’s okay,” he said, cutting her off. “I got enough.”

She touched his leg. He didn’t respond. After a few minutes, she lifted her fingers away and called the neighbor where Joey was staying. She talked to her son for some moments, telling him the truth-that they didn’t know anything yet about his grandmother. She let him ramble on about a video game he’d been playing. Brynn told him she loved him and hung up.

Husband and wife sat in silence. Brynn looked at her husband once then shifted her gaze down at the floor. Finally, after an eternity, he rested his hand on her knee. They remained that way, motionless, for some minutes-until a doctor came out of the double door. He looked at the man with the hurt arm and then walked directly toward Brynn and Graham.

HART GOT RID of the car he’d hijacked on the interstate.

He did this as efficiently as he knew how: He parked it in the Avenues West area of Milwaukee with the doors locked but the keys in the ignition. Some kids wouldn’t notice and some would notice but think it was a sting and some-in the quickly redeveloping area-would notice but would do the right thing and pass the car by.

The car, however, would still be gone within one hour. And harvested for parts in twelve.

Head down, exhausted and in agony from the gunshot and the other trauma of the night, Hart walked quickly away from the vehicle. It was a cool morning, the sky clear. The smell of fires from construction site scrap teased his nose. His instincts were still running the show and were directing him underground as fast as possible.

Walking along the sparsely populated streets he found the Brewline Hotel, though it was nowhere near the Brewline. It was the sort of place that thrived on business by the hour or by the week but rarely by the day. He paid for one week in advance with a bonus for a private bath, and was given a remote control and a set of sheets. The overweight woman clerk took no notice of his physical condition or absence of luggage. He trooped up the two flights of stairs and into room 238. He locked the door, stripped and dumped his fetid clothes into a pile that reminded him very much of Brynn McKenzie’s soaked uniform at the second house on Lake View Drive.

He pictured her stripping.

The image aroused him for a few minutes until the throbbing in his arm tipped him out of the mood.

He examined the wound closely. Hart had taken paramedic training courses-because his job often involved physical injuries. He now assessed the wound and concluded that he didn’t need a doctor. He knew several medicos who’d lost their tickets and would stitch him up, no questions asked or gunshots reported, for a thousand bucks. But the bleeding had stopped, the bone was intact and, though his bruise was impressive, the infection was minor. He’d start on antibiotics later today.

Hart showered under a stuttering stream of water, doing his best to keep his arm dry.

He returned to the bed, naked, and lay down. He wanted to consider the night, to try to make sense of it. He thought back several weeks-to a Starbucks in Kenosha, where he was meeting with a guy he’d worked with a few times in Wisconsin. Gordon Potts was a big, hulking man, not brilliant but decent and someone you could trust. And he could hook you up with dependable labor when you needed it. Potts had said he’d been approached by a woman in Milwaukee who was smart, tough and pretty. He vouched for her. (Hart now realized that Michelle had bought the credentials with a blow job or two.)

Hart was interested. He was between jobs and bored. There was a deal going down in Chicago but that wasn’t until mid-May. He wanted something now, needed some action, adrenaline. The same way that the tweaker Hart had killed in the state park last night needed to slam meth.

Besides, the job was a lark Potts told him.

A few days later Potts had hooked him up with “Brenda”-the fake name Michelle had offered-in a coffee shop in the Broadway District of Green Bay. She said, “So, Hart. How you doing?”

She shook his hand firmly.

“Good. You?”

“I’m okay. Listen, I’m interested in hiring somebody. You interested in some work?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. So how do you know Gordon Potts? You go back a long ways?”

“Not so long.”

“How’d you meet him?”

“A mutual friend.”

“Who’d that be?”

“Freddy Lancaster.”

“Freddy, sure. How’s his wife doing?”

Michelle had laughed. “That’d be tough to find out, Hart. She died two years ago.”

And Hart had laughed too. “Oh, that’s right. Bad memory. How does Freddy like St. Paul?”

“St. Paul? He lives in Milwaukee.”

“This memory of mine.”

The Dance…

After his first meeting with Brenda-Michelle, Hart had made phone calls to both Gordon Potts and Freddy Lancaster to verify times, dates and places down to the tenth decimal. A dozen other calls too, after which he was confident that nobody was working for the law. Brenda Jennings was a petty thief with no history of informing on her partners-and was also, Hart now knew, an identity Michelle had stolen.

So he arranged another meeting to discuss the job itself.

Michelle had explained she’d heard that Steven Feldman had been making inquiries about swapping old bills, silver certificates, for newer Federal Reserve notes. She’d looked into the situation and learned about some meatpacking executive who’d hidden cash in his summer home in the 1950s. A million bucks. She gave Hart the details.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Yeah, it is, Hart. So you’re interested?”

“Keep going.”

“Here’s a map of the area. That’s a private road. Lake View Drive. And there? That’s a state park, all of it. Hardly any people around. Here’s a diagram of the house.”

“Okay…This a dirt road or paved?”

“Dirt…Hart, they tell me you’re good. Are you good? I hear you’re a craftsman. That’s what they say.”

As he’d studied the map he’d asked absently, “Who’s ‘they’?”

“People.”