The Bodies Left Behind: A Novel Read online

  “I’m going!”

  The truck lurched forward a foot.

  Graham gasped but didn’t move.

  If you move, he told himself, you lose.

  Though his mind was also running through the places he could leap if the boy floored the accelerator. He didn’t think he’d make it in time.

  “You’re not going!” the boy raged. “Are you?”

  He was inclined to say, It’s not our job to go. Let the police do their thing. They’re the experts. But instead he said calmly, “Get out of the truck.”

  Aware that his instincts might be about to kill him.

  “Are you going to go find her?” He muttered something else. Graham thought one word was “coward.”

  “Joey.”

  “Get out of the way!” the boy screamed. His eyes were wild.

  For a moment—an eternal moment—Graham believed the boy was going to hit the gas.

  Then Joey grimaced, looked down at the shifter and shoved it into park. He climbed out, reaching for the gun.

  “No. Leave it.”

  Graham walked up to the boy and put his arm around his shoulders. “Come on, Joey,” he said kindly. “Let’s get some—” The boy, who seemed furious at this defeat, shrugged the gesture off and stormed into the house, past his grandmother. Saying not a word.

  AFTER A COMPASS

  reading, the women continued through a portion of the park less entangled with shrubbery and ground cover than the area they’d left behind, around Lake Mondac. There were patches of clearing—grass and meadow. And, increasingly, imposing rock formations pushed up by glaciers millions of years ago. They walked in silence now.

  A quarter mile from the last compass check Brynn was about to ask Michelle how her ankle was feeling. Instead, she said, “My husband is too.”

  Shocking herself.

  Did I really say that? she wondered. My God, did I really?

  Michelle glanced at her, frowning. “Your husband?”

  “Just like yours.” Brynn inhaled the cold, fragrant air. “Graham’s having an affair.”

  “Oh, God. I’m sorry. Are you separated? Getting a divorce?”

  After a pause she said, “No. He doesn’t know I found out.”

  Then she regretted speaking. This was absurd, Brynn thought. Just shut up and keep walking. But she wanted to tell the story. Desperately wanted to. Which was curious because she hadn’t shared it with anyone else. Not her mother, not her best friend Katie from the Fire Department or Kim from the parent-teacher organization.

  In fact, she supposed it was significant that only here, in these extreme circumstances, with a complete stranger, could she talk about what had been tormenting her for months. Part of her hoped Michelle would respond with a few words of sympathy, that the subject would dwindle and they could get back to completing their trek. But the young woman responded with genuine interest: “Tell me. Please. What’s the story?”

  Brynn arranged her thoughts. Finally she said, “I was married to a state trooper. Keith Marshall.” She glanced at Michelle to see if the name had registered.

  It didn’t seem to. Brynn continued, “We met at a State Police training seminar in Madison.” She remembered seeing the tall, broad-shouldered man standing in front of the table that served as their desk.

  Keith had glanced her way with a lingering gaze that confessed he certainly liked her looks; but she hadn’t really caught his interest until her turn to run a mock hostage negotiation, which the psychologist running the exercise said was perfect. What really got his attention, though, seemed to be the Glock field-stripping and reassembly test. She had her slide mounted and clip loaded while the runner-up was still struggling to get the locking block pin back into the frame.

  “That’s pretty romantic,” Michelle offered.

  What Brynn had thought too.

  After the seminar they’d had coffee and discussed small-town policing, and small-town dating. He’d winced once and she’d asked if he was all right. Then he explained that he’d just gotten back from a medical; he’d been shot in a real hostage rescue, which nonetheless ended happily—for everybody but the hostage takers.

  “The HT’s didn’t quite make it.”

  Oh, that incident? she’d thought, recalling the bank robbery gone bad, two armed tweakers—meth heads—inside a branch of Piny Grove Savings with customers and employees. The windows were too thick for a safe sniper shot, so Keith had walked around the barricade and through the front door, holding his weapon at his side. Not even crouching to present a smaller target, he’d shot one in the head, took a round in the side and in the vest from the other one, then killed him too, through the kiosk he tried to hide behind.

  The HTs didn’t quite make it.

  Keith had recovered quickly from his minor injuries. He was reprimanded—it had to be done—for the Bruce Willis/ Clint Eastwood procedure. But nobody had treated his disobedience very seriously and, of course, the media had lapped it up like a kitten gorging on milk.

  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.

  They approached it very slowly. Hart didn’t think it was a trap—couldn’t imagine what it would be—but he didn’t trust anything about Brynn now.

  The Trickster…

  “Cover me. I’ll check it out. Don’t shoot unless I’m about to get shot or stuck. I don’t want to give us away.”

  A nod.

  Hart, crouching, moved in close until he was about three feet away from the object. It was a white tube about eighteen inches long and three inches wide. One end bulged out. He prodded the object with a branch. When nothing happened he looked around. Lewis was scanning the nearby scenery. He gave a thumbs-up to Hart.

  The man bent down and picked it up. Lewis joined him.

  “A sock with a billiard ball inside.”

  “That was theirs?”

  “Has to be. It’s clean and dry.”

  “Shit. One of ’em was going to use that to clobber us. Man, that’d break some bone.”

  Brynn, Hart thought.

  “What’s that?” Lewis asked.

  Hart looked at him, eyebrow raised.

  “What’d you say? I missed it.”

  “Nothing. Didn’t say a thing.” Had he said her name aloud?

  They’d continued straight, going almost due north, just now their prey had come into view.

  They were directly behind the women on a relatively flat stretch of forest, mostly oak and maple and birch, that seemed to end in a clearing about a quarter mile ahead. To the right the ground dropped sharply toward a small, rocky trough—a streambed feeding what seemed to be a small lake, surrounded by dense pine forest. On their left the ground rose to a series of ridges, some covered with trees, some dotted with brush and rock, some bald.

  Hart crouched, motioning Lewis to join him. The man complied instantly.

  “We’re going to split up here. You go way round to the left. That ridge, see it?”

  A nod.

  “You’ll be in grass, so you can move faster. Then come in and get close to them on their left flank. I’ll keep going straight, come up behind them. When they hit that place there—see that sweet little clearing?”

  “Yeah, got it.”

  “I’ll wave the sock.” He tapped his pocket where he’d stuffed the billiard ball cudgel. “You shoot. That’ll keep ’em down. I’ll come up behind and finish them.”

  “Bodies?” Lewis asked. “We can’t leave ’em. The animals’ll carry the parts off all over the park. That’ll be a lot of evidence.”

  “No, we’ll bury them.”

  “Been cold this April. Ground’s pretty hard still. And what’ll we dig with?” Lewis looked around. He pointed at a small lake to their right. “There. We could weigh ’em down with rocks. Probably nobody comes there. It’s a pretty shitty little lake.”

  Hart glanced at it. “Good.”

  “Now, I’ll set the choke wide but if I don’t hit both of ’em with the first shot the other’ll go to cover right away. We’ll have to track her down. Who’d I ought to target first? Michelle or the cop?”

  Hart was watching the women make their way through the forest, casual as oblivious tourists. “You get Michelle. I’ll take Brynn.�
�

  “My pleasure.” Lewis nodded. It was clearly his preference anyway.

  THE WHITE F150

  sped out of Humboldt and onto the highway. The pickup truck was doing close to fifty, the gassy engine accelerating hard.

  Graham Boyd was driving and his only passengers were three azaleas in the truck bed, which he hadn’t bothered to untether. He’d locked away the pellet gun in the same closet that contained Joey’s skateboard.

  After the confrontation with his stepson he’d gone into the boy’s room to talk to him but he was pretending to sleep. Graham had called, “Joey,” twice, in a whisper. Part of him had been relieved that the boy didn’t respond; he’d had no clue what he was going to say. He just hated that all this tension was unresolved.

  He’d thought about taking the game cartridges, the computer and the whole Xbox itself and locking them in the toolshed. But he didn’t. It seemed to him that when it came to children, decisions about punishments shouldn’t be made in anger.

  You’re the adult, he’s the child.

  Chalk that one up to instinct.

  He’d checked five minutes later and the light under the boy’s door was still out.

  “I’m pretty worried, Graham,” Anna had said.

  He’d stared again at the picture of his wife in her velvet helmet and riding outfit and then walked out the back door, with a full beer bottle in his hand, so cold it stung his fingers. He’d stood on the small deck, which he’d built himself, and looked up at the half-moon.

  He’d fished his phone from his pocket, intending to try to reach Brynn.

  But then paused. What if the man answered again? Graham knew he wouldn’t be able to stay calm. If he gave away that they were suspicious and the police were on their way then the man might hurt Brynn and flee. He’d dropped the phone into his pocket and poured the beer onto a mulch bed surrounding a Christmas azalea behind the deck.