The Bodies Left Behind: A Novel Page 9

  “Jesus, what is that?”

  “Ammonia,” Hart answered.

  “Like fucking teargas.”

  Holding his breath, Hart flicked on the bathroom light.

  Well, look at this.

  The women had propped a bucket of ammonia on the top of the door so that whoever walked through would get drenched—and possibly blinded. Luckily the door eased shut by itself and tipped the bucket to the floor before the men arrived.

  “A fucking trap.”

  He imagined what it would’ve been like to get soaked with the chemical. The pain, unbearable.

  Wiping his eyes, Hart slammed the door shut and scanned the bedroom. “Look.” He sighed. “It wasn’t them at all. That’s what we heard.” He pointed to a TV. The electric cord of the Sony was tied around the leg of the dresser and then plugged into the wall outlet. When Hart had tried to break in the door, he’d pushed the dresser inward about three inches, which had unplugged the TV—making it seem that the women had stopped talking and presumably were hiding in the room.

  He plugged the cord in again. The Shopping Channel came on. “Women talking,” Hart whispered, shaking his head. “No music. Just voices. They set it up and went out the patio door and through the other bedroom. To keep us busy and give ’em time to get away.”

  “So they waited in the woods, saw us go past and’re halfway to the county road.”

  “Maybe.” But Hart wondered too if they’d made it seem like they were escaping to the highway when in fact they were hiding somewhere else in the house. He’d glanced downstairs earlier; the place seemed to have a large basement.

  Yes or no? He finally decided: “I think we’ll have to search.”

  Lewis replaced his pistol in his jacket and picked up the shotgun. “Okay. But let’s get the fuck out of here.” He was coughing. They pulled the dresser away from the door. But Hart paused, noticed something stuffed under a table. It was a pile of wet clothes. Of course, the cop would have changed after her swim in the freezing lake. Hart looked through the clothes. The pockets were empty. He examined the front of the shirt, the name tag, black and etched with white lettering. Dep. Brynn McKenzie.

  She’d tricked him, sure, but Hart was pleased. For some reason he always found knowing the name of his enemy comforting.

  MUTED GUNSHOTS FROM

  inside 2 Lake View Drive snapped like impatient fingers. There was a pause and then more shots followed. Brynn and Michelle were approaching the Feldmans’ house, which was now completely dark. The air was thick with the smell of fireplace flames and loam and rotting leaves. The young woman had shut down again, sullen and resentful. She limped along more slowly, using a pool cue as a cane.

  Brynn squeezed her arm.

  No response.

  “Come on, Michelle, we have to move faster.”

  The young woman complied but was obviously distraught. She seemed put out. As if she were the only victim here. It reminded her of Joey’s attitude when Brynn insisted he do homework before playing computer games or text-messaging his friends.

  As they neared the house Brynn was reflecting on the dispute she’d had with Michelle back at 2 Lake View after agreeing to put the furnace on.

  But she’d done that simply to trick the men into believing they were hiding out in the house. She’d said to the young woman, “Come on. We’re going back to the Feldmans’ place.”

  “What?”

  “Hurry.”

  Michelle, with her injured ankle and in shock from losing her friends, had begged to stay in the house at Number 2, hiding, even in the spider-filled basement, and waiting for the police. Acting like a bit of a princess, she’d resisted heading outside. She couldn’t understand why Brynn felt certain the men would circle back, rather than go on to Route 682.

  But Brynn was convinced they would do just that. The drive to the highway was just a trick.

  “But why?” the young woman had argued adamantly. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  Brynn explained her logic. “From what you told me, I don’t think this was just a random break-in. They’re professional killers. That means they’re going to come after us. They have to. We can identify them. And that means we’re a link to whoever hired them. So they’re doubly desperate to find us. If they don’t, their boss is going to come after them.”

  Brynn didn’t, however, tell her that there was another basis for her conclusion: the man named Hart. He wasn’t going away. She’d recalled how confident he’d sounded talking to her in the house. Unemotional and fully prepared to kill her without a second’s hesitation when she showed herself.

  Hart reminded her of the surgeon who, in a perfectly even voice, explained how her father had died during exploratory surgery.

  More chillingly, though, he reminded Brynn of her ex-husband. Hart’s look was the same as in Keith’s face once when she found him slipping a pistol she didn’t recognize into the lockbox in the bedroom. She’d asked about it and the state trooper had hesitated but confessed to her that fellow officers would sometimes pocket a weapon found at crime scenes, if it wasn’t necessary evidence. They’d collect them. “Just to have,” Keith had explained.

  “You mean…you mean, to plant them on a perp—so you can say you shot him in self-defense?”

  Her husband hadn’t answered. But he’d glanced at her with a look that was identical to Hart’s in that instant he rose from the foliage, holding his pistol and looking for a target.

  There was something else in the glance too, Brynn decided. Admiration?

  Maybe.

  And a challenge too.

  May the best person win….

  Assuming the men would return to the house where she and Michelle were hiding, Brynn had set the TV to a shopping network, blocked the door with a dresser and rigged the power cord around the leg. Then she’d found a bottle of ammonia and poured it on the floor, alongside a bucket, to make it look as though she’d set a trap. That would make Hart and his partner wary, thinking she was willing to blind her pursuers—though in reality she would not risk hurting the homeowners or rescue workers later.

  They’d grabbed a few other things, which they now carried: weapons. Each woman had a sock containing a billiard ball—like a South American bolo throwing weapon, which Brynn had learned about helping Joey with a project on Argentina for school. They also had Chicago Cutlery knives in their pockets, wrapped in sock scabbards, and Brynn carried a pool cue at the end of which was taped a ten-inch-long Chicago Cutlery carving knife.

  Michelle had taken the weapons reluctantly. But Brynn had insisted. And the young woman had grudgingly agreed.

  Then they’d slipped into the woods behind the house and turned north, back toward the Feldmans’ place, picking their way carefully through the boggy ground and using logs and rocks as stepping-stones to climb over the streams that ran to the lake.

  Now, keeping under cover in the yard of her friends’ house, Michelle was staring south toward the gunshots. She muttered to Brynn, “Why did you want to come back here? We should’ve gone the other way. To the county road. Now we’ve got to go past them to get there.”

  “We’re not going that way.”

  “What do you mean? It’s the only way to the county road.”

  Brynn shook her head. “I was on Six Eighty-two for nearly a half hour and I saw three cars. And that was at rush hour. We’d have to risk walking on the shoulder in the open for who knows how long. They’d find us there for sure.”

  “But weren’t there some houses on the highway? We’ll go there. Call nine-one-one.”

  “We can’t go to any of them,” Brynn said. “I won’t lead those men to somebody else’s place. I don’t want anybody else hurt.”

  Michelle was silent, staring at the Feldmans’ house. “That’s crazy. We have to get out of here.”

  “We’re going to get out. Just not the way we came in.”

  “Well, why aren’t there more police here?” she snapped. “Why’d you just come here by yourself?
The police wouldn’t do it that way in Chicago.” The young woman’s voice was positively surly. Brynn tamped down her irritation. She squinted as she looked past her and pointed.

  In the house at 2 Lake View, she could make out two flashlight beams, one upstairs, one on the ground floor. Scanning eerily. The men were both in the house, searching for them.

  “Keep an eye on the flashlights. I’m going to look inside. Did Steven have a gun?”

  “I have no idea,” Michelle scoffed. “They really weren’t the gun type.”

  “Where’s your cell phone?” Brynn asked.

  “In my purse, in the kitchen.”

  As Brynn sprinted for the porch she glanced back and could see the young woman’s eyes, just visible in the moonlight. Yes, there was a measure of sorrow—that her friends had died. But it was the put-upon expression Brynn sometimes recognized in her son during one of his irritated moments. The expression that asked, Why me? Life just isn’t fair.

  “NOTHING.”

  Spoken in a whisper.

  In the basement of the house at 2 Lake View Drive, Hart nodded, acknowledging the comment by Lewis, who was sweeping his flashlight around a dark storage area, which would have been perfect for hiding in.

  And had been pretty much their last hope of finding the women in the house.

  Hart was feeling more confident. It was likely that the women were no longer armed, a conclusion he’d come to by default: otherwise they would have lain in wait and shot the men. Still, he’d insisted they use flashlights and not put on the overhead lights.

  Once, Hart had seen a movement, spun around and fired. But the target turned out to be just a fleeing rat, its shadow magnified a dozen times. The creature scurried away. Hart was angry with himself for the panicked shot. He’d hurt his injured arm in the maneuver and they’d been temporarily deafened again. Angry too for the loss of control. Sure, it was logical. The sudden motion, jumping toward him, it seemed…. Naturally he’d fired.

  But excuses always tasted bad in Hart’s mouth. You had nobody to blame but yourself if you cut the plank wrong or planed a bow into a chair leg meant to be straight, or split a dovetail joint.

  “Measure twice, cut once,” his father used to say.

  They trooped upstairs into the dark kitchen. Hart was looking out the back windows and into the forest, wondering if he was staring right at the women. “Wasted some good minutes searching. That’s why they set up that little scene in the bedroom. Buy time.”

  And to blind us. He could smell the ammonia all the way down here, even with the upstairs bedroom door closed.

  Then Hart mused, “But where are they? Where would I go, if I was them?”

  “The woods? Snuck past us and’re making for the highway?”

  Hart agreed. “Yep. That’s what I’d guess. There’s no other way out. They’ll be thinking they can hail a car but there won’t be much traffic this time of night. Hell, there wasn’t much on the way up here. And they’ll have to stick close to the shoulder, out in the open. And that blood on Brynn’s uniform? She’s hurt. Be moving slowly. We’ll spot ’em easy.”

  BRYNN MCKENZIE WAS

  making a fast sweep through the Feldmans’ house. She left the lights out, of course, and searched by feel for weapons and cell phones. She found none. Michelle’s purse was gone, which meant the killers had it—and that they’d now know her name and where she lived.

  Brynn walked into the kitchen, where the bodies lay in their death poses, the blood making a paisley pattern next to the husband and a near-perfect circle around the wife. Brynn hesitated briefly and then knelt and searched their pockets for cell phones. None. She tried the jackets. Similarly empty. She then stood and looked down at them. Wished there were time to say some words, though she had no idea what.

  Did the couple have laptop computers? She looked at the briefcase on the floor—it was the woman’s—and at the pile of file folders all stamped with the word CONFIDENTIAL. But no electronics. The husband apparently used a backpack for his briefcase but that had contained only a few magazines, a paperback novel and a bottle of wine.

  Brynn’s feet were beginning to sting again from chafing; the lake water had soaked through the dry socks. She looked in the laundry room and found two pairs of hiking boots. She pulled on dry socks and the larger of the boots. She took the second pair for Michelle. She also found a candle lighter and slipped that in her pocket.

  Was there anything—?

  She gasped in shock. Outside, the croak of frogs and the whisper of wind vanished in the insistent blare of a car alarm.

  Then Michelle’s desperate voice calling, “Brynn! Come here! Help me!”

  Brynn ran outside, gripping her makeshift spear, blade forward.

  Michelle was standing beside the Mercedes, the window shattered. The young woman was frantic, wide-eyed. And paralyzed.

  Brynn ran to the car, glancing at the house at Number 2. The flashlights went out.

  They’re on their way. Great.

  “I’m sorry!” Michelle cried. “I didn’t think, I didn’t think…”

  Brynn ripped the passenger door open, popped the hood and ran to the front of the car. She’d made a point to learn all she could about cars and trucks—vehicles make up the majority of police work in a county like Kennesha—and her studies included mechanics as well as driving. Brynn struggled to work the cable off the positive terminal of the battery with the Chicago Cutlery knife. The piercing sound stopped.

  “What happened?”

  “I just…” Michelle moaned angrily. “It’s not my fault!”

  No? Whose was it?

  She continued, “I have low blood sugar. I was feeling funny. I brought some crackers with me.” She pointed to a bag of Whole Foods–brand snacks in the backseat. She said defensively, “If I don’t get food, sometimes I faint.”

  “Okay,” said Brynn, who’d avoided breaking into and searching the Mercedes specifically because she’d known it would be alarmed. She now climbed in fast, grabbed the crackers and handed them to Michelle, then rifled through the glove compartment. “Nothing helpful,” she muttered.

  “You’re mad,” she said, her voice an irritating whine. “I’m sorry. I said I was sorry.”

  “It’s okay. But we have to move. Fast. They’re on their way.” She handed Michelle the boots she’d found inside, the smaller pair, which should fit fine. Michelle’s own boots were chic and stylish, with spiky three-inch heels—just the sort for a young professional. But useless footgear for fleeing from killers.

  Michelle stared at the fleece boots. She didn’t move.

  “Hurry.”

  “Mine are fine.”

  “No, they’re not. You can’t wear those.” A nod at the designer footwear.

  Michelle said, “I don’t like to wear other people’s clothes. It’s…gross.” Her voice was a hollow whisper.

  Maybe she meant dead people’s clothes.

  A glance toward Number 2. No sign of the men. Not yet.

  “I’m sorry, Michelle. I know it’s upsetting. But you have to. And now.”

  “I’m fine with these.”

  “No. You can’t. Especially with a hurt ankle.”

  Another hesitation. It was as if the woman were a pouty eight-year-old. Brynn took her firmly by the shoulders. “Michelle. They could be here any minute. We don’t have any choice.” Her voice was harsh. “Put the goddamn boots on. Now!”

  A long moment. Michelle’s jaw trembling, eyes red, she snatched away the hiking boots and leaned against the Mercedes to put them on. Brynn jogged to the garage and found beside it what she’d seen when she’d arrived: a canoe under a tarp. She hefted it. The fiberglass boat wasn’t more than forty or fifty pounds.

  Although Yahoo’s estimate was accurate and two hundred yards separated them from the shoreline, a stream was only about thirty feet from the house and it ran pretty much straight to the lake.

  In the garage she found life preservers and paddles.

  Michel
le was staring down at her friend’s boots, grimacing. She looked like a rich customer who’d been sold inferior footwear and was about to complain to the store manager.

  Brynn snapped, “Come on. Help me.”

  Michelle glanced back toward the house at 2 Lake View and, her face troubled, shoved the crackers in her pocket, then hurried to the canoe. The two women dragged it to the stream. Michelle climbed in with her pool cue walking stick and Brynn handed her the spear, paddles and life vests.

  With a look back at the morass of forest, through which the killers were surely sprinting right now, the deputy climbed in and shoved off into the stream, a dark artery seeping toward a dark heart.

  THE MEN RAN

  through the night, sucking in cold, damp air rich with the smell of rotting leaves. At the sound of the horn, Hart had realized that rather than head for the county road, like he’d thought, the women had snuck back to the Feldman house. They’d probably broken into the Mercedes hoping to fix the tire, not thinking the car was alarmed. He and Lewis had started running directly for the place but immediately encountered bogs and some wide streams. Hart started to ford one but Lewis said, “No, your feet’ll chafe bad. Gotta keep ’em dry.”

  Hart, never an outdoorsman, hadn’t thought about that. The men returned to the driveway and jogged to Lake View Drive and then north toward number 2.

  “We go…up careful,” Hart said, out of breath, when they were halfway to the Feldmans’ driveway. “Still…could be a trap.” The jogging was hell on his wounded arm. He winced and tried moving it into different positions. Nothing helped.

  “A trap?”

  “Still…worried about a gun.”

  Lewis seemed a lot less obnoxious now. “Sure.”

  They slowed at the mailbox, then started up the drive, Hart first, both of them sticking to the shadows. Lewis was silent, thank God. The kid was catching on, if you could call a thirty-five-year-old a kid. Hart thought again of his brother.