“We just don’t have the manpower, Graham. I can’t send volunteers, not with those men out there. Has to be armed troopers or deputies. Now go on home, Graham. Joey’s going to be worried. He’s got to know you’re there for him. I’m talking as a father now. Not a cop…. I promise, your number’s the first one I call, we find anything.”
Eric Munce walked Graham back to his truck.
Dahl stood on the porch and looked out over the chaos of the front yard: the lights, the law enforcers, the police cars, an ambulance useful only as a taxi ride for two dead bodies. The victims’ friend, Paskell, had joined Graham and Munce. They shook hands and seemed to be sharing mutual sympathy.
As he turned back to the map to organize the search parties, Dahl thought a short prayer that ended with: And bring Brynn home to us, if you please.
STEAM OR SMOKE
or both rose from the van. But even if it was burning it wouldn’t blow up. They never did.
Brynn McKenzie lay on her back, breathing hard, locating pain and thinking: In the movies every car that crashes blows up. In real life they never do. She’d run probably a hundred highway accidents. Including four fires that wholly immolated the vehicles. The cars or trucks burned furiously but none of them had ever actually exploded.
Which hadn’t stopped her escaping as fast as she could through the gap where the windshield had been—moving like a caterpillar with her hands taped, scrunching along painfully over glass and rocks—and putting as much distance between herself and the shattered van as possible. She’d paused only to turn her back to Hart’s map and grab it, then crumple it into a ball.
She was now about twenty feet from the vehicle, which lay on its side at the foot of the steep hill they’d tumbled down sideways—that orientation had probably saved her life. Had they kept going forward, over the drop, the airbags would have come and gone with first impact and the final drop would have fired them out through the windshield and underneath the tumbling vehicle.
As it was, Hart ironically might have saved her life. She recalled how he’d broken her fall as she’d slammed into him, smelling of aftershave, smoke and bleach.
She was hurting in various places but she tested the important appendages. They all seemed to work. It was odd not having the use of her hands, still taped behind her, to evaluate injuries. The wound in her cheek, and the gum where the tooth had been, still won the pain award. The throbbing had claimed everything north of her shoulders.
Where was Hart? She couldn’t see him.
She looked to the top of the hill—it seemed very far away—where there was a faint light from the camper. She could hear Hart’s partner calling him. He’d undoubtedly heard the crash but couldn’t see the van, which had rolled through tall stands of brush.
They hadn’t fallen all the way to the bottom of the ravine. The van was resting on a flat area about twenty feet wide, at the edge of which was another drop—about thirty feet down, she estimated—to a fast-moving stream.
She told herself: Your legs’re working fine. Get up.
Only she couldn’t. Not with her hands taped. She couldn’t find any leverage.
“Fuck.” A word she’d said perhaps only a dozen times in her life.
Finally she tucked her knees up and managed to roll onto them, facedown, and then rose, staggering upright. She slipped the map into the back waistband of her sweats and looked around quickly for Hart.
And there he was. He’d been thrown free—which is usually the way she described the demise of a crash victim who wasn’t wearing his seat belt and had rag-dolled against a tree or signpost. He lay on his back on the other side of the van. His eyes were closed but his leg was moving, his head lolling slightly.
His black Glock lay about fifteen feet from him.
She decided she could kick the weapon forward like one of Joey’s soccer balls until she was safely away then drop to her knees and pick it up, then crawl upright again.
But starting for the weapon, Brynn had heard a whimper. She spun around and saw Amy—the little blond girl, in her dirty white T-shirt and denim skirt, clutching her toy. She was running down the hill in a panic. Maybe Hart’s partner had scared her and she’d fled from the camper.
Brynn was between her and Hart, who was coming to consciousness. His eyes were closed. But his fingers were clenching and unclenching. He moaned.
The girl was nearly at the foot of the hill, running blindly, crying. In ten seconds she’d be over the edge of the ravine.
“Amy! Stop!”
She didn’t hear or if she did she paid no attention.
A glance back toward Hart. He was trying to sit up, looking around, though he hadn’t seen her yet.
The gun? Oh, how she wanted the gun!
But there was no choice. Brynn gave up on the weapon and began sprinting toward the girl. She intercepted her about three feet from the cliff edge, dropping to her knees painfully right in front of the child.
Startled, Amy pulled up fast.
“It’s okay, honey. Remember me? It’s all right. Be careful. I don’t want you to fall. Let’s get back, over there, into those bushes.”
“Where’s Mommy?”
“I’m not sure Amy. But I’m here. You’ll be okay.”
“I heard—”
“Come on with me.”
Brynn glanced back. Hart was struggling to get up. Still hadn’t seen her.
“Hart!” The voice came from the top of the cliff. Brynn saw the silhouette of Hart’s partner.
“Amy, let’s go over there. I don’t like that cliff.”
“Where’s my mommy?” A raw edge to her voice.
“Come on.” Brynn hated herself for saying it but she had to: “I’ll help you find her.”
The hysteria faded. “Okay.”
Brynn moved fast toward the base of the cliff and led the girl into a thick stand of brush and tall grass, out of sight from Hart.
“I’ll help you find your mother but I can’t do it with my hands this way. Can you help me? You know how you were taping those bags?”
She nodded.
“Well, I have tape on my hands.”
“Rudy did that.”
“That’s right. It was like a joke.”
“I don’t think it was a joke. He does lots of things like that.”
“It hurts my hands. Will you take it off?”
“I’ll take it off. Okay. I don’t like Rudy. He looks at me sometimes when he thinks I’m asleep.”
Brynn’s heart thudded. “You don’t have to worry about Rudy anymore. I’m a policewoman.”
“You are? Like Charlie’s Angels?”
“Like that, yeah, Amy.”
“You’re older than them.”
Brynn nearly smiled.
Amy was slowly tugging at the tape. “How did you know my name?”
“Your father told me.”
“He’s not my father.”
“Charlie told me.”
After a number of false starts, Amy was unwinding the tape. “Why did Rudy do that?”
“He was going to hurt me. But don’t say anything, Amy. There are other people around. We don’t want them to hear us.”
“I saw them. I think one of them hurt my mommy.”
“Don’t worry; I won’t let anybody hurt you. Just don’t say anything now. We’ll be quiet. Both of us.”
“Okay.”
At last her hands were free. Brynn rubbed them. She’d scraped an elbow but the parka had protected her pretty well and there was no other damage that hadn’t been there before the tumble down the hill. She grabbed the precious map and put it in her jacket.
“Thank you, honey. Now, let’s be quiet.”
Amy nodded.
Crouching, Brynn led her back quietly toward the clearing where the van lay. She peeked through the bushes.
Hart was gone.
So was the gun.
GRAHAM BOYD DROVE
fast, away from the place where two bodies lay in a fancy vac
ation house, his wife’s clothing in another and her car at the bottom of a black lake. He tried to leave those images behind. But he couldn’t.
He’d thought he’d be seeing Sandra, then stopping for a fast drink at JJ’s—so he could honestly tell Brynn he’d been to the poker game.
But, man, had everything changed…. He’d never experienced a night like this one.
Glancing up into the rearview mirror, he saw the police car behind him, coming up close, real fast. Graham glanced at the speedometer. He was doing eighty-five.
He drove a half mile farther, then pulled over. Leaned his head against the steering wheel, gripping the plastic compulsively with his strong hands.
A few minutes later a uniformed officer was standing beside the driver’s side window. Graham took a deep breath and climbed out of the car. He stepped up to the officer and shook Eric Munce’s hand. “Thanks. I really mean it. I knew you’d understand. Nobody else would.”
“Isn’t the most regular thing in the world but I’ll go on your word, Graham.”
Brynn’s husband zipped his jacket up. He got his flashlight and a Buck knife from the tool carrier in the back of the truck. As he relocked the box, he said, “I’m not sure I’m right. Not sure at all. But everything I know about her tells me that she’d head this way.”
“And the canoe?”
“If she used it, it was a trick. To fool those men. Shoved it in the lake and then took off on foot. Brynn hated the water. She’d never try to escape that way if she could help it.”
Lakes and oceans weren’t her environment. He didn’t explain to Munce about his wife’s control issue.
“I sure hope you’re right, Graham…. I’d like a piece of those bastards,” Munce muttered, eyes gleaming. He had a round face, narrow light-colored eyes and short blond hair. He looked more like a marine than a deputy and Graham wondered if he’d been in the military. He asked.
“Yessir, I was.” Then confessed: “National Guard. Never saw the big show, though.” He shrugged with a stoic grin and asked, “But there was that ranger station on the map. You saw it? The one near Apex Lake. Why wouldn’t she make for that?”
“Might have. I’m not saying I’m certain. But I think Brynn’ll take the harder route, like I was saying. It’ll equalize them, the women and those men after ’em. On a trail, the men can move faster. In the woods she’ll have the advantage. And Brynn won’t let anybody get an edge over her.”
“Woman must be hell to play cards with.”
“We don’t play cards,” Graham said absently, staring at the map.
He then looked over the dark woods. One car whizzed past. The highway was otherwise empty.
“You’d be a good cop, Graham.”
“Me?” He laughed grimly. “No, sir.” He tapped the map. “Here’s the Joliet Trail. She’ll leave the path about there.” He touched a spot. “Then make for the Snake River and follow it right up here to the interstate.”
Munce looked at the steep hill vanishing below them into a morass of woods. “That’s a tough climb. You ever been here?”
“To the park? Yeah, but not here. Hiking when I was younger.” Graham recalled asking Joey to come with him several times in the past year. The boy had always declined, with a look on his face that said, And I’d want to do that why? Graham had regretted that he hadn’t insisted. He believed he could’ve made Joey enjoy himself.
Thinking, Should’ve listened to my instincts.
Then: What does it matter?
Munce told him he was familiar with this area. He and Brynn had been involved in a search-and-recovery mission that had ended about a mile from here.
Graham noted the word “recovery,” as in “body recovery.” Not a successful rescue. The deputy continued, “I remember some paths. Hikers and rock climbers made them. There’re some level areas but we’re going to see mostly drop-offs, twenty, thirty feet, some of them. Even more. You’ll come on them real sudden. Watch where you walk.”
Graham nodded. He said, “I’m guessing they’ll stick close enough to hear the river, to guide them. That means they’ll be somewhere in a strip fifty, a hundred yards wide, from the edge of the gorge. That’s where we should make our way down. We can’t call to ’em loud, give ourselves away…. We’ll just have to stop every so often and look around us. We could probably whisper. The sheriff said it’s two men are after them, right?”
“Yeah, what the footprints show.”
Graham looked at the deputy’s car, the shotgun locked in the front seat.
“I don’t have a gun here, Eric.”
“I can’t do that, Graham. That’s a lose-your-job thing.”
“Ah.”
“Stay close. I scored second in the department shooting competition.”
“Well, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to have two at least.”
Munce considered this. He returned to the car, unlocked the shotgun, pocketed a half dozen shells. He locked the car door and returned to Graham. Together they walked to the edge of the forest and peered down the slope of boulders and trees. To their left the river, a hundred feet down the sheer gorge walls, roared as it broke over boulders and tree trunks and a small dam, at the bottom of which was an eerie sinkhole where leaves and trash spiraled into a foul broth and disappeared.
“Looks like the waterway to hell.”
“Thanks for this, Eric. You going to get into trouble?”
“Sheriff sent us out to search. I said I was checking some roads north. I just didn’t say how far I was going.”
“Tom’s a good man but I have a feeling he’s wrong on this one. I know my wife.”
For a few minutes they wound, or muscled, their way through stands of thick brush, then over a soft bed of pine needles, which was a pleasure after the ornery forsythia, vinca and other viney and stalky plants that seemed unnaturally attracted to their boots. The hussssh of the water from the Snake River grew louder.
“Time to get serious here.” Munce bent down, spat in the dirt and made mud. He smeared it on his face and cheekbones. Graham hesitated, feeling foolish, then did the same.
“Okay. Well, let’s do it.” Munce racked the shotgun, put the safety on and led the way. They started downward into an impossible tangle of trees and branches and rocks and shadow.
Graham whispered, “Eric, curious. Was it Brynn who beat you?”
“Beat me?”
“In the shooting competition. You said you were second.”
“Oh, no, was Dobbie Masters. Boy come outa his momma’s tummy with a pistol in his hand. But I will say this, Brynn may not be the best shot, but she empties the clip and reloads twice as fast as anybody on the force. In a firefight, that counts for more. Believe me.”
JAMES JASONS FINISHED
his second hamburger, which was cold but he wanted the calories. He drove along the interstate, glancing from time to time at the screen on a small box stuck to the Lexus dashboard. The indicator told him he was about one mile from his target, which had stopped moving and had been parked by the roadside for about ten minutes.
Jasons assessed his performance as the Feldmans’ grieving friend Ari Paskell, which was one of his four identities, complete with car registration and driver’s license. When you work for somebody like Stanley Mankewitz the budget isn’t quite unlimited but it’s big enough that you can afford the tools to do your job with—the union boss’s favorite word—efficiency.
Back at the Feldman house, as he’d pretended to compose himself after hearing the sad news, he’d learned plenty. He’d made up the story about a phone call from Steven to learn what the police actually suspected, that there were two of them and they weren’t physically large, thank you, Deputy Munce.
He’d also told the story to plant the seed that the killing was locally motivated; it didn’t originate in Milwaukee. He couldn’t tell if Dahl believed that or not.
Jasons had also overheard other snippets, giving him a good idea of what the police knew about the crime, wh
ile pretending to make a phone call—you’re invisible when you’re on your mobile; nobody thinks you’re listening. The sheriff missed that completely but Jasons didn’t put him down as a small-town rube. Brilliant people always look for the simplest, most logical explanation for a situation and Jasons had offered one: a grieving friend, a driver’s license and a legitimate tag number on a nice car.
It helped too that Jasons had left soon after, as he’d been asked to, before the sheriff started to wonder about this continued presence.
In fact, he didn’t need to stay. Because his next steps had nothing to do with how the police were handling the investigation. No, he had focused on the husband of that woman deputy who’d fled into the woods, escaping Emma Feldman’s killers. Noting the conspiratorial conversation that Graham Boyd had had with Munce, Jasons deduced that they were planning their own renegade search, independent of the sheriff’s plan.
Dahl might’ve known his staff and he might’ve known logic, and human nature in general—all good cops did—but he hadn’t known the sort of things you learn about a person by sharing his life and spending bedroom time with him. Jasons just had to look at his own relationship with Robert to know this was true.
So he put his money on the husband and Munce to lead him to the deputy—named Brynn—and to the Feldmans’ friend, the witness to the murder.
The two women who were the moths drawing the men Jasons was trying to keep alive tonight.
He recalled, back at the Lake Mondac house, Graham shaking “Paskell’s” hand and giving his sympathies. Then Jasons had wished them luck with the search. Graham had then turned away and spoken to Munce, the deputy looking down as he considered the words. Munce then said something back and they’d both looked at their watches.
Might as well shout their intentions over a megaphone.
But, it turned out, everybody else was concentrating on the business at hand and the exchange had gone unnoticed. On the pretext of asking another officer for directions, Jasons had passed by the husband’s pickup truck and dropped what looked like a small chip of wood inside the bed, behind some potted plants. The wood chip contained a GPS tracker—originally designed for hunters to use to track their dogs should they get overly enthusiastic when going after a shot bird and vanish into the distance.
The Bodies Left Behind: A Novel Page 24
