The Bodies Left Behind: A Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  Control…

  “Kneel down. Hands on the top of your head. If a hand comes off your head, you’ll die.”

  “Of course, Brynn.” Hart complied.

  More vehicles were hissing past now, drivers off late shifts or hurrying to early ones. If anyone inside the cars or trucks saw the drama unfolding on the shoulder, nobody was stopping

  “Graham, get his Glock and the other gun.” Indicating the ostentatious silver SIG-Sauer that Comp had been carrying. “There’s one weapon unaccounted for. Eric’s. Search him.” Keith had taught her always to count weapons at scenes.

  Graham did and found the deputy’s service Glock. He put Hart’s black gun and Comp’s silver one on the grass beside Brynn.

  But he kept Munce’s pistol. He looked at it closely. There are no safeties as such on Glocks. You just point and shoot. Graham knew this; Brynn had instructed him and Joey about how to load and fire hers. Just in case. He fired a shot into the ground, presumably to make sure it was loaded and cocked.

  “Graham!”

  He ignored his wife. In a low, threatening tone he asked Hart, “Who’d I talk to when I called? The dead one or you?”

  “It was me,” Hart said.

  Graham turned the square automatic on Hart, who gazed past the muzzle, his gray eyes calm.

  “Graham,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be fine now. Help me, honey. I need some plastic hand restraints. Look in the glove compartment.”

  Her husband continued to stare into Hart’s eyes. The gun pointed unwaveringly at his head. The trigger poundage was very light. A twitch was enough to release a round.

  “Graham? Honey?…Please.” There was desperation in her voice. If he fired it would be murder. “Please.”

  The big man took a deep breath. He lowered the gun. Finally he said, “Where? The restraints?”

  “Graham, please, give me the gun.”

  “Where are they?” he snapped angrily. He kept the pistol. Brynn noticed Hart smiling at her.

  She ignored it and answered her husband, “The glove compartment.”

  He stepped to the car. “I don’t see any.”

  “Try the trunk. They’ll be in a plastic bag. Maybe a box. But first, call it in. The radio’s on the dash. Just push the button, say who you are, say ten-thirteen and then give the location. The engine doesn’t have to be on.”

  Staring at Hart, Graham picked up the microphone and made the call. Frantic responses came from a half dozen deputies and troopers but, bless him, he said only what was necessary: location and the situation. He dropped the mike on the seat and popped the trunk.

  Hart kept his eyes on Michelle, who stared back with pure hatred. He smiled. “You came close, Michelle. Real close.”

  She said nothing. Then he turned to Brynn and, in a voice that only she could hear, asked, “At the camper back there, after you crashed the van?” He nodded at the vastness they’d just come through. “When I was out of it, just lying there. You saw me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “My piece was nearby. Did you see that too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you go for it?”

  “The little girl was going to fall. I went after her instead.”

  “One of those hard choices.” He nodded “They do present themselves at the worst possible times, don’t they?”

  “If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be hard choices, would they?”

  He gave a faint laugh at this. “Well, say the girl hadn’t been there. Would you have taken my piece and killed me? Shot me while I was out?” He cocked his head and said softly, “Tell the truth…no lies between us, Brynn. No lies. Would you have killed me?”

  She hesitated.

  “You thought about it, didn’t you?” He smiled.

  “I thought about it.”

  “You should have. You should’ve killed me. I would’ve, it’d been you. And you and me…we’re peas in a pod.”

  Brynn glanced at Graham, who couldn’t hear the exchange.

  “There have to be a few differences between us, Hart.”

  “But that’s not one of ’em…. You’re saying you would just’ve arrested me?”

  “You forget. I already had.”

  Another smile, both his mouth and his gray eyes.

  A truck roared past. An occasional car.

  Then Graham called, “I’ve got them.”

  Which was all Hart needed. As Brynn glanced up he sprang to his feet. He wasn’t close enough to get to her—Brynn had made sure of that. But that wasn’t his intent. He jumped over the body of his partner and sprinted the twenty feet to the highway. Brynn’s shot missed him by an inch. She couldn’t fire again because of the oncoming cars. Not even looking, Hart sprinted into traffic, an act of pure faith. He could have been killed instantly.

  He made it to the center lane, froze, then leapt aside as the driver of a Toyota SUV swerved in panic. The vehicle rolled onto its left side and, in a shower of sparks and a hideous screech, skidded along the shoulder and right lane, missing the women and the child by feet. They dove to the ground, pure instinct.

  The SUV jettisoned plastic and glass and metal bits and finally came to a rest, the horn wailing and airbag dust rising from the empty window frames.

  A dozen other cars and trucks skidded to a stop. And before Brynn could draw another target on Hart, he’d run into the far lane, leapt over the hood of a stopped sedan, dragged out the driver—a man in a suit—and climbed in. He sped onto the median and accelerated past the stopped cars then into the lane again. Brynn aimed Munce’s revolver but had only a brief clear target—between two good Samaritans climbing out of their vehicles—and she wouldn’t risk injuring them.

  She lowered the gun and ran to the Highlander to help the occupants.

  A WITNESS TO

  the carnage, James Jasons crouched in fragrant bushes a hundred yards down the highway from where the SUV lay on its side. Sirens sounded in the distance.

  He believed he saw Graham Boyd helping some of the injured. The absence of the uniformed deputy, Munce, might explain the gunshot he’d heard earlier from deep within the forest.

  The sirens grew closer as he dismantled his gun and put it in the canvas bag. The traffic on this side of the highway was at a standstill. On the other side the cars and trucks were still moving but slowly, as voyeurs strained to see what had happened.

  As if there was an explanation for these bizarre events.

  One of the killers apparently lay dead—his body now covered by a tarp—and the other had escaped, but there seemed to be no other serious injuries.

  Jasons had been partially successful. There was nothing to do but leave.

  With his cap low over his eyes he walked through the stopped line of traffic and onto the median. It took a bit more dancing but the gawkers let him through three lanes without his even having to run. Though once on the other side he moved quickly into the woods to make sure none of the law enforcers noticed him. He sprinted to his Lexus.

  Jasons started it up and eased out onto the shoulder then accelerated to the speed of traffic—it was only about thirty miles an hour—and merged. He pulled the satellite phone from the bag, which was now on the seat next to him, and scrolled through speed dial. He went past his partner’s name, and then his mother’s and pushed the third button on the list.

  Even though it was very early in the morning, Stanley Mankewitz answered on the second ring.

  “NO ID.”

  Brynn glanced up from the back step of the ambulance, where she sat next to Graham.

  Tom Dahl was referring to Comp, the man shot and killed by Hart. His partner. Of all the horrors that night perhaps the worst was the look of betrayal in the young man’s face just before Hart pulled the trigger.

  “We got money, a couple boxes of ammo, cigarettes, gloves, Seiko watch. That’s it.” They’d recovered Michelle’s purse too, which might contain the men’s fingerprints. Dahl would send officers to find
Comp’s shotgun in the brambles and Eric Munce’s, which Graham explained was in the river.

  Brynn’s husband had told the story of how he’d tried to retrieve it but had fallen in the process. He’d landed on a shelf of rock, bruised and scraped but otherwise unhurt. He’d then climbed up the cliff face and was walking back past Eric Munce’s body when he recalled that the man was wearing an ankle holster with a backup revolver in it. He’d taken the gun and hurried toward where he’d heard the gunshot.

  “What was his name?” the sheriff asked, looking at the man’s body, covered by a green tarp and lying nearby.

  “Comp,” Brynn said. “Something like that.”

  A medical technician had daubed Brynn’s cheek with brown Betadine and Lanocaine and was now easing a massive bandage onto it. He was going to stitch it. She said no. A needle and thread would make a bigger scar and the thought of two facial deformities was too much for her.

  He put a tight butterfly bandage on and told her to see a doctor later that day. “Dentist too. That busted tooth’ll start to bother your tongue pretty soon.”

  Start to?

  She told him she would.

  Brynn was staring at Comp’s body. She simply couldn’t understand why Hart had killed him. This was the man Hart had risked his own life to save just a half hour earlier on the ledge—nearly getting crushed by a log, in fact, to pull the man to safety.

  And Hart had told him to stand still, then shot him—casual as could be.

  She looked around, the circus of flashing lights. Heard voices shouting, the crackle of radios.

  In addition to Dahl, there were other deputies from the Kennesha County Sheriff’s Department and a baker’s dozen of state troopers. Two FBI agents too, who’d tossed off their suit jackets, were helping out however they could, including stringing crime scene tape. No egos were present. They’d show up later.

  Head down, Michelle sat on the grass, her back against a tree, cradling sleeping Amy, both wrapped in blankets. The medics had looked them over and neither was badly injured. Michelle’s ankle turned out to be just a pulled muscle.

  Somber, Michelle clutched the girl tightly, and Brynn supposed she was mourning for them both—two people who had lost someone close to them so violently on this terrible night, two people who had left an innocence behind, dead or dying, in the tangled woods.

  Brynn rose from the ambulance and stiffly walked over the grass to Michelle. “Did you get through to them?” Brynn asked. Michelle was going to call her brother and his wife, who lived north of Chicago, to come pick her up.

  “They’re on their way.” Then her voice faded and she gave a stoic smile. “Never got a message from my husband.”

  “Did you call him?”

  She shook her head. And her body language said she wanted to be alone. She brushed Amy’s hair gently. The child was snoring softly.

  Brynn tested her wounded face, wincing despite the topical anesthetic cream, then joined Dahl and the FBI agents. She fought through her fuzzy mind—once the pursuit had stopped, disorientation had flooded into the vacuum with a smack—and gave them a synopsis of everything that had happened from her arrival at Lake Mondac: the escape, the portable meth lab, the surprise gunshots fired at them when they were on the rock ledge.

  “One of Rudy Hamilton’s people?” an FBI agent said, hearing Brynn’s opinion as to the identity of the sniper by the ledge. “I don’t know.” He seemed doubtful.

  “Rudy said somebody named Fletcher might be in the area.”

  The agent nodded. “Kevin Fletcher, sure. Meth and crack bigwig. But no evidence he operates around here. He sticks close to Green Bay. Makes ten times as much up there. No, I’m still betting the shooter was some muscle Mankewitz sent.”

  “Drove down here to protect his hit men?”

  “I’m guessing,” the other said.

  Of course they were eager to pin anything on Mankewitz, short of the Kennedy assassination. Still, Brynn didn’t disagree; it would make sense. And the shooter had saved Hart and Comp from crushed skulls or a fall into the barbwire thorns.

  “You get a look at him?”

  “Nope. Don’t even know where he was.”

  The agent looked out over the woods. “That’s not going to be an easy crime scene.”

  And then they all grew silent as a recovery team carried Eric Munce’s body from the woods. The bag was dark green. The men started to set it near the body of the other killer, but hesitated and, out of respect, set it farther away, on the grass, not the shoulder.

  “I’ve seen those bags a dozen times,” Brynn said softly to Dahl. “But never with one of ours inside.”

  The driver of the SUV and his girlfriend were sitting dazed on the ground near the ambulance. Their seat belts had kept them from any damage other than bruising. The man who’d been pulled from his car by Hart was uninjured but his fear or ego kept prompting him to mutter about lawsuits until somebody suggested he could sell his story to People or Us. It was meant sarcastically to shut him up. But he seemed to like the idea. And he did shut up.

  Brynn walked up to her husband and he put his arm around her. She asked Dahl, “Eric’s wife?”

  A sigh. “I’m going by there now. In person, no calls.”

  Graham looked at the body bag containing the deputy. “Well,” he said, as if it hurt to take enough breath to speak. Brynn rested her head against his shoulder. She was still astonished that he’d driven all this way to try to find her. Dahl wasn’t happy that he and Munce had tried an end run, particularly as it had resulted in the deputy’s death. Still, if they hadn’t, Brynn, Michelle and Amy would be dead now. And they wouldn’t have stopped at least one of the killers and collected good evidence that might lead to Hart and ultimately the man who had hired them.

  Deputies Pete Gibbs and big Howie Prescott, breathing hard, came out of the forest with several state troopers. They were carrying clear plastic bags. Inside were shell casings and an empty ammunition clip.

  They placed Comp’s personal effects into another bag. Michelle’s purse and Hart’s map went into others.

  Brynn looked over the evidence, thinking: Hart, who the hell are you? “Tom, did CS do a prelim dusting at the Lake Mondac house?”

  “Sure. Found about five hundred prints. Mostly the Feldmans’. None of the others set off alarms. The stolen Ford had about sixty and they were negative too. Those boys wore gloves the whole time. Smarter’n our criminals round here.”

  “What about the spent brass and shells?”

  “Found a ton of it. Yours, theirs. Went over the whole place with a metal detector. Even fished some out of that creek beside the garage. But no prints on a single shell.”

  “None?” Brynn asked, dismayed. “They wore gloves loading their weapons?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Yep, smarter than our criminals…

  Then she jabbed a finger at one of the evidence bags. “Tom, this’s our chance. Maybe there’re no prints on the brass—Hart’d expect to leave that. But he’s taken his weapon apart to clean and load it. There’s a print on one of those clips, I guarantee it. And the map. And they were carting around Michelle’s purse. They must’ve opened it. I’m taking the evidence up there myself—to the lab in Gardener.”

  “You?” Dahl scoffed. “Don’t be nuts, Brynn. The state folk can handle that. Get some rest.”

  “I’ll get some sleep in the car on the way home. Grab a shower and head over there.”

  Dahl nodded at the troopers. “Half these boys’re stationed in Gardener They’ll drop everything off at the lab.”

  She whispered, “And everything’ll sit gathering dust for two weeks. I want that guy.” A nod up the highway, where, peering over the ribbed pistol barrel, she’d last seen Hart in the ’jacked car speeding away. “I’m going to stand over the tech like a school teacher till I get some names from AIFIS. I want that man bad.”

  Dahl looked at her grim, determined expression. “All right.”

  Brynn
locked the bags in the glove compartment of Graham’s truck, which he’d collected a quarter mile down the road. She noticed ripe green azaleas in the back bed. They were just starting to bud. Pink and white.

  She leaned her head against her husband’s shoulder again. “Oh, honey. What a night.” He looked up. “You came. You came to find me.”

  “I did, yes.” He gave her a distracted smile. He was clearly shaken—who wouldn’t be?—having seen and experienced what he had tonight.

  “Let’s get home. I called Anna but they’ll want to see you. Joey didn’t take this whole thing too well.” He was going to say something else, she sensed. But didn’t.

  Then another State Police car pulled up and a trooper and a short woman in a suit, Latina, climbed out. She was from Child Protective Services.

  Brynn joined them, introduced herself and explained what had happened. The trooper, who was solid, square-jawed and looked like an ex-soldier, registered some shock at the news. The social worker, her face calm and observant, apparently had heard it all before. She nodded matter-of-factly and jotted some notes. “My office has lined up an emergency foster couple. They’re good people. I know them well. We’ll stop by the doctor, get her checked out and I’ll take her over there now.”

  Brynn whispered, “Can you imagine? Meth cookers for parents. And they had her helping them? And look at her neck.” She’d noticed sausage red marks from where her mother or Gandy—or maybe that disgusting Rudy—had grabbed Amy by her throat, a threat or punishment. They didn’t seem serious but Brynn still shivered with anger. And for a troubling moment felt a dark satisfaction that Hart had killed them.

  They joined Michelle, whose face was as pale as the cloudy dawn sky overhead. She was clutching Amy possessively. The girl was now awake.

  The social worker nodded at Michelle and then crouched down. “Hi, Amy. I’m Consuela. You can call me Connie, if you want.”