The Bodies Left Behind (19 page)

Silently Lewis, crouching, crossed the path and slipped behind a stand of brush. When Hart saw he was in a good position to cover the area, he started forward, also low. Head swiveling back and forth.

He noticed in the distance, at the bottom of the ravine, what appeared to be the ranger station.

Holding his own weapon pointed forward, he moved to the sign. He examined the broken branch. Then peered over the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t see anyone. Took out his flashlight and shone it down into the night.

Jesus.

He stood, put the gun away. Called Lewis over.

“What is it?”

“Look. They tried to climb down. But it didn’t work.”

Peering over the edge of the cliff, they could see in the faint moonlight a ledge twenty feet below, at the bottom of a steep, rocky wall. One of the women, or maybe both, had fallen. On the ledge was a four-foot-long branch—the one that had broken off the tree beside them. And around it was a large smear of bright red blood, glistening under the flashlight.

“Man,” Lewis said, “she hit hard.” He tried to peer farther into the ravine. “Broke her leg, I’ll bet. Bleeding plenty.”

“They had to’ve kept going down. They couldn’t get back up, hurt like that. Or maybe there’s a cave. Behind the ledge. They’re trying to hide in.”

“Well, we gotta go after ’em,” Lewis announced. “Like hunting. You follow a wounded animal till you find it. No matter what. You want, I’ll go down first.”

Hart lifted an eyebrow. “Bit of a climb.”

“I told you—construction on the lakefront. Thirty stories up and I’m strolling around on the ironwork like it’s a sidewalk.”

 

NO. SOMETHING’S WRONG.

Graham Boyd rose from the couch, walked past Anna, who had switched from knitting to a large needlepoint sampler—the woman found peace and pleasure in transforming cloth of all kinds—and walked into the kitchen. His eyes glanced at a picture of his wife as a teenager, sitting atop the horse she’d later ride to win the Mid-Wisconsin Junior Horse Jumping Competition years ago. She was leaning down, her cheek against the horse’s neck, patting him, though her eyes were focused elsewhere, presumably on one of her competitors.

He found the county phone book and looked at the map. The nearest towns to Lake Mondac were Clausen and Point of Rocks. Clausen had a town magistrate’s office, Point of Rocks a public safety office. He tried the magistrate first. No answer, and the message referred callers to City Hall, which turned out to be just a voice mail. The public safety office in Point of Rocks was closed, and the outgoing message said that anyone with an emergency should call either the county sheriff’s office or the State Police.

“And thank you for calling,”
it concluded politely.
“Have a nice day.”

How can a fucking police department be closed?

He heard Joey’s bedroom door open and close. The toilet flushed.

A moment later: “When’s mom coming home?” The boy, still not in his pajamas, was at the top of the stairs.

“Soon.”

“You called her?”

“She’s busy. She can’t be disturbed. Put your pajamas on and go to bed. Lights out.”

The boy turned around. The bedroom door closed.

Graham thought that he heard the video game again. He wasn’t sure.

Anna asked, “Where is she? I’m worried, Graham.”

“I don’t know. That deputy I talked to said it was just routine. But it didn’t feel right.”

“How do you mean?”

“Her phone. Giving it to somebody else? No way.” He could talk to Anna without worrying that she’d become defensive. When it came to serious topics, he had trouble talking to Brynn and to her son—hell, that was tonight’s theme, apparently—but he could talk to his mother-in-law. “She’s too much of a control person for that.”

He had, however, pulled back from “control freak.”

Anna’s frown morphed into a smile, as if she’d caught on. “That’s my daughter. You’re right.”

Graham picked up the landline. Made a call.

“Deputy Munce.”

“Eric, it’s Graham.”

“Hey. What’s up?”

“The sheriff in?”

“Now? Nope. He goes home about six, seven most nights.”

“Look, Brynn went out on something tonight. Up at Lake Mondac.”

“Right. Heard about that.”

“Well, she’s not back yet.”

Silence. “Not back? Forty minutes from there to your place. You’re north of town. Forty minutes
tops.
I’ve drove it in a half hour.”

“I called and got some other deputy. Said there was a domestic. And that Brynn was handling it. Child Services or something.”

A pause. “That doesn’t sound familiar, Graham. Who were you talking to?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe Billings.”

“Well, that’s nobody from our office. Hold on….” Muted sounds of conversation.

Graham rubbed his eyes. Brynn had been up at five. He’d been up at five-thirty.

The deputy came back on. “All right, Graham. Story is the guy who made that nine-one-one call called back and said it was a mistake. Brynn was going to turn around. That was close to seven, seven-thirty.”

“I know. But this deputy said it wasn’t a mistake. It was some domestic dispute, and they wanted Brynn to handle it. Could she have run into some State Police up there, town cops?”

“Could happen but that’s not the sort of thing the troopers’d handle.”

Graham’s skin chilled at this. “Eric, something’s wrong.”

“Let me call the sheriff. He’ll get back to you.”

Graham hung up. He paced the kitchen. Surveyed the new tiles on the floor. Organized a stack of bills. Drew a line in the dust on top of the small, rabbit-ear TV. Listened to the computer game upstairs.

Goddamnit. Why wasn’t the boy listening to him? He decided to ban Joey from skateboards for the rest of the school year.

Anger or instinct?

The phone rang.

“’Lo?”

“Graham, it’s Tom Dahl. Eric just called. We checked with the State Police. Nobody got any calls up at Lake Mondac. Clausen, Point of Rocks, even as far as Henderson.”

Graham explained what he’d told Eric Munce, irritated that the man hadn’t filled the sheriff in. “The deputy was named Billings.”

Silence for a moment. “Billings’s the name of a road between Clausen and the state park.”

So it might’ve been fresh in the mind of somebody trying to make up a name. Graham’s hands were sweating.

“Her phone keeps going to voice mail again, Tom. I’m plenty worried.”

“What’s wrong?” a voice called. Joey’s.

Graham looked up. The boy was standing halfway down the stairs. He’d been listening. “What’s wrong with Mom?”

“Nothing. Go back to bed. Everything’ll be fine.”

“No. Something’s wrong.”

“Joey,” Graham snapped. “Now.”

Joey held his eye for a moment, the chill look sending a shiver through Graham’s back, then turned and stomped up the stairs.

Anna appeared in the door, glanced at Graham’s grimacing face. “What?” she whispered.

He shook his head, said, “I’m talking to the sheriff.” Then: “Tom, whatta we do?”

“I’ll send some people up there. Look, relax. Her car probably broke down and she hasn’t got cell phone reception.”

“Then who was Billings?”

Another pause. “We’ll get up there right away, Graham.”

 

GASPING, FACE DOTTED

with cold sweat, Michelle crouched, leaning against her pool cue cane, Brynn beside her. They were still on the Joliet Trail, hiding in a tangle of juniper and boxwood, which smelled to Brynn of urine.

They’d come a half mile from the cliff top intersection with the
Danger
sign and shelter, running as best they could the entire distance.

They now watched the beam from a flashlight, pointed downward, slowly sweeping the ledge and cliff face as Hart and his partner climbed down. They continued walking along the trail, moving quickly.

The men had bought the sham Brynn had orchestrated: the shouting, the broken branch, the blood—her own—spattered on the ledge. The men would continue to the bottom now, either on the cliff or the path around Apex Lake, and make for the ranger station. Which would give Brynn and Michelle an extra hour to get to safety before Hart and his partner realized that they’d been tricked.

In the end it hadn’t been Michelle’s fear of heights—or Brynn’s—that decided the matter. Brynn had concluded that even climbing down the cliff and hiking through the tangled brush in the ravine would take too much time. The men would have caught up with them before they were halfway to the ranger station. But the cliff was a good chance to mislead their pursuers. Brynn had broken the branch to make it look like an accident, then carefully climbed down the cliff to the ledge. There she’d taken a deep breath, and cut her scalp with the kitchen knife. As a deputy
she knew a lot about head injuries, and that lacerations on the head didn’t hurt badly but bled copiously. (She knew this from Joey as much as from auto accident calls.) After smearing the blood on the stone, she’d climbed back up to the cliff top and they’d fled down the Joliet Trail.

She now looked back. The sweeping flashlight beam was still visible through the bones of trees. Then the path turned and the women lost sight of the killers.

“How does it feel?” Michelle nodded at Brynn’s head. She apparently thought Brynn had made her decision not to climb down the cliff face because of the young woman’s fear of heights. She glowed with gratitude. Brynn said it was fine.

Michelle began rambling, telling a story about how she’d been hit on the head by a schoolgirl on the playground, and had bled all over a new dress, which had upset her more than the fight. “Girls’re worse than boys.”

Brynn didn’t disagree. She did antigang campaigns at the high schools. Gangs…even in modest Humboldt.

An image of Joey, panting and bloody, after one of his fights at school also came to mind. She pushed it away.

Michelle kept up the manic banter and Brynn tuned her out. She paused and looked around. “I think we should go off the trail now, find the river.”

“We have to? We’re making good time.”

But the trail, Brynn told her, didn’t lead them anywhere except deeper into the woods. The closest town that way was fifteen miles.

“I need to use the compass.” She knelt to the side of the trail and set the alcohol bottle on the ground. With some prodding the needle finally swung north. “We go that way. It’s not far. A couple of miles, I’d guess. Probably less.” She put the bottle in her pocket.

They were on higher ground here and, looking back, they could still see a flashlight slowly probing for the pathway down the cliff face that would lead the killers into the valley and to the ranger station. They’d eventually learn that the women weren’t going that way but every minute they delayed on the cliff was a minute more Brynn and Michelle had to escape.

Brynn found a section of the woods that was less ensnarled than others and she stepped off the trail. Michelle, somber again, gazed at the rocky, boggy ground and started forward with a look of distaste, like a girl reluctantly climbing into her date’s filthy car.

 

THEY WERE DOING

eighty, without the light bar going or the throaty siren. Didn’t need them. There was hardly any traffic out here, this time of night. And none of the retrofit accessories in the Dodge would have any inhibiting effect on suicidal wildlife. Sheriff Tom Dahl’s feeling was that deer were born without brains.

He was sitting in the passenger seat and a young deputy, Peter Gibbs, was driving. Behind them was another car, Eric Munce at the wheel and, beside him, Howie Prescott, a massive, shaved-headed deputy who got good respect during traffic stops.

Dahl had called his deputies and found no shortage of volunteers to help find out what had happened to their colleague Brynn McKenzie. They all stood ready to go, but four, he figured, was plenty.

The sheriff was on the phone with an FBI agent in Milwaukee. His name was Brindle, which Dahl thought was a coloring of a horse or dog. The agent had been getting ready for bed but didn’t hesitate to help out. He sounded genuinely concerned.

The subject of the conversation was the woman lawyer, Emma Feldman.

“Well, Sheriff, started out as a little thing. She’s handling this corporate deal. She’s doing her homework and finds out that a lot of the companies on the lakefront have more than their fair share of documented aliens. Next thing a CI…that’s a—”

“Confidential informant?” Dahl asked, but Brindle missed the irony.

“Right. He says that Stanley Mankewitz, head of some local union, is selling forged green cards to illegals.”

“How much could he make doing that?”

“No, that’s not what it’s about. He doesn’t even charge ’em. What he does is gets them to guarantee that they’ll get jobs in open shops then unionize the workers. The union gets bigger, Mankewitz gets richer.”

Hmm, Dahl thought. Clever idea.

“That’s what we’re investigating right now.”

“And this Mankewitz? He done it?”

“Up in the air so far. He’s smart, he’s old school and he only hires people who keep their mouths shut. He’s a prick too, pardon my French, so, yeah, he did it. But the case’s weak. It takes just one witness having an accident or getting killed in a, quote, random house invasion and the whole case could fall apart.”

“And here she is, out in the wilderness, this lawyer. A lot of accidents could happen there.”

“Exactly. Milwaukee PD should’ve had somebody on her. They dropped the ball there.”

This was offered a little too fast, Dahl thought. The finger-pointing’d already started up, it seemed. Policing wasn’t much different in Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., or Kennesha County.

Dahl said, “Go faster.”

“What?” the FBI agent asked.

“I’m talking to the driver…. When my deputy’s husband called her phone, some man answered, claiming to be a deputy. Near as we can tell, there’re no troopers or neighboring law out there. None at all.”