They collected Anna and headed back home. There, Joey charged upstairs, taking the steps several at a time.
"Homework," Graham called.
"I will."
The phone rang.
Brynn? he wondered. No. A name he didn't recognize on caller ID.
"Hello?"
"Hi. This's Mr. Raditzky, Joey's central section advisor."
Middle school was a lot different nowadays, Graham reflected. He'd never had advisors. And "central section" sounded like a communist spy organization.
"Graham Boyd. I'm Brynn's husband."
"Sure. How you doing?"
"Good, thanks."
"Is Ms. McKenzie there?"
"She's out, I'm afraid. Can I take a message? Or can I help you?"
Graham had always wanted children. He made his living with plants but he had an innate desire to nurture more than that. His first wife had decided against motherhood, suddenly and emphatically--and well into the marriage. Which was a big disappointment to Graham. He believed he had instinctive skills for parenting and his radar was picking up early warning signals from Mr. Raditzky's tone.
"Well, I want to talk to you about something.... Did you know Joey cut school today? And that he was 'phalting." Something faintly accusatory in the tone.
"Cut school? No, he was there. I dropped him off myself. Brynn had to be at work early."
"Well, he did cut, Mr. Boyd."
Graham fought the urge to deny. "Go on, please."
"Joey came to central section this morning, gave me a note that he had a doctor's appointment. And left at ten. It was signed by Ms. McKenzie. But after we heard he hurt himself, I checked in the office. It wasn't her signature. He forged it."
Graham now experienced the same unexpected alarm he'd felt last summer while wheeling a plant across a customer's yard, not realizing he'd rolled it over a yellow jackets nest. Blithe and happy, enjoying the day, unaware that the threat had already been unleashed and dozens of attackers were on their way.
"Oh." He looked up in the direction of the boy's bedroom. From it came the muted sounds of a video game.
Homework...
"And what else did you say? 'Defaulting'?"
"The word is apostrophe P-H, 'phalting. As in 'asphalt.' It's when kids run up behind a truck at a stoplight with their skateboards and hold on. That's how Joey hurt himself."
"He wasn't in your school lot?"
"No, Mr. Boyd. One of our substitutes was on her way home. She saw him on Elden Street."
"The highway?"
In downtown Humboldt, Elden was a broad commercial strip but once past the town line it returned to its true nature, a truck route between Eau Claire and Green Bay, where the posted limit meant nothing.
"She said the truck was doing probably forty when he fell. He's only alive because there weren't any cars close behind him and he veered into a patch of grass. Could've been a telephone pole or a building."
"Jesus."
"This needs some attention."
I talked to him....
"It sure does, Mr. Raditzky. I'll tell Brynn. I know she'll want to talk to you."
"Thanks, Mr. Boyd. How's he doing?"
"Okay. Scraped up a little."
He's fine....
"He's one lucky young man." Though there was an undercurrent of criticism in the man's tone. And Graham didn't blame him.
He was about to say good-bye when something else popped into his head. "Mr. Raditzky." Graham crafted a credible lie. "We were just talking about something yesterday. Was there any fallout from that scuffle Joey was in?"
A pause. "Well, which one?"
Lord, how many were there? Graham hedged. "I was thinking about the one last fall."
"Oh, the bad one. In October. The suspension."
Treading again blithely over a yellow jackets nest...Brynn'd told him there was a pushing match at the school's Halloween party, nothing serious. Graham recalled Joey had stayed home afterward for a few days--because he hadn't felt well, Brynn explained. But that was a lie, it seemed. So he'd been suspended.
The teacher said, "Ms. McKenzie told you the parents decided not to sue, didn't she?"
Lawsuit?...What exactly had Joey done? He said, "Sure. But I was mostly wondering about the other student."
"Oh, he transferred out. He was a problem, ED."
"What?"
"Emotionally disturbed. He'd been taunting Joey. But that's no excuse for nearly breaking his nose."
"Of course not. I was just curious."
"You folks dodged a bullet on that one. It could have cost you big."
More criticism now.
"We were lucky." Graham felt his gut chill. What else didn't he know about his family?
A little pushing match. It's nothing. Joey went to the Halloween party as a Green Bay Packer and this other boy was a Bears' fan.... Something silly like that. A little rivalry. I'll keep him out of school for a bit. He's got the flu anyway.
"Well, thanks again for the heads-up. We'll have a talk with him."
When they'd hung up, Graham got another beer. He sipped a bit. Went into the kitchen to do the dishes. He found the task comforting. He hated to vacuum, hated to dust. Set him on edge. He couldn't say why. But he loved doing the dishes. Water, maybe. The life blood of a landscaper.
As he washed and dried he rehearsed a half dozen speeches to Joey about cutting school and dangerous skateboard practices. He kept refining them. But as he put the dishes away he decided the words were stilted, artificial. They were just that--speeches. It seemed to Graham that you needed conversation, not lectures. He knew instinctively that they'd have no effect on a twelve-year-old boy. He tried to imagine the two of them sitting down and speaking seriously. He couldn't. He gave up crafting a talk.
Hell, he'd let Brynn handle it. She'd insist on that anyway.
'Phalting...
Graham dried his hands and went into the family room and sat down on the green couch, near Anna's rocker. She asked, "Was that Brynn?"
"No. The school."
"Everything okay?"
"Fine."
"Sorry you missed poker tonight, Graham."
"No problem."
Returning to her knitting, Anna said, "Glad I went to Rita's. She doesn't have long." A tsk of her tongue. "And that daughter of hers. Well, you saw, didn't you?"
Occasionally his soft-spoken mother-in-law surprised him by letting go with a steely judgment like this one. He had no idea what the daughter's crime was but he knew Anna had considered the offense carefully and come back with a reasonable verdict. "Sure did."
He flipped a coin for the channel, lost and they put on a sitcom, which was fine with him. His team was toast this season.
THE FRANTIC YOUNG
woman was in her midtwenties, face gaunt and eyes red from tears, her stylishly short, pixie-ish hair, dark red, now disheveled and flecked with leaves. Her forehead was scratched and her hands shook uncontrollably, but only partly from the cold. It had been her panicked footsteps Brynn had heard, not those of an intruder, moving toward her through the brush.
"You're their friend," Brynn whispered, feeling huge relief that the woman hadn't met the Feldmans' fate. "From Chicago?"
She nodded and then gazed out into the deepening dusk as if the men were hot on her trail. "I don't know what to do," she said in a manic voice. She seemed childlike. Her fear was heartrending.
"We stay here for the time being," Brynn said.
Times to fight and times to run...
Times to hide too.
Brynn looked over at the couple's houseguest. She wore chic clothes, city clothes--expensive jeans and a designer jacket with a beautiful fur collar. The leather was supple as silk. Three gold hoops were in one ear, two in the other, a stud atop both. A sparkling diamond tennis bracelet was on her left wrist and a bejeweled Rolex on her other. She was about as out of place in this muddy forest as she could possibly be.
Scanning the forest around them, Brynn co
uld see no movement other than swaying branches and herds of leaves migrating in the breeze. The wind was pure torment on her soaked skin. "Over there," she finally said, pointing to cover. The women crawled a dozen feet away--to a cavity beside a fallen chinquapin oak in a snarled area of the forest, fifty yards from Lake View Drive and about a hundred and fifty from the house at number 2. When they'd settled into a nest of forsythia, ragweed and sedge Brynn looked back toward the road and the Feldmans'. No sign of the killers.
As if awakening, the young woman suddenly focused on Brynn's uniform blouse. "You're a policewoman." She turned her gaze to the road. "Are there others?"
"No. I'm alone."
She took this news without emotion and then looked at Brynn's cheek. "Your face...I heard gunshots. They shot you too. Like Steve and Emma." Her voice choked. "Did you call for help?"
Brynn shook her head. "You have a phone?"
"It's back there. In the house."
Brynn wrapped her arms around herself. It did nothing to warm her. She looked at the woman's supple designer jacket. Her face was pretty, heart-shaped. Her nails were long and perfectly sculpted. She could have been on the cover of a grocery store checkout magazine, illustrating an article on ten ways to stay fit and sexy. The woman dug into her pocket and pulled on tight, stylish gloves whose price Brynn couldn't even guess at.
Brynn shivered again and was thinking if she didn't get dry and warm soon, she might pass out. She'd never been this cold.
"That house." The young woman nodded toward 2 Lake View. "I was going to call for help. Let's go there, let's call the police. We can get warm. I'm so damn cold."
"Don't want to yet," Brynn said. It seemed less painful to speak in abbreviation. "Don't know where they are. Wait until we know. They could be headed there too."
The young woman winced.
"You hurt?" Brynn asked.
"My ankle. I fell."
Brynn had run plenty of trauma calls. She unzipped the woman's boots--made in Italy, she noticed--and examined the joint through her black knee-highs. It didn't look badly hurt. A sprain probably; thank God it wasn't broken. She saw a gold ankle bracelet that probably equaled a half dozen of Brynn's and Graham's car payments.
The young woman stared toward the Feldmans' house. Chewing her lip.
"What's your name?"
"Michelle."
"I'm Brynn McKenzie."
"Brynn?"
A nod. She usually didn't explain its derivation. "I'm a deputy with the county sheriff's office." She explained about the 911 call. "You know who they are, those men?"
"No."
Brynn whispered, her voice growing more distorted, "Need to figure out what to do. Tell me what happened."
"I met Emma after work and we picked up Steve and all drove up together. Got here about five, five-thirty. I went upstairs--I was going to take a shower--and I heard these bangs. I thought the stove exploded or something. Or somebody dropped something. I didn't know. I ran downstairs and saw two men. They didn't see me. One of them'd put down his gun. It was on the table near the stairs. I just picked it up. They were in the kitchen, standing over the...over the bodies, talking. Just looking down and they had this expression on their faces." She shut her eyes. Whispered, "I can't even describe it. They were, like, 'We shot them. Okay, no big deal. What's next?'" Her voice cracked. "One of them, he was going through the refrigerator."
As Brynn scanned the woods the young woman continued, forcing back tears, "I started to walk toward them. I wasn't even thinking. I was, like, numb. And one of them--one had long hair and one had a crew cut--the one with the long hair started to turn and I guess I just pulled the trigger. It just happened. There was this bang.... I don't think I hit them."
"No," Brynn said. "One of them's hurt, I think. One you just mentioned. With long hair."
"Hurt bad?" she asked.
"His arm."
"I should've...I should've told them to stop, or put their hands up. I don't know. They started shooting at me. And I panicked. I just lost it completely. I ran outside. I didn't have the car keys." A disgusted look on her face. "I did something so stupid.... I was afraid they'd come after me so I shot out the tires. They would've just left if I hadn't done that. Got in the car and left.... I was so stupid!"
"That's all right. You did fine. Nobody'd think straight at a time like that. You have the gun still?"
Please, Brynn thought. I want a weapon so badly.
But the woman shook her head. "I used up all the bullets. I threw it into a creek by the house so they couldn't find it. And I ran." She squinted. "You're a deputy. Do you have a gun?"
"I did. But lost it in the lake."
Suddenly Michelle became animated. Almost giddy. "You know, like, I saw this show one time, it was on A&E or Discovery, and somebody'd been in a car wreck, a bad one, and they lost a lot of blood and they were in the wilderness for days. They should've died. But something happened, like the body stopped the bleeding itself. The doctors saved them and..."
Brynn had experienced this mania before, at car wrecks and heart attack scenes, and knew the implicit question was best answered simply and honestly. "I'm sorry. I was there, in the kitchen. I saw them. I'm afraid they're gone."
Michelle held on to a fragment of hope for a moment longer. Then let it go. She nodded and lowered her head.
Brynn asked, "You have any idea what they want? Ow!" She flinched. She'd bit her tongue. "Was it robbery?" Eyes lensing with tears.
"I don't know."
The shivering grew worse, consuming Brynn. Michelle's perfect fingernails, she had noticed, were dark from plum-colored polish; Brynn's, unpolished, were the same shade.
"I understand you and Emma worked together. Are you a lawyer too?"
A shake of her pretty head. "No, I was a paralegal in Milwaukee for a while before I moved to Chicago. That's how we met. It was just a way to make some money. I'm really an actress."
"Did she ever talk to you about her cases?"
"Not too much, no."
"Could be--a case at her law firm. She might've found out about a scam or crime of some kind."
Michelle gasped. "You mean they came up here to kill her on purpose?"
Brynn shrugged.
A snap nearby. Brynn gasped and turned fast. About twenty feet away a badger, elegant in its round, clumsy way, nosed past warily.
Wisconsin, the Badger State.
Brynn asked Michelle, "Will somebody start to wonder if they don't hear from you?"
"My husband. Except he's traveling. We said we'd talk in the morning. That's why I came up here with Steve and Emma. I had the weekend free."
"Look." Brynn was pointing toward the Feldman house. Two flashlight beams were scanning the side yard, a quarter mile away. "They're back there. Hurry. The other house. Let's go." Brynn rose to a crouch, both of them staggering forward.
SO THE COP
had gone into the water. Hart and Lewis had found debris and an oil slick.
"Dead, gotta be," Lewis'd said, looking distastefully at the lake, as if he were expecting monsters to slither out. "I'm outa here. Come on, Hart. Jake's. I need a fucking beer. First round's on you, my friend."
They'd returned to the Feldman house. The fire in the hearth had burned itself out and Hart had shut off all the lights. He'd put into his pocket all the used medical supplies stained with his blood. He didn't bother with the spent shells that littered the house and front yard; he'd worn gloves when loading the Glocks and had watched to make sure Lewis had too.
Then he sprayed and wiped everything Lewis had come near with his bare hands.
Lewis couldn't resist a snicker at this.
"Keep that," an irritated Hart said, pointing to Michelle's purse.
Lewis slipped it into his combat jacket pocket and took a bottle of vodka from the bar. Chopin. "Shit. This is good stuff." He uncorked it and took a drink. He lifted the bottle to Hart, who shook his head because he didn't want any booze just now, though Lewis took it as
a criticism about drinking on the job, which was true too. At least he wore gloves when handling the bottle.
"You worry too much, Hart," Lewis said, laughing. "I know the score, my friend. I know how they operate in places like this. I wouldn't do that in Milwaukee or St. Paul. But here...these cops're like Andy in Mayberry. Not CSI. They don't have all that fancy equipment. I know how to play it and how not to."
Still, Hart noted that he wiped the lip of the bottle with his shirtsleeve before replacing it.
And he saw in that tiny gesture--so fast you'd miss it easily--a clue. A telling clue about Mr. Compton Lewis. He recognized the careless, aggressive attitude that he'd seen in other men--in his brother, for instance. The source was simple insecurity, which can control you the way a pinch collar controls a dog.
They returned outside. Lewis went to work on the Ford once more, getting the spare on the front, in place of one of those that'd been shot out--so they could drag the other flat on the rear, like he'd suggested.
Hart reflected on how much the disaster at the house was eating at him.
Blindsided...
Looking for clues he should've seen but hadn't. He hated incompetence but hated it most when he was the guilty party. Hart had once canceled a hit in St. Louis, when it turned out that the "park" his victim used to walk home from work--a perfect shooting zone--was a neighborhood playground, filled with dozens of energetic little witnesses. Angrily, he'd realized that the two times he'd surveyed the place in preparation for the kill had been in midmorning, while the kids were still in school.
He now looked around the house and yard. There was a possibility that somewhere he'd left damning trace evidence. But probably Lewis was right; the cops here weren't out of that famous show CSI--Crime Scene International or whatever it was called. Hart didn't watch TV, though he knew the idea: all that expensive scientific equipment.
No, something more fundamental was bothering him. He was thinking back to the paw print and the creature who'd left it, its disregard for the men who'd invaded its territory. Any challenges here weren't about microscopes and computers. They were more primitive.
He felt that tickle of fear again.
Lewis was moving along with the jack and the lug wrench, swapping the wheels on the Ford. He looked at his watch. "We'll be back to civilization by ten-thirty. Man, I can taste that beer and burger now."