Shallow Graves

together—just you and me.”
    Where was this leading?
    She took his hand and pulled him toward the door.
    “Where’re we going?” he asked.
    “Raking leaves.”
    “Are you serious?”
    She pulled him outside. “Sure, come on. It’s fun.”
    “I haven’t raked leaves for twenty years. They don’t have leaves in L.A. And even if they did, I wouldn’t rake them.”
    He resisted at first. But here she was, a beautiful woman with whom he’d shared secrets. And so he said, “I guess.”
    He paused on the back porch. Looked out on what must’ve been four or five acres of colored leaves. She tossed him a rake.
    He studied it for a moment. Then said, “I don’t know how it works.”
    THE GLINT OF light caught the deputy’s eye.
    He pulled the Plymouth squad car off the road and eased it into the late-morning shade of a sugar maple, scarred from past years’ syrup spigots. He climbed out of the car, pulled his lavender-tinted sunglasses on and began walking through the tall grass and forsythia whips. He’d lived in and around Cleary all his life and knew the customs and routines—where people tended to be and when you could expect to see them there and when you couldn’t.
    And one place you didn’t expect to see a car parked was in this field on Sunday morning.
    He climbed over what was left of a low stone fence and walked through a row of more maples to a narrow dirt road that led into some woods and just stopped about halfway through.
    The car was parked exactly in the center of this road. The deputy paused twenty yards away and looked at it. A cheap Nissan. White. New York plates and a Cleary Tigers bumper sticker. The reason he stopped wasn’t because he was noting all these details. He stopped because he didn’t want to see what was in the car.
    Figuring he’d deduced what had happened. Two high schoolers had spent their last hours on earth making out only to doze off and die, thanks to a bum exhaust pipe. That was the only possible reason anyonewould park on this road on Saturday night and the only reason anyone would still be here now.
    He took a breath to calm his stuttering heart and walked forward. He found out that he was wrong. There was another reason a car was parked in the middle of this deserted road. Because the driver had been murdered.
    The boy had been shot three times in the chest with a small-caliber gun. His face was serene and there was hardly any blood on the body. Which meant he’d died quickly. The boy’s face was pressed against the passenger window, away from the deputy, and his hand gripped the door handle. There was no lividity—sinking of the blood to the lower extremities of the body. Which meant that he’d died recently.
    Damn. His heart sank. The deputy walked around to the other side of the car and looked at the face. He recognized Ned Harper. A high school boy, a football player and, he believed, a one-eighty-division wrestler. He remembered that he’d seen Ned’s father driving the Nissan around town. He wondered why the parents hadn’t phoned him in missing. Maybe when your son was an eighteen-year-old football player, you assumed he’d be out late and didn’t start to worry for a day or two. The deputy’s daughter was two years old and he worried about her constantly. He didn’t think there’d ever come a time when he didn’t.
    Who’d do something like this?
    Maybe the boy’d picked up a hitchhiker. Maybe an escaped prisoner from Sing-Sing down in Ossining. But then why would he leave the car? Maybe it was an accident. He’d been hunting with a friend, the gun went off and the other boy panicked. But, no, thedeputy realized. That couldn’t be it. Not with three separate wounds.
    He walked in a slow circle, looking for obvious clues, but he knew the sheriff would take charge of that and call the county in too. Then he realized he was just stalling, not wanting to make the call to report it.
    The sun shot off the slanted window, a dove called from deep in the moist forest. The deputy walked slowly back to the car, praying he wouldn’t be the one elected to tell the boy’s parents.

Chapter 18
    AT FOUR-THIRTY PELLAM remembered Janine.
    “Oh, hell.”
    Sam looked up. Probably thinking that he’d pointed the muzzle of the single-shot, break-action shotgun the wrong way or hadn’t remembered one of the firearm safety rules Pellam had told him.
    For the past couple hours they’d been plinking away with shotguns. Occasionally Pellam would throw a