The Bodies Left Behind

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 could 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 expressionon 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.