The Bodies Left Behind

grew oblivious to the couple. They looked around the house.
    Emma’s husband continued, “Look, you can have whatever you want. We’ve got a Mercedes outside. I’ll get the keys. You—”
    “Just, don’t talk,” the taller man said, gesturing with the pistol.
    “We have money. And credit cards. Debit card too. I’ll give you the PIN.”
    “What do you want?” Emma asked, crying.
    “Shhh.”
    Somewhere, in its ancient heart, the house creaked once more.

    “A WHAT?”
    “Kinda a hang-up.”
    “To nine-one-one?”
    “Right. Just, somebody called and said, ‘This—’ and then hung up.”
    “Said what?”
    “‘This.’ The word ‘this.’”
    “T-H-I-S?” Sheriff Tom Dahl asked. He was fifty-three years old, his skin smooth and freckled as an adolescent’s. Hair red. He wore a tan uniform shirt that had fit much better when his wife bought it two years ago.
    “Yessir,” Todd Jackson answered, scratching his eyelid. “And then it was hung up.”
    “ Was hung up or he hung it up? There’s a difference.”
    “I don’t know. Oh, I see what you mean.”
    Five twenty-two P.M. , Friday, April 17. This was oneof the more peaceful hours of the day in Kennesha County, Wisconsin. People tended to kill themselves and their fellow citizens, intentionally or by accident, either earlier in the day or later. Dahl knew the schedule as if it’d been printed; if you can’t recognize the habits of your jurisdiction after fourteen years running a law enforcement agency, you have no business at the job.
    Eight deputies were on duty in the Sheriff’s Department, which was next to the courthouse and city hall. The department was in an old building attached to a new one. The old being from the 1870s, the new from exactly one century later. The area of the building where Dahl and the others worked was mostly open-plan and filled with cubicles and desks. This was the new part. The officers here at the moment—six men and two women—wore uniforms that ranged from starched as wood to old bedsheet, reflecting the tour starting hours.
    “We’re checking,” Jackson said. He too had infant skin, though that was unremarkable, considering he was half the sheriff’s age.
    “‘This,’” Dahl mused. “You hear from the lab?”
    “Oh, ’bout that Wilkins thing?” Jackson picked at his stiff collar. “Wasn’t meth. Wasn’t nothing.”
    Even here, in Kennesha, a county with the sparse population of 34,021, meth was a terrible scourge. The users, tweakers, were ruthless, crazed and absolutely desperate to get the product; cookers felt exactly the same about the huge profits they made. More murders were attributed to meth than coke, heroin, pot and alcohol combined. And there were as many accidental deaths by scalding, burning and overdoses as murders related to thedrug. A family of four had just died when their trailer burned down after the mother passed out while cooking a batch in her kitchen. She’d overdosed, Dahl speculated, after sampling some product fresh off the stovetop.
    The sheriff’s jaw tightened. “Well, damn. Just goddamn. He’s cooking it. We all know he’s cooking. He’s playing with us is what he’s doing. And I’d like to arrest him just for that. Well, where did it come from, that nine-one-one call? Landline?”
    “No, somebody’s cell. That’s what’s taking some time.”
    The E911 system, which Kennesha County had had for years, gave the dispatcher the location of the caller in an emergency. The E was for “enhanced,” not “emergency.” It worked with cell calls too, though tracing them was a little more complicated and in the hilly country around this portion of Wisconsin sometimes didn’t work at all.
    This  . . .
    A woman’s voice called across the cluttered space, “Todd, Com Center for you.”
    The deputy headed to his cubicle. Dahl turned back to the wad of arrest reports he was correcting for English as much as for criminal procedure.
    Jackson returned. He didn’t sit down in either of the two office chairs. He hovered, which he did a lot. “Okay, Sheriff. The nine-one-one call? It was from someplace around Lake Mondac.”
    Creepy, Dahl thought. Never liked it up there. The lake squatted in the middle of Marquette State Park, also creepy. He’d run two rapes and two homicides there and in the last murder investigation they’d recovered only a minority of the victim’s body. He glanced at themap on his wall. Nearest town was Clausen, six, seven miles