The Bodies Left Behind

they’d been slogging through since fleeing the Feldmans’ house.
    “Is this it?” Michelle asked.
    They found their answer only thirty feet away, a large wooden sign:
    PERKINSTOWN 64 MILES.
    DULUTH, MN 187 MILES
    CAMP RESPONSIBLY ON THE JOLIET TRAIL
    ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES

“HOW MUCH TIME do you think it bought us?” Lewis asked.
    Referring to the conversation with Graham Boyd, Brynn’s husband.
    “Hard to say.”
    They’d come miles through the underbrush, adjusting their course occasionally after consulting the GPS, Google Earth and the paper map as they made their way north.
    “So that was why you turned it on, her phone?”
    “Right.” Though just after the conversation he’d removed the battery so the police couldn’t trace it. “I’ve been waiting for that. Wanted to hold out for as long aswe could. Now we put him at ease. He’ll go to sleep and won’t worry until three or four when he wakes up in an empty bed. By then they’ll both be dead and buried.”
    “He believed you?”
    “Pretty sure.”
    As they walked on, Hart was wondering about her husband, somebody married to a woman like Brynn . . . what would he be like? Low voice, seemed smart, well-spoken, wasn’t drunk. He wondered if the man’s words had contained clues that might help him find and kill her more efficiently.
    Not really.
    Still, he kept replaying the conversation. It fascinated him.
    Two different last names. Didn’t surprise him that Brynn had kept her maiden name.
    Graham . . . The man she slept with, the man she shared a life with. Unusual name. Where did it come from? Was he conservative, liberal? Religious? What did he do for a living? Hart was interested in the relief that had filled his voice. Something seemed a bit off about it. Hart didn’t know what to make of that. Yeah, relieved . . . but another emotion too.
    He wished he’d gotten a better look at her in the Feldmans’ driveway. Pretty enough, he recalled. Brownish hair, pulled back. A nice figure. Hadn’t let herself go. Picturing her eyes. Brows furrowed as she registered his presence when he rose from the bushes.
    Hart had killed six people. Three had looked at him as he did it. Seeing their eyes meant nothing to him. He didn’t prefer that they look away. He didn’t look awayeither. The only one who hadn’t cried was the one woman he’d killed, a drug dealer.
    Yo, you gonna do this?
    He hadn’t answered.
    You and me, we work something out?
    She’d stolen money, or hadn’t, skimmed the drugs, or hadn’t. Wasn’t Hart’s issue. He’d made an agreement with the man who wanted her dead. And so he, a craftsman, made her dead, staring into her face as he did so to make sure she wasn’t going to leap aside or pull a hidden weapon.
    Brynn had looked him in the eye too as she fired.
    A craftswoman.
    “Hart?”
    Lewis’s voice shook him out of his reflection. He tensed, looking around. “Yeah?”
    “You’re a Milwaukee boy, I’m one too. How come we never worked together before?”
    “Don’t know.”
    “You work in the city much?”
    “Not much, no. Safer that way.”
    “Where you live?”
    “South of town.”
    “Toward Kenosha?”
    “Not that far.”
    “Lotta building going on in those parts.”
    Lewis stopped suddenly. “Look up there, a post or something. A sign.”
    “Where?”
    “See it? On the right.”
    They moved forward carefully, Hart putting asidehis thoughts about Brynn with some reluctance, and stopped at the sign.
    In the summer of 1673, Louis Joliet, a 27-year-old philosopher, and Fr. Jacques Marquette, a 35-year-old Jesuit priest, crossed Wisconsin on their way to the Mississippi River. Although the trail you are standing on is named for him, Joliet never hiked this 458 mile route. He and Marquette made their voyage mostly by waterway. The Joliet Trail was created by fur traders and people just like you, outdoor-lovers, some years later.
    Hart consulted the GPS on his BlackBerry and the paper map.
    “Which way’d those girls get?”
    “Has to be to the right. That’s the ranger station, few miles away.”
    Lewis looked up and down the trail, which, little traveled this time of year, was overgrown and tangled with branches and dotted with stubborn saplings rising through the sludge of leaves.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “You ask me, this ain’t no trail at all. It’s just less forest.”
    Hart smiled at that. Which made Lewis smile too.

    HERE THEY WERE, two women moving relentlessly