Jeffery Deaver

1

Something nagged, yet she couldn’t quite figure out what.

Like a faint recurring ache somewhere in your body.

Or a man on the street behind you as you near your apartment. . . . Was he the same one who’d been glancing at you on the subway?

Or a dark dot moving toward your bed that’s now vanished. A black-widow spider?

But then her visitor, sitting on her living room couch, glanced at her and smiled and Alice Sanderson forgot the concern—if concern it was. Arthur had a good mind and a solid body, sure. But he had a great smile, which counted for a lot more.

“How ’bout some wine?” she asked, walking into her small kitchen.

“Sure. Whatever you’ve got.”

“So, this’s pretty fun—playing hooky on a weekday. Two grown adults. I like it.”

“Born to be wild,” he joked.

Outside the window, across the street, were rows of painted and natural brownstones. They could also see part of the Manhattan skyline, hazy on this pleasant spring weekday afternoon. Air—fresh enough for the city—wafted in, carrying the scents of garlic and oregano from an Italian restaurant up the street. It was their favorite type of cuisine—one of the many common interests they’d discovered since they’d met several weeks ago at a wine tasting in SoHo. In late April, Alice had found herself in the crowd of about forty, listening to a sommelier lecture about the wines of Europe, when she’d heard a man’s voice ask about a particular type of Spanish red wine.

She had barked a quiet laugh. She happened to own a case of that very wine (well, part of a case now). It was made by a little-known vineyard. Perhaps not the best Rioja ever produced but the wine offered another bouquet: that of fond memory. She and a French lover had consumed plenty of it during a week in Spain—a perfect liaison, just the thing for a woman in her late twenties who’d recently broken up with her boyfriend. The vacation fling was passionate, intense and, of course, doomed, which made it all the better.

Alice had leaned forward to see who’d mentioned the wine: a nondescript man in a business suit. After a few glasses of the featured selections she’d grown braver and, juggling a plate of finger food, had made her way across the room and asked him about his interest in the wine.

He’d explained about a trip he’d taken to Spain a few years ago with an ex-girlfriend. How he’d come to enjoy the wine. They’d sat at a table and talked for some time. Arthur, it seemed, liked the same food she did, the same sports. They both jogged and spent an hour each morning in overpriced health clubs. “But,” he said, “I wear the cheapest JC Penney shorts and T-shirts I can find. No designer garbage for me. . . .” Then he’d blushed, realizing he’d possibly insulted her.

But she’d laughed. She took the same approach to workout clothes (in her case, bought at Target when visiting her family in Jersey). She’d quashed the urge to tell him, though, worried about coming on too strong. They’d played that popular urban dating game: what we have in common. They’d rated restaurants, compared Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes and complained about their shrinks.

A date ensued, then another. Art was funny and courteous. A little stiff, shy at times, reclusive, which she put down to what he described as the breakup from hell—a long-term girlfriend in the fashion business. And his grueling work schedule—he was a Manhattan businessman. He had little free time.

Would anything come of it?

He wasn’t a boyfriend yet. But there were far worse people to spend time with. And when they’d kissed on their most recent date, she’d felt the low ping that meant, oh, yeah: chemistry. Tonight might or might not reveal exactly how much. She’d noticed that Arthur had furtively—he thought—been checking out the tight pink little number she’d bought at Bergdorf’s especially for their date. And Alice had made some preparations in the bedroom in case kissing turned into something else.

Then the faint uneasiness, the concern about the spider, returned.

What was bothering her?

Alice supposed it was nothing more than a residue of unpleasantness she’d experienced when a delivery man had dropped off a package earlier. Shaved head and bushy eyebrows, smelling of cigarette smoke and speaking in a thick Eastern European accent. As she’d signed the papers, he’d looked her over—clearly flirting—and then asked for a glass of water. She brought it to him reluctantly and found him in the middle of her living room, staring at her sound system.

She’d told him she was expecting company and he’d left, frowning, as if angry over a snub. Alice had watched out the window and noted that nearly ten minutes had passed before he got into the double-parked van and left.

What had he been doing in the apartment building all that time? Checking out—

“Hey, Earth to Alice . . . ”

“Sorry.” She laughed, continued to the couch, then sat next to Arthur, their knees brushing. Thoughts of the delivery man vanished. They touched glasses, these two people who were compatible in all-important areas—politics (they contributed virtually the same amount to the Dems and gave money during NPR pledge drives), movies, food, traveling. They were both lapsed Protestants.

When their knees touched again, his rubbed seductively. Then Arthur smiled and asked, “Oh, that painting you bought, the Prescott? Did you get it?”

Her eyes shone as she nodded. “Yep. I own a Harvey Prescott.”

Alice Sanderson was not a wealthy woman by Manhattan standards but she’d invested well and indulged her true passion. She’d followed the career of Prescott, a painter from Oregon who specialized in photorealistic works of families—not existing people but ones he himself made up. Some traditional, some not so—single parent, mixed race or gay. It was next to impossible finding any of  his paintings on the market in her price range but she was on the mailing lists of the galleries that occasionally sold his work. Last month she’d learned from one out west that a small early canvas might be coming available for $150,000. Sure enough, the owner decided to sell and she’d dipped into her investment account to come up with the cash.

She glanced at her walls and told him she wasn’t sure where to hang the painting in her small apartment. A brief fantasy played out: Arthur’s staying over one Saturday night and on Sunday, after brunch, helping her find the perfect place for the canvas.

Her voice was filled with pleasure and pride as she said, “You want to see it?”

“You bet.”

They rose and she walked toward the bedroom, Arthur behind her.

They got to the bedroom door.

Which was when the black-widow struck.

With a jolt Alice now understood what had been bothering her, and it had nothing to do with the rude delivery man. No, it was Arthur. When they’d spoken yesterday he’d asked when the Prescott would be arriving.

She’d told him she was getting a painting but had never mentioned the artist’s name. Slowing now, at the bedroom door. Her hands were sweating. If he’d learned of the painting without her telling him, then maybe he’d found other facts about her life. What if all of the many things they had in common were lies? What if he’d known about her love of the Spanish wine ahead of time? What if he’d been at the tasting just to get close to her? All the restaurants they knew, the travel, the TV shows. . . .

My God, here she was leading a man she’d known for only a few weeks into her bedroom. All her defenses down . . .

Breathing hard now. . . . Shivering.

“Oh, the painting,” he whispered, looking past her. “It’s beautiful.”

And, hearing his calm, pleasant voice, Alice laughed to herself. Are you crazy? She must have mentioned Prescott’s name to Arthur. She tucked the uneasiness away. Calm down. You’ve been living alone too long. Remember his smiles, his joking. He thinks the way you think.

Relax.

A faint laugh. Alice stared at the two-by-two-foot canvas, the muted colors, a half-dozen people at a dinner table looking out, some amused, some pensive, some troubled.

“Incredible,” he said.

“The composition is wonderful but it’s their expressions that he captures so perfectly. Don’t you think?” Alice turned to him.

Her smile vanished. “What’s that, Arthur? What are you doing?” He’d put on beige cloth gloves and was reaching into his pocket. And then she looked into his eyes, which had hardened into dark pinpricks beneath furrowed brows, in a face she hardly recognized at all.

Seven books on, most series start to get a bit thin. The characters are doing the same things over and over and the plots get stretched. Which is why The Broken Window is such a surprise. This eighth novel featuring quadriplegic forensic expert Lincoln Rhyme is one of Deaver’s best. Same characters, but the plot, built around identity theft, is riveting. The case for Rhyme, this time, is close to home. His cousin, Arthur, has been arrested for murder. The forensic evidence against him is solid. In fact, it’s perfect, so perfect that it can’t all be real; no one could leave all that trace behind at a crime scene. But that’s Rhyme’s riddle. The police are satisfied and Arthur is in jail awaiting trial. It doesn’t take Rhyme and his partner/lover, Amelia Sachs, long to find out that the evidence against Arthur has been artificially planted. The problem is how and by whom? The trail leads to a huge multinational corporation with information on millions of people, and eventually to a killer so clever he can turn the tables on Rhyme and Sachs as they search for him. If you’ve even been worried about all the info an online hunter could uncover about you, this is one scary novel. Everything in it seems as plausible and easy as buying a purse on eBay. Deaver has outdone himself.”
— Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail

“The topical subject matter makes the story line particularly compelling, while longtime fans will relish Deaver’s intimate exploration of a tragedy from Rhyme’s adolescence.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Quadriplegic forensics whiz Lincoln Rhyme and his Glock-toting girlfriend, Amelia Sachs, track a serial killer who uses an all-knowing computer database to frame fall guys. Movie Pitch: Ironside meets CSI and Enemy of the State. Bottom Line: Rhyme still intrigues in his eighth outing, while Deaver’s scarily believable depiction of identity theft in a total-surveillance society stokes our paranoia. A -.”
— Entertainment Weekly

“Anxious about identity theft? Well, as a Jeffery Deaver character says, “If somebody wants to destroy your life, there’s nothing you can do about it.” That’s the theme of THE BROKEN WINDOW (Simon & Schuster, $26.95), one of the most unnerving of Deaver’s eight novels featuring his quadriplegic forensic detective, Lincoln Rhyme. Smarter and scarier than the genre’s garden-variety nut jobs, the mad genius at work in this book takes pride in penetrating secure databases. After stripping people of an essential piece of their lives, he frames them for his own murderous deeds. But here, the rape-torture-killing element seems largely just a concession to the sensationalistic formula of the thriller. Deaver is far more caught up in the devious mechanics of identity fraud, analyzed in depth by Rhyme once it’s determined that the killer has access to the supersecret files of a data-mining company whose clients include government agencies. While murder is still murder, the image that lingers in this Orwellian nightmare is that of the villain’s original guinea pig, once a doctor, now a wretch who calls himself Job and lives in flophouses, hiding from the angry God who stole his life.”
— Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

Narrated by Holter Graham.  Listen to an excerpt.

 

October 14, 2008

Question: I know you plan on alternating between a Lincoln Rhyme book and a Kathryn Dance book, so this stand-alone thriller came as a bit of a surprise when I read it. Where did the idea for “The Bodies Left Behind” come from?

Jeffery Deaver: I was in Manchester, England, a few years ago and a couple came up to me and rather shyly said, “Mr. Deaver, we know it takes you a year to write a book, but we read it only a day or two. Can’t you write faster.” I was flattered — and I took it as a challenge. If fans wanted more books, I’m happy to give them more — though it may be a few years before I produce two in a six-month period again. (I’m not as young as I used to be!) What I enjoyed about “Bodies” is that the book gave me the chance to push a bit, since it’s not a Lincoln or Kathryn story. “Bodies” is filled with typical Deaver twists and turns, and takes place over a short period of time, but it also has one of the more shocking endings of any book I’ve ever written. Not gory or macabre, but I’ve been told it takes the breath away. I’m calling the novel “Thelma and Louise” meets “Deliverance.”

Question: This book is a true thriller with non-stop action. I’ve heard it described by one reviewer as a cat-and-mouse chase through the woods. Did you spend a few nights in the woods as part of your research? Have you spent time in a park like your fictional Marquette State Park, where this book takes place?

Jeffery Deaver: I grew up in the Midwest and spent a lot of time in the woods of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Canada, fishing and hiking. I suppose the idea for the book came out of my overnight camping trips to places that were nowhere near “civilization” (like 7-Elevens and Pizza Huts!). I remember many nights where the forests were alive with noise and our youthful imaginations populated the place with all manners of killers, not to mention the more likely bears and wolves. I decided then I wanted to set a book in such a place.

Question: Brynn McKenzie, the off-duty deputy at the center of this story, is a really interesting, strong female character. How would you describe Brynn?

Jeffery Deaver: I greatly enjoyed creating Brynn. She’s resourceful, strong, intelligent . . . She’s a mother with a troubled son, a daughter of a strong mother, a devoted and yet reticent wife. Much of her outer toughness masks some deep insecurities. One of the most enjoyable things about this book was unraveling the real person Brynn McKenzie is, as the story goes along and the various plots unfold. I think readers will love learning about her as much as they do following the crime plot.

Question: You’ve created a lot of bad guys in your books and, in “The Bodies Left Behind,” you add Lewis and Hart to that long list. They work together in this story but are distinctly different in style and experience. Did you model them after anyone in particular?

Jeffery Deaver: I really wanted to explore the various faces of evil, and Lewis and Hart are bad in very different ways. Writing villains is great fun for me, and I particularly enjoyed developing the relationship between these two, seeing how they move from antagonism to a true understanding of who each is. After all, we can’t have cardboard caricatures of villains, otherwise there’s no emotional connection with the story.

Silence.

The woods around Lake Mondac were as quiet as could be, a world of difference from the churning, chaotic city where the couple spent their weekdays.

Silence, broken only by an occasional a-hoo-ah of a distant bird, the hollow siren of a frog.

And now: another sound.

A shuffle of leaves, two impatient snaps of branch or twig.

Footsteps?

No, that couldn’t be. The other vacation houses beside the lake were deserted on this cool Friday afternoon in April.

Emma Feldman, in her early thirties, set down her martini on the kitchen table, where she sat across from her husband. She tucked a strand of curly black hair behind her ear and walked to one of the grimy kitchen windows. She saw nothing but dense clusters of cedar, juniper and black spruce rising up a steep hill, whose rocks resembled cracked yellow bone.

Her husband lifted an eyebrow. “What was it?”

She shrugged and returned to her chair. “I don’t know. Didn’t see anything.”

Outside, silence again.

Emma, lean as any stark, white birch outside one of the many windows of the vacation house, shook off her blue jacket. She was wearing the matching skirt and a white blouse. Lawyer clothes. Hair in a bun. Lawyer hair. Stockings but shoeless.

Steven, turning his attention to the bar, had abandoned his jacket as well, and a wrinkly  striped tie. The thirty-six-year-old, with a full head of unruly hair, was in a blue shirt and his belly protruded inexorably over the belt of his navy slacks. Emma didn’t care; she thought he was cute and always would.

“And look what I got,” he said, nodding toward the upstairs guest room and unbagging a large bottle of pulpy organic vegetable juice. Their friend, visiting from Chicago this weekend, had been flirting with liquid diets lately, drinking the most disgusting things.

Emma read the ingredients and wrinkled her nose. “It’s all hers. I’ll stick with vodka.”

“Why I love you.”

The house creaked, as it often did. The place was 76 years old. It featured an abundance of wood and a scarcity of steel and stone. The kitchen, where they stood, was angular and paneled in glowing yellow pine. The floor was lumpy. The colonial structure was one of three houses on this private road, each squatting on ten acres. It could be called lakefront property but only because the lake lapped at a rocky shore two hundred yards from the front door.

The house was plopped down in a small clearing on the east side of a substantial elevation. Midwest reserve kept people from labeling these hills “mountains” here in Wisconsin, though it rose easily 700 or 800 feet into the air. Presently the big house was bathed in blue late-afternoon.

Emma gazed out at rippling Lake Mondac, far enough from the hill to catch some descending sun. Now, in early spring, the surrounding area was scruffy, reminding of wet hackles rising from a guard dog’s back. The house was much nicer than they could otherwise afford—they’d bought it through foreclosure—and she knew from the moment she’d seen it that this was the perfect vacation house.

Silence. . . .

The colonial also had a pretty colorful history.

The owner of a big meatpacking company in Chicago had built the place before World War Two. It was discovered years later that much of his fortune had come from selling black-market meat, circumventing the rationing system that limited foods here at home to make sure the troops were nourished. In 1956 the man’s body was found floating in the lake; he was possibly the victim of veterans who’d had learned of his scheme and killed him, then searched the house, looking for the illicit cash he’d hidden here.

No ghosts figured in any version of the death, though Emma and Steven couldn’t keep from embellishing. When guests were staying here they’d gleefully take note of who kept the bathroom lights on and who braved the dark after hearing the tales.

Two more snaps outside. Then a third.

Emma frowned. “You hear that? Again, that sound. Outside.”

Steven glanced out the window. The breeze kicked up now and then. He turned back.

Her eyes strayed to her briefcase.

“Caught that,” he said, chiding.

“What?”

“Don’t even think about opening it.”

She laughed, though without much humor.

“Work-free weekend,” he said. “We agreed.”

“And what’s in there?” she asked, nodding at the backpack he carried in lieu of an attaché case. Emma was wrestling the lid off a jar of cocktail olives.

“Only two things of relevance, Your Honor: my le Carré novel and that bottle of Merlot I had at work. Shall I introduce the latter into evid . . .” Voice fading. He looked to the window, through which they could see a tangle of weeds and trees and branches and rocks the color of dinosaur bones.

Emma too glanced outside.

“That I heard,” he said. He refreshed his wife’s martini. She dropped olives into both drinks.

“What was it?”

“Remember that bear?”

“He didn’t come up to the house.” They tinked glasses and sipped clear liquor.

Steven said, “You seem preoccupied. What’s up? The union case?”

Research for a corporate acquisition had revealed some possible shenanigans within the lakefront workers union in Milwaukee. The government had become involved and the acquisition was temporarily tabled, which nobody was very happy about.

But she said, “This’s something else. One of our clients makes car parts.”

“Right. Kenosha Auto. See, I do listen.”

She looked at her husband with an astonished glance. “Well, the CEO, turns out, is an absolute prick.” She explained about a wrongful death case involving components of a hybrid car engine: a freak accident, a passenger electrocuted. “The head of their R&D department . . . why, he demanded I return all the technical files. Imagine that.”

Steven said, “I liked your other case better—that state representative’s last will and testament . . . the sex stuff.”

“Shhhh,” she said, alarmed. “Remember, I never said a word about it.”

“My lips are sealed.”

Emma speared an olive and ate it. “And how was your day?”

Steven laughed. “Please . . . I don’t make enough to talk about business after hours.” The Feldmans were a shining example of a blind date gone right, despite the odds. Emma, a U of W law school valedictorian, daughter of Milwaukee/Chicago money; Steven, a city college B.A. from the Brewline, intent on helping society. Their friends gave them six months, top; the Door County wedding, to which all those friends were invited, was exactly eight months after their first date.

Steven pulled a triangle of brie out of a shopping bag. Found crackers and opened them.

“Oh, okay. Just a little.”

Snap, snap . . .

Her husband frowned. Emma said, “Honey, it’s freaking me a little. That was footsteps.”

The three vacation houses here were eight or nine miles from the nearest shop or gas station and a little over a mile from the county highway, which was accessed via a strip of dirt poorly impersonating a road. Marquette State Park, the biggest in the Wisconsin system, swallowed most of the land in the area; Lake Mondac and these houses made up an enclave of private property.

Very private.

And very deserted.

Steven walked into the utility room, pulled aside the limp beige curtain and gazed past a cut-back crepe myrtle into the side yard. “Nothing. I’m thinking we—”

Emma screamed.

“Honey, honey, honey!” her husband cried.

The face studied them through the back window. The man’s head was covered with a stocking, though you could see crew-cut, blondish hair, a colorful tattoo on his neck. The eyes were halfway surprised to see people so close. He wore an olive-drab combat jacket. He knocked on the glass with one hand. In the other he was holding a shotgun, muzzle up. He was smiling eerily.

“Oh, God,” Emma whispered.

Steven pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open and punched numbers, telling her, “I’ll deal with him. Go lock the front door.”

Emma ran to the entryway, dropping her glass. The olives spun amid the dancing shards, picking up dust. Crying out, she heard the kitchen door splinter inward. She looked back and saw the intruder with the shotgun rip the phone from her husband’s hand and shove him against the wall. A print of an old sepia landscape photograph crashed to the floor.

The front door too swung open. A second man, his head also covered with mesh, pushed inside. He had long dark hair, pressed close by the nylon. Taller and stockier than the first, he held a pistol. The black gun was small in his outsized hand. He pushed Emma into the kitchen, where the other man tossed him the cell phone. The bigger one stiffened at the pitch, but caught the phone one-handed. He seemed to grimace in irritation, from the juvenile toss, and dropped the phone in his pocket.

Steven said, “Please . . . What do you . . .?” Voice quavering.

Emma looked away quickly. The less she saw, she was thinking, the better their chances to survive.

“Please,” Steven said, “Please. You can take whatever you want. Just leave us. Please.”

Emma stared at the dark pistol in the taller man’s hand. He wore a black leather jacket and boots. His were like the other man’s, the kind soldiers wear.

Both men 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.