A Killing in the Hills

2


Pale yellow tape stamped with a repeating bleat of ominous black block letters – CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS – stretched across the mouth of the Salty Dawg’s parking lot, bouncing and twisting in the crisp fall wind, bellying and sagging.

Bell Elkins tore through the tape as if it were tinsel on last year’s Christmas tree – as if it were, that is, superfluous, out of place, and certainly nothing that ought, under the present circumstances, to be impeding her progress. She crossed the lot in five long strides, dodging emergency vehicles, hopping over crumble-edged fissures in the blacktop. Her arms were tucked tight against her sides, hands curled into fists, chin tilted up as she charged forward.

The door was blocked by Deputy Charlie Mathers. He was a wide man with slicked-back black hair, a perpetual frosting of sweat on his bright pink forehead, and a small dimple in his chin that looked like the half-moon print of a baker’s thumbnail pressed randomly in a ball of dough.

‘Ms Elkins,’ he said, palms held straight up like stop signs, as if she might just take a mind to run him over, ‘this here’s a crime scene and I really can’t let you—’

‘Hell with that, Charlie. My daughter’s in there.’

Bell pressed the crunchy ball of yellow tape against his massive chest and prepared to go right on by. She had run track in college, before she became pregnant with Carla, and while that was almost twenty years ago and she hadn’t kept up with the punishing daily regimen, she still had strong legs and a kind of permanent forward momentum. Her body language, she’d been told too many times, gave off the constant vibe that she was pushing against things: doors, rules, limits, propriety, even the wind. Maybe I am, had become her standard reply, more to shut people up than anything else. Maybe I am. She had springy reddish brown hair divided by a left-side part, a high forehead, thin mouth, small nose. Because she’d bolted from her desk and headed over here in such a hurry, she was still wearing black-rimmed reading glasses, glasses that she would’ve torn off if she’d remembered them. Behind the lenses, her eyes – ferocious-looking at the moment, half-wild, aimed at the place where she knew her daughter was – were light gray.

‘Ms Elkins, you can’t just go bustin’ in here without proper authoriza—’

‘Back off, Charlie. I mean it.’

Sixteen minutes earlier, Bell had been sitting in her office in the county courthouse, lost in the thought-maze of a complicated case, when her assistant, Rhonda Lovejoy, had arrived in a frantic dither, the orangey-blond curls of her perm bouncing and shivering, as if her hair were even more frightened than she was.

‘Trouble!’ Rhonda had squealed. Foamy flecks of spit accumulated in the loose corners of her mouth. ‘Gunshots . . . downtown—’ She paused to pant dramatically, sticking out a chubby index finger to mark her place in her narrative. With her other hand, she clutched her considerable stomach.

Bell, frowning, had lifted her gaze from the tiny print in the massive leather-bound law book that lay open between her spread elbows on the desktop. The case – she had to decide in two days whether to indict a mentally challenged man named Albie Sheets for the murder of a six-year-old – was a daunting one, fraught with moral and legal dilemmas as tightly tangled as miscellaneous string and single shoelaces and ancient rubber bands nested in the back of a kitchen drawer. Whenever Bell sat down to tackle it, she lost all sense of time. She had instructed her assistant to meet her here at the office this morning by 9 A.M. Hearing a heavy step in the hall, Bell had rediscovered her watch and realized how late Rhonda was. Ridiculously late. At which point another thought had occurred to her: She, too, was late – late to pick up Carla at the Salty Dawg.

First things first, however. Bell had squared her shoulders, readying herself to be the fire-breathing boss, to address Rhonda in all-out, full-on, rip-her-a-new-one mode.

And then her assistant’s words finally registered.

Gunshots. Downtown.

‘Where?’ Bell said.

Rhonda, first gulping another spoonful of air, had managed a raspy, ‘Salty Dawg.’ The syllables came out in three ragged gasps. Rhonda’s rapid ascent of the courthouse steps had just about done her in.

Bell was up and out of her chair so fast that it had startled Rhonda, causing her to tilt back and wobble precariously like a sideswiped bowling pin, nearly knocking over the yellow vase on the bookshelf behind her. Bell whipped past her assistant and flew through the narrow public hall, loafers clicking against the polished wooden floor, hand diving into the pocket of her black linen trousers to fish out her car keys.

She was halfway down the courthouse steps before she was aware of Rhonda’s voice behind her, plaintive, wailing her name, pleading with her to slow down.

‘Carla’s there,’ Bell said, curt, final, flinging the words back over her shoulder, not breaking her stride. Her runner’s rhythm had, as always, come right back to her, like an obscure fact seemingly forgotten but then instantly available, tucked as it was under the first layer of consciousness.

‘Oh my God!’ Rhonda had cried. ‘Oh my God oh my God oh my God. Do you want me to come with you or should I—’

‘Go back to the office,’ Bell snapped. ‘Get to work.’

Deputy Mathers knew Bell Elkins well enough to know it was hopeless, but he had to try. Or at least to look like he was trying. As she swept past him, he leaned over and reached out a big hand to pluck at her sleeve. Bell shrugged him off like a bug, then made short work of the restaurant door.

‘Don’t touch nothing!’ Mathers said to her back. ‘I know you know what you’re doing, but the sheriff said he’d have my butt if I let anybody—’

‘Got it, Charlie.’

Inside, the chaos was receding, like a wild animal tricked back into its cage. The stunned customers had been shepherded into a far corner of the room, away from the carnage. An old woman swayed back and forth like a human metronome, muttering Jesus Jesus Jesus.

A teenaged boy had thrown up, and he was curved over the smelly mess he’d made, sobbing and quivering, his skinny tattooed arms wrapped tightly around his T-shirted torso.

A Salty Dawg employee – you could tell by her black polyester pants and blousy bright white shirt and shiny white HI! HAVE A DAWG-GONE GOOD DAY! button pinned to the front of that shirt – stared at nothing, eyes wild, mouth open, hands dangling, feet spread.

Two portly women had locked arms and were moaning in unison. They might have been best friends since fourth grade or they might have met seconds ago; it was impossible to tell. Their moaning had a rhythmic, purring quality, almost sexual in its soft undulations.

The little girl who’d been in the midst of the chicken-biscuit meltdown was screaming; her dad, instead of trying to comfort her, was screaming, too, as if in such a terrible moment, the kid was on her own and no business of his. Screams also emanated from a pudgy middle-aged man with a round face and a black goatee.

Bell’s hop-skip of a gaze halted near the center of the room.

It was worse than she’d imagined. And she had imagined it, of course, the way everyone does when they hear about violent death, visualizing it, feeling the dark echo of it in the belly as well as the brain.

The victims lay where they had fallen. Deputies had ascertained that the men were indeed dead and then had backed off, leaving everything intact. The bodies had to stay right where they were until the crime scene techs arrived from the West Virginia State Police Forensic Laboratory.

Make it soon, Bell thought. For God’s sake, make it soon.

Small communities such as Acker’s Gap had no facilities, no personnel – and at the root of it all, no budget – to perform the kind of sophisticated, high-tech analysis that was standard procedure in modern forensics. They had to rely on the state. Which meant waiting their turn. Not even Buster Crutchfield, Raythune County coroner, could get down to business until the forensics team had signed off on it. This was a crime scene, and things had to be done the right way. Delicate sensibilities be damned.

One victim was sprawled across the tabletop. Another was faceup on the floor. Each head was angled in a small lake of blood and brain tissue.

A third man was trapped in his little plastic seat. He looked as if he were in the middle of a clumsy, halfhearted jumping jack, arms and legs spread, body caught in an improvised X. The upper half of his head was a red scramble. His jaw was slack, his mouth hanging open like a ladle on a peg.

Bell saw three knocked-over cardboard cups.

She smelled fresh coffee, stale grease, vomit, the astringent nose-prick of urine.

And she was aware, all over again, of how a violent act changes the atmosphere. She could even taste it: a hard, metallic tang brushed the back of her tongue. An extra pressure registered on her skin.

‘Mrs Elkins,’ a deputy said.

He nodded to her. He and two of his colleagues had arranged themselves in a ragged inadequate circle around the bodies, thumbs tucked into their heavy black belts. The deputies, two men and one woman, identical in their chocolate brown polyester uniforms and flat-brimmed hats, had no visible reaction to the horror that bloomed just inches from their shiny black boots. They had been trained well. They knew they could not so much as place a napkin over a victim’s ruined face, could not close a pair of staring eyes or pull down a rucked-up shirtfront, or the crime scene would be compromised. Everything had to be kept exactly as it was, which meant the dead men would have to remain on display, frozen in their last ghastly moment, for a while longer.

A man’s voice, clipped, stern, businesslike, order-dispensing, climbed above the other sounds. As she moved toward her daughter, Bell’s eyes shifted briefly in that direction. The uniformed man, clearly in charge of things, stood by the tall glass wall. His left hand was cupped around the back of his neck. His right hand was raised to a point level with his mouth. Talking sharply into the radio lodged in his big curved palm was Sheriff Nick Fogelsong.

Bell nodded at him. He nodded back.

Just before Bell had arrived, Carla Elkins found herself shuffling, zombielike, along with the pack being gently prodded by the deputies, her right thigh bumping against the rounded edge of each little beige table as she moved. She felt as if she were in shock – not the dangerous medical kind where they have to slap you or give you a shot, but the kind in which everything . . . slows . . . down . . . and noises come bouncing at you in big round soft blobs, like colored balloons. Yellow and green and purple and orange. And red. Plenty of red.

She had never heard a grown man scream before, and so she kept sneaking glances at the guy with the goatee who shuffled along beside her. He was hunched over, shoulders shaking, head bobbing, and his screams were like squeals. Animal squeals. His hands were thrust out in front of him and fluttering wildly, with evident desperation, as if the fingers didn’t actually belong to him and he was trying to fling them away, one by one, the way you’d want to get rid of something disgusting. Carla was fascinated, and a little appalled.

Then she’d noticed that the gaudy decoration on Mr Goatee’s white cotton sweater was actually blood spray, with bits of what had to be brain – pinkish-gray stuff, like chopped-up chunks of pencil eraser – stuck there, too. He’d been sitting at a table right next to the one where the old guys sat, sucking on a chocolate shake, when it happened. He’d caught a chestful.

Well, Carla thought sheepishly, in that case, guess I’d be screaming, too.

She shivered. Then she heard a commotion at the door. One quick glimpse of the figure moving toward her – the figure had paused ever so slightly at the ring of deputies, but then resumed its bold, don’t-mess-with-me stride – and Carla’s heart gave a funny little lurch. She felt a crazy fizz of joy and a spasm of pure yearning. She’d managed not to cry so far, she’d fought against tears, she’d been calm, so calm, but now she knew she could stop fighting. She didn’t have to worry anymore about being strong.

‘Mom,’ Carla said. Hot tears burned her eyes.

‘Sweetie.’ Bell Elkins reached out and pulled her daughter into her arms.

At first Bell just held her, oblivious to everything that was happening around them, the screams and the moans and the gagging, and the burgeoning noise from outside the restaurant, too, the sirens and the crackling blasts from the bullhorn, urging the world to move back, back, back, and the shouts – muffled by the glass walls, but still audible – from the swelling, swaying, curious crowd that was filling the street in the wake of the police cars and the ambulances and all the excitement.

‘It’s okay now, sweetie,’ Bell murmured. ‘It’s okay now.’ This was said directly into Carla’s ear, a soft chanting coo, a lullaby on the fly. ‘It’s okay now.’

‘Mom, I—’

Carla tried to alter her position ever so slightly within her mother’s arms, arms that made a circle as rigid as a barrel stave.

‘Don’t move, sweetie,’ Bell said. ‘Just a minute.’

It was scarier, somehow, now that she was actually holding her child, now that the reality of what had occurred right next to Carla was so grimly apparent. To keep panic at bay Bell focused on the specific reality of the young woman in her arms, on the fixed dimensions, the visceral details. Bell was keenly aware of Carla’s thin shoulders, of the beguilingly soft texture of her daughter’s short dark shingle of hair, of the jaunty smell of the Herbal Essences Fruit Fusions shampoo that Carla used – all strangely juxtaposed with the solemn proximity of death, death that spread out just beyond this neat little corner into which the customers had been corralled.

‘Mom,’ Carla said. ‘Gotta breathe, you know?’

Bell relaxed a bit, but knew she needed to maintain physical contact, knew she could not afford to break the circuit. Hands still clamped on Carla’s shoulders, she moved her head back, so that she could look directly into her daughter’s eyes.

‘You’re okay? Really?’

‘Yeah, Mom.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re sure?’

Carla nodded. Her lips were tucked in tight. She was afraid to go beyond single-word answers at this point, afraid she’d start sobbing and not be able to stop. Afraid she’d turn into Mr Goatee.

Bell scanned her daughter’s face. That face, she saw, had lost its chronic cockiness. It wasn’t just the shiny tear-trails on Carla’s thin cheeks that accounted for the change. This face had shed the hard ceramic glaze of cool that had so infuriated Bell when it first appeared about a year and a half ago, transforming her sweet little girl into an entirely new person, a stranger, a creature of shrugs and slouches and cynical opinions and constant backtalk, broodingly indifferent to anything Bell had to say.

For the moment, her child had somehow returned, in all of her transparent neediness, all of her soft vulnerability.

‘You’re okay?’ Bell repeated.

‘Yeah,’ Carla said. ‘I think so. Yeah. Yeah.’ A pause. ‘Maybe.’ Her voice was halting, tentative, husky with choked-back emotion. The next words came in a rush. ‘But listen, Mom, it was – it was awful, really, it was so gross and scary because I was sitting right over there and I saw the whole thing and – and their heads, their heads just explo—I saw it, Mom, and I just couldn’t believe that I was actually seeing what I was see—’

Bell quickly removed her hand from Carla’s right shoulder and pressed two fingers against her daughter’s lips, stopping the words.

‘No, sweetie. No, no, no. Not yet,’ Bell said, gently but firmly. ‘Wait for the deputies to take your statement. It’s very important that when you describe what happened, you’re telling it for the first time. That you’re not influenced by hearing what others say that they saw. So that it’s all your own words.’

She didn’t mean to be abrupt, she hated to shush her child, but Bell knew how imperative it was to do things right. To follow protocol.

She was a mother, but she was also a prosecuting attorney, and on the stem of her softly winding maternal thoughts, another notion was growing like a wild spike – darker, harsher, meaner. The thorn on the rose bush.

They’d get the bastard who did this. There’d be no mistakes in compiling the prosecution’s case. No technicalities that might cause an acquittal. No slip-ups that might put his sorry ass back out on the street.

Bell looked at the other customers, a clump of bug-eyed, ashen-faced people, many of whom couldn’t stop trembling and twitching and moaning and, in some cases, hyperventilating. The paramedics, she knew, would check them out, one by one, all in good time. Fine.

She wasn’t worried about their health. She was worried about her case.

‘And that,’ Bell went on, raising her voice until it turned official, until it was curtly bureaucratic, ‘goes for everybody else, too.’ She tried to connect with as many pairs of eyes as she could, locking onto them, witness by witness. ‘Please don’t talk to each other until you’ve been cleared to do so by law enforcement authorities.’

The old woman, the one who’d been repeatedly summoning Jesus, abruptly stopped her chant. With a knobby blue-veined fist, she pulled together the sagging halves of her faded gray sweater. She gave Bell a belligerent sideways glare, pale blue eyes narrowed, nose twitching, bottom lip jutting out like a pink windowsill. She didn’t hail from around here. She’d stopped in for a cup of coffee and a biscuit with redeye gravy – and now this.

‘Just who the hell are you,’ the old woman snarled, ‘to be tellin’ us what to do?’

Before Bell could answer, Carla Elkins turned to the old woman.

‘Hey – listen up,’ Carla said. Her soft muffled voice was gone, and the voice that replaced it was the snippy, dismissive one that usually irritated Bell but right now made her terribly proud. ‘For your information,’ Carla went on, ‘she happens to be Belfa Elkins, Raythune County prosecuting attorney. So if you know what’s good for you, lady, you’d better do exactly what she tells you to.’