A Killing in the Hills

24


Serena Crumpler was waiting in front of Bell’s office door. It was just after 5:30 A.M.

Spotting her as she rounded the corner, Bell sighed a sigh so long and so deep that it could have originated in the soles of her feet.

Damn. She’d been hoping for a little solitude. Craving it, in fact. No phone calls, no texts, no e-mails, no visitors, no other human face. Just the desk in front of her.

Once the day was officially under way, there’d be nowhere to hide. Nowhere to think. She had more than a dozen ongoing cases and only two assistants and a secretary. She had a court appearance that morning. She had motions to file, police reports to read. She had a speech to write. She had an appointment with the sheriff to drive out to Eloise Rader’s house for an interview about Lee Rader.

And now, she had Serena Crumpler to deal with.

‘Mrs Elkins!’

Serena was exceptionally skinny, with straight, shiny-black hair and a markedly sharp chin and nose. Her resemblance to a crow was undeniable. She clutched a black leather briefcase between two bony fists. She rocked back and forth on black heels, looking perky and expectant.

Bell considered fleeing, rejected the idea as impractical, and continued forward. There was no escape. Besides, Serena had a perfect right to be here. If Bell had been in her shoes – only metaphorically, because Bell was unable to imagine climbing up into such garishly steep footgear – she’d have been right here, too, checking in with the public official whose decision about her case would be so crucial.

‘Mrs Elkins!’ Serena called out again. She transferred the briefcase to a single hand and lifted the other wiry arm to wave.

‘Hi, Serena,’ Bell said. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll unlock the door now.’

‘Oh, sure, sure,’ Serena said, sliding sideways. ‘Sure! Sorry – didn’t mean to get in the way. Just wanted to make sure I caught you.’

Bell’s smile was so weak it might as well have been no smile at all. ‘Mission accomplished.’

She separated the correct key from its dangling brethren on the key ring and opened the office door. Centered on the frosted glass, in small gold block letters outlined with a thin black line, were the words BELFA ELKINS, RAYTHUNE COUNTY PROSECUTING ATTORNEY. As the door swung away and the letters traveled with it, Bell felt a brief electric thrill. It lasted less than a second, this frisson of astonishment and simple pride, but it always happened.

They moved through the small outer room into Bell’s office.

‘Have a seat, Serena, while I make some coffee.’

‘Oh, I’m okay. Been up for hours. Already had four cups!’

Bell gave her a level look. ‘It’s not for you. It’s for me.’

Standing in front of the utility sink in the corner, fists on her hips, Bell tried to remember how the damned Mr Coffee worked. Her secretary, Lee Ann Frickie, usually handled it, and if not her, Rhonda or Hick stepped in. But none of them would be arriving until at least 7:30.

Bell peered at the black plastic contraption with the hinged lid. She might as well have been trying to figure out cold fusion. Coffee-making was not usually so daunting, but she’d had very little sleep the night before. Her judgment was off. Her timing, too.

Her mind felt as if it were hitting three wrong notes for every right one, like a child at her first piano lesson.

She blamed Sheriff Fogelsong for her sleepless night – although not really, because she wanted him to be honest with her about everything. She depended on his timely forthrightness, on his not holding anything back, even though it was a favor she didn’t always return. He’d told her about the parole hearing right away, in the midst of a case about a killer on the loose and a mystery about why it had happened in the first place.

She and Nick had walked out of Ike’s a few minutes after he’d given her the news. They’d stood in the cold splash of artificial light beneath the awning. The wind always felt more treacherous after dark. Ominous, determined, as if it had a nasty message to deliver but didn’t have to stoop to using something as ordinary as words.

Would she attend her sister’s parole hearing?

She didn’t know.

She’d driven around the streets of Acker’s Gap for several hours, looking at the dark houses on quiet, closed-up streets, then headed out to the interstate. More night-driving. More time to think. She’d lowered the window of the Explorer. Her face was slapped around by the cold wind. That was the point; she wanted to feel it.

By the light of a thin white slice of moon, glimpsed off to her left as she drove, Bell had seen rain clouds massed across the horizon, tufted and boiling. Could be a tease, she knew. It might not rain at all. The mountains made most weather forecasts irrelevant. No matter what the sky wanted to do, the mountains were in charge. The mountains always had the last word.

‘Here,’ Serena said. ‘Let me do that.’

Serena gently hip-checked Bell away from the sink. Bell had already made a mess of things. She’d had trouble separating a single fluted-edged paper filter from the tightly stacked pack and dropped a dozen or so, and then she’d dumped two scoopfuls of coffee granules onto the floor as she tried to guide them into the filter.

‘You sit,’ Serena insisted. ‘I’ve got this.’

A minute later, the odor of cooking coffee – blunt, pungent, pleasantly bitter – began to rise in the small office. Bell could’ve sworn that tens of thousands of her synapses were perking up, row by row, and saluting as they reported for duty, solely from the smell alone. Now she was ready to deal with Serena.

‘I’m not usually so inept,’ Bell said. She was sitting at her desk now, hands crossed on the top of a closed law book, shaking her head. Irritated with herself. ‘Really.’

‘You’ve had quite a weekend, Mrs Elkins. I think it’s kind of understandable that you’d need a little while to get back to normal. And can I say that we’re all real glad that your daughter is okay?’

Serena Crumpler thought it was the shooting that had rattled her. Well, that was part of it, certainly.

‘Thanks. Appreciate it.’

Bell liked her. Serena had graduated from law school a year and a half ago and had chosen to stay right here in her home state, which was an amazing thing. Bell knew the old joke, knew it and hated it, even though she had to acknowledge its accuracy: Top two exports out of West Virginia? Coal and young people. But Serena had stuck around. She worked for a law firm over in Benton Hollow. Serena was the firm’s one-woman pro bono department. There weren’t enough cases to keep her employed on gainful matters, so the firm’s senior partners decided to farm her out as a court-appointed attorney for the indigent, to buy a little goodwill with the judges. She had been Bell’s opponent on two previous cases. Both were a win for the prosecution. That, Bell knew, said nothing about Serena’s competence as a lawyer; the cases featured overwhelming evidence against the hapless defendants.

‘Had six roommates when I was going to law school up in Morgantown,’ Serena went on. ‘Making coffee every morning was my job. I can do it in my sleep. In fact, I’m pretty much sure I did do it in my sleep, especially when we were all studying for the bar exam.’

‘Well, if it tastes as good as it smells, you’ll have my eternal gratitude.’ Bell decided there’d been enough banter. ‘How’s Albie? Recovering, I hope?’

‘Oh, yes, he’s feeling much better. I saw him last night.’

‘What happened, Serena?’

‘He ate soap.’

‘I know that. I was wondering why he ate soap.’

‘Oh, right! Right.’ A dash of color flashed in Serena’s cheeks.

She’d be a very bad poker player, Bell thought. Serena’s emotions lived in her features, as baldly obvious as a scoreboard in a ballpark. She’d have to work on that.

‘Well,’ Serena went on, ‘I don’t really know.’

‘Did somebody tell him to? Instruct him? His family, for instance?’

Serena worked hard to seem surprised at the dig. And a little hurt. ‘Why in the world would they do that?’

‘To make him appear helpless and pathetic. So that we’d decide he’s not competent to answer for his actions.’

Serena began picking assiduously through the contents of her briefcase. ‘I’ve got the latest additions to our discovery list for you,’ she said, ignoring Bell’s suggestion of a self-inflicted illness.

‘Fine.’ Point made. ‘Tell me, though – when will Albie be ready for trial?’

‘We’re asking for at least another week’s postponement.’

‘Thought he was feeling better.’

‘He is. But just in case he has a relapse.’

‘A relapse.’ Bell kept her voice even. ‘From eating soap.’

‘He has problems with the whole cause-and-effect thing, Mrs Elkins. He’s confused. He’s scared. He doesn’t understand what’s going on and why this is all happening to him. We’ve made that clear, I think, in our request to have Albie declared incompetent.’

‘You’ve certainly tried to make it clear.’ Bell looked briefly at the pages that Serena had handed her across the desk. While she skimmed them, Serena poured her a cup of coffee. ‘Thanks,’ Bell said, accepting the blue mug. Serena returned to the sofa. ‘Oh,’ Bell added, ‘and I very much appreciated the opportunity to go speak with Lori Sheets and her daughter. I drove up there yesterday morning.’ And damn near got myself killed in the process, Bell wanted to add, but didn’t, because it wasn’t relevant to the case. She hated for other people to have too much information about her. It was a lesson she’d learned in foster care. Personal information was a tool. And that tool could be shaped into a weapon.

‘Then you could tell, I’m sure, that Mrs Sheets has done the best she could for Albie,’ Serena declared. ‘Kept him at home, taken good care of him. Tried so hard to keep him out of trouble. That’s part of what makes this such a tragedy, I think – there’s nobody to blame.’

‘Nobody to blame? A six-year-old boy is dead.’

‘Well, yes, and that’s awful. But Albie didn’t know what he was doing.’

‘You seem very sure about that, Serena.’ Bell sat back in her chair. She held the coffee mug in both hands, taking occasional meditative sips from it. ‘Are you?’

Serena was momentarily flustered. She recrossed her long legs, smoothed down the lap of her black knit dress. ‘Yes,’ she finally said. ‘Yes, I am. I don’t think Albie Sheets knew what he was doing. He thought it was a game.’

‘He put a garden hose around Tyler Bevins’s neck and he pulled it tight. And that was a game.’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

‘Albie Sheets didn’t realize that, by pulling a hose tighter and tighter, he was killing his friend. Just like he didn’t realize that eating soap would give him a stomachache.’

‘Exactly.’

Bell set down the mug. ‘You keep saying “exactly,” Serena. But there’s nothing “exact” about any of this, is there? It’s more like philosophy. Or theology, even. It’s not black and white at all. It’s gray.’ She leaned forward. ‘What we’re really trying to decide here is to what extent intelligence is related to morality. Isn’t that right? If you don’t understand the consequences of your actions, are you morally culpable for them?’

Serena didn’t answer. She was surprised by this turn in the conversation. She’d been confident that the prosecutor would agree to a finding of diminished capacity for Albie. That she and Bell would spend this morning hammering out a deal. Deciding how long Albie would be kept in the state facility over in Bower County and then returned to his family.

She certainly hadn’t expected to be debating . . . what had Mrs Elkins called it? Oh, yes: Philosophy.

Jesus. It wasn’t even 6 A.M.

‘Let me ask you this,’ Bell said. If Serena wasn’t ready to answer, she’d fill the silence herself. ‘How do Tyler’s parents feel about Albie?’

This one, Serena could handle. ‘They realize his limitations. They know he didn’t understand what he was doing. They don’t hold him responsible.’

‘How very enlightened of them.’ Bell didn’t like sarcasm, but knew it could be effective. ‘Their six-year-old child is dead, and they’re as calm and broad-minded about it as a couple of saints. They’re rising above it all.’ She had carefully read the report that Rhonda Lovejoy had compiled, the one with transcripts of interviews with Bob and Linda Bevins. They were almost eerily forgiving of Albie Sheets.

Bell didn’t buy it. Vengeance was a naturally occurring force in the universe. It was powerful, inflexible. It was gravity’s dark twin, a ferocious downward pressure that pinned human beings to one spot on the earth, that kept them from rising and moving on. You could sometimes wiggle your way out from under it, but only with considerable effort – and even then, you never lost the hunger to settle the score. You might decide not to act on it, but you damn well felt it.

Nobody escaped the desire for vengeance. Nobody.

Serena’s voice cut across Bell’s thoughts. ‘Can I tell Judge Pelley we have a deal? No need for all the fuss and bother of a trial? A finding of diminished capacity for Albie?’

When Bell didn’t respond she went on, speaking quickly, a steamrolling hopefulness in her tone. ‘How about incarceration in the secure ward of the state psychiatric facility with court-ordered assessments on a regular basis? Home visits after – say, three years? We’ll go five if you think that’s best. With the possibility of permanent release into his family’s custody – with appropriate supervision – after, say, eight years? Or ten? We can go ten.’

Bell shook her head. ‘I need more time to decide.’

Serena pursed her lips. She was disappointed. She needed to get this over with. Her bosses at the law firm were pestering her. Settle it, they’d said. Get it resolved. Get rid of it. Move on. This was the kind of case that lawyers hated: the kind that didn’t make any money for anybody.

That was the one unforgivable sin.

‘How much time?’ Serena said quietly.

‘Well, let’s see.’ Bell ran a finger down the handle of the mug, tracing the flared curve. ‘Albie got a week’s postponement because he ate soap. How long do you think I ought to get, just to figure out the legal and moral implications of the taking of a human life?’

Bell Elkins, Serena realized, wasn’t going to give her a number: one day, one week, two weeks.

‘Point taken.’ Serena snapped her briefcase shut. She rose. ‘Just to be clear, Mrs Elkins, we’re absolutely certain that Albie Sheets didn’t understand his actions. And he shouldn’t be punished for something he didn’t even realize he was doing.’

Serena’s prim steps on her way out of the office gave Bell a reasonable clue as to the other woman’s chief thought:

Next time, make your own damned coffee.