A Killing in the Hills

25


Bell buttoned the top button of her suit jacket. It was cold in the courtroom.

She looked up at Terry Tolliver, the presiding judge. Only the upper third of him was visible, each palm cupping its opposite elbow on the dark mahogany bench, but the pleated black robe made him look massive, severe, biblically intimidating. The deep, face-gouging frown didn’t hurt, either.

Tolliver had a potato-shaped nose and stretched-out ears that hung like empty feed sacks. His father, Travis Tolliver, also a judge, had passed down the facial features along with a liking for alliterative names. Terry’s son Toby was only four years old but – the portrait in Terry’s office constituted a quick lesson in genetics – already his ears dangled like a basset hound’s.

Rain grayed the courtroom windows. It had finally arrived, coming just after the start of the 10 A.M. session. Bell had spent the four hours between Serena’s departure and now in preparation for this hearing – which was likely to last only a matter of minutes. It was a familiar ratio.

The ancient white radiators set along the north wall fussed and mumbled. Too early in the season for them to have to work this hard, and they wanted the world to know about it, sputtering their umbrage.

A cold November. In more ways than one, Bell thought.

‘Mrs Elkins,’ Judge Tolliver said. ‘Any objection to the defendant’s offer?’

Plenty. She had plenty of objections to it. But none she could bring up. None she could justify.

‘No, your honor.’

‘Very well.’ He shifted his gaze to Nancy Smith, the defense attorney, a short, chubby, middle-aged woman with spiky hair dyed the color of fresh paprika, long sparkly earrings, and a fluttering maternal manner. ‘Mrs Smith, your client is hereby ordered to enter the Hope for Appalachia rehabilitation clinic in Templeton County and remain for a period of no less than ninety days.’

Smith turned to her client, a young man who bobbed and jittered next to her. He wore an oversized orange jumpsuit with RAYTHUNE COUNTY JAIL stenciled on its loose-hanging back in big white letters. He was so skinny that he might have been constructed entirely from the twist-ties used to secure yard waste bags. His hair, the shade and texture of dirty broom straw, stood up from his head in an electric halo. His eyes were bright, blurred.

Smith put a chubby hand on her client’s tattooed twig of a forearm. He grinned a big grin, exposing the fact that his two front teeth jutted from his mouth almost horizontally. He leaned sideways and looked past his lawyer’s blue-skirted bubble of a rear end, to include Bell in the radius of his delight.

‘I’m not finished, Mrs Smith,’ the judge said.

‘Yes, your honor.’

Nancy Smith’s attention was yanked back to the bench. The smile disappeared. She knew better than to rile Judge Tolliver.

‘Please make certain that your client understands that if he ever has occasion to show his face in my courtroom again there will be no question of a rehabilitation facility. He’ll go straight to jail.’

‘Yes, your honor.’

‘He’s clear on that?’

‘Yes, your honor.’

Bell was seething. Terry Tolliver knew she was seething, but he also knew there was nothing she could do to alter the wretched reality of the circumstances, which meant there was nothing he could do, either. Jimmy Pugh – that was the defendant’s name, James Edward Pugh – had been caught two weeks ago with a substantial amount of marijuana, along with Percocet, hydrocodone, and assorted other prescription narcotics, in the glove box of his light green Ford Torino, when he was pulled over on a traffic stop at 3:34 A.M. by one of Nick’s deputies.

Pugh had been driving as if the center line on the road was a barber pole and he was the red stripe. When, at the officer’s request, he had lowered the car window, he had proceeded to giggle, stick out his tongue, and ‘act in a fashion that indicated he had been consuming mood-altering substances,’ as the deputy noted on the arrest report, which led to the search of the glove box and the discovery of the drugs.

Bell was certain that Jimmy Pugh sold as well as bought, and that he worked for someone else, someone bigger and more important, but she couldn’t prove it. She couldn’t prove it because she didn’t have the time or the staff to investigate it. And because space was tight in the county jail, too tight to accommodate every two-bit, penny-ante, shit-for-brains punk who was dumb enough to get himself arrested, she had to go along with Nancy Smith’s suggestion to send Jimmy Pugh to rehab instead of jail.

Bell hated it. Not because she harbored any special animosity toward Jimmy Pugh, but because, with more resources, she might’ve been able to use him, to trade what they possessed – discretion in sentencing – for what he possessed: information. He might’ve given them a fix on his boss.

As it was, Pugh got his wish – rehab in lieu of jail – without having to cooperate.

Tolliver’s gavel fell with a crack. A deputy moved forward, catching Pugh’s skinny, twitching arm. Nancy Smith gathered up her paperwork.

On his way out of the courtroom Pugh abruptly uttered a high-pitched cackle of a laugh. It didn’t sound especially sinister, and it wasn’t directed anywhere specific – he threw back his head, eyes goggling at the ceiling – but to Bell, it suddenly made the courtroom feel a lot colder.

‘So why’d you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Come back to West Virginia.’ Nancy Smith grinned. She had a pert little mouth which bright red lipstick had turned into something lascivious. ‘I’ve always wondered. Never had a chance to ask you. Don’t get over this way too often.’

She and Bell had ended up walking side by side out of Judge Tolliver’s courtroom. Turning the same way in the courthouse hall.

Bell had lived in Acker’s Gap more than five years now, but apparently still had to explain herself. What was the statute of limitations on having to justify a life decision? Ten years, twenty years? A hundred?

Bell didn’t know Smith well. She was based in Donnerton, a town about twenty miles from Acker’s Gap, and her practice was generally restricted to wills and property transfers. Occasionally, though, a criminal matter came her way, and she ended up facing Bell or one of the assistant prosecutors.

‘Why?’ Bell said.

‘Why what?’

‘Why do you wonder?’

‘Human curiosity.’ With her short legs, Smith had trouble keeping up with Bell’s long stride. She was getting winded. ‘Simple ole human curiosity.’

Bell didn’t like Nancy Smith. She wasn’t sure why. Didn’t matter. What mattered was the case.

‘Your client,’ Bell said, with no apologies for changing the subject, ‘has to follow the rehab program to the letter. We want weekly reports from his counselors. One slip – and that’s it. He goes to jail. Hope you’ll make that clear to him.’

They had reached the threshold of Bell’s office. For a moment, Bell was afraid Smith was going to follow her in.

‘Shame about that shooting,’ Smith said. The grin was gone. ‘Making any headway?’

‘Some.’

Now the grin came back, fresher and brighter, like a debutante returning from the powder room. ‘Seriously,’ Smith said. ‘Maybe we could grab a drink sometime. I’d really like to know why you came back here. You had a whole different life in D.C. That’s what everybody says, anyway. Great condo. Lots of job offers from big firms. Amazing salaries. Unbelievable perks. Had your pick. And you come back here. To Acker’s Gap.’ Smith raised and lowered her eyebrows. They had been plucked and shaped within an inch of their lives, then darkened dramatically. They seemed to be carrying on their own separate dialogue, apart from anything Nancy Smith might say out loud.

‘Everybody’s got to be somewhere,’ Bell said.

She’d be damned if she’d confide in a random defense attorney with a nosy streak. Nothing wrong with Smith asking. Nothing wrong with Bell not answering, either.

She could hear the phone ringing inside the office. The next thing she heard was her secretary, Lee Ann Frickie, primly stating, ‘Raythune County prosecuting attorney,’ and then there was a pause, while the caller stated her or his business.

‘Well,’ Smith said, ‘it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I get asked about it, frankly, whenever folks get wind of the fact that I have a case over here. Most of us can’t wait to get out. And you take the first chance that comes along to come back.’

‘Wonders,’ Bell said evenly, ‘never cease.’

Two hours later, Deputy Charlie Mathers came to fetch her.

‘Sheriff’s ready to go.’

Charlie had moved past Lee Ann Frickie’s desk with a wave and a grunt. Now he stuck his head in the open door of Bell’s office, big hand on the doorframe, black hair gleaming with the gel Charlie palmed on each morning so that he’d look like his idol, former NBA coach Pat Riley.

Charlie had bought the coach’s book about how to be a winner ‘in the game of life,’ a phrase Charlie now worked into every conversation that he possibly could, and he’d run a thick yellow highlighter across selected paragraphs and one entire chapter. Charlie had read the book four times and had recently embarked on a fifth. He had caught the self-improvement bug, and the disease apparently was incurable.

‘Coming,’ Bell said. She watched the deputy’s wide back as he departed. She was aware of his ambitions – who could miss them, given the fact that he wedged copies of paperbacks with titles like A Whole New YOU in Ninety Days or Less in the back pockets of his uniform pants? – and of his restlessness, his pride.

Charlie Mathers.

She didn’t know him well. But, she wondered, do you ever really know someone? Know what they’re capable of? She stood up and stretched, rolling her neck to one side and then to the other, feeling the familiar ache in her shoulders. Plus an extra twinge in her arm, courtesy of Sunday’s escapade on the mountain.

Lee Ann Frickie gave her an inquiring glance. ‘Back in a few hours,’ Bell said. ‘Got my cell.’

Lee Ann nodded and returned to work, dipping her small gray head back toward the computer screen. She was sixty-four years old, brushing up against the county’s mandatory retirement age, but still possessed the stamina of a thirty-year-old. Bell had inherited Lee Ann from the former prosecutor.

I come with the drapes, Lee Ann had told her the morning after Election Day, matter-of-factness in her voice. I come with the drapes and if you want to replace either of us, you just let me know right now. Because that can be arranged.

Bell decided she liked both, and told Lee Ann so. She’d had no cause for regret on either score.

Bell pulled her coat from the back of the chair. The chair executed a little half-spin from the force of the grab.

‘You watch yourself,’ Lee Ann said. She said it in a murmur, more to the notes on her computer screen than to Bell, because she knew it might annoy her boss. Bell didn’t like cautionary words. Lee Ann had seen her bite the heads off the assistant prosecutors when they dared say things such as ‘Take care’ or ‘Relax.’

This time, though, Bell smiled. She paused before following the route Charlie Mathers had taken out the door. It had been a hell of a few days. She’d take anybody’s advice. Couldn’t hurt.

‘Will do,’ Bell said.