A Killing in the Hills

26


Twenty-eight minutes later she was riding through the scrubby backwoods of rural Raythune County in a black Chevy Blazer with RAYTHUNE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT stamped on both sides in slanting yellow letters. Below that was the official county seal, a white circle with a sketch of the courthouse in the center and EST. 1863 curlicuing across the bottom. It was the year West Virginia had become a state. From the mandatory class in West Virginia history that she’d taken at Acker’s Gap High School, Bell knew that Harland Raythune was a flamboyantly mustachioed and thickly sideburned Union general who’d impressed President Lincoln with his ability to absorb staggering troop losses in one tragic battle after another without blinking or boo-hooing about it, indeed with virtually no reaction at all, and thus when the new state was being created out of the existing state of Virginia – thanks to a bit of executive branch hocus-pocus and blatantly unconstitutional sleight-of-hand – General Raythune received a nice parcel of land for his trouble. That gave him naming rights to the new county.

Nick was driving. Bell sat in the passenger seat. Charlie Mathers had hoped to come along, too – not riding in the backseat, a fatal blow to his dignity, but following in his own vehicle – but the sheriff had said no. ‘Don’t need a damned posse,’ was the actual wording of Fogelsong’s growled retort to Charlie’s request, followed by, ‘Need you to stay in town and keep an eye on things, Charlie.’ The deputy had nodded. It was true: There were still some strangers poking around Acker’s Gap, odd people drawn by the potent lure of an unsolved triple homicide. The standard camp followers of any public tragedy.

The sheriff drove as fast as he could, but the roads were booby-trapped by too many potholes per mile to get up any real speed. The morning rain had filled each pothole with several inches of black water. The Blazer bumped and splashed its way along.

They passed sagging shacks set back against falling hillsides. They passed skinny horses and spindly goats and stunned-looking cows that stood warily in small unkempt fields. They passed vinyl-sided houses with wind-ripped foreclosure notices nailed to the plywood on the front windows.

The unincorporated part of Raythune County had been poor for a long, long time. For many decades the poverty here had been ordinary, rooted, a natural fact of the landscape like a creek or a mountain. Lately, though, the poverty had changed. There was a desperate edge to it now. People who in previous years had barely scraped by weren’t able to do even that anymore. Last winter an elderly couple had been burning scrap wood in their fireplace, trying to keep warm with whatever they could scavenge, and they’d burned to death when the place caught fire. Earlier this fall, a six-year-old boy had died of malnutrition in rural Raythune County. He weighed thirty-four pounds. That kid, Nick had said to Bell when he was telling her about it, the sorrow in his eyes outdone only by the anger and incredulity, starved to death. In the United States of America. In the goddamned twenty-first century. It’s a f*cking disgrace, Bell, that’s what it is.

They passed trailers. They passed rust-ravaged cars with no tires and no glass in the windows. They passed two abandoned school buses, side by side, with long-necked weeds growing out of the tops where the roofs had rotted away.

Their drive was mainly silent. The sheriff didn’t ask Bell about her sister’s parole hearing or about Carla or about anything else. She appreciated that. There was a time to talk and a time to think, and Nick had always understood that, which was among the reasons why they worked so well together.

‘There it is,’ Fogelsong finally said.

He pointed to a spot just ahead, on the right-hand side of the road. A house that looked as if it had absorbed equal parts abuse and neglect – the porch slanted crazily to one side, the cement steps were gouged and cracked and broken off, and the wooden slats that covered the outside of the house were pitted and weathered to a dirty gray – sank into the dirt. A black mailbox with RADER painted on the side by a shaky hand jutted out from one of the porch rails.

The sheriff parked his vehicle alongside the house, next to an old Ford pickup whose red sides had been victimized by hungry rust. As he and Bell climbed out of the Blazer, Fogelsong peered discreetly into the truck bed. His lack of expression told Bell that it was empty. They continued walking toward the front porch.

‘Hey.’

Fogelsong whirled around, hand automatically curved over his holster. The sheriff wasn’t a man who liked to be surprised. Bell, also significantly startled, turned as well. With no holster to touch, she just gripped her purse strap extra tight.

A man in a sienna brown Carharrt jacket, faded jeans, and muddy black boots ambled toward them from the back of the house. Neither Nick nor Bell had noticed his approach until he was close enough to utter the universal greeting in these parts, the all-purpose ‘Hey.’

His hands were stuffed in the slash pockets of his jacket. That, Bell knew, was what had rattled Fogelsong. You don’t come at a law enforcement officer with your hands in your pockets.

‘Hold it right there,’ the sheriff said. He didn’t sound mean. Just firm. ‘Show me your hands, son.’

The man stopped, baffled. Then he obliged. He yanked his hands out of his coat pockets and quickly displayed them: front, back, front, back, front, back. Then he grinned and leaned forward and wiggled his fingers, as if he were teaching ‘The Itsy-bitsy Spider’ to a three-year-old.

Smart-ass, Bell thought, but not unkindly.

The sheriff relaxed. ‘That’ll do. You’ll have to excuse me, son, I’m kinda jumpy these days. I’m Nick Fogelsong, Raythune County sheriff. This here’s the prosecutor, Belfa Elkins.’

The man nodded. ‘We’re a little jumpy ourselves, sir,’ he said, ‘after what happened to Grandpa.’

So this, Bell thought, is Leroy Rader’s grandson, Chess Rader. From the notes compiled for her by Rhonda Lovejoy, Bell knew that he was twenty-nine, unemployed, with a minor criminal record – vandalism, a couple of speeding tickets, and one charge of grand theft auto two years ago that was later dropped, when Leroy Rader told the authorities that it was all a big misunderstanding and his grandson hadn’t meant to steal the car, just borrow it, so could he please just withdraw the complaint and they’d all head on home now? No harm done?

Chess Rader’s sandy blond hair was in the process of losing its luster. He had a scruffy-looking goatee of indeterminate color that in a dimmer light would look more like the spillover from his evening meal than the hipster’s badge that he clearly intended it to be. All in all, though, Chess Rader didn’t strike Bell as a bad guy. He seemed like a lot of young people she knew in West Virginia: bored, restless, too smart for the only jobs that were available to him around here, but without the education – or the guidance, the mentoring – that could change things for him.

He seemed – and the idea startled her even more than the sudden sight of him had done, ambling around the side of this sad-looking house – a lot like what Carla might become, if she didn’t shed her present attitude. And then another notion struck Bell. She’d not dared consider it before. It had played around at the edges of her mind, pesky and impish, but she refused to give it words, even internally.

Now she did.

Maybe Carla would be better off with her father in D.C., after all.

‘Can we talk a minute, son?’ Fogelsong said.

‘Sure.’ Chess shrugged. ‘Guess you figured out that I’m Leroy’s grandson. Chess Rader. My mom’s inside. So’s my sister Alma. They don’t like me to smoke in the house, so I come out here.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘The great outdoors, doncha know.’

After the sheriff and Chess shook hands, Bell offered the young man her own hand. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’ll be prosecuting the case against the man who murdered your grandfather.’

‘Does that mean you got ’em? You caught the sonofabitch?’ Chess said eagerly, pumping her hand with absentminded vigor, so thrilled was he at the news.

‘No,’ Bell said. ‘Not yet. But we’re working on it.’

He nodded. The shine fell out of his eyes. He withdrew his hand. ‘Okay. Well, we’re all just so sad about Grandpa, I gotta tell you. It’s been real rough on account of—’ He looked away from them. He swallowed hard. He looked back. ‘You know what? I didn’t get along too good with the old guy. We fought a lot. Hell, he fought a lot with everybody – my mom, my sister, my dad when he was still around. After Grandma died and he come to live with us here, it wasn’t no picnic. But here’s the thing.’

Chess put his hands back in his pockets and then pulled them out again. He needed the motion, Bell saw. Needed a place to put his restlessness. ‘Grandpa had standards. You know what I mean? The man had a way of doing things that he thought was the right way and that was that. He didn’t care what anybody else said about it.’

Fogelsong had slowly removed a notebook from his coat pocket. He was marking on the page with a yellow pencil no bigger than his thumb. Casually, without looking up at Chess, the sheriff said, ‘Pretty small house for all of you, isn’t it? You, your mom, your sister – and then your grandfather moves in? This house has – what, maybe two bedrooms, tops? One bath? Must’ve been kind of tight. And tense. You must’ve resented him a little bit, right? Crowding you up like that?’

Chess looked at the sheriff for a full minute before replying. ‘You are seriously off base, mister. Way, way off base. If you’d known my grandpa, you’d understand that.’

‘I did know him,’ Fogelsong said. ‘Just to say hello to. And he had a temper, as I recall. He could be headstrong. Unreasonable. He could piss people off.’

‘Sure he could,’ Chess shot back. ‘Like I said, he had standards. He knew his own mind. That’s why me and him tangled. He wanted me to go back to school and get a good job and help out my mom. And I told him it wasn’t any of his damned business. And you know what?’

Agitated now, riled up, Chess pulled his hands in and out of his pockets again. Bell guessed that he wanted a cigarette, to calm himself down. But she could also sense that he was fresh out, and that he had too much dignity to try to bum a smoke from either one of them.

‘You know what Grandpa did then?’

‘No, son,’ the sheriff replied quietly. He wasn’t writing anymore. He was looking at Chess. ‘I don’t. What’d he do?’

‘He went out and he sold his chop box and his jigsaw and his router – his tools, man, the things he loved more’n he loved anything else in the world, except maybe Grandma and my mom – and he tried to give me the money. Big damn wad of cash. He said, “You take this and you go to school, Chess. Anywhere you want, any kind of school. Just get your sorry ass out of here. Take this and get out. You can come back if you want, once you’ve got your education, but I don’t want you wasting your life in these parts with nothing to do except things that’ll bring shame to yourself and your family.”’ Chess paused, blinked. ‘That’s who he was. That’s the kind of man he was. You’d want to punch him in the mouth sometimes when you were arguing with him – damn, he could be stubborn – but in the end, he wanted you to do your best. To do the right thing. And he’d do whatever he could do to help you, too. I loved my grandpa, mister. If you’re thinking I ever would’ve hurt him in any way, if you’re implying that maybe I’d want to—’

Chess broke off his sentence and shook his head. ‘No way,’ he declared, fighting back a wave of emotion that seemed to pain him. ‘No way.’

The sheriff looked back down at the notebook page. ‘I believe you, son. I do.’

When the front door opened, a high-pitched creak from oil-starved hinges broke sharply against the chilly air. The sheriff and Bell turned to see an older woman – Eloise Rader, no doubt – start across the porch, clutching both halves of a jean jacket that refused to close over her pendulous breasts and round stomach. Her long black corduroy skirt trailed heavily along the porch floor.

‘Chess,’ the woman said. Suspicion turned the word into a whip crack. ‘What’s goin’ on?’

‘This here’s the sheriff, Mama, and this is the lady who’s gonna get Grandpa’s killer,’ he said.

Bell liked Chess’s simple description. He’d grasped the essentials. Now all she had to do was live up to it.

She looked more closely at the woman on the porch. It was a peculiar kind of obesity. It was as if Eloise Rader were in the grip of something outside her control. The excess weight seemed to be pulling her down, down, as if dark forces were reaching up from the earth itself to catch her, trip her up, hold her back. Her face was a large dollop of shifting, jiggling flesh in which the features had long ago been lost, like delicate pieces of jewelry in a churning vat of cake batter. She’d been crying, Bell saw; her massive cheeks were wet. The high collar of an enormous corduroy shirt – it was the color of rust – hid her chin. The untucked shirttail bumped over her knees.

‘Okay. Well, then,’ the woman said, ‘I’m Eloise Rader. Lee Rader was my daddy.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘I’d invite you in, but the house is a mess. If you don’t mind, we can just talk out here.’

‘Don’t mind at all,’ the sheriff said. ‘Been a pretty nice fall, ’cept for all the rain. You’d hardly know it was November today, would you?’

‘No,’ said Eloise Rader, joining him in the face-saving lie. ‘You wouldn’t.’

The four of them stood there silently for a moment, the fat woman on the porch, and out in the yard, her son and Sheriff Fogelsong and Bell. One of the things Bell loved best about Nick Fogelsong was just this: He understood people like Eloise Rader right down to the bone. He realized right away that to not invite visitors inside, to not be hospitable, to not offer them something to eat and drink, was humiliating to Eloise Rader. Yet she had no choice. The inside of her house would be much worse than the outside of her house. And she wasn’t able to offer them refreshments because she couldn’t afford it. She had nothing to spare.

Fogelsong had picked up on it right away, far quicker than Bell had: These people were struggling. Struggling hard. Living on the perilous edge of disaster. Lee Rader’s Social Security check was surely all that had kept them from complete economic collapse. They’d probably have to sell something to give him a decent burial.

‘First of all, I’m sorry for your loss, Ms Rader,’ the sheriff said. ‘Leroy was a good man.’

She nodded. Her eyes filled up again. Her chin trembled. But she didn’t say anything, so Fogelsong went on. ‘I know my deputies were out here on Saturday, talking to you right after the shooting,’ he said. ‘All we’re doing here today is tying up some loose ends.’

Chess Rader laughed. ‘They’re callin’ it “loose ends,” Mama, but what the man really means is that they want to see if we had anything to do with Grandpa’s murder. Like, were we mad at him? Did we go all crazy and send somebody after him?’

The sheriff looked gravely at Chess. ‘That’s not even close to accurate, son. But if you want to upset your mother even more than she already is, then sure. Go ahead. Keep talking.’

Chess dropped his head, ashamed. But Bell silently admired him: He had guts. She’d give him that. Because he’d identified the true nature of their errand today. Maybe something a family member had done – maybe something in which Chess or Alma were involved, up to their gray necks – had brought down a bloody wrath on Leroy Rader.

And on his two closest friends.

‘Don’t mind Chess, Sheriff,’ Eloise said. ‘He’s hurting. We’re all hurting. We don’t know what to say or what to do. Daddy was a big part of our lives. Now he’s gone – and not the way we thought it would be, not from the cancer or a heart attack or something, but in this terrible, terrible way. I can’t even stand to think about it.’ She began to sob. There was no preliminary sniffle, no wind-up; she just fell facefirst into a violent storm of weeping.

With two pudgy hands, she reached out and grabbed the single wooden rail across the front of the porch, steadying herself while she rocked and moaned.

The sheriff waited. Before Eloise had recovered herself, the door opened again and her daughter, Chess’s sister Alma, joined her mother on the porch. She was a chunky, unsmiling young woman in a dark green hoodie and black bell-bottom pants that rode low on her meaty hips. She was two years older than Chess, Bell recalled from the file, and like him, she was unemployed. She had the same dirty-blond hair that her brother did. And the same intelligent eyes.

‘Mama,’ Alma said.

‘I’m okay, baby. I’ll be okay. Just can’t think about your grandpa without getting all upset.’ Eloise reached over and drew her daughter closer to her. Alma patted the denim that covered her mother’s wide arm while Eloise coughed, caught her breath, then resumed speaking.

‘Sheriff,’ Eloise said. ‘Tell me how we can help. We sure do want you to find whoever did this to Daddy and his friends. It just don’t make no sense.’

‘We agree,’ Fogelsong said. ‘In fact, we came back out here today, Ms Rader, for just that reason. To try to find a connection between your father’s murder and – well, and anything else in his life. I don’t mean to be insulting to you or your children, but it seems to us that maybe somebody was sending your family – or the McClurg or Streeter families or maybe all three – a message.’

Chess used a boot heel to dig in the mud that served as their front yard. ‘Whaddaya mean?’

‘Like trying to get back at somebody,’ Fogelsong said. ‘Like maybe you or your sister. And using the murder of three innocent old men to do it.’

Chess lifted his head from his earnest contemplation of the ground. ‘I know what you’re saying, Sheriff. You think maybe Alma or me might’ve been working for one of them drug gangs and we got ourselves into some kind of bad trouble. Well, once again, you didn’t know Grandpa very well. If me or Alma had been doing anything like that – I mean anything – Grandpa would’ve locked us up and thrown away the damned key.’ He shook his head.

Alma picked up where her brother left off. ‘Grandpa wouldn’t have put up with nothing like that around him. If he’d thought for a second that me or Chess was selling drugs, that would’ve been the end of us. He hated drugs. Hated ’em. Thought they were ruining the whole state. If he’d caught us doing something like that, he would’ve told Mama to toss us out of this house. And if she wouldn’t do it, well sir, he would’ve moved out hisself. Before you could say “Boo.” Right, Mama?’

Eloise Rader nodded. She had curled her bottom lip under her top one, to keep her sobs in check. Her chin quivered from the effort.

Bell decided she’d been quiet long enough. ‘So how do you know for sure?’ she said to Chess and Alma, moving her gaze between them. ‘How can you be certain that your grandfather hated the drug gangs?’

Alma’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s easy, lady,’ she declared. ‘He was just about to lose one of his best friends over it. That good enough for you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Saturday morning was gonna be his last time meeting his buddies like that at the Salty Dawg,’ Alma said. ‘Which is part of what makes this whole thing so awful for us. After Saturday, he wasn’t gonna go there anymore. He’d made up his mind. I’d heard him on the phone that morning before he left, talking to one of the other guys.’

Sheriff Fogelsong’s tone was urgent. ‘What did he say?’

‘He said something like, “Selling them drugs is wrong and I’ve told him so and I won’t sit there every damned Saturday with the man, pretending it’s right. So if he don’t quit, then I’m through. I’ll drink my damned coffee at home. This is it.”’

‘Who was he talking to?’ Bell said.

Alma shrugged. ‘Don’t know. It was either Shorty McClurg or Dean Streeter. One of them other two. So now do you believe me? If me or Chess was selling drugs and Grandpa knew about it, he’d a-never put up with it. We would’ve been kicked outta here a long time ago. Ain’t that right, Mama?’