A Killing in the Hills

30


‘I grew up right here in Acker’s Gap,’ Bell said.

Her eyes moved slowly across the rows of vacant young faces. Indifference didn’t faze her. She’d expected it.

When she was their age, she’d done exactly the same thing: displayed disinterest in, if not downright hostility toward, anything that smacked even remotely of a Life Lesson from an adult.

‘I graduated in 1990,’ she went on. ‘But this isn’t the same place I went to school. It’s very different now. Sure, we had drugs. Drugs are nothing new. But let me tell you what’s changed, okay? It’s not the amount of illegal drugs, or how many kids are doing them. It’s the kind of drugs. And who’s bringing them in.’ Her voice grew even graver. ‘You’re going to have to trust me on this. Because you won’t understand why this matters. But listen.

‘The drugs that my office sees now are more powerful and more deadly than ever before. And the people who sell them are part of bigger groups. They may use your friends and people you know to distribute them, to sell you the pills, but that’s not who’s really doing this. The criminals doing this aren’t just out to make a couple of bucks. They’re part of large professional organizations that don’t care if they destroy small towns like Acker’s Gap. They’re taking all the problems we have here – the fact that there aren’t enough jobs, that people are hurting – and they’re turning all of that frustration and despair into money. They want us to give up. They want us to give in.’

She’d written nothing down. She didn’t have to.

‘I know what it’s like to be a kid from West Virginia,’ she went on. ‘You feel like you don’t matter, like nothing you ever do or say is going to matter. The world’s a big closed door. And because you don’t matter, then nothing else matters, either. If you mess up your life – so what? It’s not like the world is waiting to see what you have to offer. You aren’t letting anybody down because nobody expects anything from you in the first place. You’re invisible.

‘You end up making bad choices,’ Bell continued, ‘because you think it doesn’t matter, anyway. But you know what? It does matter. It matters a hell of a lot.’

There was a stir. She had used a curse word. She was an adult with authority, and she’d used a curse word in front of them. Bell saw a few students hitch themselves up straighter in their seats. Along the first few rows, she glimpsed some bored scowls uncoiling into what might be – might be – a faint stirring of attentiveness.

‘It matters,’ Bell said, ‘because you have a unique contribution to make to the world. Something that nobody else can ever make. And if you stay true to yourselves, then you can—’

She stopped, interrupted by the peppy chirp of a cell phone. A half-dozen teachers shot up out of their seats, scouring the rows to find out which student was the culprit, which student had smuggled in a contraband cell.

Bell, though, knew the embarrassing truth: It was her phone.

She reached in her jacket pocket. Silenced it. She’d forgotten to switch the phone to vibrate. But she had to check the call. In the years she’d been a prosecutor, only once had she ever made it all the way through a public speech without being interrupted by a call. Price of the job.

Bell turned to Stillwagon, who sat on a folding chair behind her, hands capping his chubby knees. ‘Can you take over for just a moment?’

Before the surprised principal could react, Bell had hurried off the stage. Just past the bunched and swept-back mass of the heavy maroon curtain, she stood and listened to the voice mail message.

It was from Sheriff Fogelsong.

A body had been found in a Dumpster behind a motel over in Atherton County. Young woman. No ID on her. Clearly a drug user. Her body bore the ragged signature of abuse from IV-injected narcotics.

But that wasn’t what had killed her.

What killed her was a gunshot wound to the head.

The ballistics report had just determined – and this was why the sheriff was leaving an urgent message, even though Lee Ann Frickie had told him, when he called in search of her, that Bell was speaking at the morning assembly at Acker’s Gap High School and might prefer not to be disturbed – that the nine-millimeter slug may have been fired from the same semiautomatic that had killed the old men in the Salty Dawg three days ago.