A Killing in the Hills

33


The Salty Dawg, at midday.

It felt strange to Bell. Exceedingly strange. She was standing in the center of a large room wrapped in a ghostly silence, four days after the fact.

After the split second of violence that had canceled three lives.

Adding to the eerie aura was the fact that a place like the Salty Dawg was not supposed to be deserted. It was unnatural. Downright bizarre.

No one sat at any of the little beige tables with matching chairs bolted to the floor.

No one yelled at a friend to bring over some extra napkins or ketchup packets.

No soft-rock oldies played over the sound system.

A Salty Dawg was not supposed to be like this. A Salty Dawg was supposed to be a noisy, chaotic circus, bathed in the good-bad smell of frying meat, syncopated by the sporadic rattle of ice cubes falling into cardboard cups at the self-serve drink dispenser.

The restaurant had been sealed since the shooting. But now the state police forensics team had finished its work, and Bell wanted another look at the scene. In solitude.

It was the morning after Bell had helped Ruthie and Tom Cox. Ruthie, they’d learned at the hospital, had contracted a serious infection, probably because of her low white-cell count. The infection had caused the dizziness, the fatigue. She was back home now, with a heavy regimen of antibiotics. And strict instructions to take it easy.

Not bloody likely, Bell thought, when she heard about the latter.

Wednesday had dawned bright and frigid. Bell had headed over here without telling anyone – not Lee Ann, not Hick or Rhonda or even the sheriff – where she was going. They’d ask her why. And Bell was not sure she could explain it.

She had picked up the restaurant key late Tuesday night from Ralph Purcell, the man who owned the Salty Dawg franchise in Acker’s Gap. After unlocking the side door and walking in, Bell stood at the threshold.

She didn’t turn on any lights. She didn’t need them. It was a few minutes past 11 A.M., and the expansive room was fully illuminated by the sunlight that tumbled in through the high glass walls.

Spread out across the floor were small uniform chunks of yellow plastic – they looked like tiny party hats with black numbers on them – and several had been placed on the tables as well. These, Bell knew, indicated where pieces of evidence had been located: blood droplets, bits of brain tissue, clothing, food scraps that had spilled in the wake of the shooting. Everything had been pinpointed and cataloged.

The little yellow hats also indicated where the witnesses had been sitting.

She allowed herself to be distracted momentarily. Which marker, she wondered, represents Carla’s location?

The question made her slightly sick to her stomach.

Ralph Purcell, who also owned two other Salty Dawgs, one in Bluefield and one in Chester, along with a KFC in Swanville, wasn’t sure if he would ever reopen this location. ‘Seems wrong, somehow,’ he’d said to Bell on the phone the day before, when she called to make the arrangements to pick up the key. ‘Kind of sacrilegious, maybe. Three people killed. Hell of a thing. Might be – oh, disrespectful, guess I’d call it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Course, then again,’ Purcell added, ‘I gotta make a living. You know? And folks’ll forget. Won’t they?’

‘Hard to say.’

She didn’t know. She didn’t care.

She only cared about what had happened here four days ago, and about finding out who had done it and why.

Standing in the silent restaurant, Bell felt a gust of dizziness. She steadied herself, leaning her right hand briefly against the counter that held the napkin dispensers, the bristling tub of paper-covered straws, the tiny salt and pepper packets, the jumbo plastic jugs of ketchup with the little pump spouts.

Deep breath.

Again.

She wanted to be here – it was part of her job – but she knew that such a place could never be neutral for her. And it would never be safe. She knew about the feel of a crime scene, no matter how much time has passed since the crime. She knew that the silence was an illusion, a thin skin easily pierced by echoes that waited hungrily for the chance to reemerge, to stab the air with shrieks and cries and warnings audible only to an unlucky few.

Bell was one of the few.

She knew that haunted houses had nothing to do with Halloween. Any house where a violent act had occurred was haunted.

She glanced at the front counter. She saw the darkness beyond it. During a typical lunch rush, that area would be bright and busy with employees rushing around, sometimes bumping into each other, giggling, apologizing, as they whipped up milk shakes and filled cups with Diet Coke and Sprite and iced tea, as they angled wrapped-up biscuits into open-mouthed paper sacks. Cash registers would be beeping, dinging. Customers would be laughing and talking.

Not like now, when it was quiet and empty.

Bell turned back around and looked at the door through which the killer had entered, and through which she, too, had come in just a few minutes ago.

She envisioned the door being flung open. In her mind’s eye, she saw a man advancing into the restaurant, arm hanging straight down at his side, gun in his hand. Two witnesses had corroborated that: When he came in, his arm was down.

The man in her imagination had no face. He wasn’t tall or short. He wasn’t black or white. The only sharp image in her scenario, the only absolutely clear and solid thing, was the gun.

No one notices the man. No one reacts to him at all.

He’s taking advantage of the cheerful mayhem of a busy restaurant, knowing that no one will pay the least heed to the arrival of one more customer. People have been coming in all morning long, singly or in bunches of two and three, families, knots of giggling friends, colleagues.

He takes two steps inside the door. Lifts his arm.

Aims.

Fires.

Hits three people. Turns and goes back out again, before anyone gets a good look at him, before anyone sees a thing – and this time, it’s because of what he has wrought, the blood and chaos he has caused. Everyone is focused on the victims. On the three old men.

Why? Why did he want to kill three old men?

Maybe he didn’t.

Maybe he didn’t want to kill three old men.

Maybe he wanted to kill one old man. He just didn’t know which old man he wanted to kill.

Maybe his instructions had been too general: Old man. Black jacket. And when he came into the Salty Dawg that Saturday morning, he saw three old men. Sitting together. All in black jackets.

Could be any one of them.

The solution was easy: Take out all three.

What kind of killer wouldn’t know his own target?

A killer who had been employed by, paid by, somebody else. A killer who had no relationship with the victim. A killer who was just doing his job.

So even if they found Henry Fleming – or whatever the hell his real name was – they still wouldn’t have the man behind the murders. They would only have the hired help.

The mastermind would be still at large. Still out there. Up in the hills, maybe, biding his time, waiting to order another killing. And another.