A Killing in the Hills

4


What was next was a moment of strained silence. Conversation could sometimes be difficult with the woman who sat before Nick, her arms crossed, legs crossed, body buttoned up like a storm cellar waiting for the twister to hit and move on. He was often exasperated by her stubbornness. Damn right she was fierce.

At the same time, though, he admired that fierceness. Counted on it. Truth was, nobody worth anything – this was one of Nick’s core convictions, long held, rarely discussed – ever got that way without harboring a contrary streak. The reason he rarely discussed it was because he was a sheriff, and a sheriff’s life was made much easier by rule-followers and manners-minders and instant capitulators, by the people who, if they passed his squad car going in the opposite direction, slowed down five or ten miles per hour even if they weren’t speeding in the first place. He was supposed to prefer that sort of person.

He didn’t. He secretly liked the ones who challenged him from time to time, who gave him resistance. The ones who, he sensed, cultivated their fierceness like a cash crop. Depended on it. That fierceness, he speculated, went a long way toward accounting for their survival.

Bell had mellowed some over the years, no doubt about it; he’d known her since she was a child, and naturally people changed. Hell, she was a prosecutor now, a public official, an arm of the law, same as he was. She’d learned to handle herself. She’d had to. But at the back of it all, he knew, the fierceness was still there, biding its time.

He hadn’t been in favor of her running for prosecutor. When she’d first brought it up, he’d argued with her, he’d met her in Ike’s Diner night after night and penciled hasty lists of the pros and cons on a fresh page in one of his little notebooks, and then he’d turned the notebook around and pushed it across the table at her, poking a finger at the page, because the ‘con’ list was so much longer. He’d fought her – but not because he didn’t think she was capable.

She was.

In fact, he knew that Belfa Elkins would do wonders for Raythune County. Her stubbornness would be an asset. Even a blessing. She was exactly the kind of strong, capable prosecutor that the place craved, as it stared down the barrel of problems that had come crashing into these mountain valleys, problems that, when Nick Fogelsong was a younger man, rarely had seemed to manifest themselves outside of big cities and more heavily populated states.

Bell was just what the town needed. It wasn’t the town that Nick Fogelsong was worried about, with Bell Elkins in the prosecutor’s office.

It was Bell herself.

A lot of people in town knew bits of her history, the floating fragments of innuendo, the snipped-off ends of gossip, but he knew more. He knew how those bits fit together, all the dark shards and sordid corners, all that she had endured. The things she never talked about – not with him, and probably not, he speculated, with anybody. Things that doubtless made Bell Elkins the excellent prosecutor she was – because, he speculated further, nothing shocked her or disgusted her. She was never appalled. There was no degree of human depravity that could rattle her. She did her job.

Fogelsong often fingered the particulars in his mind, especially when he was irked with her. He had to remind himself of what she’d been through.

Bell’s mother had abandoned the family when Bell was a small child. When she was ten years old and her sister Shirley was sixteen, their father was murdered. The trailer in which the family lived – a rust-savaged piece of swaybacked junk parked out by Comer Creek – had burned down on the night of his death.

Bell grew up in a series of foster families. Some were decent, some were marginal – and some weren’t even that.

Nick Fogelsong knew about the night when Bell’s life changed forever. He knew because it was the first big case he’d worked. He had just joined the sheriff’s office back then, and he was a plump, pink-cheeked, fresh-scrubbed young deputy, given to admiring himself and his fancy new brown uniform in any handy reflective surface. He was stuffed full of self-righteousness and good intentions and his mama’s fried chicken – and too much of all three, he scolded himself later. Way too much of all three.

He’d taken the 911 call. Rushed to the scene in the shiny blue-and-silver patrol car he was so proud of, lights flashing a lurid red, siren screaming in the black Appalachian night. And then he’d stood by the trailer at Comer Creek, watching it burn. Wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

Two girls stood with him, one on either side. He’d found them at the scene, wandering around barefoot in raggedy T-shirts and cutoffs, and he’d pulled them away from the trailer, yelling at them – he had to yell, they looked too dazed to comprehend anything – to get back and stay back. At some point, while the trailer disintegrated in the tremendous heat, while the bright blue-yellow flames streaked high and the noxious burning smell gouged at their eyes, the younger girl – Belfa was ten years old, he discovered later, although she was so small that he would’ve guessed seven or eight – slipped her hand into his.

She didn’t look at him, and he didn’t look at her. They watched the trailer burn. It was a long time before she took her hand away again.

Nick Fogelsong had kept in touch with her over the years. Their friendship lasted even as she’d moved away, married, graduated from college and then law school. Had a child. Divorced. When Bell returned to Acker’s Gap five years ago, he’d been plenty glad about it – until she told him what she wanted to do.

She wanted to run for prosecuting attorney of Raythune County.

He was stunned.

For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why she’d willingly subject herself to all that the job entailed, day after day, relentlessly and unavoidably. The violence, the mayhem, the tragedies – hadn’t she had enough of that? And what about the exasperating compromises, the kind that made decent public officials sick to their stomachs? Not to mention the drudgery, the tedium, the paperwork.

In the end, though, Fogelsong had capitulated. Bell won the argument. Which had persuaded him that maybe it was a good idea, after all. Because if Bell had gotten him to support her bid to be prosecuting attorney of Raythune County – and he was no pushover – then she’d do a hell of a job with any jury, on just about any case.

Looking at her now, remembering those late-night arguments in Ike’s over cooling coffee and brittle cinnamon rolls, Nick Fogelsong moved his jaw back and forth a few times, a motion that sometimes accompanied his deeper reflections.

‘I’ll make a file with my notes and e-mail it to you,’ he said. ‘Deputies are talking with the family members right now. We’ve got to figure out why somebody bothered to target three old men.’

‘Crime scene techs?’

‘Finished up a while ago. We’ll have a preliminary report within the hour. Or we ought to, anyway. Buster Crutchfield called in some help from the coroner over in Collier County. They should have news for us pretty soon, too. Unofficially, looks like the shooter used nine-millimeter Parabellum slugs, consistent with a semiautomatic pistol.’

‘Not hard to get your hands on one of those,’ Bell said. ‘Not these days.’

‘Nope.’

They were quiet for a moment.

They could hear the phone ringing over and over again in the sheriff’s outer office, and they could hear his secretary, Melinda Crouch, answering it and promising, in a polite little murmur, that the sheriff would get back to them just as soon as he possibly could.

Fogelsong and Bell both knew how this news would play in the wider world. A triple homicide would fulfill so many stereotypes about West Virginia, would make people think of every negative thing they’d ever heard about the state. Bad things happened everywhere, but somehow when they happened here, people always thought, Figures.

‘How’s Carla?’ he asked. He’d wanted to ask before now, but was afraid of pissing her off. It was, after all, a personal question. Yet now that they’d had a short period of silence, walling off the earlier part of their conversation, the business end, he took a chance.

‘Still kind of shaky,’ Bell said. ‘Took me a while to settle her down.’

‘But she’s okay now?’

‘Getting there.’

Fogelsong nodded. He’d sensed a softening in her when she talked about Carla. It gave him confidence to go forward.

‘Thing is, Bell,’ he said, ‘if she’s upset, I could send a deputy over to watch the house. For a couple of days, maybe. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, but it might give her some peace of mind.’

‘Nice of you, Nick, but she’d hate the fuss.’ Bell paused. ‘No public release of the names of the witnesses, right?’

‘Right. They’d be fighting off the TV cameras for the next month and a half. We don’t want that.’

‘Good.’

Nick pondered. ‘Now, the local folks have a pretty good idea of who was there. Hard to keep that quiet.’

‘Not “hard,” Nick. Impossible.’

With a tilt of his head, the sheriff conceded the point. ‘Anyway, the offer of a squad car stands. Let me know.’

‘She’s a tough kid,’ Bell said, making no attempt to hide the pride in her voice. ‘After she gave her statement, I got her home and made her something to eat. Finally persuaded her to take a nap. Ruthie came over to stay with her. She knew I needed to get back to work. And Tom’s been keeping an eye on the house.’ Ruthie Cox was Bell’s best friend; she and her husband Tom lived three streets over from Bell and Carla. ‘I didn’t want her to be alone.’

‘Can’t blame you.’

Bell uncrossed her legs. She leaned forward, setting her fists on her knees.

‘You know what, Nick? Truth is, I don’t know what I’d do without Ruthie and Tom,’ she said. ‘Or Dot Burdette, either, for that matter, even though she’s being a pain in the ass right now. Caught me on my way back into the courthouse and offered the Casserole Cure. But she wanted the skinny, too. Like everybody else.’

‘You’ve got a lot of good friends in this town. Ruthie and Tom and Dot are three of them, for sure. But they’re not the only ones. Don’t forget that.’

Bell lowered her gaze. She touched the front of his desk, using her index finger to follow an L-shaped scratch in the metal. The moment had passed; he could tell how badly she wanted to get back to business.

‘Friends are great, Nick, but what I really need are a few more assistant prosecutors, you know? I’ve got the Albie Sheets trial coming up next week – and now this.’

‘Yeah. Now this.’

She sat back in her chair. ‘We’ll get him,’ she declared, but it sounded hollow.

They both knew how easy it was to get lost in the hills surrounding Acker’s Gap. They knew how many nooks and creases and crevices were hidden out there, how many rough, wild places inaccessible except on foot, and only then when you’d grown up here and knew the land, knew it in all seasons, all weathers.

‘What’s your instinct, Nick? Robbery gone bad? Shooter panics?’

‘Coulda been that. Or coulda been some crazy fool out on a spree – a random thing, I mean, and those three old boys were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Damnit, Bell,’ the sheriff suddenly said, his big fist bouncing on the desktop, making the pile of notebooks shift and slide. ‘When’d this kind of thing start happening around here? Wasn’t always this way. Was it? Or am I turning into one of those nostalgic old bastards, going on and on about the good old days? I just don’t know anymore. But something tells me – it’s a feeling, only a feeling – that we’re losing something real important here. Something precious.’

He sucked in a massive chestful of air and blew it out again before continuing.

‘You know what, Bell? Sometimes I think – Oh, hell. Forget it.’

‘What’s on your mind?’

‘Nothing. Just a lot of nonsense, is all.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Well,’ the sheriff said.

He grunted, changing the position of his hips yet again. The swivel chair was too old to be comfortable. Its springs were shot. The black plastic pads on the armrests were cracked. One of its tiny wheels was prone to flopping sideways if he scooted more than half an inch in any direction. Still, he refused to replace it. When Bell had urged him to visit Office Depot in the mall out by the interstate to pick out a new chair, the sheriff had snorted and said, What’re we now – kings in a palace? Just be glad I don’t make us all sit cross-legged on the damned floor. Count your blessings.

He shifted his chin back and forth a few more times.

‘It’s like this, Bell,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I just wonder if it’s worth it. Pushing like we do. I know some sheriffs and prosecutors in other counties who take things a lot easier, and they sleep real good at night.’

‘Don’t know what you mean.’

‘Sure you do, Bell,’ he said quietly. ‘Sure you do.’

And she did. She couldn’t help but know, because they’d talked about it so many times. Talked – and argued. He wished she would ease off, wished she would ratchet down the pressure and not be so zealous and inflexible when it came to narcotics cases.

They weren’t like anything else they had ever faced, because the drugs – not street drugs like cocaine or crystal meth, not drugs that promised glamour and good times, but drugs that eased sore backs and sore lives – almost seemed like a natural part of the landscape. They seemed, insidiously, to belong here. To fit right in. Fighting these drugs felt like pushing back against the mountains themselves.

Bell, though, wouldn’t back down. She had a clear-eyed and wild-hearted hatred for the illegal suppliers of prescription medications, and for the drugs that, she believed, were poisoning the people in these mountains like arsenic dumped in a well.

Used to be, the sheriff was right there beside her, her strongest ally, following every tip and carrying out raids on big-time dealers and small-time ones, too, the ones who operated out of their pickups and off the stoops of their trailers and in the bathrooms of truck stops out on the interstate. But he’d been rethinking things. And today’s violence had rattled him. He was feeling helpless, overwhelmed.

He had stated it plainly to her just the other day. Even before the shooting: Maybe if we took a little break, Bell, maybe if you quit making so many speeches that identified drugs as the single greatest threat to the future of West Virginia, maybe if you stopped prosecuting drug-related crimes with quite so much fervor – maybe we’d have some peace again.

He’d seen what they were up against: multiple generations of the same families addicted to prescription painkillers. Kids as young as twelve or thirteen trying the stuff, underestimating its quicksilver grip. He paid close attention to the reports from the regional medical clinics, from the state police. He knew about the drug operations – audacious, increasingly well organized and, in many cases, well armed – that now had a major financial stake here, spreading their distribution networks, pushing deeper and deeper into West Virginia, wrapping their greasy little tentacles around its heart.

And squeezing.

‘So how long?’ he asked her. They had strayed off topic, far from the morning’s shootings. Or maybe they hadn’t.

‘How long what?’

‘How long can we hold out against what’s coming?’

‘One case at a time, Nick,’ Bell said. ‘That’s how we do it. Bottom line, though, is that we have to keep fighting.’

The sheriff was getting tired of the fight. He had other fights to worry about these days.

His wife, Mary Sue, a sweet-faced and fragile-natured woman, a former third-grade teacher at Acker’s Gap Elementary, had begun to be tormented by major episodes of clinical depression. She suffered through long days of sitting by windows, staring at air, while tears slid down her pale cheeks and the pink tissue in her lap was separated into tiny pieces, and those pieces into tinier pieces still. She’d been hospitalized three times in two years.

In the first frightening hours after Mary Sue’s initial breakdown, Bell had helped Nick arrange for her care at the hospital in Charleston. On the middle-of-the-night drive over, he was at the wheel, shoulders hunched, jaw moving slowly back and forth, glaring meanly at the small notch of twisting road made visible by his headlights, while Bell sat in the backseat with Mary Sue.

Bell hadn’t said a word on the way. No false cheer, no phony reassurance. No hand pats. No ‘There, there.’ Bell, Nick knew, would go anywhere he told her to go, she’d do whatever he asked of her, but she wouldn’t lie. Neither of them had any idea how things were going to turn out for Mary Sue Fogelsong, and Bell wouldn’t sugarcoat it.

All Nick knew – all anyone knew – was that Mary Sue would require a great deal of care over a very long period of time. By professionals. Even the people who loved her best weren’t enough for her anymore. It might break their hearts to think so, but their love was now largely beside the point.

If ever there was a time for the sheriff and the prosecuting attorney to take a step back – only one, and only for a little while – and not go after prescription drug abusers with such single-minded passion, this was it.

Wasn’t it?

Nick looked into Bell’s eyes. He knew what he’d see there, he didn’t have the slightest doubt about it, but he had to check, anyway. Just in case.

He saw the same resolve that was always present. If anything, it looked even tougher. Firmer. More entrenched. This woman, he thought, is so goddamned stubborn.

When he thought it, though, he smiled.

‘That white horse of yours,’ the sheriff said. His tone was lighter now. Bemused. ‘The one you’re always riding when you go tearing after those windmills. You ever give him a day off?’

‘Tried to once,’ Bell said. She’d found another tiny thread to pick. This one was on her left sleeve. Her voice, like his, had turned playful – sort of. ‘Really tried. He got restless. Damn near kicked down the barn.’