A Killing in the Hills

40


Lee Ann Frickie had started the day’s third pot of coffee. She stood by the small table, watching the liquid twist into the glass carafe in a thin dark stream. Her fists were curled against her hips, a favorite posture for cogitation. She was peering over the top of her glasses, another mind-clearing technique.

Observing the process by which dry brown crumbles in a paper filter are transformed into a life-enhancing libation was, Lee Ann often told Bell, better than a Zen garden for meditation purposes. Lee Ann was an expert at keeping her spirit calm through idiosyncratic ways. She didn’t knit or do needlepoint. She didn’t pray or read self-help books. She didn’t go to yoga classes, even though they were offered for senior citizens on Tuesday nights over at the RC, in the same cavernous space in which Carla Elkins’s Teen Anger Management workshop was held on Saturday mornings.

Instead, she made a ritual out of carefully watching certain processes: coffee being made, leaves skittering in front of a frantic push of wind, the sun dropping behind the western edge of the mountains at day’s end, a variety of vehicles rolling fitfully past the courthouse toward the four-way stop at the corner.

‘Hey, Lee Ann,’ Bell said. She’d been sitting at her desk ever since Deanna left, flicking her pencil against a stack of files, resulting in the infliction of several random gray dashes on the edge of those files.

‘Yes?’

‘Need to call the Bevins home,’ Bell said.

Lee Ann went back to her desk in the outer office. With a slight shift of her mouse and a few keystrokes, she fetched up a directory and found the number. A moment later she called out to Bell, ‘It’s ringing. Line three.’

Bell picked up her phone and pushed the lighted button on the console. The ringing was interrupted by the voice of Linda Bevins.

‘Hello?’

‘Mrs Bevins, this is Belfa Elkins. I’m the prosecuting attorney.’

‘Yes? Yes, what is it?’

Linda Bevins sounded slightly flustered. But then again, who wouldn’t be? Her six-year-old son had recently died. And she surely knew about her husband and Deanna Sheets.

Wives always know. That was Bell’s philosophy. They know, even if they don’t know they know. Wives, husbands – and the parents of teenagers – had a knowledge that went beyond verifiable fact and time-stamped photos. When you loved someone, you could read them, sense their emotions, feel when things had changed in their hearts.

‘Mrs Bevins, I need to reach your husband.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘I’d let you talk to him if he was here. But he’s working. He had to take a lot of time off just after—’ She stopped. ‘After Tyler died. There was so much to do. All the arrangements. So much. So much to do. So now he works double-hard.’

Bell waited. She assumed Linda Bevins would ask her about the case, about when Albie Sheets would go to trial for killing her son.

She didn’t. The silence widened.

Finally, Bell said, ‘Well, I really do need to speak with him, Mrs Bevins, so if you could just give me a number at which your husband can be contacted, I’ll take it from there.’

‘He’s out of town. On business. He travels, you know. These days, more than ever. He’s a salesman for Bellwood Plastics and they’re trying to get some business in other regions. Out west, mainly. Since things have been so slow around here. He’s been going to the same place once or twice a month for a good little while now.’

‘Where is he, Mrs Bevins?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Your husband. Where’s he been going so often lately?’

‘Las Vegas.’