Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  Bell didn’t reply.

  “I knew Hackel,” Nick continued, once he realized that she had no comment. “Not real well, but we’d talked a good number of times. He’d come by the Haven quite a lot. Wanted to brag about the resort and how wonderful it was all going to be. So I thought that maybe—well—”

  “What?” Bell said. “What did you think?”

  “That I could help.” He was stung by her tone, rocked back on his heels a bit, and surprised to find himself there. “Provide some background. Context. You know.”

  “No, I don’t know. I’ll tell you what I do know. I know that you’re not sheriff anymore. So I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation with you, Nick. Surely you’re aware of that.” She took a drink of her coffee. It was savagely hot, but she didn’t care. She swallowed the liquid and then moved the white mug to one side, so that she could lean forward and give him a hard look. “Don’t do this, okay? Just don’t.”

  “Do what?”

  “Pretend that we can get back to how things were. Because we can’t. It’s unethical, for one thing—like I said, I can’t discuss a current case with a civilian. And for another, I don’t want to.” The diner was busy enough now that her words most likely couldn’t be heard outside the booth. The sounds of greetings and laughter and chair-scrapes and coughing fits and the continuous fizzy plash of the deep-fat fryer—it always sounded to Bell like applause—curled around them, ensuring privacy. “You’ve moved on, Nick. You made your decision and you moved on. Well, so have I.”

  For a minute he didn’t say anything. She sensed his yearning, the sharpness of his desire. He wanted to be a part of things again, to feel he was contributing. This was his hometown, whether or not he was sheriff of it. When she’d first heard of his decision not to run again—finding out in a phone call from Sammy Burdette still rankled—she had wondered how long it would be before he realized his mistake. Before he tried to get involved. Tried to insinuate himself in the middle of an investigation.

  Well, here it was. The first major case since he’d unpinned the badge from his chest and taken off his hat and walked off into the damned sunset. Here it was.

  No way, Bell thought. She wouldn’t say the words out loud, but she willed him to read her mind once again. He was so annoyingly good at it. I’ve grieved for you, Nick Fogelsong, I miss you like hell every single time I walk into the courthouse—but no. No, you’re not a part of my world anymore. You’re an outsider now.

  He looked away from her. When he looked back, he was smiling, but she recognized the kind of smile it was: An insincere one. An abstract, let’s-keep-things-light-and-friendly smile. The one she’d seen him use any number of times as sheriff, when the situation was dangerous and he wanted to keep the tension from ratcheting up. A professional peacemaker’s smile.

  “So you got yourself a dog,” he said.

  He was so much like her: changing the subject to keep emotions off to one side, out of the picture.

  “No secrets around here,” she muttered.

  “It’s your own fault.” Now his smile seemed real, not contrived. “You bought dog food yesterday at Lymon’s. Opal Lymon asked you about it at the checkout, and you told her. Well, Mary Sue does her grocery shopping on Sundays, too, and so by the time she came in, Opal was ready with the news.”

  “Guess I ought to start shopping out of town.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s not such a bad thing, is it? People knowing your business? Used to bother me all the danged time when I was growing up here, but now I choose to think of it as folks taking an interest. Better than being forgotten, right?”

  “Not sure about that.”

  “It’ll come soon enough. Just take a stroll through any graveyard. You’ll get a quick sense of what it’s like to be forgotten.”

  She dragged the mug back until it sat right in front of her again, feeling the heat of its ceramic side when she cupped her hands around it. God, how I’ve missed this man, she thought. She couldn’t let on, but the memory had her in its grip, just as surely as she had the mug in hers: the daily back-and-forth with Nick Fogelsong, the talks about all manner of things, from coffee to law enforcement to philosophy. The give-and-take of news and opinion. The mood-lightening wisecracks.

  She felt an anguished, impossible wish—it came over her suddenly, as if someone had dimmed the overhead lights for a second or so—that things had never changed, that the world had stopped its infernal turning and paused right where it was, that the clocks had all gone cold at exactly the same moment, that Nick Fogelsong was still sheriff, that this was still Ike’s Diner, that Clay Meckling was meeting her for dinner tonight, that Carla’s room back at the house on Shelton Avenue was still Carla’s room and not an empty shell with only the diminishing echoes of the complicated, infuriating, beautiful adolescent life that once had been lived there.

  She wanted all of those things. She had none of them. Instead, she had a day packed with obligations.

  “Could be,” she said. She plucked a napkin from the dispenser at the end of the table. Folded it over once, twice, and then placed the square under her coffee mug, in case any liquid sloshed over the rim. “That it? I’ve got to head out soon.”

  “So who’s taking care of Royce’s dog while you’re at work?”

  “Ben Fawcett. Vickie Fawcett’s boy.”

  Fogelsong nodded. The Fawcetts lived two doors down from her.

  “Ben just turned nine,” Bell added. “Good reliable kid. Comes home from school for lunch every day. He’ll give her a walk and make sure she’s okay.”

  Fogelsong lifted and tipped his mug, taking a brief drink. Bell knew he wasn’t thinking about the dog—or the coffee, either, come to that.

  He finished his swallow.

  “Well,” he said, “if you need my help with anything, you know where to find me.”

  She did. And what she wanted to say to him was this: I’m confused as hell about the case. Even with all the open-and-shut forensic evidence, something’s not quite right. I wish I could talk it over with you, hear what you think, then you’d hear what I think, and we’d toss it around for hours, going back and forth with our theories. What made Royce Dillard suddenly lose his temper? What could Hackel possibly have said to him to make him grab that shovel? Jesus, Nick, I wish like hell that things were like they used to be between us.

  But what she said out loud was this: “Yeah.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The bar next to the Holiday Inn Express up on the interstate was called the Comebacker. The name was both an inducement for return visits and a tribute to the owner’s son, Ricky Garrison, who had pitched a few innings in the major leagues a decade ago—and survived a wicked comebacker hit by Derek Jeter in the top of the fifth, leaving the game flat on his back with a skull fracture and a severe concussion—after which he settled down to life in Raythune County with his wife and five children, tending bar for his father. When Ricky was in the hospital, Jeter had sent him a short handwritten note, and Ricky had paid to have it laminated and framed: Hope you feel better soon. And next time, remember to duck! Now the note was displayed on the wall behind Harold Garrison’s bar, surrounded by pictures of Ricky in his red-and-white uniform during his windup, leg cocked, arms high over his head, body kinked as if his joints were hinged to swing in either direction.

  Bell saw Diana Hackel right away. The room was dim, but it was almost empty—standard for late afternoon, before the evening crowd arrived—and a human face stood out, even in the murk. She was sitting by herself at one of the small round tables, leaning forward, elbows bracketing a glass of red wine, fingers of both hands linked to make a small flat hammock on which she rested her chin.

  Two days had passed since her husband’s mutilated body had been found at the edge of a creek. Bell, approaching the table, sensed that this woman was still stunned, still lost in the daze generated the moment she heard the news.

  “Mrs. Hackel.”

  The face rose slowly, without interes
t.

  “May I sit down?” Bell asked.

  Diana waved her hand toward the chair across from her, a halfhearted, Whatever gesture. The drinks she’d already consumed were apparent in the looseness of her movements. Diana hadn’t sounded surprised or apprehensive when Bell had called that morning to request a meeting, but neither was she particularly welcoming.

  “My sister’s with the kids,” Diana said. She blurted it out, as if Bell had demanded an explanation. “Back in Falls Church. I was going to have her bring them here, but—but it didn’t seem right. They need to be home.”

  “How are they doing?”

  “How do you think they’re doing? Eddie had a lot of faults, Mrs. Elkins, but he was a good dad. A really good dad. My boy, Shawn—he’s twelve—hasn’t said a word since we told him what happened. And Lilly won’t eat. Not a bite. So why am I still here, right?” Her eyes sought out the wineglass. “Why don’t I go home to be with my kids, right? They need me. Obviously. So why am I here? Well, I’ll tell you. Because I want to make sure that Eddie’s killer pays for what he did.” She shook her head. “We’ve had to delay the funeral. Until you people finish your work.”

  Bell wanted to correct her—in this case it was the state police crime lab, not the Raythune County prosecutor’s office, that would decide when the body could be released for burial—but it didn’t matter. They were all one thing to Diana Hackel now: The Authorities. The you people constituting the target of her discontent.

  “I have a few questions, if that’s okay,” Bell said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I’d like to get a better sense of your husband. You mentioned the other night that he was good at his job. Lots of energy. Really threw himself into his work.”

  “He was a salesman. He liked to sell things. That’s how we got together, in fact. He was working for a Toyota dealership. I needed a car. I walked out of there with a Corolla—and a dinner date. A few months later, we got married.”

  “Did he enjoy working for Mountain Magic?”

  Diana thought about her answer before offering it up. “I honestly don’t know. I mean, he said he did. But no matter where he was working, he always insisted he was having a ball. That was part of the shtick.”

  “The shtick.”

  “Yeah. You know—the optimism, the pep, the snappy patter.” Diana’s tired voice suddenly was infused with the phony zeal of a carnival barker, and she waggled her hands on either side of her face: “‘It’s all good! It’s terrific! It’s fan-tas-tic! It’s un-fucking-believable!’” She relapsed into weariness. “The pressure was on. That much, I do know. Carolyn Runyon’s a total bitch. She’d call the house at all hours, demanding to speak to him. She’d have her panties in a bunch over some big emergency—usually just some routine problem—and she’d be yelling and screaming at Eddie to fix it. Finally he just started staying here through the week, so he could be on site. The motel has a special deal for Mountain Magic employees. He came home on weekends—when he could. That happened less and less, though. Things have been heading to a real crisis point. If they don’t break ground soon, they’ll never be able to stay on schedule. And if they fall too far behind on the construction timetable—chances are, a lot of the backers will pull out.”

  The sole waitress who worked the afternoon shift had finally sauntered over. She stopped chewing gum long enough to ask Bell if she wanted anything to drink.

  “I’m good,” Bell said. She looked over at the bar. Ricky Garrison was wiping down a section of it with a striped cloth. His shirtsleeves were rolled up way past his elbows, and even at a distance, even in the dimness, Bell could see the muscles in his right arm as he dug at a spot, muscles that once had hurled a tiny white ball at speeds upwards of ninety-nine miles an hour with uncanny accuracy—his fastball was a thing of beauty—and that now were applied to the mopping up of spilled liquor. She wondered how much he remembered about his playing days; the concussion had left him foggy-brained, with a tremor in his hands.

  The waitress, young and henna-haired and skinny, eyed Diana’s wineglass.

  “Sure, Jolene,” Diana said. “I’ll have another.”

  Bell waited for the waitress to leave before resuming her questions.

  “Did your husband ever talk about Royce Dillard?”

  “Maybe. Could be. Eddie talked about a lot of people. I heard a lot of names. I can’t say I specifically remember him talking about anybody named Dillard. But I also can’t say that he didn’t. It’s kind of a blur of names, tell you the truth.” She looked at Bell, fleetingly amused. “He even mentioned you, once or twice.”

  “Me.”

  “Yeah. Something about a county commissioners’ meeting. You spoke, right? And said you weren’t exactly tickled pink about the resort?”

  “I expressed some reservations. Mainly about the tax abatements and what the return on those was likely to be.”

  “Yeah, well, that was Ed’s job. Keeping track of who was opposed to the project and then going to talk to them and bringing them around. If he hadn’t come to see you yet, believe me—he was on his way.” She laughed. “You’d have been putty in his hands. Trust me on that. Eddie Hackel could sell sand to a camel.”

  The waitress returned. She tried to pick up the old wineglass and replace it with the new one, but Diana swatted at her hand; she wanted both glasses there before her, every drop available. The waitress shrugged and withdrew. Fine by her.

  “When was the last time you spoke to your husband?”

  “Thursday morning. I got to my hotel in Charleston on Wednesday night, too late to call him. So I tried him the next day. About nine, I think. I don’t know. Check his cell.” She frowned. “You have his cell, right? It wasn’t lost or—”

  “We have it.” Hackel’s phone and other personal items had been recovered from his hotel room by Deputy Mathers. The missed call from his wife was recorded in the log. That was the only recent activity. “Apparently he didn’t take it with him when he left his room on Thursday afternoon.”

  Diana frowned again, deeper this time. “That’s weird. Eddie was one of those guys whose cell might as well be surgically attached to his ear. Never went anywhere without it.” She finished her glass of wine and immediately switched it out for the other one. The waitress drifted by again. Diana signaled her for another. “Look, can we wrap this up? I’ve got to get going pretty soon. Got to call my kids. Try to explain—” She pulled in a deep breath, and then released it again in the form of a heavy sigh. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you’ve got the bastard who killed him. I’m pleased as fucking punch. But I just wish I didn’t have to stick around here during the trial, you know? This place is like poison to me now. Poison.” She drained her glass. The next one had just arrived.

  “Had anyone made any threats against your husband? Did he mention being afraid of anyone?”

  Diana gave her a sharp look. “I thought you already caught the guy.”

  “We’ve charged someone, yes. But part of my job, Mrs. Hackel, is to make it clear that we’ve considered all the possibilities. That we didn’t overlook anything.”

  “Okay.” Diana flicked a fingernail several times against the side of her new glass, as if to welcome it to the grim party. “Yeah, he got some threats. I mean, sure, most of the people in your little town here think Mountain Magic’s a great idea. Nice big shiny resort and all the business it’ll bring. Some of them, though, think the opposite. They think it’s just a bunch of rich guys looking for another place to party. And that it’ll destroy the land. You know what? They’re probably right. But good luck trying to stop it. Money wins. Always has, always will. End of story.”

  Abruptly, Diana stood up. She was more than a little unsteady on her feet. She swayed for a few seconds, and then sat back down again. “Whoa,” she said.

  Bell decided to take advantage of this unexpected coda. “The way I understand it, your husband was trying to persuade Royce Dillard to sell his property to Mountain Magic. Dilla
rd said no, but your husband persisted. Really pushed him. Confronted him every time he had the chance. I take it that wouldn’t surprise you.”

  “Do you know any salesmen, Mrs. Elkins? If you did, you wouldn’t ask me that. A ‘No’ to a man like Ed Hackel didn’t mean ‘No.’ It meant, ‘Try again. Make me a better offer. Tempt me.’ Anyway, ever since you arrested Dillard, people around here have been telling me about him. About how he’s just plain nuts. Some kind of crazy loner, right? Maybe Eddie just ran into him on a bad day. Said the wrong thing. Maybe Dillard was off his meds. Whatever.”

  She uttered a small belch, which didn’t seem to embarrass her.

  “Look,” Diana went on. “My husband was no saint. He had a quick temper and he—well, let’s just say he liked to have a good time, okay? Partying was a big part of his job. Being sociable. Making sure everybody was nice and loose and happy. But he didn’t deserve to die the way he did. Like I said, he was a good father. A really good father. He loved his kids. And you know what’s so funny? Want to know what’s so all-fired, goddamned funny?”

  Bell didn’t say anything, so Diana continued.

  “This is really none of your business, but here goes. I’m pregnant again. Just found out last month.” She waved toward the wineglass. “I know. I know I shouldn’t. Won’t happen again. Swear. I just couldn’t face—couldn’t think about raising my kids without—Or the fact that this baby won’t ever know—”

  Diana stopped. She tried to compose herself. “That’s what Eddie and I were going to talk about over dinner. The new baby. How everything had to change. He was talking about maybe coming home for good, maybe finding another job so he could do that. Was it ever going to happen? I don’t know. But he was considering it. And that’s the part that just tears me up inside.” Her head wobbled. The alcohol seemed to hit her in a wave. “He never got the chance to change.” She almost slid out of her seat.

  Bell put a hand on her arm to help steady her. “You’re not driving anywhere tonight, right?”