Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  Finished with the list, she moved on to the photos. The first was an enlargement of the Virginia driver’s license of Edward Jerome Hackel. His plump face looked happy, satisfied. Big smile. His dark hair was parted on the left; a small curl dipped down on his forehead. It was the face of man who was trying to radiate certainty and self-importance, a man who knew—who thought he knew—what his destiny was, and strode toward it with a jaunty confidence.

  Two more photos were screen grabs from the surveillance cameras at the Cigarettes 4 Less store on the interstate, a store that would have been on Hackel’s way home from Acker’s Gap. They were time-stamped 4:47 and 4:51 P.M. on the Thursday that had been determined to be the day of Hackel’s death. He wore a brown tweed overcoat. One of the photos came from the inside of the store: Hackel was handing the cashier his credit card—the store’s records indicated it was a corporate AmEx registered to Mountain Magic—for what appeared to be two hard packs of Marlboros. The other photo came from the parking lot, and showed Hackel opening the door of his BMW. The purchase recorded on the AmEx was the clue that sent Deputy Oakes to Cigarettes 4 Less to check for the surveillance footage. If Hackel had paid cash, they might never have known about this stop. It told them that at 4:51 P.M., Edward Hackel was still alive, and most likely on his way back to his motel room.

  The next collection of photos came from the crime scene. Had Bell been unprepared—had this been her first look at what a heavy sharp object, wielded with strength and purpose, could do to the back of a human neck—she might have been sick. But this was not the worst she had seen. She wondered, briefly, what would happen on the day when she reached that point—when she did look at something that was the very, very worst she’d ever seen, ever would see. Would she know it? Would she sense it automatically?

  The first photos were taken from a few feet away. The object was facedown in Old Man’s Creek, snagged amidst the cattails and the scraggly vegetation that grew at the edges of a body of water. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might be puzzled; Hackel’s substantial body looked like a lump of garbage across which someone had tossed an old brown blanket. The next several were taken from a closer vantage point, and included puffy appendages that had to be hands. The most gruesome photo was still to come. It was a close-up of a head unattached to the body.

  From the front, the features were lost in a wet wreck of ripped flesh and abject bloating. From the back, the lethal wound gaped in a gruesome series of triangular wedges; the sharp edge had struck him repeatedly at the base of the skull, hacking through skin and bone with an intense driving force. The matted blood adhered in a sticky-looking paste like an old-fashioned poultice. Turkey vultures had snacked on the last trailing tabs of skin that had once connected his head to his body.

  Bell pictured the turkey vultures she had grown accustomed to seeing each spring, as they returned to their roosts in those broad-winged spirals of flight, scouting for carrion and then diving earthward. Some people were disgusted by them, because of their diet of rotting flesh. But turkey vultures ate what was already dead. They didn’t kill.

  With humans, it was a different story.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The phone didn’t ring anymore. That was an exaggeration, but only slightly. Nick Fogelsong’s thoughts were of the dark, bitter, and self-pitying kind on this Sunday night at the Highway Haven, and exaggerating his predicament made him feel worse, which perversely made him feel better. That was the circular paradox of self-pity: the more you despised yourself for indulging in it, the better you felt, because you knew you deserved being despised. Which in turn made you feel worse. Which in turn made you feel better.

  Three and a half weeks had passed since the body identified as that of Edward Hackel had been found in Old Man’s Creek. Royce Dillard had been arrested and charged with the murder. The trial was set to begin the next day.

  Fogelsong sat at the desk in his office at the Highway Haven. It was almost midnight, well past the time when he should have packed up his briefcase and shrugged on his overcoat and gone home. Still, he sat there. Chair scooted back, feet propped on the desk, hands linked behind his head, he sat.

  And stared at the phone, which didn’t ring.

  He felt like a teenage girl, waiting for someone to call and invite her to the prom. He felt shunned and vulnerable and needy. He felt, that is, like a damned fool. But at the moment, he couldn’t rouse himself to do much more than sit there and stew. The cup of coffee on his desk blotter was cold. So were his thoughts.

  He knew what was going on at the courthouse, because he used to be part of the process. Right in the center of it, matter of fact. He knew that Bell and her staff, assisted by Sheriff Harrison and her deputies, had been assembling evidence for the trial. Constructing the narrative whereby they would prove that Dillard had willfully and with premeditation killed Hackel. On the other side, meanwhile, Serena Crumpler—Fogelsong had approved of the news that Serena was representing Dillard—was gathering her own facts and witnesses to prove that the man was innocent. Or at least to raise enough doubt in jurors’ minds so that a conviction for first-degree murder was unlikely.

  He wanted to help. But Bell didn’t want his help. She’d made that abundantly clear.

  She hadn’t even told him about the arrest when it happened, a fact that stuck painfully in his thoughts like an undigested lump of dinner. He’d had to get the information from—even thinking the man’s name made Nick’s blood pressure rise so fast that he’d swear he could feel it elevating inch by inch, putting dangerous pressure on those arterial walls—Vince Dobbs.

  Fast-talking, empty-headed Vince Dobbs.

  So you didn’t hear?

  Hear what?

  They charged him.

  You mean Royce Dillard?

  Damn straight. First-degree murder. For killing that Hackel fella. And leaving his body down by Old Man’s Creek. You didn’t know about that?

  Sure I did.

  Didn’t sound like it. I think I surprised you.

  Think whatever you like.

  Don’t get sore at me, Nick. Ain’t done nothing to you.

  Not sore.

  Sounds like you are.

  Jesus, Vince, just move along, okay? Other folks’re waiting in line to pay for their gas. This is a place of business.

  At that point, Fogelsong had put his hand on the sleeve of Vince’s denim jacket and tugged him out of the way. There were six people behind Vince, restless, impatient, starting to shuffle their feet and mutter things under their breath. Vince was just winding up his transaction that afternoon—he’d paid for his gas at the pump, but came inside to buy a Milky Way bar for himself and a package of sunflower seeds for his mother, Esther Dobbs—when he spotted Nick Fogelsong as the latter emerged from the hall that led to the office in the back.

  That’s when Vince called to him. Nick had waved in a halfhearted way and moved over in Vince’s direction, promptly regretting it when the man delivered his information. Information that was not totally startling—Dillard, after all, had been held for questioning from the start, and all the smart money was on his being charged—but it still blindsided Nick, because there was a thing called rumor and there was something else called confirmed fact, and between those two, lay an entire world.

  I should’ve known. I should’ve been a part of it.

  He had gone into town that very Monday morning, two days after the body was found, and tried to talk to Belfa. Not in the courthouse, for God’s sake. He knew better. He went to JP’s, knowing—well, hoping—she would come in. And when she did, he tried to make his position clear: I’m not sheriff anymore, true. But I’ve got a contribution to make.

  In response, she might as well have just flung hot coffee in his face. She’d rejected his help, leaving no doubt that that’s just what she was doing.

  And now that he knew Dillard was going to trial, Nick had waited for the past two and a half weeks for her to call him. Ask him what he thought about the case
. What would he have said? Well, frankly, he thought they’d been a little hasty; he understood the pressure to make an arrest, he knew that county residents were richly consoled by what they saw as swift and decisive law enforcement action, and he further knew that the evidence was textbook—motive, means, opportunity, plus the absence of other credible suspects. And yet.

  The “and yet” part was a matter of feeling, not facts. He could not have discussed it with anyone except Bell.

  But she didn’t call.

  Sheriff Harrison, by contrast, had called him that very afternoon; she had needed his opinion on a few things. She never hesitated to reach out. She was grateful to him for giving her a chance as a deputy, eight years ago. Told him so. And he told her—not as a quid pro quo, but because it was the God’s honest truth—that she was doing a good job as sheriff. He was damned proud of her. Privately he thought she was a little impulsive sometimes, a little too quick to act—this case proved it—but that was her style. She was entitled to run things as she saw fit.

  And then, while he had her on the line, he’d asked her about an idea he had—Feel free to say no, Pam, it’s no problem—and she had listened and then said, Maybe. Let me think on it, Nick.

  Bell, though, had not called.

  A lot of his days and nights had gone just like this one: He sat at his desk and he waited for the phone to ring. Oh, he was busy enough, all right; a new group of employees had just been hired, and he had to go over the criminal background checks and the credit checks. Other people did the actual labor; he was the boss. He went over their work and made sure it was all done properly. Made sure, for instance, that the company didn’t hire a pedophile and put him in charge of the candy aisle. Moreover, Nick had undertaken a top-to-bottom review of security procedures at all the stations, preparatory to a major upgrade. It was important work. Honest work. Work that made a difference. Walter Albright had let things slip badly in his last year on the job, especially at this location. Sometimes Nick wondered if the man had been going senile. Things had deteriorated that much. It took all of his attention just to get the security protocols back up to an acceptable level.

  So why was he so miserable?

  His cell went off. It was the company cell, not his personal one, so Nick had no expectations when he answered it. He knew it wouldn’t be Belfa.

  “Hey, Mr. Fogelsong.” It was Lee Hume, the Sunday night cashier. “Got a situation out here.”

  Nick grunted and hung up. He yanked his feet off the desk and bolted forward, springing out of the chair as if it were an ejector seat. Sixty seconds later he was out in the store and moving toward the front counter. It was not an easy journey, bearing a certain resemblance to Moses and his Red Sea moment. Sunday nights at the Highway Haven were always monstrously crowded, as truck drivers made their final pushes to get to where they needed to be with their loads by Monday morning, augmenting their petroleum purchases with Mountain Dew, coffee, 5-hour Energy bottles, smokeless tobacco—whatever would keep them awake at the wheel. Other customers threaded through the aisles, too, intent on one last weekend fling before the commencement of the dreary workweek, toting their six-packs, one in each hand.

  Hume and a lushly tattooed young man in a T-shirt and skinny jeans were staring at each other across the front counter, fists cocked at their hips, lower lips thrust out.

  “What’s the trouble, Lee?” Fogelsong said.

  “This guy says I gave him a five instead of a ten,” Hume said. “He’s supposed to get ten back in change—and I gave him a ten.” Hume was an overgrown, puffy-looking man, with black glasses and a round hedge of Chia-Pet hair. Broken blood vessels covered his nose like a net. He was fifty-seven years old, which Fogelsong knew because he’d seen his personnel file; other people might have guessed younger. Hume played the age float. It was a matter of dignity. At twenty-five, even thirty, you could shrug off working the front counter at the Highway Haven as a temporary gig until your fortunes improved; at fifty-seven, it was a career.

  “You’re a fucking liar,” the kid said with a snarl. “You gave me a five, asshole.”

  Hume turned to Fogelsong, his voice high-pitched and petulant. “Hear how he talked to me? You hear that?”

  “Yes. I do.” Fogelsong motioned to Sissy Lewis, who was just coming out of the ladies’ bathroom with a mop and a plastic bucket. Somebody had stopped up one of the toilets again. It had happened about a half an hour ago, and when she called Nick to tell him where she was, he’d said, What’d they stop it up with this time? she had replied, Trust me, Mr. Fogelsong—you don’t want to know.

  “Hey, Sissy,” he said. “Take over the cash register, will you? I need to speak with Lee and this gentleman.” She said, “Sure.” She was a middle-aged mother of four, divorced, obese, and always cheerful, and she worked harder than anyone Nick had ever seen.

  He moved to a corner of the store with Hume and the young man. The other customers had been intrigued by the little drama, but now that the line was moving again, ignored it.

  “Okay,” Fogelsong said. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” He turned to the kid. The kid was so young that his pimples looked first-generation. “We’re going to give you the five bucks. The five bucks you say we owe you. Is that okay?”

  The kid’s surprised grin was wide. He smirked at Hume. “Shit, yeah, it’s okay,” he said.

  Hume started to argue. Fogelsong held up a hand. “Just a minute, Lee. I’m not finished talking.” He gave the kid a studious stare. “Here’s how it works—just in case you’re thinking of trying this again. We’ve got your picture from our security camera, okay? And from now on, when you come in here and you get change from your purchase, whoever’s working the register is going to take the change and lay it out on the counter and you’re both going to agree—before you take it—that it’s the correct change. Okay?”

  The kid’s grin slid off his face like something slick from a griddle. Clearly he’d anticipated a repeat performance of his easy-money scheme in the near future.

  “Don’t matter,” he muttered. “Never coming back to this shithole.”

  “Breaks my heart,” Nick replied. Hume snickered, which made the kid even madder. He slunk away, and the chains that hung from his belt sloshed back and forth, jingling and rattling. When he reached the front door he punched it open.

  “Thanks, Mr. Fogelsong,” Hume said. “Best part is, the fucker forget to take what he really did pay for—those two-liter Mountain Dews over yonder. Stupid punk.”

  “Get back to work, Lee.”

  * * *

  A couple of hours later, Fogelsong decided to give up and head home. He’d finished a slew of paperwork—which was not why he’d stuck around so late, but he was glad it was done. Late nights in the office were a great time to tackle paperwork. That was one way—maybe the only way—this job was like his sheriff’s job. You had no interruptions in the middle of the night. You could focus. Productivity jumped.

  He took a last look at his cell before he shoved it into his coat pocket and turned off the office light. The only calls he’d had tonight were from Mary Sue, wondering when he’d be coming home. Soon, he told her. Soon, honey. Go on to bed. Don’t wait up.

  Staring at his cell, knowing for certain now that Bell wasn’t going to call, he thought about what he would have said to her, if she had. At first he wanted it to be, Screw you—shutting me out like this. How dare you? How fucking dare you? But that lasted only seconds. The anger drained away. And he realized that what he really wanted to say to her, and what he hoped like hell she somehow sensed from him, no matter where she was right now, awake or asleep, was this:

  Good luck, Belfa. I know how much your work means to you and I hope the trial goes your way.

  Then he shut off the light, buttoned his coat, and headed out to the front part of the store. Darkness crouched against the windows. The crowd had cleared out now. Highway Haven was down to just a smattering of customers, typical for the scraped-off plain that stretched
out between 2 and 6 A.M. A truck driver filled up two jumbo thermoses over at the coffee urns. A woman stood in front of the beer cooler, puzzling over her selection. Hume looked half-asleep behind the counter, an arm propped against the register.

  Fogelsong didn’t bother to wave. He went out the front door. A blast of cold air met him there, the tricky cold of March, tricky because you half-expected winter to be gone by now and it never was—but you still anticipated that it might be. Hope beat experience every damned time. Fogelsong winced, pulling up the collar of his coat. Glad I’ve got a close parking spot, he thought, a thought immediately superseded by, Good Lord, I’m getting soft. Next thing you know, I’ll be riding one of those little scooters from my car into the building.

  A glint caught his eye. It came from across the lot, near the first row of pumps on the truckers’ side.

  He looked closer. The lights above the pumps reflected off the chrome. A truck was parked there, a big silver rig, eighteen-wheeler. The driver stood next to it. A short, burly man in a baseball cap with a Peterbilt logo. His green plaid coat was wool, and it looked as if it had last fit him maybe a decade ago. Coat and face were vaguely familiar. Nick knew most of the drivers by sight if not by name, and Green Plaid was a regular. A regular pain in the ass, Fogelsong corrected himself. After filling up his truck, Green Plaid made a habit out of hanging around, fussing pointlessly with his vehicle, walking back and forth across the lot or clogging up an aisle in the store. Nick didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Not if the man had made a purchase.

  Nick decided to go over and say hello. He liked to remind the drivers with his presence that there always might be somebody watching them, day and night. Security cameras, yes—but human beings, too. Not just dumb machines. Never hurt to let them know.

  The sound of his steps rang out against the concrete. Green Plaid’s head jerked in his direction. He looked surprised, and then he looked afraid.

  “Evening,” Fogelsong said. “Once you’ve filled up, you might want to come inside. We’ve got some mighty good coffee. Tell ’em I sent you. It’ll be on the house. Just tell ’em you ran into the head of security and he gave the okay.”