A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  ‘Come on, Nick,’ Bell said. She tilted her wrist, glancing at the small watch that was strapped there. ‘It’s not even three o’clock yet. Cut yourself some slack, okay?’

  ‘Damn it, Bell. I know what time it is.’

  He wasn’t mad at her. He was mad at the circumstances. She knew that and didn’t react.

  Nick Fogelsong closed the notebook by lifting it in a quick loop, causing the cover to flap shut. He tossed it on his desk. Watched it land. ‘The thing I don’t know,’ he went on, ‘is where the hell the shooter went. He’s still out there somewhere. Maybe planning something else.’

  ‘Still no leads?’ Bell said, knowing the answer but also knowing she needed to ask, to give Nick a place to go with his anger. A speech he could make, to siphon off the frustration.

  ‘Not a goddamned one. We did our sweep through the county and the state police put out an alert for the whole region, but it was way too late. Bastard could be in Pennsylvania or Ohio by now, for all we know. Or Timbuktu.’ With his right thumbnail, Fogelsong scratched his right eyebrow. ‘It just happened too fast to get a decent description. It was just boom boom boom – and three men are dead.’

  ‘Security cameras?’

  ‘They were down for servicing. Just our luck.’

  ‘Well, it was lucky for somebody. That’s for damned sure.’

  The sheriff frowned. Bell could tell that something had stopped his thoughts cold and then got them going again in another direction entirely.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, voice softer, expression shifting. ‘You sure this is okay for you right now? Working on this, I mean? That was a pretty grim scene over there, and with Carla involved as a witness and all, and given everything else, I’m a little bit worried that maybe it might be too mu—’

  ‘Nick.’

  Her interruption was swift and harsh. She knew exactly what he meant by ‘everything else’ – and she didn’t like it. Didn’t care for the fact that he’d brought it up while they were dealing with a case.

  ‘We discussed this,’ she snapped. ‘Over and over and over again. Four years ago. Before I was even sworn in. We talked about it until we were both damned sick of the topic, remember? It’s history. Come on. I do my job.’

  ‘Yeah. But this one’s different. Hits a little close to home. Don’t you think?’

  She looked down at her lap to buy time. She felt exactly the way she’d felt when Deputy Mathers had tried to stop her that morning.

  Get out of my way, Bell thought. Get out of my damned way.

  ‘Bell?’ the sheriff pressed, when her answer wasn’t quick in coming. ‘You know what I’m saying. You’ve been through some things.’

  ‘Me and everybody else.’ She recrossed her legs at the knee, leaned over, and picked a short white thread from the black trouser cuff. Busy work. Anything to keep from having to look at him. ‘Lots of folks have lousy childhoods, Nick.’

  ‘Not like yours.’

  She’d heard enough. This wasn’t the time.

  ‘I do my job,’ she repeated. She said it slowly, with no emotion, but something brusque and unpleasant hunched behind the words.

  ‘Sure you do,’ the sheriff said. ‘No doubt about it. But didn’t we agree that if it ever got to be too much, if it ever started to—’

  ‘Nick.’ This time the interruption came even faster, even meaner, with an edge that seemed sharp enough to draw blood if you weren’t careful around it. ‘Let’s move on,’ she said. ‘What’s next?’

  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 aro
und 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 b
ack 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.