A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  Bell was certain that Jimmy Pugh sold as well as bought, and that he worked for someone else, someone bigger and more important, but she couldn’t prove it. She couldn’t prove it because she didn’t have the time or the staff to investigate it. And because space was tight in the county jail, too tight to accommodate every two-bit, penny-ante, shit-for-brains punk who was dumb enough to get himself arrested, she had to go along with Nancy Smith’s suggestion to send Jimmy Pugh to rehab instead of jail.

  Bell hated it. Not because she harbored any special animosity toward Jimmy Pugh, but because, with more resources, she might’ve been able to use him, to trade what they possessed – discretion in sentencing – for what he possessed: information. He might’ve given them a fix on his boss.

  As it was, Pugh got his wish – rehab in lieu of jail – without having to cooperate.

  Tolliver’s gavel fell with a crack. A deputy moved forward, catching Pugh’s skinny, twitching arm. Nancy Smith gathered up her paperwork.

  On his way out of the courtroom Pugh abruptly uttered a high-pitched cackle of a laugh. It didn’t sound especially sinister, and it wasn’t directed anywhere specific – he threw back his head, eyes goggling at the ceiling – but to Bell, it suddenly made the courtroom feel a lot colder.

  ‘So why’d you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Come back to West Virginia.’ Nancy Smith grinned. She had a pert little mouth which bright red lipstick had turned into something lascivious. ‘I’ve always wondered. Never had a chance to ask you. Don’t get over this way too often.’

  She and Bell had ended up walking side by side out of Judge Tolliver’s courtroom. Turning the same way in the courthouse hall.

  Bell had lived in Acker’s Gap more than five years now, but apparently still had to explain herself. What was the statute of limitations on having to justify a life decision? Ten years, twenty years? A hundred?

  Bell didn’t know Smith well. She was based in Donnerton, a town about twenty miles from Acker’s Gap, and her practice was generally restricted to wills and property transfers. Occasionally, though, a criminal matter came her way, and she ended up facing Bell or one of the assistant prosecutors.

  ‘Why?’ Bell said.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why do you wonder?’

  ‘Human curiosity.’ With her short legs, Smith had trouble keeping up with Bell’s long stride. She was getting winded. ‘Simple ole human curiosity.’

  Bell didn’t like Nancy Smith. She wasn’t sure why. Didn’t matter. What mattered was the case.

  ‘Your client,’ Bell said, with no apologies for changing the subject, ‘has to follow the rehab program to the letter. We want weekly reports from his counselors. One slip – and that’s it. He goes to jail. Hope you’ll make that clear to him.’

  They had reached the threshold of Bell’s office. For a moment, Bell was afraid Smith was going to follow her in.

  ‘Shame about that shooting,’ Smith said. The grin was gone. ‘Making any headway?’

  ‘Some.’

  Now the grin came back, fresher and brighter, like a debutante returning from the powder room. ‘Seriously,’ Smith said. ‘Maybe we could grab a drink sometime. I’d really like to know why you came back here. You had a whole different life in D.C. That’s what everybody says, anyway. Great condo. Lots of job offers from big firms. Amazing salaries. Unbelievable perks. Had your pick. And you come back here. To Acker’s Gap.’ Smith raised and lowered her eyebrows. They had been plucked and shaped within an inch of their lives, then darkened dramatically. They seemed to be carrying on their own separate dialogue, apart from anything Nancy Smith might say out loud.

  ‘Everybody’s got to be somewhere,’ Bell said.

  She’d be damned if she’d confide in a random defense attorney with a nosy streak. Nothing wrong with Smith asking. Nothing wrong with Bell not answering, either.

  She could hear the phone ringing inside the office. The next thing she heard was her secretary, Lee Ann Frickie, primly stating, ‘Raythune County prosecuting attorney,’ and then there was a pause, while the caller stated her or his business.

  ‘Well,’ Smith said, ‘it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I get asked about it, frankly, whenever folks get wind of the fact that I have a case over here. Most of us can’t wait to get out. And you take the first chance that comes along to come back.’

  ‘Wonders,’ Bell said evenly, ‘never cease.’

  Two hours later, Deputy Charlie Mathers came to fetch her.

  ‘Sheriff’s ready to go.’

  Charlie had moved past Lee Ann Frickie’s desk with a wave and a grunt. Now he stuck his head in the open door of Bell’s office, big hand on the doorframe, black hair gleaming with the gel Charlie palmed on each morning so that he’d look like his idol, former NBA coach Pat Riley.

  Charlie had bought the coach’s book about how to be a winner ‘in the game of life,’ a phrase Charlie now worked into every conversation that he possibly could, and he’d run a thick yellow highlighter across selected paragraphs and one entire chapter. Charlie had read the book four times and had recently embarked on a fifth. He had caught the self-improvement bug, and the disease apparently was incurable.

  ‘Coming,’ Bell said. She watched the deputy’s wide back as he departed. She was aware of his ambitions – who could miss them, given the fact that he wedged copies of paperbacks with titles like A Whole New YOU in Ninety Days or Less in the back pockets of his uniform pants? – and of his restlessness, his pride.

  Charlie Mathers.

  She didn’t know him well. But, she wondered, do you ever really know someone? Know what they’re capable of? She stood up and stretched, rolling her neck to one side and then to the other, feeling the familiar ache in her shoulders. Plus an extra twinge in her arm, courtesy of Sunday’s escapade on the mountain.

  Lee Ann Frickie gave her an inquiring glance. ‘Back in a few hours,’ Bell said. ‘Got my cell.’

  Lee Ann nodded and returned to work, dipping her small gray head back toward the computer screen. She was sixty-four years old, brushing up against the county’s mandatory retirement age, but still possessed the stamina of a thirty-year-old. Bell had inherited Lee Ann from the former prosecutor.

  I come with the drapes, Lee Ann had told her the morning after Election Day, matter-of-factness in her voice. I come with the drapes and if you want to replace either of us, you just let me know right now. Because that can be arranged.

  Bell decided she liked both, and told Lee Ann so. She’d had no cause for regret on either score.

  Bell pulled her coat from the back of the chair. The chair executed a little half-spin from the force of the grab.

  ‘You watch yourself,’ Lee Ann said. She said it in a murmur, more to the notes on her computer screen than to Bell, because she knew it might annoy her boss. Bell didn’t like cautionary words. Lee Ann had seen her bite the heads off the assistant prosecutors when they dared say things such as ‘Take care’ or ‘Relax.’

  This time, though, Bell smiled. She paused before following the route Charlie Mathers had taken out the door. It had been a hell of a few days. She’d take anybody’s advice. Couldn’t hurt.

  ‘Will do,’ Bell said.

  26

  Twenty-eight minutes later she was riding through the scrubby backwoods of rural Raythune County in a black Chevy Blazer with RAYTHUNE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT stamped on both sides in slanting yellow letters. Below that was the official county seal, a white circle with a sketch of the courthouse in the center and EST. 1863 curlicuing across the bottom. It was the year West Virginia had become a state. From the mandatory class in West Virginia history that she’d taken at Acker’s Gap High School, Bell knew that Harland Raythune was a flamboyantly mustachioed and thickly sideburned Union general who’d impressed President Lincoln with his ability to absorb staggering troop losses in one tragic battle after another without blinking or boo-hooing about it, indeed with virtually no reaction at al
l, and thus when the new state was being created out of the existing state of Virginia – thanks to a bit of executive branch hocus-pocus and blatantly unconstitutional sleight-of-hand – General Raythune received a nice parcel of land for his trouble. That gave him naming rights to the new county.

  Nick was driving. Bell sat in the passenger seat. Charlie Mathers had hoped to come along, too – not riding in the backseat, a fatal blow to his dignity, but following in his own vehicle – but the sheriff had said no. ‘Don’t need a damned posse,’ was the actual wording of Fogelsong’s growled retort to Charlie’s request, followed by, ‘Need you to stay in town and keep an eye on things, Charlie.’ The deputy had nodded. It was true: There were still some strangers poking around Acker’s Gap, odd people drawn by the potent lure of an unsolved triple homicide. The standard camp followers of any public tragedy.

  The sheriff drove as fast as he could, but the roads were booby-trapped by too many potholes per mile to get up any real speed. The morning rain had filled each pothole with several inches of black water. The Blazer bumped and splashed its way along.

  They passed sagging shacks set back against falling hillsides. They passed skinny horses and spindly goats and stunned-looking cows that stood warily in small unkempt fields. They passed vinyl-sided houses with wind-ripped foreclosure notices nailed to the plywood on the front windows.

  The unincorporated part of Raythune County had been poor for a long, long time. For many decades the poverty here had been ordinary, rooted, a natural fact of the landscape like a creek or a mountain. Lately, though, the poverty had changed. There was a desperate edge to it now. People who in previous years had barely scraped by weren’t able to do even that anymore. Last winter an elderly couple had been burning scrap wood in their fireplace, trying to keep warm with whatever they could scavenge, and they’d burned to death when the place caught fire. Earlier this fall, a six-year-old boy had died of malnutrition in rural Raythune County. He weighed thirty-four pounds. That kid, Nick had said to Bell when he was telling her about it, the sorrow in his eyes outdone only by the anger and incredulity, starved to death. In the United States of America. In the goddamned twenty-first century. It’s a fucking disgrace, Bell, that’s what it is.

  They passed trailers. They passed rust-ravaged cars with no tires and no glass in the windows. They passed two abandoned school buses, side by side, with long-necked weeds growing out of the tops where the roofs had rotted away.

  Their drive was mainly silent. The sheriff didn’t ask Bell about her sister’s parole hearing or about Carla or about anything else. She appreciated that. There was a time to talk and a time to think, and Nick had always understood that, which was among the reasons why they worked so well together.

  ‘There it is,’ Fogelsong finally said.

  He pointed to a spot just ahead, on the right-hand side of the road. A house that looked as if it had absorbed equal parts abuse and neglect – the porch slanted crazily to one side, the cement steps were gouged and cracked and broken off, and the wooden slats that covered the outside of the house were pitted and weathered to a dirty gray – sank into the dirt. A black mailbox with RADER painted on the side by a shaky hand jutted out from one of the porch rails.

  The sheriff parked his vehicle alongside the house, next to an old Ford pickup whose red sides had been victimized by hungry rust. As he and Bell climbed out of the Blazer, Fogelsong peered discreetly into the truck bed. His lack of expression told Bell that it was empty. They continued walking toward the front porch.

  ‘Hey.’

  Fogelsong whirled around, hand automatically curved over his holster. The sheriff wasn’t a man who liked to be surprised. Bell, also significantly startled, turned as well. With no holster to touch, she just gripped her purse strap extra tight.

  A man in a sienna brown Carharrt jacket, faded jeans, and muddy black boots ambled toward them from the back of the house. Neither Nick nor Bell had noticed his approach until he was close enough to utter the universal greeting in these parts, the all-purpose ‘Hey.’

  His hands were stuffed in the slash pockets of his jacket. That, Bell knew, was what had rattled Fogelsong. You don’t come at a law enforcement officer with your hands in your pockets.

  ‘Hold it right there,’ the sheriff said. He didn’t sound mean. Just firm. ‘Show me your hands, son.’

  The man stopped, baffled. Then he obliged. He yanked his hands out of his coat pockets and quickly displayed them: front, back, front, back, front, back. Then he grinned and leaned forward and wiggled his fingers, as if he were teaching ‘The Itsy-bitsy Spider’ to a three-year-old.

  Smart-ass, Bell thought, but not unkindly.

  The sheriff relaxed. ‘That’ll do. You’ll have to excuse me, son, I’m kinda jumpy these days. I’m Nick Fogelsong, Raythune County sheriff. This here’s the prosecutor, Belfa Elkins.’

  The man nodded. ‘We’re a little jumpy ourselves, sir,’ he said, ‘after what happened to Grandpa.’

  So this, Bell thought, is Leroy Rader’s grandson, Chess Rader. From the notes compiled for her by Rhonda Lovejoy, Bell knew that he was twenty-nine, unemployed, with a minor criminal record – vandalism, a couple of speeding tickets, and one charge of grand theft auto two years ago that was later dropped, when Leroy Rader told the authorities that it was all a big misunderstanding and his grandson hadn’t meant to steal the car, just borrow it, so could he please just withdraw the complaint and they’d all head on home now? No harm done?

  Chess Rader’s sandy blond hair was in the process of losing its luster. He had a scruffy-looking goatee of indeterminate color that in a dimmer light would look more like the spillover from his evening meal than the hipster’s badge that he clearly intended it to be. All in all, though, Chess Rader didn’t strike Bell as a bad guy. He seemed like a lot of young people she knew in West Virginia: bored, restless, too smart for the only jobs that were available to him around here, but without the education – or the guidance, the mentoring – that could change things for him.

  He seemed – and the idea startled her even more than the sudden sight of him had done, ambling around the side of this sad-looking house – a lot like what Carla might become, if she didn’t shed her present attitude. And then another notion struck Bell. She’d not dared consider it before. It had played around at the edges of her mind, pesky and impish, but she refused to give it words, even internally.

  Now she did.

  Maybe Carla would be better off with her father in D.C., after all.

  ‘Can we talk a minute, son?’ Fogelsong said.

  ‘Sure.’ Chess shrugged. ‘Guess you figured out that I’m Leroy’s grandson. Chess Rader. My mom’s inside. So’s my sister Alma. They don’t like me to smoke in the house, so I come out here.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘The great outdoors, doncha know.’

  After the sheriff and Chess shook hands, Bell offered the young man her own hand. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’ll be prosecuting the case against the man who murdered your grandfather.’

  ‘Does that mean you got ’em? You caught the sonofabitch?’ Chess said eagerly, pumping her hand with absentminded vigor, so thrilled was he at the news.

  ‘No,’ Bell said. ‘Not yet. But we’re working on it.’

  He nodded. The shine fell out of his eyes. He withdrew his hand. ‘Okay. Well, we’re all just so sad about Grandpa, I gotta tell you. It’s been real rough on account of—’ He looked away from them. He swallowed hard. He looked back. ‘You know what? I didn’t get along too good with the old guy. We fought a lot. Hell, he fought a lot with everybody – my mom, my sister, my dad when he was still around. After Grandma died and he come to live with us here, it wasn’t no picnic. But here’s the thing.’

  Chess put his hands back in his pockets and then pulled them out again. He needed the motion, Bell saw. Needed a place to put his restlessness. ‘Grandpa had standards. You know what I mean? The man had a way of doing things that he thought was the right way and that was that. He didn’t care what anybody
else said about it.’

  Fogelsong had slowly removed a notebook from his coat pocket. He was marking on the page with a yellow pencil no bigger than his thumb. Casually, without looking up at Chess, the sheriff said, ‘Pretty small house for all of you, isn’t it? You, your mom, your sister – and then your grandfather moves in? This house has – what, maybe two bedrooms, tops? One bath? Must’ve been kind of tight. And tense. You must’ve resented him a little bit, right? Crowding you up like that?’

  Chess looked at the sheriff for a full minute before replying. ‘You are seriously off base, mister. Way, way off base. If you’d known my grandpa, you’d understand that.’

  ‘I did know him,’ Fogelsong said. ‘Just to say hello to. And he had a temper, as I recall. He could be headstrong. Unreasonable. He could piss people off.’

  ‘Sure he could,’ Chess shot back. ‘Like I said, he had standards. He knew his own mind. That’s why me and him tangled. He wanted me to go back to school and get a good job and help out my mom. And I told him it wasn’t any of his damned business. And you know what?’

  Agitated now, riled up, Chess pulled his hands in and out of his pockets again. Bell guessed that he wanted a cigarette, to calm himself down. But she could also sense that he was fresh out, and that he had too much dignity to try to bum a smoke from either one of them.

  ‘You know what Grandpa did then?’

  ‘No, son,’ the sheriff replied quietly. He wasn’t writing anymore. He was looking at Chess. ‘I don’t. What’d he do?’

  ‘He went out and he sold his chop box and his jigsaw and his router – his tools, man, the things he loved more’n he loved anything else in the world, except maybe Grandma and my mom – and he tried to give me the money. Big damn wad of cash. He said, “You take this and you go to school, Chess. Anywhere you want, any kind of school. Just get your sorry ass out of here. Take this and get out. You can come back if you want, once you’ve got your education, but I don’t want you wasting your life in these parts with nothing to do except things that’ll bring shame to yourself and your family.”’ Chess paused, blinked. ‘That’s who he was. That’s the kind of man he was. You’d want to punch him in the mouth sometimes when you were arguing with him – damn, he could be stubborn – but in the end, he wanted you to do your best. To do the right thing. And he’d do whatever he could do to help you, too. I loved my grandpa, mister. If you’re thinking I ever would’ve hurt him in any way, if you’re implying that maybe I’d want to—’