A Killing in the Hills (3 page)

‘Mrs Elkins,’ a deputy said.

He nodded to her. He and two of his colleagues had arranged themselves in a ragged inadequate circle around the bodies, thumbs tucked into their heavy black belts. The deputies, two men and one woman, identical in their chocolate brown polyester uniforms and flat-brimmed hats, had no visible reaction to the horror that bloomed just inches from their shiny black boots. They had been trained well. They knew they could not so much as place a napkin over a victim’s ruined face, could not close a pair of staring eyes or pull down a rucked-up shirtfront, or the crime scene would be compromised. Everything had to be kept exactly as it was, which meant the dead men would have to remain on display, frozen in their last ghastly moment, for a while longer.

A man’s voice, clipped, stern, businesslike, order-dispensing, climbed above the other sounds. As she moved toward her daughter, Bell’s eyes shifted briefly in that direction. The uniformed man, clearly in charge of things, stood by the tall glass wall. His left hand was cupped around the back of his neck. His right hand was raised to a point level with his mouth. Talking sharply into the radio lodged in his big curved palm was Sheriff Nick Fogelsong.

Bell nodded at him. He nodded back.

Just before Bell had arrived, Carla Elkins found herself shuffling, zombielike, along with the pack being gently prodded by the deputies, her right thigh bumping against the rounded edge of each little beige table as she moved. She felt as if she were in shock – not the dangerous medical kind where they have to slap you or give you a shot, but the kind in which
everything . . . slows . . . down
. . . and noises come bouncing at you in big round soft blobs, like colored balloons. Yellow and green and purple and orange. And red. Plenty of red.

She had never heard a grown man scream before, and so she kept sneaking glances at the guy with the goatee who shuffled along beside her. He was hunched over, shoulders shaking, head bobbing, and his screams were like squeals. Animal squeals. His hands were thrust out in front of him and fluttering wildly, with evident desperation, as if the fingers didn’t actually belong to him and he was trying to fling them away, one by one, the way you’d want to get rid of something disgusting. Carla was fascinated, and a little appalled.

Then she’d noticed that the gaudy decoration on Mr Goatee’s white cotton sweater was actually blood spray, with bits of what had to be brain – pinkish-gray stuff, like chopped-up chunks of pencil eraser – stuck there, too. He’d been sitting at a table right next to the one where the old guys sat, sucking on a chocolate shake, when it happened. He’d caught a chestful.

Well
, Carla thought sheepishly,
in that case, guess I’d be screaming, too
.

She shivered. Then she heard a commotion at the door. One quick glimpse of the figure moving toward her – the figure had paused ever so slightly at the ring of deputies, but then resumed its bold, don’t-mess-with-me stride – and Carla’s heart gave a funny little lurch. She felt a crazy fizz of joy and a spasm of pure yearning. She’d managed not to cry so far, she’d fought against tears, she’d been calm, so calm, but now she knew she could stop fighting. She didn’t have to worry anymore about being strong.

‘Mom,’ Carla said. Hot tears burned her eyes.

‘Sweetie.’ Bell Elkins reached out and pulled her daughter into her arms.

At first Bell just held her, oblivious to everything that was happening around them, the screams and the moans and the gagging, and the burgeoning noise from outside the restaurant, too, the sirens and the crackling blasts from the bullhorn, urging the world to move back, back, back, and the shouts – muffled by the glass walls, but still audible – from the swelling, swaying, curious crowd that was filling the street in the wake of the police cars and the ambulances and all the excitement.

‘It’s okay now, sweetie,’ Bell murmured. ‘It’s okay now.’ This was said directly into Carla’s ear, a soft chanting coo, a lullaby on the fly. ‘It’s okay now.’

‘Mom, I—’

Carla tried to alter her position ever so slightly within her mother’s arms, arms that made a circle as rigid as a barrel stave.

‘Don’t move, sweetie,’ Bell said. ‘Just a minute.’

It was scarier, somehow, now that she was actually holding her child, now that the reality of what had occurred right next to Carla was so grimly apparent. To keep panic at bay Bell focused on the specific reality of the young woman in her arms, on the fixed dimensions, the visceral details. Bell was keenly aware of Carla’s thin shoulders, of the beguilingly soft texture of her daughter’s short dark shingle of hair, of the jaunty smell of the Herbal Essences Fruit Fusions shampoo that Carla used – all strangely juxtaposed with the solemn proximity of death, death that spread out just beyond this neat little corner into which the customers had been corralled.

‘Mom,’ Carla said. ‘Gotta breathe, you know?’

Bell relaxed a bit, but knew she needed to maintain physical contact, knew she could not afford to break the circuit. Hands still clamped on Carla’s shoulders, she moved her head back, so that she could look directly into her daughter’s eyes.

‘You’re okay? Really?’

‘Yeah, Mom.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re sure?’

Carla nodded. Her lips were tucked in tight. She was afraid to go beyond single-word answers at this point, afraid she’d start sobbing and not be able to stop. Afraid she’d turn into Mr Goatee.

Bell scanned her daughter’s face. That face, she saw, had lost its chronic cockiness. It wasn’t just the shiny tear-trails on Carla’s thin cheeks that accounted for the change. This face had shed the hard ceramic glaze of cool that had so infuriated Bell when it first appeared about a year and a half ago, transforming her sweet little girl into an entirely new person, a stranger, a creature of shrugs and slouches and cynical opinions and constant backtalk, broodingly indifferent to anything Bell had to say.

For the moment, her child had somehow returned, in all of her transparent neediness, all of her soft vulnerability.

‘You’re okay?’ Bell repeated.

‘Yeah,’ Carla said. ‘I think so. Yeah. Yeah.’ A pause. ‘Maybe.’ Her voice was halting, tentative, husky with choked-back emotion. The next words came in a rush. ‘But listen, Mom, it was – it was awful, really, it was so gross and scary because I was sitting right over there and I saw the whole thing and – and their heads, their heads just
explo
—I saw it, Mom, and I just couldn’t believe that I was actually seeing what I was see—’

Bell quickly removed her hand from Carla’s right shoulder and pressed two fingers against her daughter’s lips, stopping the words.

‘No, sweetie. No, no, no. Not yet,’ Bell said, gently but firmly. ‘Wait for the deputies to take your statement. It’s very important that when you describe what happened, you’re telling it for the first time. That you’re not influenced by hearing what others say that
they
saw. So that it’s all your own words.’

She didn’t mean to be abrupt, she hated to shush her child, but Bell knew how imperative it was to do things right. To follow protocol.

She was a mother, but she was also a prosecuting attorney, and on the stem of her softly winding maternal thoughts, another notion was growing like a wild spike – darker, harsher, meaner. The thorn on the rose bush.

They’d get the bastard who did this. There’d be no mistakes in compiling the prosecution’s case. No technicalities that might cause an acquittal. No slip-ups that might put his sorry ass back out on the street.

Bell looked at the other customers, a clump of bug-eyed, ashen-faced people, many of whom couldn’t stop trembling and twitching and moaning and, in some cases, hyperventilating. The paramedics, she knew, would check them out, one by one, all in good time. Fine.

She wasn’t worried about their health. She was worried about her case.

‘And that,’ Bell went on, raising her voice until it turned official, until it was curtly bureaucratic, ‘goes for everybody else, too.’ She tried to connect with as many pairs of eyes as she could, locking onto them, witness by witness. ‘Please don’t talk to each other until you’ve been cleared to do so by law enforcement authorities.’

The old woman, the one who’d been repeatedly summoning Jesus, abruptly stopped her chant. With a knobby blue-veined fist, she pulled together the sagging halves of her faded gray sweater. She gave Bell a belligerent sideways glare, pale blue eyes narrowed, nose twitching, bottom lip jutting out like a pink windowsill. She didn’t hail from around here. She’d stopped in for a cup of coffee and a biscuit with redeye gravy – and now this.

‘Just who the hell are
you
,’ the old woman snarled, ‘to be tellin’
us
what to do?’

Before Bell could answer, Carla Elkins turned to the old woman.

‘Hey – listen up,’ Carla said. Her soft muffled voice was gone, and the voice that replaced it was the snippy, dismissive one that usually irritated Bell but right now made her terribly proud. ‘For your information,’ Carla went on, ‘she happens to be Belfa Elkins, Raythune County prosecuting attorney. So if you know what’s good for you, lady, you’d better do
exactly
what she tells you to.’

3

‘Saw the crawl.’

Dorothy Burdette – ‘Dot’ only to her friends, and only then when she gave explicit permission – normally was cool and reserved and unflappable. Now, though, she was talking fast. Too fast. And repeating herself: ‘Saw the crawl.’

She stood directly in Bell’s way, blocking her progress through the narrow courthouse corridor. Running in a high dusty stripe across the gray stucco walls on either side of that corridor were wood-framed portraits of previous mayors, sheriffs, judges, and prosecutors – all male, all white, several sporting thick muttonchop sideburns and caterpillar eyebrows – who looked down upon the living with peeved judgmental expressions, as if to say:
Whatever the hell’s going on down there – well, that kind of nonsense would never have happened on
our
watch
.

The corridor was made even narrower by a steady churn of people heading in both directions. Normally the courthouse was closed to the public on Saturdays. In the wake of the shooting, though, Sheriff Fogelsong had opened it up, and people had poured right on in.

Bell, hurrying along with her head down, massively preoccupied, had nearly barreled straight into Dot Burdette.

‘Dot,’ Bell said. ‘For heaven’s sake.’

Dot smelled like the cigarette she’d reluctantly mashed under her high heel on the way in. She was thirty-eight years old and had been smoking for twenty-five of them, and only the
NO SMOKING
sign on the big front door of the courthouse could account for the fact that she didn’t have a Salem menthol on her lip right now.

Dot frowned, to show she understood the gravity of the situation, to demonstrate that naturally she was distraught, but it was also clear that, like everybody else in town, she was titillated by the morning’s crisis.

Spotting Bell’s SUV back in its regular slot in front of the courthouse, she’d come straight over from Mountaineer Community Bank two doors down, a beige cotton raincoat flung over the shoulders of her suit, quivering like a cocker spaniel who’d just heard the jingle of the leash.

‘Saw the crawl,’ Dot repeated. This time, she leaned forward and enunciated each word, same as she’d do for a regrettably dim-witted child.

Bell was confused. Was this a strange new language, some kind of hasty shorthand communication that had replaced normal discourse during the two hours she’d been away, taking Carla home and getting her settled? Or had the whole county gone insane, as might very well be the case, given the morning they’d endured?

‘Saw the crawl,’ Dot snapped for the fourth time, only now she added, ‘on CNN.’

The light dawned. Bell nodded.
The crawl
. Got it. Dot meant the endless unspooling of sentences at the bottom of the TV screen when the set was tuned to cable news channels, the perpetual roll call of lurid crimes and celebrity breakups, the kind of information that nobody needed – but everybody wanted – to know.

‘“Triple homicide at West Virginia eatery. Suspect still at large,”’ Dot said, reciting the words she’d seen on the screen, the ones she’d instantly memorized, in a low, enthralled voice. ‘How’d they find out so fast? How’d they do that?’

Bell shrugged. Damned if she knew. Driving back to the courthouse, she’d had to weave her exasperated way around the slow-moving, antenna-topped, wide-bodied white news vans from TV stations in Charleston and Huntington and Pittsburgh. The vans were cruising around the small downtown, just as they’d probably cruised through some other tragedy-stunned downtown the day before, drawn inexorably to the world’s open wounds. Camera crews and reporters were eagerly prowling the smattering of streets in Acker’s Gap, hunting for scared-looking people to interview.

Many of those people, of course, were thrilled to oblige. Making a left turn onto Jackson Boulevard and then a quick right onto Main, Bell had seen entire families – moms, dads, grandparents, teenagers, little kids – grouped in front of Fontaine’s Funeral Home or Ike’s Diner or Cash X-Press Payday Loans, leaning into microphones wielded by pretty young women. They’d look suspiciously down at the microphone, as if half fearful that it might bite, and then shyly up at the reporter’s face and finally back down at the microphone again, after which, suddenly and mysteriously emboldened, they’d start talking, and as they did so, the older ones would pull at a pleat of loose skin hanging from their necks, a habit that seemed to enhance the thought process. The younger ones would sway back and forth as they talked, hands jammed in their pockets.

Just about everybody, Bell knew, would be insisting that they’d either left the Salty Dawg seconds before the shooting or had definitely planned on stopping by in a minute or so.
I coulda been gunned down, I woulda been right there in the line of fire when that murderin’ sumbitch come in, and that woulda been it, period, end of story
.

‘Look, I have to go,’ Bell said. ‘Meeting with the sheriff. Lots to do. Hell of a morning.’ She touched Dot’s forearm, throwing in a brief, tight frown.