A Killing in the Hills (30 page)

‘Yes, Ruthie,’ Tom said. ‘Let’s just be quiet now, okay? We’re almost there.’

He sounded impatient, Bell thought. Slightly scolding. How many times had they been forced to do this, during the long course of Ruthie’s treatment? Too many times.
Even saints
, Bell told herself,
must get pissed off every now and again
.

Ruthie shook her head. She had opened her eyes again, and her voice was soft but determined.

‘Bell, listen to me. I’ve been thinking about Marlene Streeter. About how hard this whole thing must be for her. After everything else she’s been through. Losing a loved one is hard no matter how it happens, but murder—’ Ruthie paused. ‘Bell, there was something I wanted to mention to you. It occurred to me yesterday, when I thought about the Streeters.’

Bell waited. Ruthie took a few rejuvenating breaths and then resumed.

‘Cherry Streeter was in my support group for about a year. She was terribly ill by the time she joined, so I never got to know her very well. But Cherry did tell us a lot about her father. Talked about him all the time, in fact,’ Ruthie said. ‘He’d been a driver’s ed teacher at the high school for almost fifty years. He was there until he retired last year. Taught nine-tenths of the people in this valley how to drive, Cherry said. Never made much money, but loved what he did. Just loved it. Loved working with the kids.

‘When Cherry was diagnosed,’ Ruthie continued, after a pause to catch her breath, ‘she’d been out of work for more than three years. She didn’t have any health insurance. She was forty-eight years old, so there wasn’t much chance she’d be able to get it, either. Her savings were gone. So she moved back in with her parents, with Dean and Marlene, even though it was a very small place. There wasn’t even a second bedroom. Cherry slept on the couch in the living room. She felt just awful about it – she thought she was in the way, crowding them – but she was so sick that she had no choice.

‘You remember this, don’t you, Tom?’ Ruthie said, looking over at her husband for confirmation. ‘After Cherry joined, I would come back from those support group meetings, week after week, and I’d just be so sad for that poor family.’

Tom nodded. He was squinting through the windshield, looking for the hospital entrance off Route 12.

‘But then something odd happened, Bell,’ Ruthie went on. ‘Cherry showed up at a meeting one night – this was about a month or so later – and she was very excited. She said they were going to move into a bigger house. A new one.’

‘A new house?’ Bell said.

‘Yes,’ Ruthie answered. ‘It was strange, because all we’d heard about was how poor the family was, how Cherry could barely afford her medication. And then there’s the announcement that things are better.’

‘Better.’

‘Yes.’

Tom was turning the Escalade into the hospital lane marked
EMERGENCY ROOM ENTRANCE
. He had taken his hand back from Ruthie by now; he needed it to handle the big steering wheel.

‘I’d never seen Cherry so excited,’ Ruthie went on. ‘And you know, Bell, I was so glad that she didn’t have to fret about money while she was going through everything else.’ Ruthie lowered her head, then raised it again. ‘I went to her memorial service, and I met her parents. They were absolutely devastated. I’ve never seen grief like that. Never. It was like a hurricane had blown straight through their lives and there was nothing left – only rags, tatters. Only scraps. That’s all.’

Tom had pulled in front of the emergency room door.

‘If I help get Ruthie inside,’ he said to Bell, ‘can you park the car and meet us in there?’

‘You got it.’

Tom climbed out of the Escalade and hurried around to his wife’s door. By the time he got there, however, Ruthie had opened it on her own and slid out of the vehicle.

‘I’m fine, Tommy,’ she said. ‘Fine.’

He let his arms – the arms he’d been reaching out to her – drop. Shook his head. Bell understood. Sometimes Ruthie’s independence could be vexing; occasionally Ruthie had setbacks from trying to do too much, too fast.

But Bell also knew something else: That same stubborn spirit was one of the chief reasons Ruthie was still alive. ‘I’m just too
ornery
to let this cancer get the best of me,’ Ruthie liked to declare.

Bell slipped behind the wheel and watched them as they moved slowly through the glass double doors that opened with a discreet automatic swish, the tall man in the brown cap and the frail, slightly stooped woman in the down jacket who hung from his arm, and she thought, not for the first time, that not all love stories have happy endings.

Hell. Maybe none of them did.

33

The Salty Dawg, at midday.

It felt strange to Bell. Exceedingly strange. She was standing in the center of a large room wrapped in a ghostly silence, four days after the fact.

After the split second of violence that had canceled three lives.

Adding to the eerie aura was the fact that a place like the Salty Dawg was not supposed to be deserted. It was unnatural. Downright bizarre.

No one sat at any of the little beige tables with matching chairs bolted to the floor.

No one yelled at a friend to bring over some extra napkins or ketchup packets.

No soft-rock oldies played over the sound system.

A Salty Dawg was not supposed to be like this. A Salty Dawg was supposed to be a noisy, chaotic circus, bathed in the good-bad smell of frying meat, syncopated by the sporadic rattle of ice cubes falling into cardboard cups at the self-serve drink dispenser.

The restaurant had been sealed since the shooting. But now the state police forensics team had finished its work, and Bell wanted another look at the scene. In solitude.

It was the morning after Bell had helped Ruthie and Tom Cox. Ruthie, they’d learned at the hospital, had contracted a serious infection, probably because of her low white-cell count. The infection had caused the dizziness, the fatigue. She was back home now, with a heavy regimen of antibiotics. And strict instructions to take it easy.

Not bloody likely
, Bell thought, when she heard about the latter.

Wednesday had dawned bright and frigid. Bell had headed over here without telling anyone – not Lee Ann, not Hick or Rhonda or even the sheriff – where she was going. They’d ask her why. And Bell was not sure she could explain it.

She had picked up the restaurant key late Tuesday night from Ralph Purcell, the man who owned the Salty Dawg franchise in Acker’s Gap. After unlocking the side door and walking in, Bell stood at the threshold.

She didn’t turn on any lights. She didn’t need them. It was a few minutes past 11
A.M.
, and the expansive room was fully illuminated by the sunlight that tumbled in through the high glass walls.

Spread out across the floor were small uniform chunks of yellow plastic – they looked like tiny party hats with black numbers on them – and several had been placed on the tables as well. These, Bell knew, indicated where pieces of evidence had been located: blood droplets, bits of brain tissue, clothing, food scraps that had spilled in the wake of the shooting. Everything had been pinpointed and cataloged.

The little yellow hats also indicated where the witnesses had been sitting.

She allowed herself to be distracted momentarily.
Which marker
, she wondered,
represents Carla’s location?

The question made her slightly sick to her stomach.

Ralph Purcell, who also owned two other Salty Dawgs, one in Bluefield and one in Chester, along with a KFC in Swanville, wasn’t sure if he would ever reopen this location. ‘Seems wrong, somehow,’ he’d said to Bell on the phone the day before, when she called to make the arrangements to pick up the key. ‘Kind of sacrilegious, maybe. Three people killed. Hell of a thing. Might be – oh, disrespectful, guess I’d call it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Course, then again,’ Purcell added, ‘I gotta make a living. You know? And folks’ll forget. Won’t they?’

‘Hard to say.’

She didn’t know. She didn’t care.

She only cared about what had happened here four days ago, and about finding out who had done it and why.

Standing in the silent restaurant, Bell felt a gust of dizziness. She steadied herself, leaning her right hand briefly against the counter that held the napkin dispensers, the bristling tub of paper-covered straws, the tiny salt and pepper packets, the jumbo plastic jugs of ketchup with the little pump spouts.

Deep breath.

Again.

She wanted to be here – it was part of her job – but she knew that such a place could never be neutral for her. And it would never be safe. She knew about the feel of a crime scene, no matter how much time has passed since the crime. She knew that the silence was an illusion, a thin skin easily pierced by echoes that waited hungrily for the chance to reemerge, to stab the air with shrieks and cries and warnings audible only to an unlucky few.

Bell was one of the few.

She knew that haunted houses had nothing to do with Halloween. Any house where a violent act had occurred was haunted.

She glanced at the front counter. She saw the darkness beyond it. During a typical lunch rush, that area would be bright and busy with employees rushing around, sometimes bumping into each other, giggling, apologizing, as they whipped up milk shakes and filled cups with Diet Coke and Sprite and iced tea, as they angled wrapped-up biscuits into open-mouthed paper sacks. Cash registers would be beeping, dinging. Customers would be laughing and talking.

Not like now, when it was quiet and empty.

Bell turned back around and looked at the door through which the killer had entered, and through which she, too, had come in just a few minutes ago.

She envisioned the door being flung open. In her mind’s eye, she saw a man advancing into the restaurant, arm hanging straight down at his side, gun in his hand. Two witnesses had corroborated that: When he came in, his arm was down.

The man in her imagination had no face. He wasn’t tall or short. He wasn’t black or white. The only sharp image in her scenario, the only absolutely clear and solid thing, was the gun.

No one notices the man. No one reacts to him at all.

He’s taking advantage of the cheerful mayhem of a busy restaurant, knowing that no one will pay the least heed to the arrival of one more customer. People have been coming in all morning long, singly or in bunches of two and three, families, knots of giggling friends, colleagues.

He takes two steps inside the door. Lifts his arm.

Aims.

Fires.

Hits three people. Turns and goes back out again, before anyone gets a good look at him, before anyone sees a thing – and this time, it’s because of what he has wrought, the blood and chaos he has caused. Everyone is focused on the victims. On the three old men.

Why? Why did he want to kill three old men?

Maybe he didn’t.

Maybe he didn’t want to kill three old men.

Maybe he wanted to kill
one
old man. He just didn’t know which old man he wanted to kill.

Maybe his instructions had been too general:
Old man. Black jacket
. And when he came into the Salty Dawg that Saturday morning, he saw
three
old men. Sitting together. All in black jackets.

Could be any one of them.

The solution was easy: Take out all three.

What kind of killer wouldn’t know his own target?

A killer who had been employed by, paid by, somebody else. A killer who had no relationship with the victim. A killer who was just doing his job.

So even if they found Henry Fleming – or whatever the hell his real name was – they still wouldn’t have the man behind the murders. They would only have the hired help.

The mastermind would be still at large. Still out there. Up in the hills, maybe, biding his time, waiting to order another killing. And another.

34

Rhonda Lovejoy didn’t apologize for disappearing on a workday. In fact, she seemed sincerely oblivious to the fact that there might be anything for which she needed to apologize.

She and Hick Leonard sat at either end of the couch in the prosecuting attorney’s office. It was just past 8
A.M.
on Thursday, a sunless, bleak-seeming day of densely packed clouds the color of slate, the kind of day when the mountains looked aloof and sinister. The weather had been cold all week, with a frisky, biting wind. Winter waited right behind that wind.

Bell sat at her desk. She was looking at her staff, but she was seeing something else as well. She was picturing the photo of Tyler Bevins that had run with all the news accounts of his murder: Plump cheeks. Big grin, with a couple of teeth missing – missing in the usual way, nature’s way, not the West Virginia way – and round ears that stuck straight out from the sides of his head. Orangey-red hair. Looked like he’d need a haircut soon.

Except there wouldn’t be any more haircuts for Tyler Bevins. Or birthdays. Or Christmas mornings.

The image of Tyler Bevins was part of what darkened her mood this morning. The other part was the sight of Rhonda Lovejoy.

Bell didn’t want to be a hard-ass. She didn’t like to be a hard-ass. She prided herself on being a reasonable boss, one who made her expectations clear and consistent, one who wasn’t moody – Bell had had some moody bosses, and despised them – and one who was humane. Understanding of personal problems and the occasional foible.

But Rhonda Lovejoy had tested Bell’s patience from the get-go. She was scattered and irresponsible and unreliable. In the middle of two major cases, she’d gone missing. Messages, to Bell’s way of thinking, did not replace actual contact.

Using her index fingers, Bell rolled a pencil back and forth on the desk in front of her. It was the only space that wasn’t swamped by stacks of papers and massive law books. From each of those dark closed volumes bristled multiple bookmarks – yellow pencils, pink and green Post-It notes, tan emery boards, silver gum wrappers, whatever small item was within snatching reach when Bell needed to save her place in the text – which made the otherwise grim, stately books look as if they had whimsically donned festive headgear, as if they were temporarily tricked-up like Supreme Court justices letting loose in a Mardi Gras parade.