Last Ragged Breath (18 page)

Royce Dillard was not that kind of person. She'd bet her house on it. And yet he had just casually confessed to a lethal assault on another human being. Moreover, his motivation for so doing still seemed to Bell to be mysteriously inadequate.

Something was wrong here. And while a guilty plea and a sentencing deal might save the county a good deal of money, and the prosecutor's office a good deal of time and trouble, Bell was still unsettled.

She argued with herself, remembering a bit of prosecutorial wisdom that her favorite law school professor, Annabel Jethcoat, had imparted:
You don't have to be certain that an accused person is guilty. You just have to be certain that you can prove he is.
Anything else—determining true innocence or absolute guilt—is way above your pay grade, Professor Jethcoat would add.
We leave that up to God. And He doesn't have to worry about being reversed on appeal.

Fine. So maybe she should ignore her doubts, her questions—right? But a judge would have to approve any plea deal made by the prosecutor's office. And if Bell herself couldn't fathom why a man like Royce Dillard had suddenly snapped and committed murder—and had no plausible story to explain it—then a judge might very well notice the same thing, and wonder if Dillard's confession meant he was covering for someone else. The judge could reject any deal to which Bell agreed.

“Mr. Dillard,” Bell said. “I need to know why.”

“Why what?”

“You have no history of violence. There's no record of your having an uncontrollable temper. No suggestion of drug or alcohol abuse. You've never been in serious trouble before. So why, out of the blue, did you get so angry at Edward Hackel that you ended up killing him? Even if he insulted you or threatened you—I'm finding it hard to believe that you would have lost your head so completely that you'd attack him that way. What was it, Mr. Dillard? What did Hackel say to you?”

“Said he wanted to buy my land. I didn't want to sell.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else.”

“No other threats? Nothing he was going to do if you didn't sell? He had a lot of powerful friends. And a lot of them have important positions. There's big money behind that resort—and you've been holding it hostage. Millions of dollars are at stake. What did he threaten you with, Mr. Dillard? A lawsuit? An IRS audit? A bogus lien on the rest of your property?” Even as she listed the possibilities, Bell knew they weren't right. Royce Dillard wouldn't have cared about any of those things. “Maybe,” she added, “he threatened your dogs. Was that it?”

Dillard's face congealed into a sneer, a sneer he showed to his own hands. “You think that me and my dogs were afraid of Ed Hackel? Why, even the little ones made him nervous. They'd give him one bark and he'd be shivering and shaking. Ready to run all the way back to town. Probably peed his pants. The man was a first-class, ring-tailed fraidycat.”

So that wasn't it. But how had Hackel gotten under his skin? What leverage did he have?

“I also need to know,” Bell said, “how the victim got out to your property. He didn't take his own car. Did someone drive him? Who dropped him off?”

Dillard moved his jaw. He closed his mouth, turning it into a tight slit.

“Mrs. Elkins,” Serena said, “maybe we can move things along by—”

“No.” Bell set down her pen. She folded her hands together and placed them on top of the legal pad. “Not until I'm satisfied that Mr. Dillard here is telling the truth. And the only way I can be sure of that is if he explains to my satisfaction how Hackel got there—and why he killed him.”

“He confessed to the crime, for God's sake,” Serena said. “The investigation's over. You've got your killer.”

“Yes, but until I get these questions answered—no deal.”

Dillard shook his right hand, so that the handcuff would rattle and clank. He wanted to get their attention.

“Look,” he said, “if that's not going to work—if saying I done it won't get me home to my woods no sooner—then I take it back. I didn't kill him.”

Serena rolled her eyes and sagged back in her chair. “Oh, great. Terrific. That's just peachy keen.” She bolted forward again, her irritation with Dillard giving her gestures a herky-jerky abruptness. “Listen to me, Royce. This isn't some goddamned game, okay? You're wasting everybody's time.”

He shrugged. “Told you from the start I didn't do it. You're the one who got me to say I did.”

Bell shared Serena's irritation with Dillard, but didn't have the luxury of being able to let it show. She reached for her phone. “Lee Ann,” she said into the receiver, “please tell Deputy Mathers that I'm ready for the prisoner to be returned to his cell.” She hung up and looked across the desk at Serena. “So he's pleading not guilty. Looks like we're going to trial.”

Royce rattled his handcuff again. “Got a question for you,” he said to Bell. He tilted up his head. An inch more and he'd actually be looking at her. But he stopped moving it before that could happen.

“Yes?” She wondered if he was finally ready to reveal some curiosity about how the proceedings against him would go.

“Just wondering,” Dillard said, “how Goldie's getting along. Wouldn't like the other dogs to hear it, but she's my favorite. Nice girl, but she can be right skittish in unfamiliar circumstances.”

*   *   *

The prosecutor's office was quiet now. Didn't happen often, but the rarity of it had taught Bell to savor it, which was always the lesson taught by rare things. Late afternoons sometimes delivered up this gift of a few minutes of privacy and calm, when no one was clamoring for anything, when the day's court sessions stood at recess and the phones forgot how to ring. Soon enough, they would remember.

She reached into a desk drawer. At her request Rhonda Lovejoy had done a LexisNexis search for articles on Royce Dillard and his parents, Mike and Ellie Dillard. On the Buffalo Creek tragedy. The assistant prosecutor had printed out the bounty and put the pages in a file folder. She could have e-mailed it, but she knew that when it came to history, Bell preferred to hold paper in her hand, pages she could touch and sift and sort.

The older articles—the ones published before the Internet made such searches a matter of a few clicks—existed only as hard copies in archives. Rhonda had used a copying machine to transfer the actual newspaper pages onto letter-sized sheets. They all told the same basic story: According to eyewitness accounts, Mike Dillard had given up his own life to save that of his toddler son, Royce. On one of the worst days in West Virginia history, the account of a man's spontaneous act of heroism was a bright spot, a gesture that reminded the stunned, grief-bludgeoned survivors that human beings were capable of more than just greed. About greed, they knew plenty; it was greed on the part of the coal company that had caused the disaster in the first place.

Bell read the article on the top of the stack. It had appeared in the
Bluefield Daily Telegraph
and was dated March 3, 1972:

FATHER DIED TO SAVE SON, 2

(AP) Middle Fork Hollow, W.Va.—Among the dozens of people killed in last month's flooding in the Buffalo Creek Valley were Mike and Ellie Dillard, parents of Royce Dillard, 2. Eyewitness accounts say that Mike Dillard was responsible for his son's survival. The tragedy took more than one hundred lives and left thousands of people bereft and homeless.

“I seen it with my own eyes,” said Vera Tolbert, 22, of Lundale. “That water was just pounding right along. It wouldn't quit coming. I was up on the ridge. The Dillard house was getting pushed by a lot of other houses that had busted loose, and it started to spin away in the flood. I seen Ellie Dillard and her little boy coming out the window. Just squirting out, it looked like, the both of them, like toothpaste from a tube. Real quick after that, Ellie lost her grip and she went under. She never come up again. Then Mike come along out of the house and he grabbed that boy.

“The people on the ridge—it was me and my cousins and my uncle and some folks I didn't know—they started yelling at Mike: ‘Throw him up here! Here! We'll catch him!' It was plain to see that Mike couldn't hang on much longer, not with trying to keep his little boy's head above the water. So he tossed that boy up toward the ridge. Right as he was doing that, a big tree trunk went flying by, and I swear that if he hadn't been heaving that boy up right then, if he'd let go of the boy, Mike could've grabbed that tree trunk and saved himself. But he didn't. Up on the ridge, my uncle was holding out his arms and he caught little Royce. Caught him in his two hands. Caught him like you'd catch a sack of potatoes thrown your way. Once we saw the boy was safe and we looked back down at the water, Mike was gone. It was so quick.”

The child, Royce Enoch Dillard, is now living with a relative in Raythune County. Vera Tolbert and her family said they wish the very best for the boy, and hope that when he is old enough, he will understand his father's sacrifice.

“His daddy gave up his life for his child,” Tolbert said. “You cannot love somebody more than that—to give up your life for them. I hope that little boy knows about that. I personally would be glad to tell him when the time comes, because I was there and I saw it all.”

Accompanying the story was a grainy, wavy black-and-white photo—all the photos in the early stories were black-and-white, because this was long before smaller newspapers began to use color photography—of Royce Dillard. The photo was taken when he was twenty-two months old, the caption said, a month or so before the flood. It was a family photo, supplied by a relative, and it was amateurish, out of focus: the little boy sits on the floor, wearing only a diaper, chubby legs stretched out in front of him, playing with what looks to be a toy truck, big grin on his round face. At the edge of the frame, two hands are reaching down. Bell assumed those were the hands of Ellie Dillard, eager to pick up her baby boy and take him off to supper, or maybe just to hold him close, kissing his bare belly and making him giggle.

Bell read several more newspaper articles about the Dillard family and that terrible day at Buffalo Creek. She envisioned Royce, once he was old enough, reading the same articles, and then being asked, over and over again, about what had happened. As he grew up the interview requests had tapered off; people moved on, and there was always another tragedy in the headlines. But that would not matter. Royce still had the memories, whether or not anyone ever asked him about them. This was his story.

She slid the sheets back into the folder. She closed it.

All at once she wished like hell that she could pick up the phone and call Nick Fogelsong, to run some ideas past him. But she couldn't do that. She couldn't talk with Pam Harrison, either, for a different reason: She hadn't worked with her long enough yet to think out loud in front of her.

Bell was on her own.

Fine,
she thought. Pride flickered, caught hold, flared.
Fine
.

She had a hunch that was sketchy, half-formed, made from materials scraped off the surface of the known facts, but it wouldn't leave her be. Whatever had happened on the day of Hackel's death, the origins of that violence lay elsewhere—and the destinies of Edward Hackel and Royce Dillard had been linked from long ago, in ways unbeknownst to either.

*   *   *

An hour later, Bell left the courthouse. She had almost reached her Explorer when she heard a loud, annoyed-sounding voice: “Mrs. Elkins!”

Diana Hackel, small face bunched in umbrage, was marching across Main Street. A red beret held her hair in check. A few tendrils had worked their way loose and bounced against her neck. The sun had begun its slow descent behind the mountains and the air was cold; Diana's cheeks looked raw and tender.

“Can I help you?” Bell said.

“Yeah. Yeah, you can. You can promise me right this minute that you're not going to make some sort of plea deal with that scumbag.” She was slightly out of breath from having moved so quickly to confront her. Bell had the distinct impression that Diana had been waiting to intercept her, so that she could have her say.

“Pardon me?”

“Dillard. I heard you're making a deal with him.” She had recovered her breath but her voice still shook with anger. “It's not fair, okay? My husband's dead. My kids don't have a father—and you're making a deal. With that
killer
.”

A courthouse leaked worse than a slotted spoon. Someone had probably seen Dillard being led from the jail to her office, and told someone else, who told someone else, and word got back to Diana Hackel. Or the gossip might have trickled out through Serena's office.

“Mrs. Hackel,” Bell said. She tried to sound more patient than she felt. “There's no deal. Royce Dillard is pleading not guilty. As of now, we're going to trial.”

“Oh.” She stepped back, slightly chagrined. “Oh—well, then. Okay. Good. That's good. Fine. Have a nice evening.”

Bell opened the Explorer door. She had nothing more to say. She didn't want to prolong this encounter. Diana was under stress; she had lost her husband, and Bell would cut her slack on account of it.

But Bell also believed that she'd devoted enough—more than enough—of her day to courts and plea deals and grieving widows. Right now, she wanted to go home. Home to be with Goldie.

Her last sight of Diana came in her rearview mirror. The woman was standing on the sidewalk with a cell pressed to her ear, talking with animated fervor.

 

Chapter Eighteen

The house was intact. The hardwood floor bore a few scratch marks, thanks to Goldie's toenails, and the couch cushions sagged with a Goldie-sized imprint, but that was the only significant proof that a dog was now in residence—except for the animal herself, of course, who must've jumped up when she heard Bell's key in the door and now stood alertly in the front hall, tail going furiously, muzzle raised expectantly.