Last Ragged Breath (4 page)

“One more thing,” he said.

Here it comes,
she thought. Now he'd say something heartfelt, something about how he, too, remembered their daily interactions back in Acker's Gap, and missed the camaraderie of a shared purpose. Missed, even, the impossible hours and the constant frustrations.

“No charge for the paper clip,” he said.

She gave him a brief wave to acknowledge the levity.

The front part of the store, when she rounded the corner and returned to it, was a different place now, with all three cash registers going full tilt, with lines of customers snaking around the racks and bins, waiting to pay for gas and gum and coffee and lottery tickets and peanuts and candy bars and sunglasses and cigarettes. Bell moved in a haze, preoccupied by her memories of previous mornings with Nick Fogelsong, work mornings, mornings when they'd felt the weight of the world but never really minded it because each had the other one right there, ready to take up the slack when one of them grew weary. The past was a tricky bastard. It called and called to you—and when you turned around and tried to grasp it, it disappeared.

Reaching the double glass doors, she took a quick look back at the busy store. She was mildly surprised to see the fat man—the one who'd walked in just ahead of her, the one in the green plaid coat and the cap with the oval Peterbilt logo—still on the premises. Must be stocking up. He stood at the start of the soft drink aisle, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, apparently torn by an existential dilemma regarding two-liter plastic jugs of Dr Pepper: diet or regular? The only visible motion came from his jaw, as it grappled with a bountiful plug of snuff, and his eyes, which roved restlessly.

 

Chapter Three

“I didn't kill him, but I sure as hell don't mind the fact that he's dead.”

Royce Dillard put a stiff nod at the end of the sentence, as if that settled the matter, once and for all. His palms were flat on the tabletop. His spine was pressed against the back of the chair and his feet were spread wide; his legs kept up a steady vibration, causing his boot heels to tick against the concrete floor. His gray-blond hair wasn't long but still appeared flighty and disorganized, as if it never felt the press of a comb. There was a look of apprehension in his black eyes. Those eyes were ringed with dark, the natural tattoo of the chronic insomniac. He was one of those people who blinked so rarely that you'd swear someone was making him pay per blink, and he'd been keeping careful count since the day he was born so that he wouldn't be overcharged.

“We got that.” Sheriff Harrison stood behind him. She was motionless at this point, but seconds before she'd been making a series of slow, deliberate loops around the gray metal table and chair that hosted Dillard in the interrogation room, pausing at irregular intervals: in front of him, behind him, beside him, then in front of him again. She didn't like interview subjects to get too comfortable. From the look of Dillard, there was no chance of that.

It was just after seven on Saturday night. Bell would be showing up at the courthouse soon; Harrison had reached her on her cell. The sheriff sensed that she was interrupting something—she'd been able to hear, in the background, the purr of soft music, the drift and murmur of voices, the courtly clink of cutlery, indicating a restaurant, and not the sort that got by with plastic utensils and paper plates—but Bell didn't seem to mind and promised she'd be there in half an hour. That was twenty minutes ago.

“Good.” Dillard barely opened his thin-lipped mouth to speak. A quantity of suppressed energy appeared to be buzzing and fluttering inside him, power held back only by an effort of will. He was a medium-sized man, but his jangling nervousness made him appear bigger, more volatile, a potential threat. “Just so we're clear.”

“Oh, we're clear all right,” Harrison snapped. She was in motion again, ambling behind him and then around toward the front of the table. Her arms were crossed. She was a petite, visibly fit woman with short brown hair and a pink birthmark that splashed across one side of her face, lapping down onto her neck. The big hat cast a shadow over her face, and people meeting her for the first time sometimes mistook the birthmark for part of that shadow. When they realized their mistake—the shadow stayed, even when she removed her hat—they were embarrassed, even though no words had been spoken to indicate the error. Pam Harrison was used to it by now, used to people's reactions to the left side of her face. She'd been dealing with it ever since she was old enough to understand how profoundly a superficial anomaly could change one's destiny.

“So why am I still here?” Dillard said.

“Because you lied to us. Twice.” Harrison stopped her march, then started up again an instant later. She traveled behind him, then around the side of the table, then to the front of it, then down the other side. “Deputies come to your door this afternoon and say a body's been found on your property. You don't ask where. You don't ask who.”

“That ain't a lie. That's just a lack of curiosity.”

The sheriff halted her pacing. She was directly in front of him now, timing the pause and the position to coincide with this particular point in her questioning. He turned his head to one side. He didn't want to look at her. He didn't want to look at anybody.

“The lie came after that, Dillard,” she said. “As you well know. By then, we had a preliminary ID on the victim. Deputy Mathers asked you if you'd ever heard of a man named Edward Hackel. You said no.”

“I forgot. Forgot I knew him.”

“You didn't forget.”

“Well, then—I was confused.”

“You weren't confused. You knew him well, didn't you? And when I asked you just now when you'd seen him last, you said you don't remember.”

“I don't.”

“You sure as hell
do
remember. You took a swing at him the day before yesterday. In public.”

“Well, if I did, he deserved it.”

“We have witnesses, Dillard. Several of them.” Harrison started her rounds all over again. She was behind him now. He didn't turn in his chair. He didn't watch her, as most people did when she circled the table. He kept his head angled toward the floor, just as he'd been doing since he first arrived here, brought in by Deputy Charlie Mathers.

“In fact,” she went on, “you'd had many angry confrontations with the victim. He wanted your land. And you didn't want to sell. Isn't that right?”

Dillard snorted. His headshake was vigorous and prolonged. Yet a flicker of tension showed up along his jawline, causing it to flex and settle. It was not the sort of detail Harrison was apt to miss.

“My business,” he said. “Not yours.” But his voice had shed some of its confidence.

“A lot of people heard you repeatedly threatening him with physical harm.”

He pondered that. “Okay,” he said. “Fine. So I knew the man. And, yeah. I'd called him an SOB, a time or two. Said I was gonna knock him flat on his ass. Still didn't have nothing to do with him ending up that way.”

“Convince me.”

“Use your head,” he said, his voice rising until it was just short of a shout. “If it was me what done it, then why'd I leave him right out in the open like that? If you think I'd murder that rat bastard and not try to hide the body, then you figure me for the biggest fool that ever was.”

Harrison took another break from her pacing, pausing once again in front of the small table. The brim of the sheriff's hat extended so far over her small face that the nature of her expression was unavailable to onlookers. She liked it that way. Not being able to read another person's eyes was unsettling. It rattled a lot of suspects, even more than her questions did.

This was the first major case she'd handled on her own, and she was determined to wind it up quickly. Efficiently. Gather the evidence, make an arrest, assist the prosecutor in getting ready for trial. Harrison liked Nick Fogelsong, and admired the hell out of him, but sometimes she'd found his methods a little too …
slow
. Yes. That was the word. A little too slow. Ponderous, even. He spent a lot of time—too much time, maybe—thinking about things. Contemplating. Must be those books he was always reading, Harrison had told herself. They could turn you into a chin-stroker. A philosopher—a word her daddy always deliberately mispronounced as “
fool
-losopher.” She preferred action. She knew that a female sheriff was not exactly the norm in these parts, and she figured that the faster she moved, the swifter and more forthright her decision making, the sooner her constituents would realize that a young woman could do this job every bit as well as a middle-aged man—maybe better—and that they'd been right to elect her. Nick Fogelsong's endorsement had made her a lock the first time around; next time, she wouldn't need him.

“You're smart,” she said. “Wily enough to do just that—to kill a man and then leave the body right out in the open, in a creek on your very own land, assuming it would throw off suspicion.” Harrison hooked her hands on the front table edge and leaned forward. He leaned back, his eyes on her hands, not her face. “Trouble is, Dillard, nobody on God's green earth wanted Edward Hackel dead more than you did.”

“Not true.” He stuck out his chin. “There's a line of folks a mile long who hated that bastard. Just like me. I ain't the only one who'd be rootin' for the buzzards.”

“You're not helping yourself with that observation. You ought to know that.”

The sheriff had read him his rights, and knew that Deputy Mathers had done so, too. But Dillard said he wanted to talk. He rejected—repeatedly—the offer of a court-supplied attorney. She halfway wished he'd told her to go to hell and then clammed up, refusing to talk, daring her to charge him with the murder. She wished, fleetingly, that he'd had a tight-knit, pugnacious family to protect him, to speak up for him, a complicated network of angry uncles and prickly aunts and outraged cousins who would've shown up at the courthouse when word got round that he'd been brought in for questioning, a bristling picket line of blood relations who would've demanded that she show her evidence or let him go. But Royce Dillard didn't have any family. Not that such a thing was unusual anymore: By the time they reached forty, fifty years old, a lot of people around here didn't have much family left. Sometimes it was on account of the slow regular way of the world—heart attack, stroke, diabetes, the cancer—but sometimes it happened another way. A quick way, with violence involved. That was how it had happened for Dillard.

Once again, though, that didn't mark him out as special. So many people in this region had violence living in their history, like a snake waiting under a pile of rocks: You knew it was there, but you tried to forget about it, and if you had an errand that took you past those rocks, you walked a wide circle around them.

The only people who seemed to give a damn about Royce Dillard were the old couple from the farm next to his, Andy and Brenda Stegner. It was Andy who'd found the body in the first place; he'd used his cell to call 911, and then had the judgment and good grace to move away a few yards, so that his puked-up breakfast of biscuits and gravy wouldn't contaminate the crime scene. Shortly thereafter, the state police forensic unit had arrived and started its work. When it came to the science component of an investigation, counties as small as Raythune didn't have the resources to run their own show.

“Last chance, Dillard,” the sheriff declared. Maybe she couldn't do the chemical analysis part, but she sure as hell could handle the psychology part. She'd watched Fogelsong do this for years, with dozens of suspects in dozens of cases. She was ready. And she knew a guilty man when she saw one.

“Last chance to tell the truth here,” she went on, swapping out her hard-ass tone for an affable, bargaining one. “You help me—and I help you. Okay? So maybe Hackel shows up at your cabin. Starts pushing you around again. Trying to get you to sell your land. Won't let up. Hasn't let up for weeks. This time, maybe he threatens you. Maybe you fear for your life. Is that how it happened? You're scared. Maybe you're trying to defend yourself. Maybe you grab a heavy object and you take a big swing at him. Maybe you connect. You're a strong man, Dillard. Anybody can see that, just by looking at you. And so maybe you accidentally kill him. And then maybe you panic. So you drag his body down to Old Man's Creek and you hope that nobody finds him till the spring thaw—and by then he'd be unrecognizable even to his own mother, after the woods have had their way with him. Is that it, Dillard? Is that how it went down?”

The man stared at the cinder-block wall across from his chair. The jiggling motion in his legs had picked up speed. “Like I told you,” he said, “I didn't kill him. But I won't lie—I ain't at all sorry he's dead.”

 

Chapter Four

Sheriff Harrison left the interrogation room. Deputy Mathers, waiting outside, took her place—not to question Royce Dillard, but just to keep an eye on him. Harrison would do all the questioning herself. She'd be back.

Her office was in the courthouse annex that had been added in the 1960s, when it seemed as if Raythune County, boosted by new jobs in busy coal mines, might continue to grow. It hadn't. The mines died, and the population shrank back. Whole corridors of the original courthouse were swept by shadows now, the offices used strictly for storage.

“Okay, Sheriff,” Andy Stegner said. He spoke the moment Harrison stepped across the office threshold. “What'd he say? He didn't have nothing to do with this, right? Like we told you.”

Harrison ignored the old man and woman who'd been waiting for her, until she'd first pulled out the chair from under her desk and placed herself in it. She kept her hat on. It was cold in here, for one thing, and for another, she didn't like the air of informality that sometimes ensued when she took it off. This was serious business. Nobody should think otherwise.