Last Ragged Breath (6 page)

“About what?”

He pointed to her cell. “About that.”

 

Chapter Six

Driving back to Acker's Gap along a road that cut a curving line between two night-shrouded mountains, Bell let herself be brought up to date on the day's events. Sheriff Harrison would be busy in the interrogation room, so she'd called Deputy Charlie Mathers, putting him on speakerphone so she could focus on the white line. His big friendly baritone filled her vehicle.

“The 911 operator took the call about noon or thereabouts,” he said. “It was a guy named Andy Stegner. Bought a little farm after he retired from the railroad. Out near Sawyer Fork. Said he'd come across a body down in Old Man's Creek. Sheriff sent me and Jake Oakes out there to take a look. We ditched the Blazer and hiked about a mile or so to get to the spot. Mud liked to ruin my boots.” Oakes was the new deputy hired to replace Pam Harrison when she ascended to the sheriff's position. Bell knew very little about him yet, other than the fact that Oakes hailed from somewhere in Georgia and had worked briefly for the Beckley Police Department before applying for the open spot in Raythune County. He was young and muscular and good-looking, a trio of attributes that immediately distinguished him from Charlie Mathers. Oakes had shiny black hair, a dashingly crooked grin, and a tendency to wink at any woman to whom he was speaking, a habit Bell intended to quash the moment she had time to sit down and discuss it with him. He had a certain flourish in his step when he patrolled the streets of Acker's Gap in his brown uniform and big black boots, as if he were simultaneously walking and admiring himself from afar.

“Took one look,” Mathers went on, “and called for the coroner and the state forensics team. It was a body, all right. The buzzards had started to have their way with the face. Always go for the soft parts first, have you noticed?”

Bell felt her supper stir in her gut. “Go on,” she said.

“Well, turns out the property belongs to Royce Dillard. Found him in his cabin. Claimed he didn't know the deceased. Corrected himself later.”

“I'll need the tape of the 911 call. And your notes from the initial conversation with Dillard at his residence.”

“Already on your desk.”

“Go on.”

“Okay, well, the state folks made the ID through fingerprints. That Mountain Magic company has a policy of fingerprinting all of their employees when they do background checks, so the prints were easy to match up.”

“Preliminary ruling on cause of death?”

“Blood loss from trauma to the base of the skull. Even with the head being such a mess, Buster found evidence of the nature of the assault.” Buster Crutchfield was the Raythune County coroner. “Something hard and sharp, applied repeatedly.”

“Time of death?”

“Nothing's set in stone, but unofficially, about a day and a half ago. No more'n that. Sometime late Thursday afternoon. Maybe early evening. State crime lab boys're doing their own autopsy. Might be able to narrow it down better.”

“How about the victim's car?”

“Still parked at the Hampton up on the interstate. That's where he was staying. It's a nice one—a BMW X5—leased for him by the company. He must've gotten a ride with somebody out to where he was killed. Either that,” Mathers added with a chuckle, “or he had himself a magic carpet.”

She ignored that. “Notification of next of kin?”

“State police is handling that. His family's in Falls Church, Virginia. Hackel went home on the weekends to see 'em. His wife's supposed to be on her way here right now. Hope she's bringing a friend to spell her with the driving. It's a five-, maybe six-hour trip—and not an easy one.” He paused. Bell could tell that he was holding the phone away from his face. She heard a belch, and then he was back. “Sheriff had us pick up Dillard. Being as how he lied initially, and being as how he had a history with this Hackel guy—and not exactly a cuddly one, you know?—she's still talking to him.”

“Okay,” Bell said. According to the sheriff's call that she'd taken at the restaurant, Dillard denied any involvement in the murder, despite the fact that he had no plausible alibi, no one to vouch for his whereabouts for the past two days, and a big reason to want Hackel to go away.

The Explorer's headlights splashed a bucketful of light on a green exit sign with white lettering:
ACKER'S GAP
. Even after she made the turn, Bell would have a good half an hour of driving before reaching the town, the county seat of Raythune County. No safe way to shave any time off that journey. The county road was considerably less hospitable than the smooth and well-lighted interstate she was leaving behind.

“Any word from Hackel's employer?” she asked.

“CEO of Mountain Magic was already here in town this weekend, going over some blueprints. She's on her way to the courthouse.”

Bell tried to think of another question, even though she knew she'd be seeing Mathers soon. For some reason, she didn't want to hang up; it was as if, as long as she kept the line open, she could put off the moment when the murder drowned out everything else and took over their lives, when the investigation and subsequent trial became a massive intractable fact that spread to every corner of their world. Once she parked her Explorer in front of the great gray courthouse that loomed over the old town like a three-story foretaste of Judgment Day, it was all over. She'd be caught. She would have to see this case through to its conclusion. And that road, too, had to be traveled with caution; that road, too, had things waiting around corners that could not be anticipated, vexing things, maybe even perilous things.

She had a crazy compulsion to just keep right on driving, to glide past the exit and go plunging into the darkness of whatever came next, as long as it wasn't a homicide investigation. At the moment the impulse hit her, she had the clearest understanding yet of why Nick Fogelsong had done what he did last fall, turning his back on his job and, by extension, on her. The weariness she felt was not physical but emotional, even spiritual, as she prepared to embark upon this new case. Duty was a stubborn kudzu vine that looped around her ankle and held her fast. It would never let her go.

Damn you, Nick Fogelsong,
Bell fumed.
You think I don't feel exactly the same way that you do? I'd like to quit, too. But there's nobody else to do this. Nobody.
She knew what she'd see on both sides of the road once she left the interstate: a series of dark, hunched shapes. By daylight, the shapes would reveal themselves to be rotted-roofed shacks and scruffy barns and broken-down trailers and scuffed-up cars. Places where nothing green would ever grow.

To hell with you, Nick Fogelsong. You think I can't do it without you? Watch me. You just watch me.

She shook her head. She made the turn.

“Mrs. Elkins?”

Mathers, unnerved by her silence, sounded anxious, tentative. He added, “Still on the line, ma'am?”

“Yeah. Almost there.”

 

Chapter Seven

Nick Fogelsong had once had a friend named Bert Cousins with whom he occasionally shared a beer or three. Nick wasn't much of a drinker, but Bert was, and thus if you wanted to spend time with Bert, you were better off matching him drink for drink, instead of listening to him take potshots at your manhood all evening long. Bert had made a small fortune as a concrete contractor over in Swinton Falls, and he'd been a reliable contributor to Nick's campaigns during all those successful runs for sheriff, and so Nick owed him. They would get together two or three times a year, have dinner, laugh too loud, drink too much, then call their wives to pick them up. Nick's clanging headache the next day was, he thought, generally worth it. And as it happened, it wasn't a dilemma with which he had long to reckon; Bert Cousins, two years younger than he was, had died in November from colon cancer, a gaunt and stony-eyed ghost of himself.

Nick always remembered one of their earliest conversations. Each man was embarking on his fourth—or was it fifth?—Budweiser at Sloppy Sam's, a bar in Swinton Falls, when Bert leaned over the table in the booth, its wood all liquid-shiny with a slick yellow varnish, and poked a finger in Nick's face. “Happens to you, too, right?” Nick didn't know what his friend was talking about, and told him so. Bert grinned and shook his head and said, “Oh, come on. I mean, getting tired of the same thing at home, night after night.” Turned out that Bert Cousins was determined to reveal that he was having an affair. His wife, Gloria, just didn't excite him anymore, at least not in the way that a woman named Liz Something-or-Other, a waitress he'd met over in Chester, could do. Nick didn't catch Liz's last name and didn't ask Bert to repeat it. He didn't care what her name was. And he didn't want to hear Bert's confession, because he knew that it was less about confessing than about wanting to have Nick confirm that he, too, had thought about it, that he, too, had either cheated on Mary Sue or was seriously considering it.

One thing Nick had learned from all those years of being a sheriff was this: People wanted solidarity in their sins. They wanted the comfort of company when they misbehaved. That's why they confessed so often, right on the spot, in those needy, wheedling tones that used to drive him crazy:
You know what I mean, right? Under the circumstances, you would've done the same thing, right? Right, Sheriff?
It was almost as if, Nick thought, people believed the shame and the guilt might be lessened that way, split up and parceled out and spread around, so that no one person bore the total weight of the remorse.

When he told Bert no—no, he'd never cheated on Mary Sue, and no, he didn't desire to do so—Bert hooted his disbelief and his disdain, but Nick didn't care. It was the truth. Nick Fogelsong had first seen Mary Sue at a church picnic more than a quarter century ago. The moment was a dividing line in his life; there was a definite Before and an absolute After. As he tried to explain to Bert, it wasn't that he was some goody two-shoes, or was trying on halos for size; he just had no interest in any other woman, in that way. Mary Sue was funny and smart and beautiful, and there was a life force in her—that was the only description that worked, “life force,” even though Nick had never previously used the phrase and was surprised when it popped out of his mouth—that seemed to deepen all the colors of the world.

It was still true, all these years later. Despite everything.

Nick sat across the dining room table from her and finished the final bite of his chili. Saturdays were typically his longest days at the Highway Haven, and this one was longer than usual; a few hours after Bell left, a trucker had miscalculated the distance when he was backing up to the pump and had sideswiped it. He hadn't knocked it over—that would've necessitated urgent requests to a dozen different fire-rescue units and the evacuation of half the county, not to mention the filing of about ten thousand forms with the EPA—but he'd bumped it, and that meant a temporary shutoff and a lot of complications. It wasn't a crisis, but it was a major pain in the ass.

And the day had started off with another kind of aggravation: Bell's visit. Clearly, she was still sore at him for giving up the sheriff's job, for deciding not to run for reelection and taking the position at the Highway Haven. Nowadays she was stiff and formal with him, faintly condescending, and too polite, like a damned stranger. What was the statute of limitations for being pissed off at somebody?
Whatever it is,
Nick thought,
Belfa will stretch it out longer. No doubt about that
. He didn't see her often these days, but when he did, the atmosphere wasn't easy and comfortable. Not like it had been for all those years.

He had arrived home half an hour ago, kicked off his hard black shoes, pulled off his tie, and sat down to dinner. The sight of Mary Sue across the table—her hair, her face, her eyes—had put him in mind of that night with Bert Cousins, and Bert's question, and Nick's quick uncomplicated answer:
No
.

“One more bite,” he said amiably, “and I swear I'll pop wide open.”

“Well, we don't want that. Think of the mess it'll make.”

He grinned and dropped his spoon into the empty bowl. That produced a pair of nervous plinks as the spoon hit first the ceramic bottom and then the side. He wiped his mouth on a white paper napkin. He crumpled the napkin into a tidy wad and left it next to his bread plate.

The dining room was big, too big, really, for just two people. The whole house was like that: It was a rambling, shingle-sided place that had once belonged to a mine foreman and his family. Four children and an elderly aunt, in addition to the foreman and his wife, had once lived here comfortably. Then the foreman was transferred to a mining operation out in Wyoming—the new West Virginia, Nick had heard it called, although he doubted that the people of Wyoming would embrace the label willingly—and Nick had purchased it. Back then, a decade or so into his marriage, he was still sure that he and Mary Sue would have a family. Not four kids—Lord!—but maybe two. At least one.

Nowadays, the large house got on his nerves sometimes. The rooms had high ceilings and wide windows, and there was a broad backyard that went on and on until finally it ran underneath a jagged shelf of mountain called Smithson's Rock. The day after he and Mary Sue moved in, a proud and happy Nick Fogelsong had taken an exploratory stroll around the property, like a squire with his walking stick and his spaniel, and when he came to that shadowy space beneath Smithson's Rock, he bent over and took a few scooting steps forward. His toe bumped a soft edge. It was a pile of comic books. Nick plucked one off the top. There was a handwritten note taped there:

To the new kid who moves in here. I'm Corey. I'm eight years old and we are going to Wyoming. These are my comic books. I'm leaving them for you, okay? This is a great place for a fort. PS I hope you are a boy.