Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  “Thank you, Mr. Blevins.” In her right hand, Bell held a pencil by its sharpened tip. She softly beat the palm of her left hand with the eraser end. “Please tell the court what you witnessed at approximately two thirty P.M. on Thursday, February nineteenth, in front of Lymon’s Market.”

  “Well, ma’am, I was just coming out of the store. Picked me up a little something for lunch, is what I did. Some sliced bologna and saltine crackers. I was leaning on the newspaper box, same as I always do, talking to some folks that were just going in—Fred Larson and Beanie Larson, his boy.” Blevins looked concerned. “Well, I oughta come clean here, since you made such a point of it. Beanie’s not really Beanie—no more than I’m really Rusty. I mean, his given name is Eldred. But folks’ve been calling him Beanie since he was a little kid. I believe it has something to do with a can of kidney beans and this habit he had of jamming them up his nose. He’s grown out of it now. But the name stuck.” Blevins snickered. “Good thing the beans didn’t, am I right?”

  Bell nodded. She was so focused on her questioning that she didn’t realize he’d made a joke until several spectators chuckled softly. Blevins waggled his head; he was enjoying his moment in the sun.

  The trial was now fully under way. Opening statements and jury selection had taken up the first week, and several motions filed by Serena Crumpler had required another three days for the judge to sort out and rule upon. Then Bell had begun her presentation of the county’s case. She expected to wrap up her side of things quickly. The forensic evidence was solid and unassailable, and her job was simply to lay out the narrative that would turn the science into a story: the story of how Royce Dillard had lured Edward Hackel out to his property for the express purpose of murdering him, and had done so via a series of blows to the back of the neck with the sharp edge of a shovel, and then transported the body down to the creek bed with the help of a small wagon.

  At noon each day or thereabouts, when Judge Barbour sonorously announced the lunch recess, Bell drove out to the Raythune County Medical Center for a quick visit with Nick and Mary Sue. There had been a setback. Two days after his surgery, Nick suffered a slight stroke when a flake of plaque from a vessel near his heart broke off and blocked the blood flow. The numbness in his right arm—likely permanent—meant he would henceforth not be able to handle firearms. Any lingering dreams he might have secretly harbored of returning to a job in law enforcement were now officially over. They should have been over before—he’d said as much to Bell—but she knew Nick Fogelsong, and knew that what he said out loud and what he planned in the privacy of his thoughts were often two very different things. She knew what a blow this was. She also knew he likely wouldn’t want to talk about it. She was correct.

  In the evenings, when the long day in court was over, Bell would go home to feed and walk Goldie. Then she returned to the hospital. She’d bring Mary Sue a takeout dinner from JP’s—fried chicken or beef stew or country-fried steak or a round carton of soup—and the three of them would sit in Nick’s room, now located on a regular floor and not in the ICU, which meant there was a window. Even through the darkening scrim of dusk, you could look out that window and see the faint, fading outline of the mountains in the distance. If you had lived here long enough, as the three of them had, you knew what spring was doing to those mountains: persuading them, with a quiet whisper, to shed the gray and the black in favor of green. Bell liked to think of the healing of Nick’s body the same way. So much was invisible now, so much was happening under the surface, prodded by a secret clock, like bare branches poised to leap into flower.

  And so the three of them sat there, night after night, with little conversation, Nick dozing after a punishing day of physical therapy. Bell would open her briefcase and prepare for the next day’s court session, legs crossed, yellow legal pad balanced on her knee, pen busy, and Mary Sue read or slept, and that was how they passed the time.

  * * *

  Rusty Blevins ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth, giving each cheek its due. It was what he did when he was thinking. Bell had asked him how often he’d seen Royce Dillard in town.

  “Not too common a sight, grant you that,” he said.

  “Once a month?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. Maybe every two, three months.” He paused, scrunching up his wrinkled face, double-checking the memory, and then he nodded, having confirmed his recollection. “Yep. That’s about it. You’d see him at the post office, maybe, then over to Lymon’s, or vicey-versy. He had a lot of dog food to haul back, so he had this little wagon. Needed some grease on them axles. You’d hear him coming before you saw him. Just squeaking along. But not too often. Like I said—three or four times a year, is all.”

  “And you saw him on Thursday, February nineteenth, is that correct?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  “Outside Lymon’s Market.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Was he going in or coming out?”

  “Coming out, ma’am. That little wagon of his was piled yea high with sacks of dog food.” Blevins unhooked a crooked hand from the front of the box and indicated a height close to his shoulder. Then he reasserted his grip, leaning even farther forward. “I’d seen him earlier that day at the post office, too. Checking his box.”

  “Did you speak to him either time—at the post office or at Lymon’s?”

  “Tried to. He ain’t what you’d call overly friendly. Never has been.” Blevins looked over at the defense table, attempting to give Dillard a sickly smile, an intention thwarted by the fact Dillard was staring at one of the radiators. “Sorry, Royce. I’m under oath,” Blevins said.

  Judge Barbour’s intervention was swift. “Mrs. Elkins, please instruct your witness to refrain from addressing the defendant.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” Bell set down the pencil on the prosecutor’s table, lining it up so that its yellow length was parallel to the edge. “Mr. Blevins, you need to direct your answers to me, not to Mr. Dillard.” She allowed herself a quick sideways glimpse at Dillard, to see his reaction to all of this—not just to Blevins’s remark, but to the trial itself. She’d had few opportunities to watch him, gauge his mood. It had been her professional duty to argue against bail—with no family, no job, no one to vouch for him, he was a classic flight risk—but she worried that it would be almost unbearable for him, locked up in a jail cell, away from his cabin, his land, and most especially, his dogs. A few years ago she’d prosecuted a man who was a lot like Royce Dillard, a scribble-haired, scraggly bearded recluse who lived off the land up in the mountains, and who could barely form words after so many years of not needing them. He was accused of arson; he’d left a campfire burning and the wildfire had consumed fifteen acres. But before the preliminary testimony was over, Deputy Mathers had found the man hanging in his cell by a bedsheet.

  When you’re used to seeing the sky over your head every day, Bell thought, it must be difficult to ratchet down your expectations to the sliver of it that could be seen through the window of a jail cell. That’s why she was concerned about Royce Dillard.

  He looked fairly placid, however, seated next to Serena Crumpler, hands clasped on top of the table, feet flat on the floor, head down. The only slight indication of any nervousness was a faint shimmy of the table, caused by the vibration of his legs. Otherwise, it seemed as if he’d granted himself an excused absence. His body was here, all right, but that was the extent of it. His mind was somewhere else. Probably off with Goldie, Bell guessed; in his imagination the two of them were surely roving across the countryside, thrashing happily through the brown leaves, jumping over fallen logs.

  “Mr. Blevins,” she said. “You provided the sheriff’s office with a video recording made with your cell phone, is that correct?”

  “Sure did.”

  “And when and where was this recording made?”

  “February nineteenth, ma’am, right there in front of Lymon’s Market. Along about half past two. When things started to g
et interesting I just pulled out my cell phone—my granddaughter’s the one who got it for me, because she says everybody needs one these days, it’s not optional anymore—and I pushed the button.”

  “What do you mean by ‘interesting,’ Mr. Blevins?”

  He grinned. “Well, old Royce over there was shouting at the man who’d been hanging around town ever since they started up with that resort. Hackel. Ed Hackel. Great big fella. Talked to him a few times myself. No matter what you said to him—Hackel, I mean—he always brought the conversation back to that big ole place they wanna build. Fella had one thing on his mind and one thing only.” The grin had gone away by this time, as Blevins seemed to remember the seriousness of what was being discussed here. “So Royce was yelling and Hackel gave it right back to him, giving just as good as he got. And then Royce said—”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” Serena said. She had jumped up, quick as a jack-in-the-box. “Hearsay.”

  “We’ll be introducing the cell phone video shortly,” countered Bell. “It’s already been admitted into evidence. The jury will be able to hear the conversation that Mr. Blevins is describing. I simply wanted to set the scene.”

  One of Barbour’s nicknames—each judge had about half a dozen—was Judge Snap Judgment, and he demonstrated why.

  “Sustained,” he said without hesitation. “Let’s let the jury see the video, Mrs. Elkins, and they can make up their own minds about what’s going on in it. Don’t think we need the subtitles.”

  A TV set on a rolling cart had been brought in that morning and set up next to the witness box. Bell gestured toward it. Then she turned to Judge Barbour’s bailiff, who was ready with her MacBook.

  “Jessica, please run the video.”

  The screen came alive. Two men faced off on a sidewalk. One was Royce Dillard. The other was Edward Hackel. Behind them was the dirty salmon-colored brick of Lymon’s Market. The shaky recording was hard to watch; the picture jumped around, tilting first one way and then the other, like a flimsy ship in a bad storm, and the sound consisted of muffled squawks, punctuated by the occasional comprehensible sentence rising above the scramble: Say that one more time, you dirty sonofabitch, and I’ll kill you—swear I will. The person yelling the threat was Royce Dillard. There was a bout of back-and-forth shoving between the two men, and then Dillard left the frame. He returned a second later, a wicked-looking object in his two-handed grip—a tire iron, maybe. It wasn’t clear. He took a wild swing at Hackel’s head. Hackel ducked. There was a scream from the crowd, and a scattering of squeals, and then the picture dissolved in a bleary smear of people and general agitation.

  Bell waited a few seconds, to let the jury absorb what they had just watched.

  “Thank you, Jessica,” she said to the bailiff. She turned back to Blevins, who had watched the screen with avid concentration, right along with everyone else, leaning so far forward in the witness box that he looked as if he might tumble over the front partition.

  “Mr. Blevins,” Bell said, “is that the footage you shot on your cell on February nineteenth of this year?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And who were the combatants in that altercation?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Who was fighting?”

  “Oh. Okay, well, it was Royce Dillard and that Hackel fella.”

  “Will you point to the man who was fighting with Mr. Hackel?”

  Blevins pointed to Dillard. Dillard had no reaction. His hands remained locked together on the tabletop. His eyes watched his hands.

  “Let the record show,” Bell said, “that the witness identified the defendant, Royce Dillard.” She picked up her pencil again, and once again tapped her left palm with the eraser end. “Mr. Blevins, do you have any idea why Mr. Dillard was so angry at Mr. Hackel—the man who later turned up dead in a creek on Mr. Dillard’s property?”

  Serena was up in a flash. “Calls for speculation, Your Honor.”

  “And so it does,” Judge Barbour declared. “Mrs. Elkins, your witness is welcome to his views on the possible motivations of the defendant. However, they won’t be a part of these proceedings. Move on.”

  * * *

  Serena declined to cross-examine Rusty Blevins, much to his disappointment. He sank back in his seat in the witness box, already feeling the chill as the spotlight swung away from him. Before he climbed down, Serena reserved the right to call him later—her request put a bit of the gleam back in the old man’s eye—and then the county’s case marched forward.

  Bell spent the rest of the day presenting the physical evidence. She called to the stand Wallace Barr, a forensic specialist from the state police crime lab in Charleston. He testified that the blood on the shovel found in Dillard’s barn had been Hackel’s, and that, after matching the shovel edge to the shape of the victim’s wounds, they could say with a high degree of certainty that the shovel was the murder weapon. Barr then explained the hair and fiber evidence found inside Dillard’s wagon, following that up with the soil analysis proving that the mud clinging to the wheels had most likely emanated from the bank of Old Man’s Creek. Dirt and debris on the bottom of Hackel’s shoes, he added, had come from the area in front of Dillard’s barn. The preponderance of the evidence indicated that Hackel had been struck and killed in or near the barn early Thursday evening, then placed in the wagon and hauled to the creek for disposal, like an oversized sack of trash.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The next morning Bell called Deputy Jake Oakes to the stand. He left his hat on his seat and ambled slowly up to the front of the courtroom. After taking the oath, he sat down and made himself comfortable in the witness box. And then he winked at her.

  “Your full name,” Bell asked him, her voice formal and cold, even though he was her witness.

  “Jake Oakes.”

  “I said full name, please. Including middle.”

  “That’s it. Jake Oakes. Don’t have a middle name.”

  “Really.”

  “Nope. Neither did Harry Truman.” He grinned at her.

  “So—is it Jacob Oakes?”

  “Just Jake. My folks didn’t have very high ambitions for me, I guess. Figured plain old Jake would do me fine.”

  She heard Judge Barbour clear his throat, a sure sign that he, too, was now officially perturbed.

  “What is your profession?” she asked him.

  “I’m a deputy in the Raythune County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “And how did you come to be involved in the investigation of the death of Edward Hackel?”

  Oakes sat up straighter now, the smile gone. “On Saturday, February twenty-first, at 11:07 A.M.,” he said, “the 911 operator received a call from a man who identified himself as Andy Stegner. Caller reported finding a body in Old Man’s Creek. Said the property belonged to his neighbor, Royce Dillard. Deputy Mathers and I were assigned to go check it out.”

  “What did you find?”

  “We hiked about a mile or so from the hard road until we reached the creek. After moving along the bank for a while, we came across a dead body. It was covered with a brown tweed overcoat. Later identification proved it to be the body of Edward Hackel.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “We called the state crime lab from the scene and waited for their arrival, to make sure it was undisturbed. Once they got there, we went up to Dillard’s cabin to ask him some questions. He already knew about the body. Mr. Stegner had filled him in on what he’d found.”

  “Did you and your colleague consider Mr. Dillard a suspect at this time?”

  “No.”

  “But you read him his rights.”

  “We did. As a precaution.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “Well, he said he didn’t know how the body had gotten there or who it might be. At that point we requested his presence at the courthouse, to give us more details, but he was under no obligation to comply. He came voluntarily. Rode in with Deputy Mathers and me.”
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  “Very well,” she said. “Later that day you were able to obtain a search warrant for Mr. Dillard’s property, were you not?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Can you tell the court what you found during the execution of that lawful search?”

  “I found a shovel. Appeared to be covered with blood.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In the defendant’s barn. I set aside several objects that were in plain view and then I saw the shovel, leaning against the back wall of the barn. I bagged it for analysis. Arranged for its transport to the state crime lab. Chain of custody was observed throughout. The shovel was later determined to be the weapon that killed Edward Hackel.”

  “Did you see anything else in the barn relevant to this case?”

  The puckish side of Jake Oakes returned, if only for a moment. “Well, ma’am, there were three big dogs. One of them—according to what Andy Stegner told us—was the one that actually found the body. But she refused comment. I can only assume she was following the advice of counsel.”

  A stir of chuckles swept across the jury box. They liked Jake Oakes. Bell could see that. This was a grim business, and the deputy was a good leavening agent, his personality a nice way to temporarily balance out the darkness.

  “Anything other than the shovel and the dogs?” she said. “Perhaps later. During a second search.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Oakes said. The levity left him. He was deadly serious now. “Upon your instruction, I went back to the barn three days ago and searched again. The premises have been sealed off since the victim’s body was recovered and the defendant removed to our custody. The only people who’ve been in there after my initial search are you and assistant Raythune County prosecutor Rhonda Lovejoy.”

  “Go on.”

  “Like I said, I scoured the place all over again. Top to bottom. And underneath a panel in the rafters I found—”

  He hesitated.

  “What, Deputy?” Bell pressed him. “What did you find?”