A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  Stillwagon was loud, pompous, borderline buffoonish. He was encumbered, or so Carla had once informed her mother with palpable distaste, with perpetual body odor, the kind correctable only by surgery, although Bell assumed that that piece of weirdness was just one of the ordinary slanders routinely slung at high school principals. In Bell’s day at Acker’s Gap High School, the principal had been an exceptionally tall, mannish woman named Louisa Hinkle, and the rumors persisted that she’d undergone a sex change, that she’d started out life as Louie Hinkle. The small mustache on her upper lip hadn’t helped to quell the gossip.

  Stillwagon was in his late fifties. He had a snowman’s build, round belly set atop short, fat legs. Atop the torso was a big round head. The head featured the world’s most unnatural-looking comb-over, an abomination to which the eye was drawn due to the lavish application of gel to the dwindling strands. He seemed positively to relish the fact that he wielded the power of life and death over a bunch of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.

  He and Bell were natural enemies. They had clashed repeatedly ever since she took office. The principal didn’t share her urgency over the prescription drug problem in Acker’s Gap High School. Had Bell believed this was an honest difference of opinion, she could have lived with it. But she always suspected that Stillwagon just didn’t give a damn, knowing that if he agreed with her, he’d have to work harder.

  Their most recent tangle had come during a school board meeting late last spring.

  Kids, he’d said to her, have always done drugs. Always have, always will. Didn’t you smoke pot in high school, Mrs Elkins?

  How ’bout it?

  It’s not the same, she had replied.

  Sure it is.

  No, it isn’t, she had countered heatedly. This isn’t the bus driver selling you a dime bag. This isn’t your cousin taking you out in the woods to sample ’shrooms. These are well-armed, highly organized, and highly efficient organizations that are destroying an entire generation of young West Virginians. They’re targeting the poor and the hopeless, and they’re—

  Hey, Mrs Elkins, Stillwagon had interrupted, smiling, looking not at her but at the school board members, as if they surely shared his private assessment that she was a bit of a crackpot on this issue, a hysterical female. They make decaf, you know.

  As a ripple of laughter had crossed the room at the school board meeting that night, Bell felt an anger so intense that it made her dizzy.

  Stillwagon had only invited her to the assembly today because he’d had no choice. A group of parents had requested her presence. As Bell mounted the stage, Stillwagon came forward to greet her. His handshake went on too long, and it was distastefully moist.

  ‘We’re just so darned glad you could come today, Mrs Elkins,’ Stillwagon declared, insincerity oozing from him like excess grout on a bad tile job. ‘This is a genuine’ – he pronounced the word so that it rhymed with ‘twine’ – ‘honor.’ He winked. His pink cheeks were frosted in a bright sheen of sweat. ‘Truly.’

  ‘Happy to be here.’

  ‘We’ve got some of your fans in the crowd. The parents who wanted to hear you speak.’ He lowered his voice until he sounded like a cartoon villain, warning about death rays coming from aliens in the sky. ‘They’re real worried about the pills and such, same as you.’

  ‘Good. They should be.’

  Five minutes later, after Stillwagon had delivered a series of short, pointless announcements and colorful threats of serious repercussions if the student body of Acker’s Gap High School did not give Raythune County Prosecuting Attorney Belfa Elkins its complete attention, Bell stepped to the lectern.

  A brief crackle of applause.

  She dipped her head toward the fuzzy black microphone.

  ‘Good morning,’ Bell said.

  Her too-amplified voice was a shock. She moved back slightly, tapped the mike with a finger to judge its sensitivity. Cleared her throat. Leaned forward again. ‘Nice to see everybody. As Mr Stillwagon told you, I’m a prosecuting attorney. That means that when you get into trouble around here, I’m the person you need to be second-most afraid of. The person you need to be most afraid of is your mom or your dad.’

  A dutiful wave of chuckles spread through the auditorium. Reluctant ripples across a sullen pond.

  ‘I’m here today,’ Bell went on, ‘to talk to you a little bit about your future. Most of you won’t listen. Most of you are already tuning me out. You’re totally sure that you know everything you need to know about the world. Right? You don’t need some old lady to tell you anything about your life. You’ve already got it all figured out, don’t you?’

  Another wave of chuckles. She was right, of course: Most of them wouldn’t be paying the slightest bit of attention to anything she had to say. But – and this was the part of which Bell reminded herself, each time she agreed to make this kind of speech – there might be one kid who was listening.

  One kid who, in the heat of the moment when a choice had to be made, might make the right one.

  One kid.

  All the lost children. Those were the words that came into Bell’s mind sometimes, when she thought about young people growing up in the mountains of West Virginia. Alma and Chess Rader seemed to have ended up all right. But so many didn’t.

  That’s why she was here. Why she showed up. Why it was worth it to look out across the sea of bored and belligerent faces, enduring the sounds of shuffling feet and coughs and sneezes and sighs, even though at least 99 percent of the student body wouldn’t be able to tell you – ten seconds after the assembly’s end, even if you offered them a million dollars to get it right – a single word that their friendly local prosecuting attorney had said.

  Carla was in misery.

  She scrunched low in her seat, head down, arms crossed, feet flat on the sticky auditorium floor, hoping everybody would forget about the fact that she was related to the woman up on the stage.

  Only one thing kept her from absolute, soul-obliterating, suicidal despair. She had a little more information now.

  She was on the trail.

  She was getting somewhere.

  Lonnie had texted her that morning while she was still at home, pulling on her black tights. He’d found out something about Mr Piggy. Lonnie’s friend Eddie – he was the guy who’d had the stupid party at his stupid house – was tracking him down. Will call U, Lonnie had ended his message.

  If she found the guy, the shooter, she could do something for her mom. The same mom who, even now, was embarrassing her so much that, if she’d been able to pull it off, Carla would have chosen to sink right through that same sticky floor and disappear for, like, a thousand years or so. Or at least until her mom was finished talking.

  It was weird. She hated her mom but she loved her, too, and it was like the two emotions were locked in a kind of primitive combat in her heart, fatally bound up with each other, equally matched throughout eternity, like characters in a video game who fall off cliffs together in a single snarling unit because neither one will let go. Neither one could win outright, either. One couldn’t get the edge over the other. So on it went.

  Carla was going to help her mom solve the case. Find the killer. And that would make up for the fact that she was leaving. Moving in with her dad.

  All she had to do was get a name.

  Mr Piggy’s real name.

  30

  ‘I grew up right here in Acker’s Gap,’ Bell said.

  Her eyes moved slowly across the rows of vacant young faces. Indifference didn’t faze her. She’d expected it.

  When she was their age, she’d done exactly the same thing: displayed disinterest in, if not downright hostility toward, anything that smacked even remotely of a Life Lesson from an adult.

  ‘I graduated in 1990,’ she went on. ‘But this isn’t the same place I went to school. It’s very different now. Sure, we had drugs. Drugs are nothing new. But let me tell you what’s changed, okay? It’s not the amount of illegal drugs, or how ma
ny kids are doing them. It’s the kind of drugs. And who’s bringing them in.’ Her voice grew even graver. ‘You’re going to have to trust me on this. Because you won’t understand why this matters. But listen.

  ‘The drugs that my office sees now are more powerful and more deadly than ever before. And the people who sell them are part of bigger groups. They may use your friends and people you know to distribute them, to sell you the pills, but that’s not who’s really doing this. The criminals doing this aren’t just out to make a couple of bucks. They’re part of large professional organizations that don’t care if they destroy small towns like Acker’s Gap. They’re taking all the problems we have here – the fact that there aren’t enough jobs, that people are hurting – and they’re turning all of that frustration and despair into money. They want us to give up. They want us to give in.’

  She’d written nothing down. She didn’t have to.

  ‘I know what it’s like to be a kid from West Virginia,’ she went on. ‘You feel like you don’t matter, like nothing you ever do or say is going to matter. The world’s a big closed door. And because you don’t matter, then nothing else matters, either. If you mess up your life – so what? It’s not like the world is waiting to see what you have to offer. You aren’t letting anybody down because nobody expects anything from you in the first place. You’re invisible.

  ‘You end up making bad choices,’ Bell continued, ‘because you think it doesn’t matter, anyway. But you know what? It does matter. It matters a hell of a lot.’

  There was a stir. She had used a curse word. She was an adult with authority, and she’d used a curse word in front of them. Bell saw a few students hitch themselves up straighter in their seats. Along the first few rows, she glimpsed some bored scowls uncoiling into what might be – might be – a faint stirring of attentiveness.

  ‘It matters,’ Bell said, ‘because you have a unique contribution to make to the world. Something that nobody else can ever make. And if you stay true to yourselves, then you can—’

  She stopped, interrupted by the peppy chirp of a cell phone. A half-dozen teachers shot up out of their seats, scouring the rows to find out which student was the culprit, which student had smuggled in a contraband cell.

  Bell, though, knew the embarrassing truth: It was her phone.

  She reached in her jacket pocket. Silenced it. She’d forgotten to switch the phone to vibrate. But she had to check the call. In the years she’d been a prosecutor, only once had she ever made it all the way through a public speech without being interrupted by a call. Price of the job.

  Bell turned to Stillwagon, who sat on a folding chair behind her, hands capping his chubby knees. ‘Can you take over for just a moment?’

  Before the surprised principal could react, Bell had hurried off the stage. Just past the bunched and swept-back mass of the heavy maroon curtain, she stood and listened to the voice mail message.

  It was from Sheriff Fogelsong.

  A body had been found in a Dumpster behind a motel over in Atherton County. Young woman. No ID on her. Clearly a drug user. Her body bore the ragged signature of abuse from IV-injected narcotics.

  But that wasn’t what had killed her.

  What killed her was a gunshot wound to the head.

  The ballistics report had just determined – and this was why the sheriff was leaving an urgent message, even though Lee Ann Frickie had told him, when he called in search of her, that Bell was speaking at the morning assembly at Acker’s Gap High School and might prefer not to be disturbed – that the nine-millimeter slug may have been fired from the same semiautomatic that had killed the old men in the Salty Dawg three days ago.

  31

  ‘Name on the register,’ Fogelsong said, ‘was Fleming. Henry Fleming.’

  ‘Credit card?’

  ‘No credit card. Paid cash.’

  Bell frowned. It figured. Of course he’d paid cash.

  ‘Anything else?’ she said. ‘Does the manager remember anything about him? Race? Height and weight? Accent? Make and model of car? Anything left in the room?’

  Fogelsong flipped through the pages of his notebook, even though he already knew the answer.

  ‘Nope.’

  They were sitting in the sheriff’s office. That is, Fogelsong was sitting. Bell and two deputies, Pam Harrison and Greg Greenough, were standing. The meeting had convened five minutes ago, when Bell arrived from the high school.

  She’d apologized to the students, promising to return soon to finish her speech.

  Harrison and the sheriff had just returned from the motel in Atherton, where they’d had a mostly fruitless interview with the mostly clueless manager. Greenough was holding a two-page printout of the preliminary ballistics report.

  ‘Manager got curious when the guy checked out early,’ Harrison said. She was a thin, serious-faced young woman in her mid-twenties, with a pointy nose and a bright red birthmark that covered the right side of her neck. ‘He was a stranger, but that’s not unusual. They get truckers through there all the time. Paid for a week. Left after three days. Maid goes in. Finds a hell of a mess.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ Bell said.

  ‘Meaning blood and brain tissue on the carpet. Also on the bed, the nightstand, a lampshade,’ Harrison replied, her words coming in a quick-step march. ‘No body. Just big hints of a killing. Recent. Real recent.’

  Bell looked to the sheriff. ‘How’d they get the idea to look out back for the victim? To check the Dumpster?’

  ‘They didn’t.’ Nick’s face was dark. His answers didn’t arrive the way Deputy Harrison’s did. He spoke slowly. ‘Dogs got in there. Lid was left open. Manager heard the ruckus – if you’ve ever seen hungry dogs fighting for their supper, you’ll know how that manager heard it over the noise of his TV show – and went out back to have himself a look-see. Found the body. Called us.’

  Bell nodded. ‘What do we know about the victim?’

  Harrison took over again. ‘We know enough to know there’s nothing to know.’

  Bell hated riddles. She scowled at Harrison. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s nobody,’ Harrison said. ‘Just some drug addict. We’ll probably have a positive ID pretty soon, but it won’t tell us much. We’re searching other databases. Even if she doesn’t have a criminal record, we can send the description around to the rehab centers. Most of those people are in and out of court-ordered rehab a dozen times before they turn twenty-five. Frankly, Ms Elkins, she appears to have been a prostitute. Probably trading sex for drugs. Upset the wrong customer. That customer apparently was our shooter.’ Harrison shrugged. ‘Blowing off steam, I guess.’

  Bell looked down at the sheriff.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Looks like our man is still at it. This Henry Fleming – or whatever the hell his name really is – isn’t through with killing.’

  ‘And so now,’ Bell said, ‘we have to find a link between a prostitute and drug addict and three old men. A reason why somebody would want those four people dead. Drugs? Sex? What’s the connection?’

  Harrison suddenly snapped her fingers.

  ‘That name,’ she said. ‘The name the guy was registered under. Fleming.’

  Bell turned. ‘What about it?’

  ‘I know that name. English class. Middle school.’ Harrison closed her eyes, to help herself think. ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ She opened her eyes again. ‘I’m sure of it. Might be just a coincidence, but Henry Fleming is the main character in The Red Badge of Courage.’

  Greenough, a heavyset, middle-aged man with rust-colored hair that he wore in a curly perm, nodded. ‘The novel about the Civil War.’

  ‘That’s the one.’ Harrison folded her arms across her chest.

  Fogelsong spoke next, and Bell was surprised by the sarcasm that snaked through his tone. Nick wasn’t prone to sarcasm. At least not when things were going well.

  ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘That’s just great. I always prefer my killers to be up on their American literatu
re.’

  Walking through the corridor back to her office, Bell checked her cell. She’d let the phone go to voice mail while she conferred with Fogelsong and his deputies. She was willing to be interrupted while giving a speech, but not while being debriefed by Nick and his staff.

  Speeches could be repeated, postponed, rescheduled. Murder cases, by contrast, had a ticking clock at their core. Bell knew the statistics. Hell, anybody who’d been in law enforcement more than ten minutes knew the statistics: If a case wasn’t solved in the first few days – a week, tops – the odds of it ever being solved went way, way down.

  Trails grew cold. Memories clouded. Interest faded.

  In less than an hour, she’d racked up eight messages. That wasn’t even close to her all-time record of forty-eight calls in a sixty-minute span, which had occurred a year and a half ago, during the controversial prosecution of a woman who’d poisoned her mother-in-law, stashed the body in the attic, and then continued to cash the old lady’s Social Security checks. At least half of Acker’s Gap had regarded it as their solemn duty to let Bell know that the victim had been a mean-spirited, cantankerous old bitch, whereas the alleged murderer was a sweet, gentle soul who attended church regularly. Shouldn’t those facts matter?

  Bell never did find an artful way to convey to her endless line of callers that nothing – not even a mother-in-law’s decades-long obnoxiousness – justified murder.

  Cell cocked between her right ear and an upraised shoulder, Bell listened to her stacked-up messages as she made her way through the courthouse corridor.

  Four were about routine business. A deputy needed paperwork to apply for a warrant. Collier County prosecutor Lance Burwell had a question about the procedure for serving subpoenas in a nursing home. An assistant prosecutor in Richmond needed a ruling on an extradition request from the state of Virginia for a burglary suspect whom Sheriff Fogelsong had in custody. And there was a brief, businesslike greeting from Amanda Silverton, a state legislator who was about to propose a new bill about mandatory sentencing for prescription drug–related offenses and wanted Bell’s input on the wording.