A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

  ‘What do you think?’ she said.

  ‘I think Mrs Bevins made herself a bargain,’ Rhonda answered. Her voice was flat and sad but also certain. ‘And it put her in hell. She’ll say and do whatever she has to. Whatever she’s told to.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning she’s already lost her child. She doesn’t want to lose her husband, too.’

  42

  ‘Albie,’ Bell asked, ‘why did you put the hose around Tyler’s neck?’

  Serena Crumpler was standing a foot away from Bell. Albie sat on his bunk, legs spread. His hands were in front of his face. He was playing with his fingers. He seemed to be only half-listening, but Bell sensed he was paying attention. He was paying attention because he liked her. She was his friend.

  When she arrived that night, Bell had looked around for bugs. She found a tiny spider in the corner and stepped on it. Albie had clapped his hands and squealed in delight.

  ‘Why?’ Bell repeated.

  She was gentle with Albie, but she wouldn’t coddle him. They had been coddling him too long. They weren’t doing him any favors that way. He deserved direct questions.

  Bell saw something shift in Albie’s demeanor. The head-on question seemed to have shaken something loose inside him. Freed him.

  ‘Necklace,’ Albie said. He said it with a kind of relief. He looked at Bell.

  ‘The hose was a necklace?’

  ‘Yeah. To make him look pretty. All green. Shiny green.’

  ‘What did Tyler say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why not, Albie? Why didn’t Tyler say anything?’

  ‘He was quiet. Tyler fell down. Asleep.’

  Albie wiggled his fingers. Then he began bending them down, one by one, making each hand into a lumpy fist.

  ‘How did he fall down, Albie?’

  ‘His daddy knocked him down. It was a accident.’ Albie opened his fingers again so he could start all over, bending each finger down.

  ‘Accident,’ Bell said.

  ‘Yeah. Me and Tyler was playing outside. We come in.’

  ‘Was there anybody else in the basement, Albie?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who, Albie? Who else was in the basement?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘Tyler’s daddy and Dee-Dee,’ he said.

  ‘You mean your sister, Deanna.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah.’

  Bell had read the transcripts of earlier interviews with Albie. This was the first time he had mentioned other people in the basement.

  Then it struck her: We never asked.

  We never asked, because we figured we knew what had happened.

  We never asked, because it was obvious.

  The investigators had arrived on the scene and immediately observed a large, powerful man with extremely limited mental capacity, and the body of a small boy who was his playmate, and a hose around the small boy’s neck. The large man was frightened and cowering.

  And so, Bell chastised herself, we didn’t treat it like a crime scene. We treated it like a seminar room in a divinity school. We didn’t look closely enough at Tyler’s body. We started asking about good and evil, and right and wrong, and intelligence and the lack thereof.

  I’ve been acting like I’m Socrates, she thought with disgust, abandoning the comfort of the ‘we,’ when I should’ve been acting like an officer of the court. I wanted Truth – when plain old truth would’ve done just fine.

  ‘What were they doing, Albie? Tyler’s daddy and your sister – what were they doing? When you saw them in the basement?’

  Albie’s face clouded.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Bell moved a few steps forward and touched his arm. He stared at her hand, which looked small and pale on his thick hairy forearm. He smiled. Bell realized that Albie probably wasn’t touched very often. People didn’t shake his hand or pat him on the back. They were afraid of him. And so he missed out on casual human contact, on that sense of being connected to other people by a simple bridge of skin.

  No wonder he’d loved playing with Tyler. Tyler was too young to know he was supposed to keep his distance from Albie. He treated Albie like a friend. Not a freak.

  ‘You can tell me what you saw, Albie,’ Bell said softly. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘They was—’ He shook his head. He started again. ‘They was on the couch. Tyler’s daddy was up on top of Dee-Dee. Like when me and Tyler is wrestling. Like that. And they was moaning. Like they was hurt or something. Moaning like this.’ He closed his eyes. His rubbery lips vibrated as he said, ‘Mmmm – oooooo-mmmm.’

  Under different circumstances, it might have been funny.

  It wasn’t funny now.

  Bell looked back at Serena Crumpler. Serena’s face wore a somber and stricken expression. It seemed to Bell as if the young woman had aged ten years since she’d arrived at the jail, since she’d signed her name at Deputy Mathers’s behest, since she’d stepped into Albie’s cell. She, too, had failed to ask the right questions. And she was his defense attorney.

  Bell turned back to Albie. ‘And you and Tyler saw them?’

  ‘Yeah. We come in the basement. We’d been at my house and then we walked back to Tyler’s house. We come in the basement from the back door and then Tyler’s daddy jumped up and he started yelling at Tyler.’

  ‘Yelling.’

  Albie nodded. ‘Like how my mama does when she gets mad at me after I do something bad wrong. Real bad. Tyler’s daddy was hopping around. Getting his pants on. And he was yelling.’

  ‘Were you scared, Albie?’

  ‘Yeah. Tyler, too. We didn’t know we done nothing bad. We just come inside there to play.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  Albie took a deep breath. He licked his lips. ‘Tyler’s daddy come running at Tyler and he picked him up and he shook him and shook him. He pushed him real hard. Tyler hit the wall and he fell down. Went to sleep.’

  ‘Then what, Albie?’

  ‘Well, then Tyler’s daddy looked at Dee-Dee and she looked at Tyler’s daddy. Dee-Dee was crying. Then she wasn’t crying no more.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then Dee-Dee, she says to me, “Hey, Albie, won’t Tyler look nice with a pretty little necklace? When he wakes up, doncha think he’d like a pretty necklace?” And she went and got me the hose. It was right outside. On the patio. I put the pretty necklace on him and Dee-Dee said, “Pull it, Albie. Pull it tight. It don’t fit him like that. Pull it tight and when he wakes up, he’ll like it.” And then Tyler’s daddy and Dee-Dee, they left. They left me there. I couldn’t get Tyler to wake up. I tried and tried. I wanted to play some more. I started feeling bad. Real bad. Somethin’ was wrong with Tyler and I done it. So I run away. I run so fast, I lost my shoe.’

  43

  Coat buttoned, gloves on, arms crossed to preserve body heat, Bell stood before the courthouse. Darkness was pushing all the light out of the sky. Night had arrived. The cold had come with it.

  Sheriff Fogelsong stood beside her. He had dispatched a squad car to the Charleston Airport. When Bob Bevins’s flight arrived from Las Vegas, the deputies would meet him on the tarmac, arrest him, and bring him to the courthouse.

  A second squad car, sent to the trailer on Route 6 an hour ago to pick up Deanna Sheets, ought to be getting back here at roughly the same time.

  ‘She confessed to Charlie Mathers,’ Fogelsong said. He’d just ended a call on his radio, opening his big black wool coat to clip it back on his belt. ‘I sent Deputy Harrison along with him, in case there was any trouble, but it wasn’t necessary. The minute Deanna Sheets saw them, standing at the door of the trailer, she started talking. She almost seemed – hold on to your hat, Bell – she seemed kind of proud, Charlie said. Kind of excited to be in the middle of things.’

  The sheriff thrust his hands in the slash pockets of his coat. He lifted his big shoulders and then let them fall again. He’d apologized to Bell for his handling of
the case, for arresting Albie in the first place, for not insisting that the state send a forensics team, for failing to look beyond the obvious.

  ‘Enough blame to go around for all of us,’ she’d replied. ‘Nobody’s covered in glory with this one, Nick. I’m just glad we finally got it right.’

  They waited. At this hour, the downtown was virtually deserted. Bell had counted only two cars going by since they’d first come out here to wait. The storefronts, half-drowned in shadows, had a wary, barren feel to them, as if they were protecting themselves from the next blow. Part of that, Bell knew, was caused by the cold. And part of it wasn’t.

  She looked down at a troubled little shrub at the edge of the courthouse lawn. By the meager light that remained in the sky she could see, at the base of the scraggly plant, a crooked circle of flattened cigarette butts.

  Dot Burdette, Bell thought. You rascal. You know better. Yes, it was a rush to judgment; lots of people smoked. Okay, fine. She’d give Dot the right of appeal.

  When Nick spoke, it startled her; she was buried so deep in her own thoughts.

  ‘You know what really gets me, Bell?’ he said. ‘When Deanna started spilling her guts to my deputies, Lori Sheets tried to shut her up. Can you beat that? Deanna kills a little boy, and still her mama’s trying to protect her. Letting her own son take the rap.’

  Bell nodded. She would have to decide whether to charge Lori Sheets with impeding an investigation and making false statements to the police. If she did that, though, and if Lori Sheets went to jail, then who would take care of Albie? Sometimes she wished a prosecutor’s job were as simple as some people thought it was. She longed for a few easy dilemmas. The black-and-white kind.

  She stamped her feet against the sidewalk a few times, trying to jump-start her circulation. The fall season in these mountain valleys bred a peculiar species of cold. Not winter’s cold, with its rock-bottom temperatures and ice-bound paralysis of everything that used to be moving, but a sideways kind of cold. A sly cold. No matter how many times Bell had experienced it, the cold in November always took her by surprise.

  ‘Parents do all kinds of things to protect their children, Nick,’ she said. ‘There’s no way to figure it out. No accounting for it.’

  She hadn’t heard from Carla all day. No call. No text. No whining request to pick her up after school so she wouldn’t have to ride the bus – because, as Carla reminded her daily, the suspension of her driver’s license was still in effect.

  Carla had probably caught a ride home with Lonnie.

  Yes. That made sense. She’d be spending as much time as possible with her friends, now that she’d decided to leave here. Wouldn’t she?

  And then Bell’s thoughts were drawn back to the present. Two big black Chevy Blazers had rounded the corner of Main and Thornapple and were heading toward the courthouse, red lights turning importantly on their tops. No sirens. No need to scare the bejesus out of three-quarters of the town.

  Inside the vehicles, Bell knew, were the two people responsible for the death of Tyler Bevins.

  The sheriff spoke without looking at her.

  ‘That thing you just said – about parents protecting their children,’ he said. ‘Guess somebody forgot to tell Bob Bevins, huh?’

  It began, Deanna Sheets told them, on an afternoon last spring. Bob Bevins came to pick up Tyler at the Sheets trailer. Her mother wasn’t home from work yet. So she and Bob Bevins started talking.

  ‘That’s all it was at first – just talking. Then it got to be something else,’ Deanna said coyly. She arched her eyebrows, inviting them to let their imaginations go wherever they’d like them to go. Fine by her. ‘My mama didn’t come back till way after dark sometimes. She’s got a long bus route. And I’d get lonely. Up there on the mountain like that – you can understand. And Albie wasn’t much company.’

  Deanna had settled herself in a straight-backed metal chair in front of the square metal table. This room, a small gray box, was one of two that the sheriff set aside for interrogations.

  Bell sat across the table from her. Hick stood in the corner, hands in the pockets of his rumpled gray trousers, head tilted against the cinder-block wall. They were in Hick’s territory now, Bell knew. This was his kind of villain – not a criminal mastermind, but a petty, attention-starved show-off. Hick Leonard’s private law practice had depended for years on precisely this kind of person: more selfish and opportunistic than evil. The Deannas of this world didn’t go looking for trouble; they slid into it, like a cheap shack built on a muddy hillside that ends up in the creek. When the rain came – and the rain always came – down they went, scooting and sliding and making excuses and telling stupid lies as they rode the ooze to the bottom.

  Rhonda was in a chair beside Bell, her face as serious as Bell had ever seen it. She was taking notes, even though the video camera was dutifully memorizing everything from its angled perch near the ceiling.

  ‘Pretty soon,’ Deanna said, ‘we started going on drives. Whenever Bob could get away. We’d go into Blythesburg. Have lunch.’ She tested out a dirty-minded smile. She seemed to like the feel of it on her lips. So it stayed. ‘Thing is, Bob and his wife just don’t get along no more. So it’s not like a real marriage. And pretty soon, Bob’s gonna buy me my own salon. He promised. So it’s a win-win. If you think about it right.’

  ‘Tell us about the day Tyler died,’ Bell said. Deanna had waived her right to have an attorney present, but she’d probably change her mind later, and Bell wanted to get as much information as she could right now, while the young woman still wanted to impress them, still wanted them to know how central she was to everything.

  Deanna frowned. She used one fingernail to pick at another.

  ‘Those boys – they weren’t supposed to be there,’ she said, sounding annoyed. ‘Albie and Tyler were playing at the trailer that day. Wasn’t supposed to come over to Bob’s house at all. And Linda was gone to visit her sister up in Morgantown.’ She gave Bell a look that was half plea, half challenge. ‘It wasn’t our fault, you get me? Bob and me, we thought we was alone in that basement. We did. But they come back. The boys come back to the house. Just barged right in through the basement door. They was looking for Tyler’s LEGO set. All the other shit those boys have got to play with – and what do they want right that second? LEGO set.’

  ‘So they surprised you,’ Bell said. ‘They interrupted you and Bob.’

  ‘Yeah. And Bob – well, he’s got a temper on him. He does. You can ask anybody. It’s like a fire startin’ up. Once it gets going, he can’t help himself. He has a hard life, you know? You’ve seen that wife of his. Don’t take care of herself at all. Started letting herself go, long time back. Bob told me all about it. He’s had to put up with a lot, believe me. She’s big as a house.’

  ‘So he got mad.’

  ‘Oh, yeaaah,’ Deanna answered, drawing out the word, marveling at the memory of her lover’s fierceness. ‘The boys had seen us, caught us, and Bob just blew his top. You don’t want to mess with Bob Bevins when he’s got up a head of steam, believe me. He grabbed Tyler and – well, he didn’t mean to hurt him, I know he didn’t, I’m sure of it, but somehow—

  ‘I tried to make it right,’ she said, interrupting herself after a pert frown. ‘See, Bob told me to make it look like Albie done it. Because Albie wouldn’t get in no trouble. Because he’s simple. “They’ll just get him some help,” Bob said. “He’ll be in a nice place for a while, a clean place with good meals, and then he’ll come back home.”

  ‘It was the only way,’ Deanna went on. ‘Bob didn’t mean to hurt his boy. Just lost his temper, is all. If we’d told what happened, Bob woulda been in big trouble. Albie, though – Albie wouldn’t get the same punishment that a real person would. And he’d never tell about what happened. Not if I asked him not to. He’s a good boy. He knows I’m looking out for him.’

  Bell felt Rhonda’s hand on her forearm. Her assistant wanted to ask a question. Bell nodded and sat back.


  ‘Deanna,’ Rhonda said, ‘what happened when Mrs Bevins got home that day? Did you tell her what happened?’

  Deanna looked surprised at the question. ‘Well, of course we did.’

  ‘Her little boy was dead. And she agreed to keep your secret?’

  Deanna made a noise that was uncomfortably close to a snicker. ‘Oh, she cried and she screamed and she waved her fat arms over her head like a crazy person, and she was yelling, “Tyler! Tyler! My little boy Tyler!” – but in the end, she wanted to keep Bob happy. She’d do whatever he told her to do. She’s got to hang on to him now. She’ll never get a man like Bob, ever again. I mean, you’ve seen her hair, right? And the size of that butt?’

  44

  When it came time to speak to Bob Bevins, Bell went in alone.

  She had another job for Rhonda and Hick. She’d asked them to go back to their office and start the paperwork to secure Albie’s release. ‘And in the meantime,’ Bell had added, as they parted in front of the interrogation room to which Bob Bevins had been taken, ‘tell the deputy on jail duty to check for spiders in Albie’s cell, will you? Ask her to do a regular sweep. Once an hour. Twice, if she can manage it.’

  Bell opened the door. The gray cinder-block walls and concrete floor of this room, the smaller of the two that Fogelsong maintained for conferences and interviews, made any color – in this case, Bob Bevins’s bright blue tie – look showy and out of place.

  She didn’t need him to confess. She already had Deanna’s confession, Deanna’s eyewitness testimony to what had happened in that basement. If Bevins stonewalled, fine. If he lied, fine. Now that Bell knew the truth, she’d have the forensics specialists go back over everything, every speck of evidence that had been collected in that basement.

  It was a different kind of search now. Not a search for a truth they didn’t know and had to discover, but a search for the proof of a truth they already knew.