A Killing in the Hills

by Julia Keller

‘Doesn’t look like foul play, then?’

  ‘Not so far as I can see. Only person who wanted to do any harm to young Mr Pugh,’ Buster said, ‘was Mr Pugh himself.’

  Four minutes after she finished with Buster Crutchfield, her cell rang again.

  This time, it had to be Carla. Bell was so sure of it that she didn’t bother checking the caller ID before speaking.

  ‘Hey, sweetie – where in the world have you been?’

  A light cough of embarrassment. A man’s cough.

  Bell pulled the phone away from her ear and checked the small blue screen: MECKLING, CLAYTON.

  ‘Look,’ she said sharply. ‘I really need to stay off the phone. I’m expecting to hear from my daughter any minute now.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. I’ll just call you back another time. Maybe tomorrow?’

  Bell hesitated. She’d read the caller ID but had already forgotten the name, so frazzled was she over Carla’s absence. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Clayton Meckling. I work with my dad. Walter Meckling. As in Walter Meckling Construction.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  ‘I’ve left you a couple of messages. But I know you’re busy. We understand there’s been a problem with the electrical work we did. I wanted to come by at some point and take a look. Sooner the better, what with the fire risk. We switched you from a fuse box to circuit breakers, right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you did. But like I said, I’m waiting to hear from my daughter.’

  She hated to put him off, because she wanted that wiring fixed. She wanted things to be perfect for Carla during the last few weeks she’d be living here. And Bell could never take the word ‘fire’ lightly.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know this sounds strange – it’s so late and all – but I’m just going to be sitting around for the next hour or so, waiting for my daughter’s call. If you’re in the neighborhood, you could come over right now. Have a look. At least get a start on tracking down the problem, maybe. And making sure it’s safe for now.’

  ‘Deal.’

  ‘You’ll be going in the cellar, right?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Bring a flashlight. And your oldest clothes. The kind you don’t mind ruining. Our cellar’s got a touch of the Addams Family to it. You’ll be swatting at cobwebs. Swearing you hear things scuttling around in the corners.’

  ‘Been working for my dad for a while now. I’ve crawled around a lot of old basements. I’m good buddies with Cousin Itt.’

  Bell laughed. It felt odd to be laughing when she was still so concerned about Carla, but she realized there was nothing she could do about that right now. Just wait. And worry.

  And maybe get the wiring fixed.

  Clayton Meckling turned out to look a lot like his father.

  Rangy, redheaded, with a casually graceful way of walking and an easy manner. Self-confident, without the arrogance that sometimes went with it. Bell put him at ten, maybe fifteen years younger than she was, which is why she’d never met him, even though they’d both grown up in the vicinity, both graduated from Acker’s Gap High School. He had skin that looked as if he’d spent a fair amount of time outdoors. Greenish gray eyes.

  He was, in point of fact, an attractive man. Bell was a little surprised at herself for even noticing. For one thing, she was nearly beside herself with worry about her daughter; for another, she’d only dated a few times since her divorce. There was Harry Simms, an orthopedic surgeon over in Charleston, a friend of Ruthie’s, and there was Bill Vaughan, an engineer who worked for the state. Good men, both of them, smart and funny, but there were no sparks.

  She’d half-persuaded herself that after Carla left for college, she’d settle down with a cat or seven – just to round out the spinster stereotype, good and proper.

  And now, here was Clayton Meckling.

  She waited in the kitchen. After a few shy preliminary remarks, he had headed down to the cellar, wielding a Maglite and a pair of needle-nose pliers, his head protected by a bright yellow hard hat.

  The moment he was out of sight, she went back to worrying.

  It was 10:38. Still no word.

  Now Bell was beginning to panic all over again. At 10:40 she called Ramona Phipps. Carla and Ramona had been best friends throughout middle school and still hung out occasionally, but they’d split up in high school. Different crowds.

  Ramona said she hadn’t spoken to Carla in several weeks. Sorry.

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  Then Bell overcame her powerful, instinctive dislike of Lonnie Prince and actually dialed his cell. She had requested the number from Carla a while back. In case of emergency, she’d told her daughter. That’s all.

  The message on the voice mail was about what Bell had expected: ‘Dude! You know what to do. And do it at the beep.’ Bell didn’t leave a message. She’d just keep trying his number, she told herself, until he answered.

  She set her cell on the kitchen countertop. Her next call would be to Sheriff Fogelsong. She was wishing that she’d started all of this much earlier, but she was torn; Carla always complained that Bell didn’t trust her, and resented it when her mother tried to track her down. Bell wanted to treat Carla like an adult.

  She heard Clayton tromping up the basement steps.

  ‘Well,’ he said, lifting off the hard hat and running a hand through his hair, ‘I checked all the circuit breakers and everything looks good. But when we replaced that knob-and-tube wiring, I wonder if maybe we forgot to—’

  Bell’s cell rang. She lunged for it so frantically that Clayton took a few steps back in surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ Bell said into the phone.

  ‘Bell, it’s Nick.’ His voice was somber. ‘It’s about Carla.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting for her, I’ve been waiting for hours, I’ve been calling her friends – Nick, is it – do you know – are you calling because—’

  He cut her off. ‘Just needed to see if she was home yet.’ His voice shifted into another register. It was his information-dispensing voice. ‘But I do have some news. I’m not sure what it means – if it means anything at all, if it’s even relevant. You know Sheriff Beauchamp – Wally Beauchamp. Takes care of the Alesburg area. He got a report of a shooting this evening. Went to the scene.’

  A shooting.

  Bell felt her knees liquefy. She was suddenly afraid they’d give way. Somehow Clayton Meckling sensed that; he crossed the room and took her arm, stabilizing her. He held her that way while the sheriff continued speaking. Bell was only barely aware of Clayton’s presence.

  ‘At the home of a man named Edward Jerome Briscoe,’ Nick said, ‘Wally found the body of a twenty-year-old male resident of Raythune County named Lonnie Lee Prince. He’d been shot three times at close range. There was a cell found at the scene.’ A pause. ‘Bell, it was Carla’s.’

  ‘She wasn’t there?’

  ‘No. Just the cell.’

  ‘But the Briscoe person, did he—’

  ‘He was dead, Bell. Shot with the same weapon.’ The sheriff cleared his throat. ‘I thought I remembered you mentioning somebody named Lonnie. A friend of Carla’s, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ever hear her mention this Briscoe?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Any idea why she might’ve gone there?’

  ‘None.’

  She was getting shaky all over again, but someone was holding her; Bell looked up and saw a man’s face. A man she didn’t know. She was grateful for his assistance but all she could think was, Who the hell is this guy? I’ve never seen him before and what in the world is he doing in my kitchen and—

  It came to her. Clayton Meckling. Something about the wiring.

  She closed her eyes, trying to clear her head. Seconds later, when she spoke into the phone again, Bell hoped she didn’t sound hysterical, even though that’s exactly how she felt.

  ‘Nick, what do we do? What’s the next move?’

  ‘I’m figuring that out right now. Just ha
d to check first and make sure Carla wasn’t with you. Stay put. I’m coming over. Crime scene techs are working in the house in Alesburg, and they’ll be able to tell us if Carla was actually there. The cell might have been stolen. Or she could’ve loaned it to somebody. Lots of ways, Bell, it could’ve gotten there.’

  The call ended with a click. Bell drew the cell away from her ear and stared at it, as if she’d never seen this kind of device before, as if it were something exotic and bizarre. Her mouth was savagely dry. She had lost the feeling in her fingertips.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Clayton said. ‘Other than just getting out of your way? I mean, I hate leaving you like this. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I can see you’re pretty upset.’

  Bell finally was able to focus on him. ‘I’m sorry. This is an emergency. A family emergency. I – I shouldn’t have had you come over tonight.’ She looked down, because she thought she might be starting to cry.

  They realized simultaneously that they were still in physical contact with each other, that he still held her arm. Clayton instantly let go and backed away three steps. It was a small kitchen, and his rear end collided with the table. Bell had reached out to keep him from striking it, but she was too late, and in the process they became tangled up with each other all over again, arms crossing over arms, shirtsleeves rubbing, hands touching.

  There was an awkwardness to the moment, but there was something else as well. Another feeling. Bell, though, had no time to think about it, to analyze it.

  She apologized, blushed, and quickly moved away from him.

  Clayton muttered his own apology. He dipped his head in mild embarrassment. Then he fled from the kitchen, hard hat pinned under his arm, hands jammed in his jeans pockets, boots slapping the hardwood floor.

  Bell heard the heavy front door close.

  Now all she could do was wait for Nick.

  She looked down at the table. Carla’s half-eaten bowl of Cap’n Crunch from that morning still rested on the plastic place mat, a soggy yellow mess of curdled milk and congealed cereal. Under normal circumstances, the sight would’ve irritated Bell. She’d be silently rehearsing her firm, finger-wagging speech for when she next saw her daughter: Young lady, you know you’re supposed to rinse out your bowl in the sink and put it in the dishwasher . . .

  Now Bell was glad the bowl was there. Thrilled, in fact.

  It was a touch of normalcy, and its very ordinariness – Carla always forgot to rinse out her Cap’n Crunch bowl when she’d finished her breakfast – gave Bell hope. Hope that Carla was safe, and that she would be coming home soon.

  47

  Eddie Briscoe was a moron – and now he was a dead moron – but his question had merit.

  What the hell are you gonna do with her?

  Chill would kill her in the end. He had to. She could ID him as the killer, so naturally he’d have to get rid of her. No question about that. The question was what he’d do in the meantime. How he’d use her.

  They’d been driving for at least an hour now. Back at Eddie’s, Chill had dumped Carla in the backseat of the piece-of-shit car. Thank God she was skinny.

  She was out cold. He’d thought about taking advantage of that fact, but he didn’t want to waste the time. He wanted to get the hell out of Eddie’s house and get the hell out of Eddie’s neighborhood.

  Chill hated guys like Eddie. Guys who got high. It was disgusting, letting yourself reach the point where you were out of control. Chill knew a lot of guys in his line of work who couldn’t keep their hands off the merchandise, but that wasn’t him. He’d tried pot once, just once, and hated it, hated the burning throat and the way it left him: hungry, clawingly hungry, with a bad case of the giggles. The other stuff, the pills, he hadn’t touched. Never would. He needed to keep himself sharp. Mind clear. Ready.

  He admired the boss for doing that, too. For never touching the crap he sold. The boss was a businessman. He’d started out dealing pills, same as everybody. He had a good source. Then he’d added heroin, the new kind from Mexico, cheap stuff, and it was smart, because the pills ended up costing too much for the folks around here, once they got going.

  That fact turned Chill into the bad guy, showing up and counting the money they handed him and telling them they didn’t have enough, he couldn’t give them anything, or maybe just a few pills, not what they wanted, worse than nothing at all, and then watching them fall apart. The guys’d threaten him. The women’d drop their eyes to his crotch and lick their lips. Like Lorene, they were usually skinny and skanky, and while Chill wasn’t too particular, he didn’t like to mix things that way. Business and pleasure. Or what passed for pleasure.

  In the end, lots of the guys, too, would offer to do whatever he wanted, just gimme them pain pills please please I’m not doin’ so good you can see that cancha but that disgusted Chill, the idea of some guy sucking him off for a bunch of pills. Okay, fine, so he had let a guy do it to him once, just once, but it was disgusting. After, he’d punched the guy in the face.

  Heroin was a better deal. Didn’t cost much, compared to pills. Kids, especially, liked it. High school kids liked the sound of it, the sound of the word, all that it stood for, the history of it, the legend, Sid and Nancy, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, and they liked all the shit that went with it, the needles and the spoons and the plastic tubing and the little Bic lighters. The Bic lighters came in all colors: red, green, black, white, purple, yellow. You could pick your favorite color. They always had ’em in a box at the checkout at the 7-Eleven, all the different colors. The kids liked the swagger, too, that went along with it. With the life.

  Even the word rehab had a click to it. A shine. Movie stars did rehab. Rock stars. You read about it all the time.

  He heard a moan in the backseat. Chill took a quick look over his shoulder.

  He’d been driving in the mountains, the piece-of-shit car lurching and grinding up the steep inclines, because there was almost nobody on these roads, and it was getting really dark now, seriously dark, so all he could see in his backseat was the curve of a small body, crushed into a tight ball. She coughed a few times, wet gurgling coughs that went on for a long, long time, coughs that could mean she was choking, not getting enough air, and he thought, Don’t die on me now girlie not yet because finally he’d had an idea, an idea about where to go and what to do with her, an idea that had been coiled in the back of his thoughts the same way she was curled in the backseat of his car.

  He needed someplace dramatic. Like what you’d see in a movie. Anything less – a motel room or a 7-Eleven – would be embarrassing. This had to be spectacular. He wanted a place that people would remember, so that, forever after, when they passed it, they would look at each other and nod and know that everybody was thinking the same thing.

  That’s where Chill Sowards did it. Right there. Big standoff. Hostage situation. He was way outnumbered. Hell of a thing. Guy’s got elephant balls. No question.

  In the backseat, Carla moaned again. Her coat scratched against the vinyl car seat. She was moving. Shifting around. He hoped she wasn’t going to throw up or something. He’d be trapped in here with the smell. Fucking gross, is what it’ll be. Fucking disgust—

  Goddamnit.

  Big lights, coming up behind him. Red lights. Filling his rearview mirror. He had to squint. Little yip-yip of a siren. The siren wasn’t needed; he’d slowed down right away.

  He couldn’t out run anybody. Not in this piece-of-shit car.

  Chill yanked the compact over to the berm and waited. His gun was on the passenger seat. He slid it under the pile of other stuff on the seat, under the rattling little city of trash: the Ruffles bags and the KFC boxes and the Dolly Madison wrappers and the packs of cigarettes, everything dumped together.

  Thing was, though, he could reach for the Steyr if he needed to, could reach under the trash and swing it up at the window, could give this asshole cop a howdy like he’d never had before. In one second. Less.

  If the
guy gave him any problem, that’s what he’d have to do. He didn’t want to do it, he didn’t want to take the time, because he’d have to get out then and make sure the guy was really dead and all, but if he had to, he would.

  Rolled down his window. Stuck out an elbow. Casual-like.

  ‘Yeah, officer? Somethin’ I can do for you?’

  48

  Teddy Wolford had been a deputy with the Collier County Sheriff’s Department for less than a month. Law enforcement was not the career he had dreamed about; that distinction belonged to NASCAR. Not as a driver, but as somebody working in the pits. He’d been told he had good hands. He was strong and he knew cars, so he figured he had a shot.

  Never worked out. Nothing ever did, right? Not like you plan it. So here he was, nineteen years old, with a two-month-old baby, Danielle Marie, and he was married to Patty Weeks because there was no other choice. He didn’t follow NASCAR much on TV anymore. No point to it.

  He’d heard that the sheriff’s department was hiring and so here he was, Deputy Teddy Wolford. He had to patrol the back roads on the overnight shift – the shit shift is what they called it – and he couldn’t complain because he was new, he was low man on the totem pole.

  He was supposed to keep his radio on at all times, but nobody did. The other guys had wised him up. If you had your radio on and you got a call, you had to respond, and while that was okay most of the time, there were nights when you needed a break. So you turned it off for a little bit and if they asked you about it, you said you’d been taking a piss in the woods. That crackling static could get on your nerves. And he liked the quiet up in these mountains, liked to drive on the dark mountain roads and think about nothing.

  Deputy Wolford, then, had not been privy to the initial bulletins requesting extra vigilance because a man suspected of felony kidnapping was at large, somewhere between Alesburg and Acker’s Gap.

  ‘Where you headin’?’ he asked.

  The driver was a kid, even younger than Teddy was. Bad skin, toothless grin. Tiny eyes, turned-up nose. He looked like a pig.

  Good thing he was a skinny guy, Teddy thought, or the nickname ‘Porky’ would’ve been hung around his neck in third grade and never taken off again. The passenger seat looked like somebody had dumped a trash can on it. The car smelled like cigarettes and sweat. Had it been cleaner, better-looking, Teddy would’ve been more suspicious. This guy, though, was like everybody else he knew. Hell, he was like Teddy himself.