A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,10
scalp. Fogelsong kept his gone-to-gray hair in a brutally short crew cut. Even the little bit of hair he had, though, seemed to irritate him today. He frowned, and the frown dragged at the outside corners of his eyes, making them look even squintier than usual.
‘They were minding their business, Bell,’ he said. ‘Just a regular Saturday morning. Same as any other. Until it wasn’t.’
The notebook that preoccupied him was a narrow one with cardboard covers, the kind with a row of coils across the top to cinch the pages. For every major incident, Sheriff Fogelsong bought a new notebook at the Walgreens across the street from the courthouse. He knew how to use a computer, and kept his formal files there, but he still bought a notebook at the start of each new case. When Bell kidded him about it, calling him an old-school throwback, he’d nod and say, ‘Guilty.’ He didn’t even give her the satisfaction of denying it.
‘That’s all I got,’ Fogelsong added. ‘Just three old guys passing the time of day. And they end up with their damned heads blown off. And then the killer just disappears.’
The sheriff finally abandoned his notebook page and looked up at her. For a moment, nobody spoke. Bell was recalling how many afternoons she’d sat here just like this, going over a case with Nick Fogelsong, the air thick with facts and frustration.
His office was right down the hall from hers, in an annex that had been built onto the courthouse seventeen years ago. Yet it felt like a different world. Unlike Bell’s domain, this room was absent any soft details. There was no sofa or coffee table, no small yellow vase on the bookshelf, no paintings on the walls, and no carpeting, just a speckled salmon-colored linoleum so cheap and drab and ugly that Bell always swore it must’ve come pre-scuffed, to save him the trouble.
Fogelsong wasn’t offended when she’d first made that observation to him four years ago, right after Bell was elected prosecuting attorney. He was, he told her, downright pleased by the wisecrack. He often said – preached was a better word for it – that austerity was the only true virtue, that thriftiness was an aspect of character that out-weighed even honesty and loyalty.
Other people thought it was less lofty than all that. Nick Fogelsong, they noted, was a notorious skinflint. And the fact that he was so protective of county funds – in effect, their money – only endeared him to them. He’d been reelected sheriff seven times, after starting out as a deputy under Sheriff Larry Rucker.
This office had institutional-white walls, two grimy leaded windows through which dismal sunlight struggled to shove its way, and an old-fashioned transom over the door. There was a chill in the air. Not a metaphorical chill, owing to the fact that a triple homicide had occurred just up the street only a few hours ago, but a bracing, honest-to-goodness, permanent cold snap. Many people swore that Fogelsong had rigged the office thermostat so that it wouldn’t go above single digits, to save on the county’s heating bill. Bell had learned early on to bring a sweater if she intended a lengthy visit.
She didn’t mind his quirks. She admired Nick Fogelsong just as much today as she had on the night she’d first met him, twenty-nine years ago, when she was ten years old. He was one of the chief reasons she’d wanted to be prosecuting attorney of Raythune County, to come to work each morning in the scruffy, run-down courthouse and face a punishing case load armed only with an inadequate staff and a budget that was like worn-out underwear: It covered what it absolutely had to, but just barely, and sooner or later, your luck was going to run out. At the most inopportune moment, most likely.
Bell knew she could learn a lot from Nick Fogelsong. Not just about administering justice. About administering justice in a place like Acker’s Gap.
It was a shabby afterthought of a town tucked in the notch between two peaks of the Appalachian Mountains, like the last letter stuck in a mail slot after the post office has closed down for keeps. Acker’s Gap was situated within sight of the Bitter River, just over the ridge from the CSX Railroad tracks. It consisted of a half-dozen dusty, slanting downtown streets surrounded by several neighborhoods of older homes, two trailer parks, a tannery, a junkyard specializing in domestic auto parts, and a shut-down