A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,11
shoe factory ringed by a black-topped parking lot against which the weeds and the wadded-up Doritos bags and the crushed Camel packs were staging a hostile takeover. The county courthouse, built under a massive rocky outcropping that left a good portion of the town in shadow except at high noon, was stone-wrapped, high-windowed, fronted by a wide sweep of gray concrete steps and four white pillars, and capped by a theoretically gold dome that had silently begged for a new paint job since about 1967. Just outside the city limits was a handful of played-out coal mines and, beyond and above them, the corrugated foothills of the Appalachians, their sides dense with sweet birch trees and scarlet oaks, the ground crowded with mountain laurel and black huckleberry.
It was a beautiful place, especially in the late spring and throughout the long summer, when the hawks wrote slow, wordless stories across the pale blue parchment of the sky, when the tree-lined valleys exploded in a green so vivid and yet so predictable that it was like a hallelujah shout at a tent revival. You always knew it was coming, but it could still knock you clean off your feet.
It was also an ugly place, a place riddled with violence – the special kind of violence that follows poverty, the way a mean dog slinks along behind its master. A thoughtless, automatic, knee-jerk violence, a what-the-hell kind of violence that was, Bell had often heard Sheriff Fogelsong say, nearly impossible to stop.
Each year for the past two years the number of first-degree murder cases handled by Bell and the sheriff had risen. Same was true of involuntary manslaughters and aggravated assaults. She and the sheriff were plenty familiar with violence; they’d seen lots of it, quelled some of it, lived with the consequences of all of it.
What had happened that morning, though, felt different to her.
And if it felt different to Bell, then she was sure it felt different to Fogelsong, too – not because he’d said so out loud, but because she’d known him long enough to be able to extrapolate from his gestures and his expressions, from the way he rubbed the back of his neck, the way he gripped the small notebook in which he’d recorded the details, from the short vertical line between his eyebrows that seemed to cut slightly deeper each time she saw him.
Life was changing at whip-crack speed in the small towns in the mountains of West Virginia. Changing dramatically. Illegal drugs – prescription medications such as OxyContin and Vicodin, and lately an especially vicious commodity known as black tar heroin – had, for the past several years, been roaring across the state like a wildfire in a high wind, sweeping up and down the mountainsides and reaching deep in the hollows, leaving in its wake only dead-hearted towns and dead-eyed people.
As Sheriff Fogelsong and Bell had discussed many, many times, it had gotten ahead of them. They weren’t able to tell the residents of Raythune County, as Nick had told them for the first half of his career, to relax and leave it to the people whose job it was to handle such things – because the truth was, he didn’t think they should relax at all.
Not for one minute.
There had been a terrible crime just hours ago, right in broad daylight, in the middle of Acker’s Gap. Three men were dead. The shooter had walked in, did what he’d done, and then walked right back out again. Nobody saw him coming or going. Nobody remembered what he looked like. Even the people who said they did remember turned in such contradictory accounts as to be all but useless, the sheriff had told Bell with a grunt of annoyance.
The shooter’d been short, tall, young, old, fat, thin, black, white, bald, bushy-haired.
He was clean-shaven and he had a beard.
He drove a truck or a van or a four-door sedan. Or maybe it was a compact car.
Fogelsong would not have been too surprised, he added with a sour little grimace, if somebody had claimed he’d been purple and riding a tricycle.
‘Truth is,’ he went on, ‘we’re still at square one.’
His face slumped with what Bell liked to call its sack-of-concrete look: gray, pulpy, every pore visible. It tended to get that way when he was tired, she knew. Beat-down. The small wallets of flesh under his eyes broadened, grew puffier. The sheriff was fifty-two. Right now, you’d guess at least sixty.