A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,28
in the street, she gave a quick look around to make sure Shelton Avenue was clear – no kids, dogs, cats, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, or snapping turtles, all of which, at one time or another, she’d had to swerve to avoid when she squirted out of her driveway in a hurry – and then shifted from reverse into drive. All systems go.
In ten minutes she’d be on Route 6, climbing the side of the mountain, which meant accelerating her way into a series of dizzy, lurching turns of legendary peril. Route 6 was the kind of road that required you to grip the wheel until your fingers ached and your palms were rubbed raw, while hoping that prayer could outmaneuver gravity.
She remembered the old joke. There are only good drivers in West Virginia, the joke went, because all the bad drivers are dead. With the steep drop-offs and hairpin turns, with the winding roads and the sudden plunges that awaited you down either side, if you weren’t a good driver, then you – followed by your next of kin – found out pretty quickly.
Lori Sheets lived near the top of the mountain. Bell had met her twice before, both times briefly: at the time of her son’s arrest three weeks ago and then again at his arraignment a day later. Bell’s impression of Lori Sheets was tentative, incomplete, composed of quickly glimpsed fragments, a makeshift mosaic. She could recall short frosted hair; a square, chunky, decidedly middle-aged build; circular face; and anxiety. Lots of please and thank you and excuse me. That was Lori Sheets: excruciatingly polite, exceedingly nervous. The kind of nervous that went with being poor and powerless.
Bell wanted to have one last talk with the woman before deciding whether or not to try her son Albie for the murder of six-year-old Tyler Bevins.
Albie was twenty-eight, but profoundly mentally retarded. Albie and Tyler had been playing together in the Bevins’ basement when things somehow went catastrophically wrong. Tyler, limp, pulse-less, was found propped against a wall, a garden hose wrapped tightly around his small neck. Albie’s tennis shoe was close beside him. Paramedics discovered Albie in the Bevins’ backyard, kneeling behind a tree, shaking and sobbing.
‘Done a bad thing,’ he had said. When Albie pulled his big hands away from his face, the officers told Bell, shining strings of snot connected his nose and his fingertips. His regret, they said, seemed genuine. ‘Done a bad thing,’ he mumbled. ‘Albie bad. Bad. Bad.’
Bell could charge him with first-degree murder, or she could argue for diminished capacity. She could insist to the judge that he belonged in prison for the rest of his life, or she could say he ought to be detained in a forensic facility and evaluated regularly, until he could be released into his family’s care.
She had to make up her mind by the next day. So she’d called Lori Sheets, in between her conversations with Sheriff Fogelsong about the shooting, and she asked for permission to stop by early Sunday morning. Albie was in jail, and would stay there throughout the trial, but Bell wanted to get a sense of his family. To see them in their home, the home where Albie had lived, too.
She wanted every speck of information she could get before making her decision about Albie’s fate.
Lori Sheets had been instantly obliging. ‘That’s no problem at all, Mrs Elkins,’ she had said, and her voice on the phone was perky, hopeful. ‘No problem at all. We’ll put on the coffeepot. You come on by. And thank you. We’re much obliged. Thank you.’ She knew what the stakes were. Her attorney, Serena Crumpler, had explained it all to her. The prosecutor’s decision about what Albie would be charged with – first-degree murder or involuntary manslaughter with mitigating circumstances – could make all the difference.
The Sheets case was the kind Bell craved. It was complex and it was multilayered, and it required her to locate the fine line between justice and mercy. It was the kind of case that validated her decision to uproot her life and move herself and her child back to a hometown that – unlike Washington, D.C., unlike anywhere else in the world – knew her, knew every knot and twist and nuance.
Which was both good and bad.
She wrestled the gearshift into second. The engine put its protest on the record, making a low throaty grumble.
The higher Bell climbed, the more the world thickened and dimmed. To her left and right,