A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,30

a ring.

Good sign. If Nick had the energy to be ornery, it meant he wasn’t slumped in a chair after an all-nighter at the office, brooding about the state of the town for which he’d felt too much responsibility for too many years.

‘Mornin’, Nicholas,’ she replied. Two could play at that game. ‘Any news?’

‘Now, Bell, you know good and well that if there’d been any news, I would’ve called you before now – no matter what time it was.’

‘True.’

‘But I do have to say—’ Fogelsong had paused, and Bell could hear him take a long satisfying slurp of his coffee. ‘– that things are moving along.’

She pressed the phone tighter against her ear.

‘That right?’

‘Yeah. We got the comprehensive ballistics report back from the state police crime lab. Nine-millimeter slugs, just like we thought. We’re going over it right now. Which is a start. Plus, a couple of my deputies worked all night and came up with some good leads. They went over the reports of some gun-related violence in adjacent counties over the past few months and pulled out some similarities in the incidents.’

‘Any idea why somebody would want to kill those three people in particular?’

‘Nothing yet. We’re going to be talking to their families again. Trying to shake something loose. We’ve got to go easy, though. Their loved ones are pretty broken up. Just like you’d figure they’d be.’

‘Yes,’ Bell said. ‘Of course.’

She was driving past the post office and saw, in the small parking lot, an enormous TV news van surrounded by a bobbing, shifting mass of people in baseball caps and flannel coats. Still eager, no doubt, for the chance to be interviewed for a newscast. Bell figured she ought to be disdainful of these people and their fierce hunger to see themselves on television, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t be.

A lot of the people in Raythune County felt invisible. They felt marginalized, forgotten. The world paid them no mind. This might be the one time in their lives – just one measly time, a few seconds, tops – that the spotlight would swing their way, and they would feel its welcome heat on their weathered, used-up faces. Being on television, even if it was only to say, Yessir, we’re all pretty darned scared ’round here after that awful shootin’, no question ’bout it, might be the high point of their lives. Thus Bell couldn’t begrudge them their determination to stand in a parking lot, first thing Sunday morning, and jostle and bump and elbow each other out of the way for the chance to look into a TV camera and give opinions. They weren’t used to anybody caring about their opinions.

Which was not to say Bell herself wanted any part of the publicity. She’d had to deal with the press on a few of her cases, and she found herself wishing that the big fat van that was now safely in her rearview mirror might somehow wind up with four flat tires and a snapped-off antenna.

She was coming to the intersection of Route 6. She had to wind up the call.

‘Nick,’ she said. ‘I know you know this, but let me say it anyway. You’ve got a lot going on, too, what with Mary Sue’s illness. You need a hand with anything, you need to talk anything over—’

‘You bet, Bell,’ he said, cutting her off in just the way she’d expected him to. They were two of a kind. ‘How’s Carla this morning?’

Bell was at a loss about how to answer. She felt exiled from her daughter’s emotional state. Even if Carla hadn’t been a witness just the day before to an act of grotesque, unfathomable brutality, she still would have been a mystery to her mother. Bell knew from her own teenage years – singed, as her daughter’s now were, by a flash of violence – that there were some things you could not talk about, no matter how much the people who loved you wanted you to.

‘Doing okay for now,’ Bell said. ‘Thanks, Nick. Gotta run. On my way out to the Sheets place.’

The sheriff, she knew, wasn’t terribly interested in the Sheets case. It was, to his mind, over. The perpetrator had been immediately apprehended. There was no mystery to it, no crime to solve. Albie Sheets was guilty. He was locked up. Now it was up to the courts; it was none of his lookout. Nick Fogelsong was a man of action, and his attention stayed fixed on cases in which he