A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,31
had to hunt down the culprit.
He liked to focus on the chase. To stay in motion.
For Bell, though, the murder of Tyler Bevins wasn’t over at all. Not even close. Albie Sheets was guilty – but guilty of what? There was plenty of motion in the Sheets case, but it wasn’t the sheriff’s kind of motion. It wasn’t about high-speed car chases or gun battles. It was the kind of activity that took place in a prosecutor’s head.
Could someone with an IQ as low as Albie Sheets possessed even know what murder was? And if he didn’t – by what right did the state punish him?
‘Well,’ Fogelsong said, ‘if you’re heading out to the Sheets home, you be sure and watch the curves going up and down that mountain – they’re pretty damn treacherous.’ He made a harrumphing sound in the back of his throat. ‘Like you don’t know that already,’ he added testily, scolding himself. Sometimes, Bell knew, he could forget that she’d been born and raised here, just like him.
She’d lived away from Acker’s Gap for a few years, and to some folks – Nick Fogelsong was not usually among them, but occasionally he slipped – that was almost enough to mark her as an outsider. A spectator. Not a native.
‘Will do.’ Bell flipped her cell shut and dropped it onto the seat beside her. The mountain loomed dead ahead.
9
Lori Sheets and her two children, Albie and Deanna, lived in a trailer that was permanently marooned on a patch of land right next to the road.
‘Next to’ the road wasn’t quite right. It was virtually in the road. When the state widened Route 6 in the late 1980s, it had tried to buy out the landowners whose lots bordered the road. Most sold willingly, but Curtis Sheets, Lori’s late husband, said no. Actually, he said, ‘Hell, no,’ and then spit out a chaw of Red Man with enough vigor to knock over a tin can perched on a fence post.
So the state widened the road anyway, and their front yard – only a small portion of which was their legal property, but as long as the road had been narrow, that didn’t much matter – vanished. The dirty gray ocean of road now lapped right up to the bottom step of the thin concrete slab that Curtis Sheets had installed as a front porch. When the coal trucks went pounding by, the trailer swayed and bounced like an out-of-balance washing machine. Dishes shimmied off the kitchen table and collectibles popped off the shelves. The family’s mailbox had been repeatedly sacrificed to nasty sideswipes by lurching sixteen-wheelers.
Curtis Sheets had died in 1994 in a single-car crash, leaving his wife Lori to deal with their son Albie. Their daughter Deanna, twenty-two, also lived at home.
On the afternoon of October 14, Tyler Bevins’s mother had checked on the boys in the basement of the Bevins home, which was located in a subdivision about a mile away. Despite the age discrepancy – Tyler was only six – they often played together, building LEGO forts or watching Scooby Doo videos.
Linda Bevins found her son with a bright green garden hose tied around his neck.
Bell parked on the left side of the trailer, pulling the Explorer as far off the road as she possibly could. She hoped that when she returned to it, the vehicle’s rear end would still be attached to the front. Your average coal truck, she knew, lacked a certain subtlety when it came to sucking in its gut and staying inside the white lines on mountain roads.
As Bell opened the car door, she heard a voice calling out. ‘Hey there, Mrs Elkins.’
Up on the porch, Lori Sheets was pulling a brown cloth jacket around her wide shoulders. It was cold up here in the mountains, although it was still early in the fall. The sun, on account of the topography, had a hard job on its hands. And the heavy canopy of twisting trees thwarted the sun’s best intentions.
‘Good morning,’ Bell said, retrieving her briefcase from behind the driver’s seat.
The trailer had once been white, but the dirt flung up by the constant churn of the coal trucks had stained its aluminum sides a brownish yellow. There were red plastic flowerpots set in each corner of the porch, filled with artificial flowers. A dusty film coated each plastic petal, so that what had started out as blue and yellow and pink was now a uniform gray.