Held back, the engine lapsed into a frantic, incensed grinding that made Bell think of popping neck muscles and snapping hamstrings, as the SUV tangled with one tight curve after another.
She tried to keep her mind exclusively on the road, but it was difficult. Bell was thinking about parents and kids, about how far a mother would go to protect her child. She remembered the feeling she’d had the day before, when she had barreled her way into the Salty Dawg, knowing only that there had been a shooting and that Carla was in the vicinity. She would’ve done anything to protect her child.
Same as any mother.
So what would Lori Sheets do? How far would she go? Would she lie about Albie’s mental capacities? About his understanding of what happens when you loop a hose around a small boy’s neck and tighten it? Would she try to protect him however she could? And if Albie had acted innocently, how could his actions be considered evil?
Most people thought a prosecutor’s main workplace was the courtroom. But the bulk of Bell’s labor occurred elsewhere. The meat of it had nothing to do with a judge or jury. It happened when she made decisions – decisions about whom to indict, about what to charge them with, about which crimes she should focus on and how to deploy the resources of her office – just as she was having to make in the Albie Sheets case. Those decisions always came outside the courtroom, before a trial began. Bell liked to compare it to sports. Everybody enjoyed watching the game, but for the athlete, the real moment of truth came on the practice field or in the weight room, in the long afternoons of repetition, of fatigue. By the time the game came around, the outcome was all but assured. The game was only the coda. The shadow of the main event. By the time Bell walked into a courtroom, most of the real drama was long over.
She had visited Albie Sheets in jail shortly after his arrest. He was clearly terrified. Not of her, not of the justice system, not of the dire punishment that might await him – but of the bug he’d seen that morning in the corner of his cell.
‘Big bug,’ Albie had said to her.
With a thick, wobbling finger, he pointed into the corner. The bug was long gone, but Albie wanted her to know about it. ‘Big, big bug. Bad.’ A tear rolled down one of his round cheeks. It stalled in the rolls of fat that gathered in poofed-out rings around his neck like a flesh-colored muff.
When he gestured toward the corner, his whole body shook, and greasy black ringlets moved across the massive shelf of his shoulders.
The cell was a small gray box. There was a bunk, a sink and a toilet, and a tiny barred slit of a window high up on one wall that let in a tantalizing lozenge of light. Because the individual cells were arranged in a straight line down a long corridor, you couldn’t see the other cells, but you could hear the prisoners who occupied them, courtesy of the coughs and the sneezes, and sometimes the singing and the cursing or the simple rhythmic muttering of the men held here. A dense, compacted smell of pure humanness: sweat, feces, and urine, sometimes cut with the astringent odor of an ammonia-based cleaning fluid with which the cells were rinsed out every other day.
Bell had tried to distract Albie, to talk about other things, but the bug obsessed him. He licked his lips and muttered, ‘Bug, bug.’ His sluglike tongue looked unhealthy to Bell, speckled and scaly, too pale. Albie was a big man – the XXL orange jumpsuit issued to prisoners by the Raythune County Sheriff’s Department was too small, and the inner seam along his left thigh had already split, allowing a wad of white flesh to bulge out of the slit like the stuffing from a ripped mattress – and he rarely stood up straight. He hunched. When he walked around the cell, he obsessively dragged one foot behind him. Prisoners in nearby cells had complained about the scraping sound. All night long, they griped, it goes on. He drags that damned foot behind him. Racket’s killing us.
Bell had checked with the deputy. A doctor had been summoned to examine Albie’s foot; there was nothing physically wrong with the limb. He just wanted to drag it.
Maybe, Bell had speculated, the