A Killing in the Hills - By Julia Keller Page 0,49
was matter-of-fact. ‘Irish Spring, I think, although it might’ve been Dove. Or Ivory. Not that they have the fancy stuff in the county jail – can you imagine Nick Fogelsong’s face, if he thought we were giving inmates fancy name-brand soap at county expense?’
Hick chuckled. When Bell didn’t join him, he cleared his throat and went back to his report. ‘The soap came from Albie’s family. They’d brought him some stuff yesterday afternoon. Toiletries ’n’ such. In a little basket. With a ribbon on it. Pink. The ribbon was pink. Way I hear it, Albie’d chewed and swallowed a bar and a half before the guards put a stop to his little between-meal snack.’
Bell shifted the phone to her other ear. By this time, she had seated herself on the bottom step of her staircase, elbows on kneecaps, leaning her head against the mahogany baluster. The pain in her shoulder had faded to a mild ache.
This job. Never a dull moment.
‘Why’d he eat soap?’
‘Nobody knows. Deputies found him sick as a dog in his cell. Throwing up, grabbing his gut, screaming. Judge Pelley postponed the start of the trial a couple of days.’
‘Is Albie Sheets really ill?’
Overhead, Bell could hear the floorboards of the old house flex and moan. Carla must be moving around her bedroom. Was she packing? Already? No. Couldn’t be. Maybe she’s just blowing off steam. Pacing. Bell did that herself sometimes; she kept moving, kept in action, so that her fears and frustrations had to work to catch up with her.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Hick said. ‘Just got a bellyache to beat the band.’
‘I was out at the Sheets place myself this morning.’ Bell considered telling Hick about the episode up on the mountain, about the bastard who’d tried to run her off the road, but then changed her mind. She didn’t want her staff distracted. There were too many things she needed them to do. She didn’t want them wasting their time, fighting her battles. She was used to fighting her battles alone.
The sounds over Bell’s head, the creaks and squeaks, had stopped. Carla was probably stretched out on her bed, clutching her favorite stuffed animal – a purple plush giraffe she’d had since she was a toddler, and which she’d named, for obscure reasons, Mr Gompers – and, Bell surmised, thinking about D.C. and all the cool things she could do there with her dad and with Glenna Saint-Pain-in-the-Ass.
‘Well,’ Hick said, ‘Judge Pelley just wants to be sure, I guess, that Albie’s not going to keel over and die during opening arguments. He wants to hold things up until the end of the week. He told the deputies on jail duty to keep a close eye on our boy Albie – who, after this stunt, by the way, must have the cleanest gol-durned innards of any prisoner in the history of the Raythune County Jail.’
Bell gave a small grunt. By all rights, Hickey Leonard should’ve outgrown his propensity to make bad jokes about their cases, but if it hadn’t happened by now – Hick was fifty-nine – it wasn’t going to happen at all, Bell surmised.
Hick Leonard had maintained a private law practice in Acker’s Gap for more than three decades before deciding to run for prosecutor in the wake of the Bobby Lee Mercer scandal. Oddly, though, losing to Bell Elkins on Election Day had seemed like a relief to him. His motivation for seeking office had been a simple one, he said: Hick wanted, at long last, to be on what he called ‘the side of the good guys’ – the state of West Virginia and the county of Raythune – instead of the side of the bad guys, by which he meant the creeps, bums, thieves, liars, con artists, hypocrites, and low-life punks whose worthless asses he’d kept out of jail for lo these many years. But Hick wasn’t cut out to be the boss, to run a complicated public office. Deep in his heart, he appeared to know that. The voters apparently knew it, too.
The day after her victory, Bell had called Hick and asked him to join her staff. It wasn’t an abstract goodwill gesture. She needed him. He might be a third-rate comedian, but he was a first-rate attorney. And he knew the recent history of Acker’s Gap – the greasy river of quid pro quo that oozed through any small town, the labyrinthine network of favors offered and accepted and parlayed into other currencies – better than