notion was growing like a wild spike – darker, harsher, meaner. The thorn on the rose bush.
They’d get the bastard who did this. There’d be no mistakes in compiling the prosecution’s case. No technicalities that might cause an acquittal. No slip-ups that might put his sorry ass back out on the street.
Bell looked at the other customers, a clump of bug-eyed, ashen-faced people, many of whom couldn’t stop trembling and twitching and moaning and, in some cases, hyperventilating. The paramedics, she knew, would check them out, one by one, all in good time. Fine.
She wasn’t worried about their health. She was worried about her case.
‘And that,’ Bell went on, raising her voice until it turned official, until it was curtly bureaucratic, ‘goes for everybody else, too.’ She tried to connect with as many pairs of eyes as she could, locking onto them, witness by witness. ‘Please don’t talk to each other until you’ve been cleared to do so by law enforcement authorities.’
The old woman, the one who’d been repeatedly summoning Jesus, abruptly stopped her chant. With a knobby blue-veined fist, she pulled together the sagging halves of her faded gray sweater. She gave Bell a belligerent sideways glare, pale blue eyes narrowed, nose twitching, bottom lip jutting out like a pink windowsill. She didn’t hail from around here. She’d stopped in for a cup of coffee and a biscuit with redeye gravy – and now this.
‘Just who the hell are you,’ the old woman snarled, ‘to be tellin’ us what to do?’
Before Bell could answer, Carla Elkins turned to the old woman.
‘Hey – listen up,’ Carla said. Her soft muffled voice was gone, and the voice that replaced it was the snippy, dismissive one that usually irritated Bell but right now made her terribly proud. ‘For your information,’ Carla went on, ‘she happens to be Belfa Elkins, Raythune County prosecuting attorney. So if you know what’s good for you, lady, you’d better do exactly what she tells you to.’
3
‘Saw the crawl.’
Dorothy Burdette – ‘Dot’ only to her friends, and only then when she gave explicit permission – normally was cool and reserved and unflappable. Now, though, she was talking fast. Too fast. And repeating herself: ‘Saw the crawl.’
She stood directly in Bell’s way, blocking her progress through the narrow courthouse corridor. Running in a high dusty stripe across the gray stucco walls on either side of that corridor were wood-framed portraits of previous mayors, sheriffs, judges, and prosecutors – all male, all white, several sporting thick muttonchop sideburns and caterpillar eyebrows – who looked down upon the living with peeved judgmental expressions, as if to say: Whatever the hell’s going on down there – well, that kind of nonsense would never have happened on our watch.
The corridor was made even narrower by a steady churn of people heading in both directions. Normally the courthouse was closed to the public on Saturdays. In the wake of the shooting, though, Sheriff Fogelsong had opened it up, and people had poured right on in.
Bell, hurrying along with her head down, massively preoccupied, had nearly barreled straight into Dot Burdette.
‘Dot,’ Bell said. ‘For heaven’s sake.’
Dot smelled like the cigarette she’d reluctantly mashed under her high heel on the way in. She was thirty-eight years old and had been smoking for twenty-five of them, and only the NO SMOKING sign on the big front door of the courthouse could account for the fact that she didn’t have a Salem menthol on her lip right now.
Dot frowned, to show she understood the gravity of the situation, to demonstrate that naturally she was distraught, but it was also clear that, like everybody else in town, she was titillated by the morning’s crisis.
Spotting Bell’s SUV back in its regular slot in front of the courthouse, she’d come straight over from Mountaineer Community Bank two doors down, a beige cotton raincoat flung over the shoulders of her suit, quivering like a cocker spaniel who’d just heard the jingle of the leash.
‘Saw the crawl,’ Dot repeated. This time, she leaned forward and enunciated each word, same as she’d do for a regrettably dim-witted child.
Bell was confused. Was this a strange new language, some kind of hasty shorthand communication that had replaced normal discourse during the two hours she’d been away, taking Carla home and getting her settled? Or had the whole county gone insane, as might very well be the case, given the morning they’d endured?
‘Saw the crawl,’ Dot snapped for the fourth time, only now she added, ‘on CNN.’