Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,54

face it alone. Connie’s husband Luke Dollar said so, too. She’d have done that. That was pure Connie, he said.

Holding hands, looking their killer straight in the eye through the whispery scrim of snow, they waited for the shotgun blasts that had not been long in coming—or so their loved ones hoped, knowing the agony of anticipating the grimly inevitable.

Chapter Eight

She needed to talk to Nick.

Two days had passed since the night when Connie Dollar and Marcy Coates were found dead at the base of the tree. Heavy snowfall had obscured any usable clues. A search of the house and repeated sweeps of the area had turned up nothing.

The conviction had gripped Bell suddenly: I have to talk to Nick Fogelsong. So even though she had just settled herself at her desk on Friday morning, she sprang up again, pulling on her coat, ignoring Lee Ann’s perplexed and even slightly alarmed look as she left.

She parked in front of the long, low, cedar-shingled house and walked around the north side, heading for the backyard. The walks bore no evidence of the week’s repeated bouts of snow; they were cleaned down to the quick. Nick was a demon with a shovel.

She was not in the least concerned when she heard the pop! of a gunshot as she rounded the back corner. She had expected it. It was the quality of the sound, not its presence, that intrigued her. Cold air changed everything. Sound waves traveled faster in warmer air than in cooler; the cold muddied the sounds, knocking the sharpness out of them. She heard another pop! and then two more in succession: pop-pop!

The regularity of the shots—the way they were spaced out, the orderly rhythm of them—meant target practice, not random gunfire. Nick was trying to get his marksmanship skills back. A year ago he’d had an injury, a serious one, and the nerve damage in his right arm was a hill he just might not be able to climb. Ever. But no one said that to his face.

“Hey,” Bell called out. She knew better than to sneak up on a man with a gun. You made your presence known, loud and clear and often. If she’d had a bugle, she would have tooted it.

He lowered his weapon. He turned around. He grunted a greeting.

Nick was wearing a gray plaid Woolrich coat and boots, a workingman’s clothes, but the dress pants were the giveaway. He had a desk job now, an executive position. Until recently, he had been sheriff of Raythune County. He had held that position for many years, and for the last portion of them, he had been Bell’s confidante and partner in keeping peace in the region—but not anymore. He had gone another way. She had finally forgiven him, but it was a long time coming.

“Heard about those poor old ladies out on Hanging Rock Road,” he said. “Any leads?”

“No.” She crossed her arms, jamming her hands up into her armpits. “It’s damned cold out here, Nick. Can we go inside to talk?”

He nodded. “One more?”

“Sure.”

He turned back to the cardboard target he had suspended from a pair of thin black cables that traversed the back of his property. On the target was a sketch of the top half of a man’s body; the man was crouching, a revolver in his hand. Tiny circles with numbers on them radiated out from the man’s center of gravity, the numbers getting smaller as the size of the circles increased. Nick bent his knees, brought both hands up on the Glock, held his arms out in front of his body—not rigid, but relaxed and natural—and aimed and fired. The pop! ricocheted off the white-hooded mountains in the distance, but in the frigid air, it never achieved the wincing sharpness of a classic echo.

The target jumped and shuddered. He holstered his pistol and pulled at the parallel cables, hand over hand, until the target came close enough for him to snatch it off the line. He checked it out. He had hit it very close to the center.

“Not bad,” Bell said. With Nick Fogelsong, you had to keep the compliments to a minimum. Anything that reeked of gratuitous praise would send him into a two-day brood. She had learned that the hard way.

He shrugged. It was good. He knew it was good. But he also knew that it did not really mean anything. Not yet. He had a long, long way to go before he was anywhere close to where he