Last Ragged Breath (22 page)

But she knew the other side, too, of all that energy and bluster. The bullying side. She knew that Hackel had pressured Royce Dillard to give up his land after Dillard had changed his mind about selling. He'd cajoled and connived in order to create a shiny new resort for high rollers that would replace a rugged and unique natural landscape.

Was she being unfair to Hackel and his job? Maybe. Maybe she was, at that. Because a resort was surely a better fate for the land—any land—than a coal mine, either the underground kind or the surface-mining kind that whacked off the tops of the mountains with the monotonous efficiency of a bread-slicer. Anyway. In the end, Hackel's morals didn't matter. His personal failings were irrelevant. Bell would work as hard as she could to convict his killer—whom the county believed to be, and would prove accordingly, Royce Dillard. That was her job. And she didn't have to approve of the victim in order to do it.

She ran a finger down the list of items the deputies had found in his room:

A plastic vial of Tic Tacs (Cherry Passion flavor). Axe body spray (Dark Temptation scent). Hair gel. A roll of Tums, half gone. A sleeve of bright green Gas-X pills. A prescription bottle of Zoloft. Tiny white crumbles found on the bathroom vanity; sent to the state crime lab for testing, the substance was determined to be cocaine. Two (2) cuff links, embossed with the interlocking initials
EJH
. Four (4) packages of Trojan condoms. An unopened pack of Marlboros. Nail clippers. A travel-size package of Q-tips. Car keys. Business cards. One Samsung Galaxy cell. One MacBook Air, the Internet search history of which Hickey Leonard—he was the courthouse's resident geek—had dug out and enumerated, finding a dreary series of porn sites. On the desktop were icons that led to files containing artists' renditions of how Mountain Magic would look once it was up and running, from the sprawling, glass-walled hotel to the eighteen-hole golf course, all tucked under the protective gray embrace of a mountain range. His e-mail was mostly business-related. Two e-mails in his Draft file were addressed to his wife, with instructions to share them with his children. They contained links to allegedly funny YouTube videos showing frantic cats scrabbling out of bathtubs, scaling drapes, and being hypnotized by ceiling fans. The e-mails were signed,
Thot you guys would get a kick out of these!! Love, Dad.

The last item was a small triangle of paper, a corner torn from a larger sheet, found on Hackel's bedside table. Two letters scribbled on it:
VG.
And next to them, a dollar sign and two question marks. Bell had no idea what it meant.

Finished with the list, she moved on to the photos. The first was an enlargement of the Virginia driver's license of Edward Jerome Hackel. His plump face looked happy, satisfied. Big smile. His dark hair was parted on the left; a small curl dipped down on his forehead. It was the face of man who was trying to radiate certainty and self-importance, a man who knew—who thought he knew—what his destiny was, and strode toward it with a jaunty confidence.

Two more photos were screen grabs from the surveillance cameras at the Cigarettes 4 Less store on the interstate, a store that would have been on Hackel's way home from Acker's Gap. They were time-stamped 4:47 and 4:51
P.M.
on the Thursday that had been determined to be the day of Hackel's death. He wore a brown tweed overcoat. One of the photos came from the inside of the store: Hackel was handing the cashier his credit card—the store's records indicated it was a corporate AmEx registered to Mountain Magic—for what appeared to be two hard packs of Marlboros. The other photo came from the parking lot, and showed Hackel opening the door of his BMW. The purchase recorded on the AmEx was the clue that sent Deputy Oakes to Cigarettes 4 Less to check for the surveillance footage. If Hackel had paid cash, they might never have known about this stop. It told them that at 4:51
P.M.,
Edward Hackel was still alive, and most likely on his way back to his motel room.

The next collection of photos came from the crime scene. Had Bell been unprepared—had this been her first look at what a heavy sharp object, wielded with strength and purpose, could do to the back of a human neck—she might have been sick. But this was not the worst she had seen. She wondered, briefly, what would happen on the day when she reached that point—when she
did
look at something that was the very, very worst she'd ever seen, ever would see. Would she know it? Would she sense it automatically?

The first photos were taken from a few feet away. The object was facedown in Old Man's Creek, snagged amidst the cattails and the scraggly vegetation that grew at the edges of a body of water. If you didn't know what you were looking at, you might be puzzled; Hackel's substantial body looked like a lump of garbage across which someone had tossed an old brown blanket. The next several were taken from a closer vantage point, and included puffy appendages that had to be hands. The most gruesome photo was still to come. It was a close-up of a head unattached to the body.

From the front, the features were lost in a wet wreck of ripped flesh and abject bloating. From the back, the lethal wound gaped in a gruesome series of triangular wedges; the sharp edge had struck him repeatedly at the base of the skull, hacking through skin and bone with an intense driving force. The matted blood adhered in a sticky-looking paste like an old-fashioned poultice. Turkey vultures had snacked on the last trailing tabs of skin that had once connected his head to his body.

Bell pictured the turkey vultures she had grown accustomed to seeing each spring, as they returned to their roosts in those broad-winged spirals of flight, scouting for carrion and then diving earthward. Some people were disgusted by them, because of their diet of rotting flesh. But turkey vultures ate what was already dead. They didn't kill.

With humans, it was a different story.

 

Chapter Twenty-two

The phone didn't ring anymore. That was an exaggeration, but only slightly. Nick Fogelsong's thoughts were of the dark, bitter, and self-pitying kind on this Sunday night at the Highway Haven, and exaggerating his predicament made him feel worse, which perversely made him feel better. That was the circular paradox of self-pity: the more you despised yourself for indulging in it, the better you felt, because you knew you deserved being despised. Which in turn made you feel worse. Which in turn made you feel better.

Three and a half weeks had passed since the body identified as that of Edward Hackel had been found in Old Man's Creek. Royce Dillard had been arrested and charged with the murder. The trial was set to begin the next day.

Fogelsong sat at the desk in his office at the Highway Haven. It was almost midnight, well past the time when he should have packed up his briefcase and shrugged on his overcoat and gone home. Still, he sat there. Chair scooted back, feet propped on the desk, hands linked behind his head, he sat.

And stared at the phone, which didn't ring.

He felt like a teenage girl, waiting for someone to call and invite her to the prom. He felt shunned and vulnerable and needy. He felt, that is, like a damned fool. But at the moment, he couldn't rouse himself to do much more than sit there and stew. The cup of coffee on his desk blotter was cold. So were his thoughts.

He knew what was going on at the courthouse, because he used to be part of the process. Right in the center of it, matter of fact. He knew that Bell and her staff, assisted by Sheriff Harrison and her deputies, had been assembling evidence for the trial. Constructing the narrative whereby they would prove that Dillard had willfully and with premeditation killed Hackel. On the other side, meanwhile, Serena Crumpler—Fogelsong had approved of the news that Serena was representing Dillard—was gathering her own facts and witnesses to prove that the man was innocent. Or at least to raise enough doubt in jurors' minds so that a conviction for first-degree murder was unlikely.

He wanted to help. But Bell didn't want his help. She'd made that abundantly clear.

She hadn't even told him about the arrest when it happened, a fact that stuck painfully in his thoughts like an undigested lump of dinner. He'd had to get the information from—even thinking the man's name made Nick's blood pressure rise so fast that he'd swear he could feel it elevating inch by inch, putting dangerous pressure on those arterial walls—Vince Dobbs.

Fast-talking, empty-headed Vince Dobbs.

So you didn't hear?

Hear what?

They charged him.

You mean Royce Dillard?

Damn straight. First-degree murder. For killing that Hackel fella. And leaving his body down by Old Man's Creek. You didn't know about that?

Sure I did.

Didn't sound like it. I think I surprised you.

Think whatever you like.

Don't get sore at me, Nick. Ain't done nothing to you.

Not sore.

Sounds like you are.

Jesus, Vince, just move along, okay? Other folks're waiting in line to pay for their gas. This is a place of business.

At that point, Fogelsong had put his hand on the sleeve of Vince's denim jacket and tugged him out of the way. There were six people behind Vince, restless, impatient, starting to shuffle their feet and mutter things under their breath. Vince was just winding up his transaction that afternoon—he'd paid for his gas at the pump, but came inside to buy a Milky Way bar for himself and a package of sunflower seeds for his mother, Esther Dobbs—when he spotted Nick Fogelsong as the latter emerged from the hall that led to the office in the back.

That's when Vince called to him. Nick had waved in a halfhearted way and moved over in Vince's direction, promptly regretting it when the man delivered his information. Information that was not totally startling—Dillard, after all, had been held for questioning from the start, and all the smart money was on his being charged—but it still blindsided Nick, because there was a thing called rumor and there was something else called confirmed fact, and between those two, lay an entire world.

I should've known
.
I should've been a part of it.

He had gone into town that very Monday morning, two days after the body was found, and tried to talk to Belfa. Not in the courthouse, for God's sake. He knew better. He went to JP's, knowing—well, hoping—she would come in. And when she did, he tried to make his position clear:
I'm not sheriff anymore, true. But I've got a contribution to make.

In response, she might as well have just flung hot coffee in his face. She'd rejected his help, leaving no doubt that that's just what she was doing.

And now that he knew Dillard was going to trial, Nick had waited for the past two and a half weeks for her to call him. Ask him what he thought about the case. What would he have said? Well, frankly, he thought they'd been a little hasty; he understood the pressure to make an arrest, he knew that county residents were richly consoled by what they saw as swift and decisive law enforcement action, and he further knew that the evidence was textbook—motive, means, opportunity, plus the absence of other credible suspects. And yet.

The “and yet” part was a matter of feeling, not facts. He could not have discussed it with anyone except Bell.

But she didn't call.

Sheriff Harrison, by contrast, had called him that very afternoon; she had needed his opinion on a few things. She never hesitated to reach out. She was grateful to him for giving her a chance as a deputy, eight years ago. Told him so. And he told her—not as a quid pro quo, but because it was the God's honest truth—that she was doing a good job as sheriff. He was damned proud of her. Privately he thought she was a little impulsive sometimes, a little too quick to act—this case proved it—but that was her style. She was entitled to run things as she saw fit.

And then, while he had her on the line, he'd asked her about an idea he had—
Feel free to say no, Pam, it's no problem
—and she had listened and then said,
Maybe. Let me think on it, Nick.

Bell, though, had not called.

A lot of his days and nights had gone just like this one: He sat at his desk and he waited for the phone to ring. Oh, he was busy enough, all right; a new group of employees had just been hired, and he had to go over the criminal background checks and the credit checks. Other people did the actual labor; he was the boss. He went over their work and made sure it was all done properly. Made sure, for instance, that the company didn't hire a pedophile and put him in charge of the candy aisle. Moreover, Nick had undertaken a top-to-bottom review of security procedures at all the stations, preparatory to a major upgrade. It was important work. Honest work. Work that made a difference. Walter Albright had let things slip badly in his last year on the job, especially at this location. Sometimes Nick wondered if the man had been going senile. Things had deteriorated that much. It took all of his attention just to get the security protocols back up to an acceptable level.

So why was he so miserable?

His cell went off. It was the company cell, not his personal one, so Nick had no expectations when he answered it. He knew it wouldn't be Belfa.

“Hey, Mr. Fogelsong.” It was Lee Hume, the Sunday night cashier. “Got a situation out here.”

Nick grunted and hung up. He yanked his feet off the desk and bolted forward, springing out of the chair as if it were an ejector seat. Sixty seconds later he was out in the store and moving toward the front counter. It was not an easy journey, bearing a certain resemblance to Moses and his Red Sea moment. Sunday nights at the Highway Haven were always monstrously crowded, as truck drivers made their final pushes to get to where they needed to be with their loads by Monday morning, augmenting their petroleum purchases with Mountain Dew, coffee, 5-hour Energy bottles, smokeless tobacco—whatever would keep them awake at the wheel. Other customers threaded through the aisles, too, intent on one last weekend fling before the commencement of the dreary workweek, toting their six-packs, one in each hand.