Last Ragged Breath (14 page)

“Fine,” she said.

“Don't know him personally, but heard plenty. Most of it good.”

“Imagine so.”

 

Chapter Fourteen

Speak of the devil,
Bell thought.

She had dropped into JP's for a quick cup of coffee, the visit to Dillard's cell still weighing heavily on her mind. She had interviews for other cases scheduled throughout the day; this was likely her only chance for a break until late this afternoon, when she had yet another errand to run.

And there he was.

Nick Fogelsong, big as life. Suit jacket open, elbows spread, making himself comfortable in a booth that the two of them had occupied numberless times during his days as sheriff, when they'd sit across from each other, blanketing their internal organs with the blackest, harshest, foulest, most detestable—and thereby delectable—coffee that the human digestive system could handle, all the while comparing notes on the most difficult cases they were facing. JP's was less than two years old; it had replaced Ike's, a diner with a long and motley history that had ended abruptly and permanently.

“Hey,” Nick said. He raised his hand. A semi-wave. The cuff link on his dress shirt caught the light.

Bell held back a wince. Nick and cuff links: Nope. Didn't work for her. Didn't work at all.

She paused, and then she moved in that direction, trying to hide the fact that she was rattled. And not on account of the cuff link. She'd just about broken herself of the habit of looking for Nick on workdays, in the courthouse corridors or on the streets of Acker's Gap or here in the diner. For a crazy second, time itself went a little sideways; she half wondered if she was in JP's or back in Ike's, years ago, having just ordered a slice of apple pie from Georgette Akers, causing Georgette to whip out the stubby yellow pencil from behind her right ear so that she could write down the order in her little notebook, even though she didn't need to, of course—Bell always went for apple—and as Georgette reached for the pencil, Bell's eyes followed her fingers and she noticed the sparkly barrettes that propped up Georgette's bright blond hair in a swollen bouffant …

No. Couldn't be. Georgette was dead. Dead for more than two years now.

“Belfa? You okay?”

She sat down on the other side of the booth.

“Fine.”

“Look like you've seen a ghost.”

Fogelsong was more of a mind-reader than he'd ever know. Bell didn't tell him how close he'd come to being right.

“Just overwhelmed with work,” she said.

“It's not even nine o'clock yet.”

She shrugged. “Lots of active cases.”

“Same as it ever was, then.”

Two mugs of coffee appeared before them, steam rising from the tops, a gauzy promise of the bitter heat within. Bell and Fogelsong simultaneously looked up at Jackie LeFevre, the diner's owner, who had sidled over with the mugs.

“Took a chance on what you'd order,” Jackie said, answering the surprise in their eyes. She wasn't known for spontaneous gestures. “Never see you anymore, Nick. Guess they keep you pretty busy up at the Highway Haven.”

“They do. But nothing says I can't drop by here more often, Jackie. Count on it.”

“I will.” It wouldn't happen, and they both knew that, but she was too polite to say so. She turned to Bell. “Anything to go with that? Eggs? Toast, maybe?”

“No, thanks. Just the coffee for now. I'm going to try to make it in for lunch, though.”

Also unlikely, but Jackie nodded, anyway. She was a tall, handsome woman with long straight black hair, an angular face, and dark unreadable eyes. People in Acker's Gap still weren't quite sure about Jackie; her unwillingness to generate and react to banter was a definite handicap. Her late mother, Joyce LeFevre, had owned the diner that previously resided on this spot, and that gave Jackie an automatic boost—family was important around here—but she refused to build on that natural advantage. She was too quiet. A few months ago her ex-husband had come looking for her and caused a bit of trouble one night. People didn't mind the trouble—that could happen to anyone—but they did mind the fact that Jackie never talked about it afterward, never turned it into a story to share.

“Nice as it is to see you,” Bell said to Fogelsong, once Jackie had moved on to another booth, “I'm curious. What brings you to town?”

Nick took his time with his coffee. He blew on it, sipped it, blew some more.

“Heard about Royce Dillard,” he said. “You've been questioning him about the Hackel murder.”

Bell didn't reply.

“I knew Hackel,” Nick continued, once he realized that she had no comment. “Not real well, but we'd talked a good number of times. He'd come by the Haven quite a lot. Wanted to brag about the resort and how wonderful it was all going to be. So I thought that maybe—well—”

“What?” Bell said. “What did you think?”

“That I could help.” He was stung by her tone, rocked back on his heels a bit, and surprised to find himself there. “Provide some background. Context. You know.”

“No, I
don't
know. I'll tell you what I do know. I know that you're not sheriff anymore. So I can't discuss an ongoing investigation with you, Nick. Surely you're aware of that.” She took a drink of her coffee. It was savagely hot, but she didn't care. She swallowed the liquid and then moved the white mug to one side, so that she could lean forward and give him a hard look. “Don't do this, okay? Just don't.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend that we can get back to how things were. Because we can't. It's unethical, for one thing—like I said, I can't discuss a current case with a civilian. And for another, I don't want to.” The diner was busy enough now that her words most likely couldn't be heard outside the booth. The sounds of greetings and laughter and chair-scrapes and coughing fits and the continuous fizzy plash of the deep-fat fryer—it always sounded to Bell like applause—curled around them, ensuring privacy. “You've moved on, Nick. You made your decision and you moved on. Well, so have I.”

For a minute he didn't say anything. She sensed his yearning, the sharpness of his desire. He wanted to be a part of things again, to feel he was contributing. This was his hometown, whether or not he was sheriff of it. When she'd first heard of his decision not to run again—finding out in a phone call from Sammy Burdette still rankled—she had wondered how long it would be before he realized his mistake. Before he tried to get involved. Tried to insinuate himself in the middle of an investigation.

Well, here it was. The first major case since he'd unpinned the badge from his chest and taken off his hat and walked off into the damned sunset. Here it was.

No way,
Bell thought. She wouldn't say the words out loud, but she willed him to read her mind once again. He was so annoyingly good at it.
I've grieved for you, Nick Fogelsong, I miss you like hell every single time I walk into the courthouse—but no. No, you're not a part of my world anymore. You're an outsider now.

He looked away from her. When he looked back, he was smiling, but she recognized the kind of smile it was: An insincere one. An abstract, let's-keep-things-light-and-friendly smile. The one she'd seen him use any number of times as sheriff, when the situation was dangerous and he wanted to keep the tension from ratcheting up. A professional peacemaker's smile.

“So you got yourself a dog,” he said.

He was so much like her: changing the subject to keep emotions off to one side, out of the picture.

“No secrets around here,” she muttered.

“It's your own fault.” Now his smile seemed real, not contrived. “You bought dog food yesterday at Lymon's. Opal Lymon asked you about it at the checkout, and you told her. Well, Mary Sue does her grocery shopping on Sundays, too, and so by the time she came in, Opal was ready with the news.”

“Guess I ought to start shopping out of town.”

“Oh, come on. It's not such a bad thing, is it? People knowing your business? Used to bother me all the danged time when I was growing up here, but now I choose to think of it as folks taking an interest. Better than being forgotten, right?”

“Not sure about that.”

“It'll come soon enough. Just take a stroll through any graveyard. You'll get a quick sense of what it's like to be forgotten.”

She dragged the mug back until it sat right in front of her again, feeling the heat of its ceramic side when she cupped her hands around it.
God, how I've missed this man,
she thought. She couldn't let on, but the memory had her in its grip, just as surely as she had the mug in hers: the daily back-and-forth with Nick Fogelsong, the talks about all manner of things, from coffee to law enforcement to philosophy. The give-and-take of news and opinion. The mood-lightening wisecracks.

She felt an anguished, impossible wish—it came over her suddenly, as if someone had dimmed the overhead lights for a second or so—that things had never changed, that the world had stopped its infernal turning and paused right where it was, that the clocks had all gone cold at exactly the same moment, that Nick Fogelsong was still sheriff, that this was still Ike's Diner, that Clay Meckling was meeting her for dinner tonight, that Carla's room back at the house on Shelton Avenue was still Carla's room and not an empty shell with only the diminishing echoes of the complicated, infuriating, beautiful adolescent life that once had been lived there.

She wanted all of those things. She had none of them. Instead, she had a day packed with obligations.

“Could be,” she said. She plucked a napkin from the dispenser at the end of the table. Folded it over once, twice, and then placed the square under her coffee mug, in case any liquid sloshed over the rim. “That it? I've got to head out soon.”

“So who's taking care of Royce's dog while you're at work?”

“Ben Fawcett. Vickie Fawcett's boy.”

Fogelsong nodded. The Fawcetts lived two doors down from her.

“Ben just turned nine,” Bell added. “Good reliable kid. Comes home from school for lunch every day. He'll give her a walk and make sure she's okay.”

Fogelsong lifted and tipped his mug, taking a brief drink. Bell knew he wasn't thinking about the dog—or the coffee, either, come to that.

He finished his swallow.

“Well,” he said, “if you need my help with anything, you know where to find me.”

She did. And what she wanted to say to him was this:
I'm confused as hell about the case. Even with all the open-and-shut forensic evidence, something's not quite right. I wish I could talk it over with you, hear what you think, then you'd hear what I think, and we'd toss it around for hours, going back and forth with our theories. What made Royce Dillard suddenly lose his temper? What could Hackel possibly have said to him to make him grab that shovel? Jesus, Nick, I wish like hell that things were like they used to be between us.

But what she said out loud was this: “Yeah.”

 

Chapter Fifteen

The bar next to the Holiday Inn Express up on the interstate was called the Comebacker. The name was both an inducement for return visits and a tribute to the owner's son, Ricky Garrison, who had pitched a few innings in the major leagues a decade ago—and survived a wicked comebacker hit by Derek Jeter in the top of the fifth, leaving the game flat on his back with a skull fracture and a severe concussion—after which he settled down to life in Raythune County with his wife and five children, tending bar for his father. When Ricky was in the hospital, Jeter had sent him a short handwritten note, and Ricky had paid to have it laminated and framed:
Hope you feel better soon. And next time, remember to duck!
Now the note was displayed on the wall behind Harold Garrison's bar, surrounded by pictures of Ricky in his red-and-white uniform during his windup, leg cocked, arms high over his head, body kinked as if his joints were hinged to swing in either direction.

Bell saw Diana Hackel right away. The room was dim, but it was almost empty—standard for late afternoon, before the evening crowd arrived—and a human face stood out, even in the murk. She was sitting by herself at one of the small round tables, leaning forward, elbows bracketing a glass of red wine, fingers of both hands linked to make a small flat hammock on which she rested her chin.

Two days had passed since her husband's mutilated body had been found at the edge of a creek. Bell, approaching the table, sensed that this woman was still stunned, still lost in the daze generated the moment she heard the news.

“Mrs. Hackel.”

The face rose slowly, without interest.

“May I sit down?” Bell asked.

Diana waved her hand toward the chair across from her, a halfhearted,
Whatever
gesture. The drinks she'd already consumed were apparent in the looseness of her movements. Diana hadn't sounded surprised or apprehensive when Bell had called that morning to request a meeting, but neither was she particularly welcoming.

“My sister's with the kids,” Diana said. She blurted it out, as if Bell had demanded an explanation. “Back in Falls Church. I was going to have her bring them here, but—but it didn't seem right. They need to be home.”

“How are they doing?”

“How do you think they're doing? Eddie had a lot of faults, Mrs. Elkins, but he was a good dad. A really good dad. My boy, Shawn—he's twelve—hasn't said a word since we told him what happened. And Lilly won't eat. Not a bite. So why am I still here, right?” Her eyes sought out the wineglass. “Why don't I go home to be with my kids, right? They need me. Obviously. So why am I here? Well, I'll tell you. Because I want to make sure that Eddie's killer pays for what he did.” She shook her head. “We've had to delay the funeral. Until you people finish your work.”