Summer of the Dead (12 page)

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“Hey, boss.” Rhonda had answered after half a ring.

“Need to see if you recognize a name,” Bell said.

“Hit me.”

Bell could picture the assistant prosecutor leaning back in her creaky chair, clutching the heavy black rotary-dial phone, having hurriedly brushed the Doritos crumbs from the lap of her skirt when she realized it was Bell on the line.

Cells were useless in the courthouse basement, where Rhonda and Hickey Leonard had their office. The thick plaster walls were the guilty parties. A dank, low-ceilinged, markedly unpleasant space, the office spread out at the base of a crumbling stone staircase and was dominated by two rickety oak desks that Rhonda and Hickey had shoved together to make one larger surface. When the ancient furnace kicked on during the winter months with its shuddering, gas-pain groans and constant palsy, objects had been known to vibrate right off the edges of the desk. In the summer, moisture freckled the wooden baseboard. The assistant prosecutors' office had a seedy, beat-up, stripped-down feel to it that Rhonda and Hickey had come to appreciate. It rhymed with their view of their jobs: This was a place where justice was pursued, and justice was a thing not of glamour, but of grit and perseverance.

“Odell Crabtree,” Bell said.

Silence.

“Rhonda? Still there?”

“I'm here, boss.” Rhonda sighed. “Yeah, I know Odell Crabtree.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, I've known the Crabtrees forever, seems like. Leroy Crabtree used to live right next door to my aunt Bridie over in Swanville.”

“And how is Leroy related to Odell?”

“Leroy is Odell's great-uncle. But he's been dead for twenty years.”

“You mean Odell?”

“No. I mean Leroy.”

Bell had been flicking a pencil tip against a sheet of paper on her desk. The pace of the flicking intensified. “Okay. So who the hell is Odell Crabtree?”

“Retired coal miner.” Rhonda was a bit hurt by Bell's impatience, and her voice reflected it. As she went on, though, captivated by the story she was telling, the umbrage wore itself away, replaced by the simple awe that always accompanied Rhonda's contemplation of the infinite varieties of human destiny. “Odell lost his wife about six years ago,” she said. “Margaret Crabtree was a real good woman. Maiden name was Schoolcraft. A lot younger than Odell, but they were a good match. Margaret—oh, my, she was sweet. Heart of gold. Born and raised in Raythune County. Surely didn't deserve to die the way she did—in pain, pain like you wouldn't believe. At least it was quick. Merciful, you ask me.” Rhonda paused, pondering things, then returned to her narrative. “She and Odell had a child. A little girl. Surprised people, really, what with Odell being so much older. And he'd always said he didn't want any children. Made that clear. But—oh, goodness, how Margaret loved her! Lindy must be—let's see, I guess maybe nineteen or twenty by now. Graduated high school a few years back. Little thing, no bigger'n a minute. Kind of a tomboy, but she's got these green eyes. Those eyes—well, one look and you know you're dealing with a smart girl. Quiet. Keeps to herself. Got some pride. The kind of pride that can get you in trouble sometimes. 'Cause you don't ask for help. You try to do everything all by yourself. You know what I mean?”

Bell knew better than to chastise Rhonda for her digressions. Might as well get mad at the river for its tributaries.

“So,” Rhonda quickly continued when Bell didn't answer, “it's just been Odell and Lindy for some time now, living way out there. A while back, the mine shut down—and Odell just seemed to shut down with it. Started acting real peculiar. Well—he'd been acting peculiar before, I have to say, and the disappointment just made it worse. Way I hear it, Lindy takes care of things around the house. Sees that the bills are paid and keeps up with repairs and whatnot.”

“Peculiar how?”

“Oh, I don't know. He has a lot of pain from his years in the mine—back pain, mainly—and he has a funny way of walking. He's a real big man, still strong as an ox, and it's hard to see him brought low like this. Hunching along. Mostly, though, the problem's his mind. He'll be okay for a spell, and then he just goes off. He can be real nice and polite and then—
boom!
—it's like everybody's a stranger who means him harm. Took a swing a few years ago at a little boy in Lymon's Market. Kid was being a brat, making a racket, but still. So Lindy keeps him home. He's afflicted with—well, my grandma Lovejoy used to call it ‘hardening of the arteries.' I don't think that's scientifically accurate, but you get the picture.”

“Alzheimer's?”

“Don't know. Does it matter, though? If they can't cure it, does it matter what they call it?”

Bell let a few seconds go by. “One more thing,” she said. “The guy who was stabbed at Tommy's last weekend. Jed Stark. Know anything about him?”

“Oh, yeah. He was a real shady character, that Jed. My neighbor's cousin April Lloyd used to go out with him—although it was years and years ago, and she came to her senses real quick, first time he raised a hand to her.” Rhonda paused, and Bell could visualize the shudder of repulsion that ran through her assistant's body. “Had a bad, bad temper. Lived over in Steppe County, which is why you never had to deal with him in a courtroom. Count your lucky stars. He was lazy and stupid—and he would've shot his own granny if it put an extra nickel in his fist.”

“Any reason you can think of that Stark might be doing business with a New York City law firm?”

Rhonda made a snickering sound in her nose. “Jed Stark's ambitions generally stayed a whole lot lower than that, but—stranger things have happened. Promise I'll think on it, boss.”

 

Chapter Fourteen

There were trials that bothered Bell more than others. She kept that knowledge to herself. It didn't do any good to show your feelings; it only made you look weak and foolish, not to mention selfish and unimaginative, as if you could measure a thing only against your own experiences, as if you couldn't fathom the bedrock evil of a particular behavior unless you had personally been injured by it, or by something similar. She was a prosecutor, which meant she was sworn to pursue all kinds and degrees of criminal offenses, and to hold the perpetrators accountable. She couldn't play favorites—not just favorites among individuals, which naturally was unacceptable, but among crimes, too. There were degrees of crimes, to be sure, but she was required to pursue every case with the same relentless but thoroughly neutral vigor.

Hell with that
.

Children abused by their parents: Those were the cases that dug their hooks into her, and with every shift of the fortunes of the trial, every wrinkle in the proceedings, every slight twist and new development, those hooks were driven deeper. The reason such cases troubled her was obvious. But the fact that she'd had a violent father herself—a fact that a good portion of the county seemed to know as well—was not relevant to her work. She wouldn't allow her staff to discuss it. She was always alert to the possibility that some enterprising defense attorney might bring up her personal history and demand that she recuse herself from a child abuse case. Question her objectivity. Thus she was scrupulous about not crafting a prosecutorial strategy based on emotion or histrionics. Her visceral disgust and skin-prickling revulsion were carefully concealed beneath a steady, deadpan presentation of evidence. Bit by bit, fact by fact, Bell built her cases, never raising her voice or deviating from a logical progression of linked and irrefutable truths. Yet deep inside, she was demanding:
Kill this sick bastard, kill him right now.
The brutal character of her internal monologues often startled her. She had tried to talk about it once with Nick Fogelsong, asking him if it was normal to harbor such terrible visions of revenge, and at first he said, “Lord, Belfa, don't ask me about ‘normal,' nobody knows the answer to that,” and when she persisted, he said, “I'm a damned sight more worried about the people who
don't
think those thoughts, the ones who don't get it out of their system that way—because they're likely to just bust loose in real life. Got no escape valve.” She wasn't sure she totally bought it, but his theory calmed her down nonetheless.

On Thursday afternoon, Bell stood in the hot box of a courtroom presided over by Judge Ezra Tripp. She was ready to continue the prosecution's case against Lanny Waller. The latter, who had opted for a trial before the judge instead of a jury, was an exceptionally loathsome individual who hailed from a section of Raythune County known as Briney Hollow. Fifty-three years old and unemployed—unless you counted the oxycodone tablets he sold to the jangling, desperate people who met him in parking lots and behind trailers in and around Acker's Gap—Waller was as gray and skinny as a vent stack poking up from an old roof. The skin on his face hung in vertical yellow folds, like the nicotine-stained drapes in a halfway house. His teeth—the three or four still in residence—stuck up like broken-off branches driven into scorched ground, and they were tilted and jagged.

The criminal charges against Waller were even more repugnant than his physical appearance. He had spent the last four years regularly raping his girlfriend's three daughters, now aged five, twelve, and fourteen.

“Hold on,” Bell had said when Deputy Harrison first briefed her on the case, after Waller's arrest. “The youngest is barely five now. You're telling me that Waller raped a twelve-month-old child?” And Harrison, who generally let her eyes do most of her talking, had simply looked at Bell, those eyes reflecting a vivid incomprehension and deep-set sorrow that no amount of law enforcement savvy could mitigate. Nothing much ever rattled Pam Harrison—but this, it seemed, did. Not for long, but it did.

Waller's explanation was the same one Bell heard over and over again, in sexual abuse case after sexual abuse case, year after year. He had offered it during their initial interrogation: “You gotta understand. I didn't do nothin' to them girls, but that's only because I got a strong will. Them girls come on to me. Okay? They did. Don't you be fooled by that innocent shit they try to pull. All that crying and hollering and carrying on. I'm telling you—they swing them hips and shake that thing at me. All the damned time. No normal man could see that and not want to get hisself some, you know what I'm saying? Good thing I got a conscience on me. Never touched them girls.”

Opening statements had concluded the day before, and the morning was taken up with various defense motions and rulings thereof. Bell, ready to leap into her case against Waller after the lunch recess, had just risen behind the square wooden table that served as the prosecution's outpost. The courtroom was sweltering today. The thick black drapes blocked the sun—but could not, to everyone's dismay, block the sun's pernicious effects. Portions of the old courthouse were cooled by portable air-conditioning units, but the racket they made was prohibitive in courtrooms presided over by ancient judges with cut-rate hearing aids. Thus the hot, still air gathered in the room like additional spectators. Court Recorder Rosie Drake, a heavyset woman in a too-tight flowered blouse and tan slacks, paused regularly to lick at the fringe of sweat on her upper lip. It re-formed within minutes.

Looming above Drake was the wide, dark-paneled cabinet behind which sat Judge Tripp. Ezra Tripp was an old man, and summer afternoons were a particular challenge for him; he had a tendency to doze off after his habitually large lunch. Bell realized that she had a maximum of about twenty minutes to present her case before Tripp's head would start to wobble and his eyelids sag, and after that, a trickle of drool would start its familiar journey from the corner of his mouth to his chin and on down into the crinkled city of wrinkles on his neck. Bell had been present on several occasions when the judge's head had fallen irredeemably forward, chin on chest, the only movement thereafter coming from a sporadic shudder inspired by an elongated snore.

Hickey Leonard, the other assistant prosecutor, stood next to Bell. A big man, he looked pink from the heat, and pinched and uncomfortable in a blue suit, valiantly suppressing the urge to squirm and to yank off his tie. What hair he had left—Hickey was in his early sixties—was combed away from his forehead and kept there with the willing assistance of gel. It was hard to tell which entity—sweat or gel—was most responsible for giving his hair its drenched look. Hickey had spent the last ten minutes before the judge's return arranging the yellow legal pads upon which Bell had plotted out the county's case, making sure they were stacked in the proper order.

Sitting at the defense table, a veteran attorney named George Pyle—inevitably nicknamed Gomer—was engaged in a tense whispered conversation with the defendant. Waller listened, then shook his head violently; Pyle whispered something else, then Waller whispered something back, and finally the men nodded simultaneously. Bell had no idea what was going on. She didn't care. Waller was guilty as hell. And she was ready to prove it.

“Mrs. Elkins,” Judge Tripp said, his voice a thin croak. He gestured with a scaly scrap of brown-speckled flesh that looked more like a claw than a hand. “You ready to get us going again?”

“I am, Your Honor.” Bell signaled to Hick, who handed her the legal pad on the top of the pile. She knew what was written there, but glanced at it anyway. No mistakes. “The prosecution would like to call—”

“Hold up, hold up.” Pyle was rising, buttoning his suit coat as he did so. He smiled, but the smile, Bell noticed, stopped well short of his eyes. “Judge,” he said, “we'd like to request a recess.”

“A recess? Lord in heaven,” Tripp declared. “We ain't rightly started yet.”

“Well, sir,” Pyle replied, “there's some extenuating circumstances.”