A Killing in the Hills (36 page)

Bell looked around as they walked through the living room. A picture of Tyler hung on the wall next to the arched doorway leading into the kitchen. He was wearing a bow tie and a navy blazer and a red pinstriped shirt. His reddish hair, shiny-wet with gel, was combed straight back from his forehead. His earnest smile was slightly goofy-looking, endearingly so. Kids, Bell thought, held nothing back when they smiled. You got everything they had. Kids weren’t cautious and self-conscious, the way adults believed they had to be when they were getting their pictures taken.

Bell remembered Carla at six years old, when her smile was just like Tyler’s: eager, guileless, trusting.

Carla
.

Bell’s thoughts drifted for an instant away from the case. She wished Carla would check in; even a quick text would do. But her daughter, she knew, had a lot on her mind these days. And Bell didn’t want to pry. They’d talk about it that night, she decided. They’d make a casual pact:
Just give me a general idea once a day about where you are. No big deal
.

‘Coffee?’ asked Linda. The word was stripped bare of any genuine hospitality.

She was a short, heavyset woman whose chin was a mere bump in an upsurging sea of flesh. She wore a brown velour track suit. Each time she raised her pink hands to fuss at her mahogany-tinted hair, fluffing it up, flipping it off her shoulders and letting it fall again, two turquoise bracelets shivered and clanked on each wrist. Despite her bulk she seemed fragile to Bell. Skittish. Her gestures and her words were like steps in a recipe:
Do this. Now do this. And then, this
. There was nothing spontaneous about Linda Bevins, nothing joyful.

Grief can do that, Bell thought. Grief – and maybe something else, too.

The three women settled into straight-backed seats in the breakfast nook. Linda Bevins on one side, Bell and Rhonda on the other. The yellow-walled kitchen was cold, Bell noted, in ways that went beyond temperature, and unnaturally spotless. It was like someone dressed up for church: stiff, formal, and fake. The countertops were scrubbed and empty. The stove looked as if it had never hosted a bubbling saucepan or a greasy skillet.

Bell remembered a snapshot she’d seen in the case file. Photos were as crucial as notarized documents in nailing down histories, in understanding people’s lives. She always pushed Rhonda and Hick to scan copies of every family photo they could get their hands on in the course of an investigation.

The one Bell recalled now was a picture of Bob and Linda Bevins on their wedding day. Linda had looked about sixty pounds lighter – and a great deal happier – than she was now.

‘No, thank you,’ Bell said. ‘We just had a few more questions.’

‘Questions? I’ve answered plenty of questions,’ Linda snapped back. ‘That’s pretty much
all
I’ve been doing these days, in fact. That’s the sum total of my life now. Answering questions. Do you know what kinds of questions I answered this morning? Do you?’

When neither Bell nor Rhonda replied, Linda went on. ‘I had a call from the man at the place that does the headstones. A Mister Perkins. And he asked me what I wanted on my son’s marker. Those are the questions I was answering this morning from Mister Perkins. Pink granite, I said. Pink. Not gray. And do you know what it’s going to say?’

Bell and Rhonda continued to look at her without speaking.

‘It’s going to say—’ Linda put a hand across her mouth to stop a sob. Composing herself, she went on. ‘It’s going to say “Tyler Taggart Bevins. Beloved son of Robert and Linda Bevins. The angels have taken him home.” Taggart was my maiden name, you see.’ A pause. ‘That was my answer to Mister Perkins. He had questions for me, too. Plenty of questions. Because that’s what I do now. That’s all I do. I answer questions. Questions, questions, questions.’

Bell lifted a notebook out of her purse. ‘Mrs Bevins,’ she said, ‘I know you loved your son. And I can’t imagine the enormity of your loss.’

Linda eyed her. ‘You bet your ass you can’t.’

‘As you’re well aware, however, Albie Sheets has been accused of the crime. And we just need to get a few more de—’

Linda interrupted her. ‘What do you mean, “has been accused”? What are you saying? Albie Sheets killed my boy.’ Indignation rose in her voice. ‘He killed my Tyler.’

‘That’s certainly how it looks. And if he does indeed plead guilty, a judge will help determine his sentence. In the meantime, I’d like to ask you about—’

‘No,’ Linda cut in, her voice low and hard. ‘No, no, no, no,
no
. There’s no doubt about it. Albie Sheets killed my boy. I never liked it when Tyler played with him.
Never
. He was too big. Too rough. But Tyler liked him a lot, and Bob said I had to—’ She stopped.

‘Had to what, Mrs Bevins? What did your husband say you had to do?’

‘Nothing.’ She folded her arms across her heavy breasts and looked away from them. Her gaze roved restlessly around the kitchen. ‘Nothing. Albie Sheets killed my boy. Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing. Maybe he did. Not for me to decide. But he killed my boy. That’s all I want to say.’

‘Yes, Mrs Bevins, I know that’s how you feel. And we feel that way, too. That’s why the state has filed charges against Albie. But I wonder if we have the whole story.’

Linda’s head whipped back around.

‘What do you mean – the “whole story”?’

‘It’s my understanding that Tyler and Albie played at both homes. Sometimes they played here and sometimes they played at the Sheets trailer.’

‘Yeah.’ Linda’s voice was hard now, hard in a let’s-get-this-over-with way. ‘So?’

‘So how far of a walk is it from here to the Sheets home?’

‘Don’t know. Never walked it. Never drove it, either. In fact, I’ve never been there.’

‘You haven’t?’

‘Never.’ Linda’s face, twisted with disgust, supplied a silent addendum:
Wouldn’t go anywhere near that trailer-f of white trash. Not if you paid me to
.

‘And so who,’ Bell continued, ‘picked up Tyler over there when it was too dark for him to walk home? Who went to get him?’

‘Bob. My husband. He always went.’

‘I see.’

Something moved in Linda’s face.

‘Anyway,’ she said brusquely, ‘that doesn’t matter. Albie Sheets killed my little boy. Any other questions for me, Mrs Elkins? Anything else I can do for you and your assistant? Or is it okay with you two if I get back to what I was doing? And do you know what that was?’

She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘I was just sitting here and missing my little boy. My Tyler. He’s all I had. He’s all I ever had.’ She leaned toward them. The vastness of her grief, barely held at bay during their conversation, seemed to rush back into the room. ‘He’s the only thing in the world I ever really cared about. And I was missing him something awful, missing him so much that I—’

She groped for a way to describe it.

‘I miss him so much that right now,
right now
, right this goddamned minute and every single minute since he left me and probably every minute for the rest of my life, I dearly wish I could walk right out of this goddamned house and climb that big goddamned mountain out there and then jump right off, jump right off the edge of it, so’s I could be with my Tyler. With my precious little baby boy. You got any questions for me about
that
, Mrs Elkins?’

The last thing they did was look at the basement.

It wasn’t that Bell expected to find something the deputies had missed; it was, rather, her desire to stand quietly in the presence of the aftermath of a violent act. After all the evidence had been collected and all the facts catalogued, she liked to see what remained, what essence moved in the air. Bell was usually practical and logical, relentlessly so, but this was the one realm in which she wasn’t.

She needed to stand at the threshold of a crime scene and . . .
listen
. Listen for the echoes.

The ones that still moved in the air, fitting themselves into a tight spiral that linked the past with the present. These echoes were composed not of sounds, but of emotions: terror, anger, passion, loss.

Linda did not accompany them. To Bell’s request to see the basement, she responded with a heavy shrug. She gestured toward a door at the other end of the kitchen; her bracelets shifted and clanked. She remained sitting at the breakfast nook, eyes staring straight ahead, while Bell and Rhonda descended the steep wooden staircase, slowly and cautiously.

They stood at the bottom.

The walk-out basement was carpeted in a mossy green shag. The walls had been hung with Sheetrock and painted a lemony yellow. In one corner, Bell saw a small crack in the drywall about two feet up from the floor. A pool table took up another corner. In the middle of the room, a long leather couch faced a big-screen TV. Along the south wall, Bell spotted a sliding door that led to the backyard. At the other end of the room, arranged on a concrete pad, were a washer and dryer. Sitting on top of the dryer was a stack of garments, some in bright solid colors such as green and red and blue, some striped, others tie-dyed.

These were Tyler’s T-shirts. Linda had yet to dispose of her son’s belongings.

Sometimes, grieving people took a long time to do that. Months. Years, even. Indeed, Bell had known of relatives of crime victims who never let go of the tangible evidence of a loved one’s existence, the shoes and wristwatch and comb and socks and toothbrush that proved beyond any doubt that the person had once been here, had walked on the earth. And she’d also known people who got rid of those items before the sun went down on the day of the death. Grief was as specific and individual as a fingerprint.

‘So,’ Rhonda said, just to have something to say.

‘Let’s go,’ Bell said.

Bell and Rhonda stepped out onto the porch.

A light snow was falling. The flakes melted the instant they hit the ground, but the frail skittish curtain of white still was mesmerizing. It imbued the mountain in the near distance with an air of intrigue, as if the mountain were pulling a cloak around itself, trying to disappear behind the flakes. Erasing itself. The mountain reminded Bell of a child who puts a blanket over her head and believes she’s invisible.

‘What do you think?’ she said.

‘I think Mrs Bevins made herself a bargain,’ Rhonda answered. Her voice was flat and sad but also certain. ‘And it put her in hell. She’ll say and do whatever she has to. Whatever she’s told to.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning she’s already lost her child. She doesn’t want to lose her husband, too.’

42

‘Albie,’ Bell asked, ‘why did you put the hose around Tyler’s neck?’

Serena Crumpler was standing a foot away from Bell. Albie sat on his bunk, legs spread. His hands were in front of his face. He was playing with his fingers. He seemed to be only half-listening, but Bell sensed he was paying attention. He was paying attention because he liked her. She was his friend.

When she arrived that night, Bell had looked around for bugs. She found a tiny spider in the corner and stepped on it. Albie had clapped his hands and squealed in delight.

‘Why?’ Bell repeated.

She was gentle with Albie, but she wouldn’t coddle him. They had been coddling him too long. They weren’t doing him any favors that way. He deserved direct questions.

Bell saw something shift in Albie’s demeanor. The head-on question seemed to have shaken something loose inside him. Freed him.

‘Necklace,’ Albie said. He said it with a kind of relief. He looked at Bell.

‘The hose was a necklace?’

‘Yeah. To make him look pretty. All green. Shiny green.’

‘What did Tyler say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why not, Albie? Why didn’t Tyler say anything?’

‘He was quiet. Tyler fell down. Asleep.’

Albie wiggled his fingers. Then he began bending them down, one by one, making each hand into a lumpy fist.

‘How did he fall down, Albie?’

‘His daddy knocked him down. It was a accident.’ Albie opened his fingers again so he could start all over, bending each finger down.

‘Accident,’ Bell said.

‘Yeah. Me and Tyler was playing outside. We come in.’

‘Was there anybody else in the basement, Albie?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Who, Albie? Who else was in the basement?’

He hesitated.

‘Tyler’s daddy and Dee-Dee,’ he said.

‘You mean your sister, Deanna.’

‘Yeah. Yeah.’

Bell had read the transcripts of earlier interviews with Albie. This was the first time he had mentioned other people in the basement.

Then it struck her:
We never asked
.

We never asked, because we figured we knew what had happened
.

We never asked, because it was obvious
.

The investigators had arrived on the scene and immediately observed a large, powerful man with extremely limited mental capacity, and the body of a small boy who was his playmate, and a hose around the small boy’s neck. The large man was frightened and cowering.

And so
, Bell chastised herself,
we didn’t treat it like a crime scene. We treated it like a seminar room in a divinity school. We didn’t look closely enough at Tyler’s body. We started asking about good and evil, and right and wrong, and intelligence and the lack thereof
.

I’ve been acting like I’m Socrates
, she thought with disgust, abandoning the comfort of the ‘we,’
when I should’ve been acting like an officer of the court. I wanted Truth – when plain old truth would’ve done just fine
.

‘What were they doing, Albie? Tyler’s daddy and your sister – what were they doing? When you saw them in the basement?’

Albie’s face clouded.

‘Don’t know.’

Bell moved a few steps forward and touched his arm. He stared at her hand, which looked small and pale on his thick hairy forearm. He smiled. Bell realized that Albie probably wasn’t touched very often. People didn’t shake his hand or pat him on the back. They were afraid of him. And so he missed out on casual human contact, on that sense of being connected to other people by a simple bridge of skin.

No wonder he’d loved playing with Tyler. Tyler was too young to know he was supposed to keep his distance from Albie. He treated Albie like a friend. Not a freak.