Summer of the Dead (15 page)

*   *   *

Bell was almost home when her cell rang. The ringtone—it was Gloria Gaynor's 1978 anthem “I Will Survive”—tipped her off that it was her ex-husband calling.

“Hi, Sam,” she said. Cordial, but just barely. His transgressions since their divorce ranged from mildly annoying to borderline unforgivable. Bell didn't waste her time or her emotional energy by hating him; instead, she felt a sort of general distaste at the prospect of a conversation with him. Bottom line: He was Carla's father, and that meant, like it or not, he would always be in Bell's life.

“Hey,” he said. “How's it going?”

This was suspicious. Sam didn't make casual calls.

“Fine,” Bell said. She had paused at a four-way stop, waited her turn, then surged forward, punching the accelerator with more force than was strictly necessary.

“Okay. Well, I just thought I'd check. Heard from Aunt Thelma again. She knows the Frank family pretty well. Jesus, Belfa. What's going on back there?
Two
unsolved homicides, one right after the other? How are you holding up?”

“Did you need something, Sam?”

“Like I said. Just checking in.”

“Okay. You checked in. Has Carla made a start on her packing? Listen, if she doesn't want to haul a big suitcase on the plane, you can just ship her clothes and anything else she wants to have here. Might be easier.”

“Uh—sure.”

There it was again: something odd in his voice. Bell didn't care enough to figure out what it was. But a thought occurred to her: Sam was being cordial. God only knew why—but she could take advantage of it. He worked at the fancy end of the legal profession, the end filled with Audis and escargot. It was drastically different from her end—the world of Ford Explorers and peanut butter crackers.

Sam, she realized, might be able to satisfy her curiosity about the business card in Jed Stark's pocket.

“Hey,” she said. “Ever heard of a New York City law firm called Voorhees? Guy named Sampson J. Voorhees?”

“Sure, I know him. By reputation, I mean. He's not really a lawyer, though. More like a slimy, bottom-feeding—wait, let's make that ‘ethically challenged'—fixer.”

“Fixer.”

“Yeah. There are a few outfits like that here in D.C., too. The ‘law firm' part is pretty much window dressing. They're muscle. Security. Plus some semi-legal private investigator work.”

“Such as?”

“Such as—well, let's say you're a Fortune 500 CEO and you think your wife is bumping uglies with the golf pro at your country club. You want pictures, you want transcripts of wiretaps, you want copies of e-mails—but discreetly. Under the radar. Because what you're really after is leverage. Blackmail bait. Voorhees and his ilk keep pretty busy, let me tell you.”

“So why isn't there any contact info on his business card? How does he do business?”

“He doesn't
want
your business,” Sam said, and he said the sentence slowly, spacing out the words to give it an exaggeratedly remedial feel, as if she'd asked him a simple math problem that even a kindergartener ought to be able to figure out. “He works strictly on referrals. It's like the old story about the guy who applies for a job with a Chicago politician. The politician says, ‘Who sent you?' and the guy says, ‘Nobody.' And then the politician says, ‘I don't want nobody that nobody sent.' Voorhees doesn't want to be contacted—unless you already know how. If you're not part of the elite network of deals and favors that those guys live by, he's not interested. So naturally there's no information on his business card. But I can probably dig up a number somewhere.”

“Great,” Bell said. She was sitting in her driveway by now, engine off, listening intently. She'd arrived home a few minutes ago but didn't want to interrupt him.

“Why are you asking?”

“Too complicated to explain. Gotta go, Sam.”

 

Chapter Sixteen

By high noon on Friday the sun was a pale white blister in an even paler sky. That sun had turned the blacktopped parking lot of the Raythune County Medical Center into a sink of misery; today it was crowded with people, not cars, and in the shimmery heat-haze, the solid black rectangle with the bright yellow stripes seemed tentative, insubstantial, as if the edges might give way at any minute and make an instant river of scalding tarry goo. The hospital itself comprised two stories of topaz-tinted brick with, at one end, a perky, inviting-looking lobby entrance finished off with ornamental grasses, and at the other end, a grimmer, more serious-looking set of double doors with
EMERGENCY
stenciled in red block letters across the glass. It was ten years old, yet still was one of the newest buildings in the county.

The occupants of the lot looked both afflicted and exhilarated. They seemed to be engaged in a long, slow, inevitable melt, like crayons left on a radiator, but their eyes gleamed with anticipation. There were old women wedged into the plastic lawn chairs that they'd carried in and opened up and locked into position with a violent snap; old men in wraparound sunglasses and baseball caps sitting proudly athwart motorized scooters with American flag decals slapped across the shiny maroon flanks; small children sitting cross-legged in little red wagons, arguing over who was entitled to the last suck from the juice box; and at the outer rim of the crowd, skinny teenagers in cutoffs and tight T-shirts, pecking at their cells with alternating thumbs, even though the recipients of those texts were standing right beside them; plus an appreciable number of dogs whose pale pink tongues fell out of the sides of their mouths and stuck there, stiff as sticks. The aggressive PA system sent too-loud music thumping out of two tall black amplifiers, along with a constant garnish of static.

Bell had arrived here twenty minutes ago, having hitched a ride from the courthouse with Deputy Harrison in the black Chevy Blazer, one of two that the county owned. The other was assigned to Sheriff Fogelsong. Harrison was a petite woman, barely five feet two, as solid as a bridge abutment—and even less talkative. But she had compensatory skills: She could outrun just about any man in the county. Outshoot him, too.

Moments after parking the Blazer, Harrison nodded to Bell and abruptly departed; she began her patrol along the crowd's outer edge, looking improbably cool even in her brown polyester uniform and flat-brimmed brown hat and black boots. She tucked her thumbs in her belt as she walked, but unlike her colleague Charlie Mathers, there was no belly fat to dig through in order to reach it. Harrison was lean and sleek. The lump of the black leather holster on her hip was the only rounded part of her.

Bell's eyes swept the sweltering lot. A few people recognized her and waved; dutifully, she waved back. Faces looked as if they were being glimpsed underwater, the features blurry and distorted by smearing curtains of sweat. Bell felt the heat rising from the blacktop through the soles of her shoes, and she could feel it coming from the other direction as well, pressing on the top of her head. Even the applause was hijacked by the heat; it sounded halfhearted, boxed in, a dry rattle that crossed the packed space each time there was a twitch of activity that might signal commencement of the ceremony.

Two people—an old lady and a toddler—had already succumbed to the temperature and, limp and glassy-eyed, been hauled off by the paramedics.
At least we're right here at the ER,
Bell thought.
Can't get much handier
.

She tried to come up with a rough head count. Were there a thousand people here today, as Sheriff Fogelsong had predicted? Close to it, maybe. In any case, it was one of the largest gatherings she'd ever seen in Raythune County. Maybe the free hot dogs and RC Cola served up on long tables at the back were the principal lure—even though some visitors had obviously smuggled in their own refreshments, the kind classified under the “adult beverages” rubric. No wonder: This was a special day. And these people were plenty excited to see Jessup, former governor of West Virginia, on one of his rare trips back to his homeplace.

So far they hadn't seen a thing, because the show was running late. Jessup and his entourage had arrived a while ago in a lumbering, big-hipped, white motor home with a license plate that read
WV GOV
and were hustled forthwith into the building. All the crowd could do now was wait and sweat.

Watching them, Bell did what she always did when in the presence of a large group, her eyes brushing quickly across each face like a feather duster moving down a row of balusters:
tick, tick, tick, tick
. She suspected that she probably kept up that careful vigilance in her sleep, too; behind the closed lids, her eyeballs were moving, shifting back and forth, because she was generally certain there was trouble brewing somewhere, and only her to stop it. Or only her and Nick and his deputies.

Which sins lurked in this heart or the other one, what guilty memories or bad intentions haunted which souls? That was what she wondered, peering at these people. She couldn't help herself. The cost of being a prosecutor, Bell had discovered only a few months into the job, was this ongoing appraisal: Statistics insisted that a certain number of people in any gathering had either committed a crime or were going to, in the near future; a certain number had gotten by with something or hoped to. A certain number hid terrible secrets.

Hell. Whoever was responsible for two violent homicides could be here right now. Whoever had smashed an old man's head and then stabbed another man—both of the victims were helpless, both of them were beloved to someone—might be within the shifting orbit of her gaze. He could be out there in the crowd at this very moment, mopping at the sweat on the back of his neck just like anybody else, muttering about the heat, grinning at somebody's joke, while in the locked basement of his mind, he dreamed of the darkness to come, of what he would do and how he would do it.

*   *   *

“Hot nuff fur ya?”

The crowd roared back various versions of “Yeah!” and “
Hell,
yeah!” and “Uh-huh!” followed by raucous spurts of hooting and whistling. Small children begged to be hoisted up on the hairy shoulders of fathers in tank tops, and the fathers obliged. Old people rose painfully from their lawn chairs and squinted toward the flag-festooned truck bed, flattening out one hand for use as an eyeshade, bunching up the other into a fist to place against a fleshy hip for stability.

Riley Jessup stood on the makeshift stage as if it were the most natural thing in the world for an eighty-nine-year-old man to be right here, clutching a cordless microphone as lovingly as an ice cream cone, blinking in the all-over sunshine. His head was a white hairless lump stuck on the wide plank of his shoulders. He was short and grievously overweight, but the seersucker suit had been tailored with such discreet and non-binding generosity that his true dimensions were obscured.

“Hot nuff fur ya?” he repeated. The echoes of his amplified voice bounced around the parking lot in tattered bits and scraggly patches. The crowd cheered and laughed and stomped and whooped and whistled, and Jessup, Bell saw, drank it all in, the voluminous love and the honest admiration. He inhaled it, he absorbed it, and she would have sworn that she could actually see the crowd's rowdy energy filling him up like an elixir, causing him to blossom and swell, restoring him, rejuvenating him, and as the magic stuff branched through his body, he seemed to shed a few brittle flakes of his old age and decrepitude; the crowd's energy straightened his spine by a tick or two and enabled him to lift his arms just that much higher as he gestured toward it, his sweaty red bulb of a chin raised up, his eyes aimed at a spot slightly above their heads, positively popelike in his all-encompassing, beatific gaze. He hadn't held elective office in almost three decades, but he still had the gift. He still knew how to handle a crowd, how to rile it up and smooth it out and rile it up again.

“My, oh my—it's
so-o-o-o-o
good to be back home!” Jessup hollered. “Right here in Raythune County!”

More cheers, whistles. Then the crowd sank back down like a half-baked soufflé, rising and now cratering, the brief stir of activity having reminded everyone of just how wickedly enervating this heat really was.

“My friends,” Jessup said. Voice calm now. Softer. It caused the people to lean in, straining to hear. They were hungry for what he had to say. They needed him. Just as these people filled and energized Riley Jessup, he had the same effect on them. Bell had attended a few political rallies now and again, but never had she witnessed such raw and obvious synchronicity, such a mass symbiotic exchange. Jessup had moved beyond the confines of Raythune County in so many ways, but the place still energized him; it still moved in his blood and fed his dreams. It was still a part of him. And he of it.

“My friends,” he repeated, the public address system popping and crackling with every third word or so, “when I was a little boy growing up in Briney Hollow, it was a terrible thing when somebody got sick. Nearest doctor was three counties away.” Jessup shook his head, initiating an answering ripple in the folds of flesh on his neck. “If somebody
did
get sick—well, all you could do was pray. Pray and pray and pray. Sometimes the good Lord saw fit to bless your loved one with a little more time. And sometimes He didn't.”

Jessup paused. He frowned. He looked down at the pointy tips of his shoes. Every old person in the crowd, Bell guessed, was recollecting right along with him, remembering a parent or great uncle or favorite aunt who'd died a slow and misery-filled death a half a hundred years ago back in some inaccessible niche, a death impossible to contemplate in a modern era of painkillers and antibiotics. And paved roads.

“No more!” Jessup thundered. He'd raised his head abruptly, as if he'd suddenly heard his long-dead but eternally beloved mother calling his name from the back porch, fetching him home for supper. “No more! 'Cause we got ourselves this
fine
medical center right here in Raythune County. And now it's even gonna have its very own MRI machine!”