The Devil's Stepdaughter: A Bell Elkins Story (Bell Elkins Novels) (6 page)

“Mom,” Carla said. “Gotta breathe, you know?”

Bell relaxed a bit, but knew she needed to maintain physical contact, knew she could not afford to break the circuit. Hands still clamped on Carla’s shoulders, she moved her head back, so that she could look directly into her daughter’s eyes.

“You’re okay? Really?”

“Yeah, Mom.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

Carla nodded. Her lips were tucked in tight. She was afraid to go beyond single-word answers at this point, afraid she’d start sobbing and not be able to stop. Afraid she’d turn into Mr. Goatee.

Bell scanned her daughter’s face. That face, she saw, had lost its chronic cockiness. It wasn’t just the shiny tear-trails on Carla’s thin cheeks that accounted for the change. This face had shed the hard ceramic glaze of cool that had so infuriated Bell when it first appeared about a year and a half ago, transforming her sweet little girl into an entirely new person, a stranger, a creature of shrugs and slouches and cynical opinions and constant backtalk, broodingly indifferent to anything Bell had to say.

For the moment, her child had somehow returned, in all of her transparent neediness, all of her soft vulnerability.

“You’re okay?” Bell repeated.

“Yeah,” Carla said. “I think so. Yeah. Yeah.” A pause. “Maybe.” Her voice was halting, tentative, husky with choked-back emotion. The next words came in a rush. “But listen, Mom, it was—it was awful, really, it was so gross and scary because I was sitting right over there and I saw the whole thing and—and their heads, their heads just
explo
— I saw it, Mom, and I just couldn’t believe that I was actually seeing what I was see—”

Bell quickly removed her hand from Carla’s right shoulder and pressed two fingers against her daughter’s lips, stopping the words.

“No, sweetie. No, no, no. Not yet,” Bell said, gently but firmly. “Wait for the deputies to take your statement. It’s very important that when you describe what happened, you’re telling it for the first time. That you’re not influenced by hearing what others say that
they
saw. So that it’s all your own words.”

She didn’t mean to be abrupt, she hated to shush her child, but Bell knew how imperative it was to do things right. To follow protocol.

She was a mother, but she was also a prosecuting attorney, and on the stem of her softly winding maternal thoughts, another notion was growing like a wild spike—darker, harsher, meaner. The thorn on the rose bush.

They’d get the bastard who did this. There’d be no mistakes in compiling the prosecution’s case. No technicalities that might cause an acquittal. No slip-ups that might put his sorry ass back out on the street.

Bell looked at the other customers, a clump of bug-eyed, ashen-faced people, many of whom couldn’t stop trembling and twitching and moaning and, in some cases, hyperventilating. The paramedics, she knew, would check them out, one by one, all in good time. Fine.

She wasn’t worried about their health. She was worried about her case.

“And that,” Bell went on, raising her voice until it turned official, until it was curtly bureaucratic, “goes for everybody else, too.” She tried to connect with as many pairs of eyes as she could, locking onto them, witness by witness. “Please don’t talk to each other until you’ve been cleared to do so by law enforcement authorities.”

The old woman, the one who’d been repeatedly summoning Jesus, abruptly stopped her chant. With a knobby blue-veined fist, she pulled together the sagging halves of her faded gray sweater. She gave Bell a belligerent sideways glare, pale blue eyes narrowed, nose twitching, bottom lip jutting out like a pink windowsill. She didn’t hail from around here. She’d stopped in for a cup of coffee and a biscuit with red-eye gravy—and now this.

“Just who the hell are
you
,” the old woman snarled, “to be tellin’
us
what to do?”

Before Bell could answer, Carla Elkins turned to the old woman.

“Hey—listen up,” Carla said. Her soft muffled voice was gone, and the voice that replaced it was the snippy, dismissive one that usually irritated Bell but right now made her terribly proud. “For your information,” Carla went on, “she happens to be Belfa Elkins, Raythune County prosecuting attorney. So if you know what’s good for you, lady, you’d better do
exactly
what she tells you to.”

Bitter River

A Killing in the Hills

Photograph courtesy of Mike Zajakowski

JULIA KELLER spent twelve years as a reporter and editor for the
Chicago Tribune
, where she won a Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, she was born in West Virginia and lives in Chicago and Ohio.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE DEVIL’S STEPDAUGHTER.
Copyright © 2014 by Julia Keller. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph by Jose AS Reyes / Shutterstock.com

e-ISBN 9781466857025

First Edition: June 2014

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.