Ghost Roll by Julia Keller Read Free Book Online Page B

intensity in her gray eyes. Those eyes seemed to take in everything all at once, filing most of it away for later; there was nothing cursory or slack about her gaze, nothing casual. She was closer to forty-four years old than she was to forty-three, but she looked younger than that, owing in part to an edgy restlessness, a sort of spirited impatience, in her manner. She wore jeans, a taupe barn coat with a dark brown collar, and a blue cable-knit sweater. The thin strap of a black leather purse made a diagonal slash across the front of that sweater.
    Just before she opened the double doors with the giant red H painted on each side of the glass, she glanced to her left. The last parking place on that side was occupied by a white Chrysler LeBaron. Nick’s car. She felt a slight but definite pang. In years past, when she arrived at a crime scene and looked around for his vehicle, her eyes would search automatically for a black Chevy Blazer with an official Raythune County seal on both sides. This wasn’t a crime scene, but she’d automatically had the old expectation. Since November, however, when Nick had handed over the Blazer keys to his successor, he had been driving his own car. He had decided not to stand for reelection. His former deputy, Pam Harrison, had won easily.
    She gave the car a quick going-over with her glance, same as she’d done the three previous times she’d come out here to see him. The Chrysler didn’t suit him. Nothing suited him but the Blazer.
    On the curb in front of his vehicle was a pert warning delivered in red stenciled letters: RESERVED N. F . He had his own spot. Unreasonably, that also bothered her; it gave his new job an aura of permanence, of finality. This wasn’t some temporary gig—which she already knew, of course, but seeing it spelled out that way forced a firmer kind of knowing.
    Nick Fogelsong worked here now, as head of security for the Highway Haven chain. He wasn’t coming back to the courthouse.
    She and Fogelsong had worked together for six years. She was the prosecutor; he was the sheriff. They had been friends since Bell was ten years old—he was one of the few people she allowed to call her by her given name, Belfa—but it was as colleagues, as professionals, that they had truly bonded. They had solved difficult cases. They had faced death together, more than once. They had sparred and argued. They had gone long days without speaking after especially intense quarrels over tactics or priorities or ethical issues—and then resealed their friendship over long chats while chain-drinking cups of black coffee at JP’s, a diner in Acker’s Gap. They’d run the justice system as best they could in this beautiful, beleaguered patch of West Virginia.
    All of that was over now. In the fall, after his testimony at a trial that concluded one of their most challenging cases—the middle-of-the-night murders of two defenseless citizens, and other revelations that had shocked a town whose residents thought they were well beyond that kind of dark astonishment—Nick Fogelsong announced he was giving up the sheriff’s post. He didn’t notify Bell before he did it. He was afraid, he told her later, that she’d talk him out of it. And I would have, too, she’d snapped back at him. You bet your ass I would’ve done just that. She was still upset when she said it, still mourning the loss of him as her comrade.
    She’d had an inkling he was losing his enthusiasm, losing his keen edge, losing his relish for the job—but who didn’t, from time to time? Who didn’t occasionally falter, wondering if it was all worth it? This was a place that would challenge anybody’s optimism. It featured, after all, a steady cascade of falling-down shacks and crumbling roads and slow slides into alcoholism and drug addiction, along with red spikes of random violence. To believe in the future around here required a