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as it is.” Bell wandered over to the window. The brown drapes were tied off on either side. She looked out through the clear glass but didn’t see a thing; she was too preoccupied. How was it that you could look out a window and not see beyond your own thoughts?
    â€œYou got that right,” Mathers declared. “But it’s not all bad news, you know? Folks’re already talking about Friday. Plenty excited. Might take our minds off our troubles.”
    Bell, her back to the deputy, nodded. Friday was the day former West Virginia Governor Riley Jessup was scheduled to show up at the Raythune County Medical Center and—with substantial assistance close at hand, Bell hoped, given the fact that Jessup was eighty-nine years old and possessed not only a pacemaker but also two artificial hips and a catheter bag and at least a hundred more pounds than a man with his frame ought to be hauling around—climb on the back of a flatbed truck to speak at the dedication of a new MRI machine. Jessup had written the check to buy it. A great many people in town were thrilled about the visit because he was a local boy, born and raised in Raythune County. Jessup had left office decades ago and rarely returned to his homeplace, but he was still revered in these parts.
    To Mathers and Bell, though, and to anyone with any connection to public safety, the governor’s visit meant only one thing: extra hassle. He would have to be met, escorted, monitored, protected, catered to, fed, watered, waited on, hoisted up, helped down, ferried about, and generally fussed over. Sheriff Fogelsong would be back by then, and he’d coordinate everything, but still.
    â€œWouldn’t it just figure,” Mathers went on, “that we’d have the governor coming by for his little visit right in the middle of a homicide investigation? I mean—any other time, I’d be looking forward to shaking his hand, same as everybody else. But things being what they are right now—well, we’re bound to be a little skittish.”
    Neither Mathers nor Bell spoke for a moment; neither wanted to acknowledge out loud the bad luck that seemed like a permanent resident around here, instead of an occasional visitor. Unlike Collier County, where the civic fortunes were boosted by the presence of a metal fabrication plant just outside the county seat of Donnerton and a wholesale beauty supply shop in Swanville that shipped products to three states, Raythune County faced a bleak economic future. It had no manufacturing plants left, no industry. The men—and it was all men back then, Bell liked to remind people—who had ruled Raythune County throughout the twentieth century rarely spent any time wooing businesses; they’d been satisfied with the coal mines that kept the taxes rolling in and the trucks rolling out, staggering happily under their high-peaked loads.
    Now most of those mines were shut down: Brassy-Waltham, Acer, Milltown Limited. West Virginia coal was not nearly so coveted as it once had been. The region had settled into serious decline, a decline made worse by the bad habits people developed to distract themselves from it: violence and alcohol and drugs. Bell and her two assistant prosecutors had more cases than they could comfortably handle.
    â€œMy grandpa knew Riley Jessup pretty well,” Mathers added. “Knew him before he got so danged rich and famous, that is. Lots of folks around here remember Jessup. Look up to him, too. I’ve heard it said that politicians are the new celebrities. Hard to think of Riley Jessup in the same picture frame with Brad Pitt, but maybe so. Maybe so. What do you think, Mrs. Elkins?”
    Bell didn’t answer. She reclaimed her seat at the desk. Her mind had been circling back to the events at Tommy’s, and to the single nagging detail that made them interesting. “The victim in the bar,” she said. “Jed Stark. He had a business card on him.