The Smoky Mountain Mist

“I’m fine,” Rachel lied. “Are you an FBI agent?”

Delilah’s dark eyebrows lifted. “Um, not anymore. I left the FBI years ago. I work for a private security company now.”

“Oh.”

“What did the doctor tell you?” she asked gently.

“No sign of sexual activity, but they also couldn’t find a toxicological explanation for my memory loss. Some-thing about the tests not being good at spotting GHB or drugs like it.”

“You don’t have any memory of where you might have gone last night?” Delilah picked up Rachel’s discarded clothes from the chair next to the exam table and handed them to her.

“None. The last thing I remember is being at the cemetery.”

Delilah left the exam area without being asked, giving Rachel a chance to change back into her own clothes in private. When Rachel called her name once she’d finished dressing, Delilah came back around the curtain.

“Look, I’m going to be straight with you,” Delilah said. “Because I’d want someone to be straight with me. I know about Mark Bramlett and the murders. I know that they all seemed to be connected to Davenport Truck-ing in some way. Or, more accurately, connected to you.”

Rachel put her fingertips against her throbbing temples. “Why do I feel as if everybody knows more about what’s going on in my life than I do?”

“If someone’s targeting you, up to this point it’s been pretty oblique. But drugging you up and leaving you to fend for yourself outside on a cold October night while you’re high as a kite?” Delilah shook her head. “That’s awfully direct, if you ask me. You really need to figure out why someone would want you out of the way.”

“You think I should go to the police.”

The other woman’s brow furrowed. “Normally, I’d say yes.”

“But?”

“But is there any reason why it might not be in your best interest for the police to be involved?”

Rachel’s head was pounding. “I don’t know. I can’t think.”

“Okay, okay.” Delilah laid her hands on Rachel’s shoulders, her touch soothing. “You don’t have to make that decision right now. Let’s get you home and settled in. Is there someone there who can keep an eye on you until you’re feeling more like yourself?”

“No,” Rachel said, remembering that her stepmother had made plans to leave for Wilmington after the funeral. Diane’s sister had invited Diane to visit for a few days. Paul had his own place, and while she and her stepbrother were friendly enough, she wouldn’t feel comfortable asking him to play nursemaid. She already suspected he thought she was in over her head at the trucking company. He might even be right.

She didn’t want to give him more reasons to doubt her.

“I’d offer to watch after you myself, but I have to drive to Alabama as soon as I can get away. I have a meeting with my boss, and it’s a long drive. But you’re welcome to stay at the house while I’m gone.”

She wondered if Seth was staying there, too. She didn’t let herself ask. “I’m okay. I’ll be fine at home by myself.”

“Are you sure?”

Rachel nodded, even though she wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

“SMOKY JOE” BRESLIN WASN’T exactly thrilled when Seth roused him from bed on a rainy morning to answer a few questions, and his responses were laced liberally with profanities and lubricated by a few shots of good Ten-nessee whiskey. Seth had never been much of a drinker, so he nursed a single shot while Breslin knocked back three without blinking.

“Yeah, she was in here last night. Looked like a hothouse flower in a weed patch, but she seemed to be enjoying the music. And there were a few fellows who enjoyed lookin’ at her, so who was I to judge?”

“Was she alone?” Seth asked.

“No, came in with some frat boy type. He tried a little something with her and she gave him a whack in the face, and some of the boys escorted him out. Not long after that, she headed out of here.”

“What kind of condition was she in?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really watchin’ when she left. I know she wasn’t fallin’-down drunk or nothin’.”

“You didn’t check to make sure she wasn’t driving?”

“Hell, you know how it can get around here on a busy night! I can’t babysit everybody who comes here for the show. I do know she didn’t have much to drink, so I didn’t worry too much about it.”

Which meant that unless she’d gone somewhere else to drink, it hadn’t been alcohol alone that had put her up on that bridge.

“What can you tell me about the frat boy?” he asked Joe.

The older man grimaced. “Just some slicked-down city fellow. You know the type, comes in here with his nose in the air givin’ everyone the stink-eye like he was better than them. I was glad to see the girl give him what for, if you want my opinion.” Joe poured another glass of whiskey and motioned to top off Seth’s.

Seth waved him off. “Did he pay for the drinks?”

“Yeah.”

“Cash or credit?”

“Credit. One of them gold-type cards for big spenders. Flashed it like it was a Rolex watch or something.”

“Would you have the receipt?”

Joe cut his eyes at Seth. “You pullin’ another scam? I don’t put up with that around here. You know that.”

“No, no scam.” He took no offense. “The woman he hit on is a friend of mine, see. I’d like to talk to the man about his behavior toward her.”

“I see.” Joe shot him an approving look. “Well, tell you the truth, she seemed to handle him pretty good all by her lonesome. But I’ll see what I can dig up for you. Just promise me you’re not gonna beat him up or shoot him or anything like that. I don’t want the cops trackin’ you back here and giving me any trouble.”

“Just want to talk,” Seth assured him, although if he found out that Frat Boy had anything to do with drugging Rachel Davenport, he couldn’t promise he’d keep his fists to himself. She’d come way too close to going off the bridge the night before. She wouldn’t have been likely to survive that fall.

Maybe the guy had slipped her something hoping it would make it easy to get lucky with her rather than to make her go off the deep end and hurt herself, but that distinction sure as hell didn’t make drugging her any less heinous a crime.

And there was still the matter of the murders. Over the past two months, four women connected to Rachel Dav-enport had been murdered in what had initially seemed like random killings. Until investigators found the perpetrator and learned he’d been hired to kill those women and make the deaths look random. With his dying words, he’d admitted that it was “all about the girl.”

All about Rachel Davenport.

Joe came back from the cluttered office just off the bar bearing a slip of paper. “Guy signed his name ‘Davis Rogers.’”

The name wasn’t familiar. Could have been someone Rachel knew from Maryville or even an old friend in town for her father’s funeral. He’d ask her about him when she got back from the hospital.

The thought of her trip to Knoxville made his chest tighten as he left Smoky Joe’s Saloon and headed toward the road to Maryville. He’d taken the past two days off work, but he was scheduled to work the next four. He had some vacation time coming to him, and he figured this might be the right time to take it.

He was surprised to find Paul Bailey in the office when he asked to see whoever was in charge while Rachel was out. Bailey had the account books open and looked up reluctantly when Seth stepped inside.

“Mr. Bailey, I’ve had a family situation come up. I know it’s short notice, but I have a couple of weeks of vacation built up, and I’d like to take them now if possible.”

Bailey’s gaze was a little unfocused, as if his mind was still on whatever he’d been doing before Seth interrupted. “Yeah, sure. Nobody else has any days off scheduled, and they’ll be happy to have the extra hours this time of year, with the holidays coming up. Just let Sharon at the front desk know what days you’re taking, and she’ll put it on the schedule.”

“Thank you.” Seth started to turn away, then paused. “I’m real sorry about Mr. Davenport.”

“Thank you,” Bailey answered with a regretful half smile.

On impulse, Seth added, “By the way, do you know a Davis Rogers?”

Bailey’s gaze focused completely. “Why do you ask?”

“I just ran into a guy with that name last night at a bar,” Seth lied. “He mentioned he knew the family. We drank a toast to Mr. Davenport.”

“Last night?”

Seth kept his expression neutral. “Yeah. He mentioned he was thinking about selling his car, and I know someone in the market. I should’ve gotten his phone number, but I didn’t think about it until afterward.”

“He’s not from here,” Bailey said with a dismissive wave. “Probably couldn’t work out a sale anyway before he heads back to Virginia.”

Seth had a vague memory that Rachel had gone to college somewhere in Virginia. So, maybe an old college friend.

Maybe even an old boyfriend.

A sliver of dismay cut a path through the center of his chest. He tried to ignore it. “Thanks anyway.” He left the office before Paul Bailey started to wonder why one of his fleet mechanics was suddenly asking a lot of nosy questions.

He stopped in the fleet garage, where he and the other mechanics shared a small break room. The three mechanics working in the garage today were out in the main room, so he had the place to himself.

Grabbing the phone book they kept in a desk drawer, he searched the hotel listings, bypassing the cheaper places. Joe Breslin had described Davis Rogers as a slicked-back frat boy, which suggested he’d stay at a nice hotel.

Was that Rachel’s type? Preppy college boys with their trust funds and their country club golf games?

Drop it, Hammond. Not your concern.

She wasn’t exactly what he considered his type, either. She was attractive, clearly, but quiet and reserved. And maybe if he hadn’t begun to put clues together that suggested the recent Bitterwood murders were connected to Davenport Trucking, he might never have allowed himself to think about Rachel Davenport as a person and not just a company figurehead.

But ever since he’d given up the con game for the straight and narrow, he’d shown an alarming tendency to take other people’s troubles to heart. And Rachel Daven-port’s life was eaten up with trouble these days.

An old twelve-step guy he knew had told him overcompensation was a common trait among people who felt the need to make amends for what they’d done. They tended to go overboard, wanting to save the whole damned world instead of fix the one or two things they could actually fix.

And here he was, proving the guy right.

Using his cell phone, he called Maryville hotels with no luck. He was about to start calling Knoxville hotels when he remembered there was a bed-and-breakfast in Bitterwood that offered the sort of services a guy like Davis Rogers would probably expect from his lodgings. The odds were better that he was staying in Knoxville, but Sequoyah House was a local call, so what would it hurt?

The proprietor at Sequoyah House put him right through to Davis Rogers’s room when he asked. Nobody answered the phone, even after several rings, but Seth had the information he needed.

He had a few tough questions for Davis Rogers, and now he knew where to find him.

Chapter Four

On the ride back to Bitterwood, Rachel realized she had no idea where her car was parked. Seth had said he’d found her on Purgatory Bridge, so it made sense that she’d left her car somewhere in the area. Delilah agreed to detour to the bridge to take a look.

Sure enough, as soon as they neared the bridge, Deli-lah had spotted the Honda Accord parked off the road near the bridge entrance, just as Seth had said.

“Do you have your keys?” Delilah asked as she pulled the truck up next to Rachel’s car.

“Yeah. I found them in my pocket.” God, she wished she could erase the last twenty-four hours and start fresh. But then, she’d have to face her father’s funeral all over again. Feel the pain of saying goodbye all over again. The stress of staying strong and not breaking. Not letting anyone see her crumble.

What would those mourners at the funeral have thought, she wondered, if they’d seen her acrobatics on the steel girders of Purgatory Bridge last night?

She shuddered at the thought, not just the idea of making a spectacle of herself in front of those people, but also the idea of Purgatory Bridge itself. Crossing the delicate-looking truss bridge in a car was nerve-racking enough. Standing on the railings with land a terrifying thirty feet below?

Unimaginable.

The morning rain had gone from a soft drizzle to sporadic showers. Currently it wasn’t raining, but fog swirled around them like lowering clouds. As Rachel crunched her way across the wet gravel on the shoulder of the road, Delilah rolled down the passenger window. “You sure you feel up to driving?”

“I’m fine,” she said automatically.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” Delilah smiled gently as she rolled the window back up, shutting out the damp coolness of the day. Rachel watched until the truck disappeared around the bend before she slid behind the wheel of the Honda.

The car’s interior seemed oppressively silent, her sudden sense of isolation exacerbated by the tendrils of fog wrapping around the car. Outside, the world looked increasingly gray and alien, so she turned her attention to the car itself, hoping something would jog her missing memory.

What had she done the last time she was in her car? Why couldn’t she remember anything between standing at her father’s gravesite and waking up in a strange room with Seth Hammond watching her with those intense green eyes?

A trilling sound split the air, making her jump. She found the offending noisemaker—her cell phone, which lay on the passenger floorboard. Grinning sheepishly, she grabbed it and checked the display. She didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Rach! Thank God, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

“Davis?” The voice on the other end of the line belonged to her grad school boyfriend, Davis Rogers. She hadn’t heard from him in years.

“I thought maybe you regretted giving me your number and were screening my calls. Did you get home okay?” Before she could answer, he continued, “Of course you did, or you wouldn’t be answering the phone. Look, about last night—”

Suddenly, there was a thud on the other end of the line, and the connection went dead.

Rachel pulled the phone away from her face, startled. She looked at the display again. The number had a Vir-ginia area code, but Davis had spoken as if he was here in Tennessee.

She tried calling the number on the display, but it went to voice mail.

He’d said he’d been trying to call her. She checked her own voice mail and discovered three messages, all from Davis. The first informed her where he was staying—the Sequoyah House, a bed-and-breakfast inn out near Cutter Horse Farm. She entered the information in her phone’s notepad and checked the other messages.

In the last message, Davis sounded upset. “Rachel, it’s Davis again. Look, I’m sorry about last night, but he seemed to think you might be receptive. I’ve really missed you. I didn’t like leaving you in that place. Please call me back so I can apologize.”

She stared at the phone. What place? Surely not Smoky Joe’s. Why was her ex in town in the first place—for her father’s funeral? Had she seen him yesterday?

And why had his call cut off?

SEQUOYAH HOUSE WAS a sprawling two-story farmhouse nestled in a clearing at the base of Copperhead Ridge. Behind the house, the mountain loomed like a guardian over the rain-washed valley below. It was the kind of place that lent itself more to romantic getaways than lodgings for a man alone.

But maybe Davis Rogers hadn’t planned to be alone for long.

Most of the lobby furnishings looked to be rustic antiques, the bounty of a rich and varied Smoky Mountain tradition of craftsmanship. But despite its hominess, Se-quoyah House couldn’t hide a definite air of money, and plenty of it.

The woman behind the large mahogany front desk smiled at him politely, her cool gray eyes taking in his cotton golf shirt, timeworn jeans and barbershop haircut. No doubt wondering if he could afford the hotel’s rates.

“May I help you?” she asked in a neutral tone.

“I’m here to see one of your guests, Davis Rogers.”

“Mr. Rogers is not in his room. May I give him a message?”

“Yes. Would you tell him Seth Hammond stopped by to see him about a matter concerning Rachel Davenport?”

He could tell by the flicker in her eyes that she recognized his name. His reputation preceded him.

“Where can he reach you?”

Seth pulled one of the business cards sitting in a silver holder on the desk. “May I?” At her nod of assent, he flipped the card over and wrote his cell phone number on the back.

The woman took the card. “I’ll give him the message.”

He walked slowly down the front porch steps and headed back to where he’d parked in a section of the clearing leveled off and covered with interlocked pavers to form a parking lot. Among the other cars parked there he spotted a shiny blue Mercedes with Virginia license plates.

Seth looked through the driver’s window. The car’s interior looked spotless, with nothing to identify the owner. If Ivy Hawkins weren’t on administrative leave for another week, Seth might have risked calling her to see if she could run down the plate number. She’d investigated the murders that had started this whole mess, after all. She’d damned near fallen victim to the killer herself. She might be persuaded.

But her partner, Antoine Parsons, had no reason to listen to anything Seth had to say. And what would it matter, really? Seth already knew Davis was staying at Sequoyah House. Though if the car with the Virginia plates was his, it did raise the question—if he wasn’t in his room, and he wasn’t in his car, where exactly was he?

As he headed back toward the Charger through the cold rain, a ringing sound stopped him midstep. It seemed faint, as if it was coming from a small distance away, but he didn’t see anyone around.

He followed the sound to a patch of dense oak leaf hydrangea bushes growing wild at the edge of the tree line. The cream-colored blossoms had started to fade with the onset of colder weather, but the leaves were thick enough to force Seth to crouch to locate the phone by the fourth ring. It lay faceup on the ground.

Seth picked up the phone and pressed the answer button. “Hello?” he said, expecting the voice on the other end to belong to the phone’s owner, calling to locate his missing phone.

The last thing he expected was to hear Rachel Dav-enport’s voice. “Davis?”

Seth’s gaze slid across the parking lot to the car with the Virginia plates. His chest tightened.

“Davis?” Rachel repeated.

“It’s not Davis,” he answered slowly. “It’s Seth Hammond.”

She was silent for a moment. “This is the number Davis Rogers left on my cell phone. Where is he? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I heard the phone ringing and answered, figuring the owner might be looking for his phone.”

“Where are you?”

“Outside Sequoyah House.” He pushed to his feet and started moving slowly down the line of bushes, looking through the thick foliage for something he desperately hoped he wouldn’t find.

“What are you doing there?” She couldn’t keep the suspicion from her tone, and he couldn’t exactly blame her.

“I went and talked to Joe Breslin at Smoky Joe’s Sa-loon. He remembered seeing you there with a man last night. So he looked up the man’s credit card receipt and got a name for me.”

“I was at Smoky Joe’s with Davis?” She sounded skeptical. “That is definitely not his kind of place.”

“Maybe it’s yours,” he suggested, remembering her sing-along with the bluegrass CD.

“Did you talk to Davis?”

“The clerk said he wasn’t in his room, so I left him a message to call me.” He paused as he caught sight of something dark behind one of the bushes. “I used your name. Hope you don’t mind.” He hunkered down next to the bush and carefully pushed aside the leaves to see what lay behind.

His heart sank to his toes.

Curled up in the fetal position, covered in blood and bruises, lay a man. Seth couldn’t tell if he was breathing. “Rachel, I have to go. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

He disconnected the call and put the cell phone in his jacket pocket. The tightly packed underbrush forced him to crawl through the narrow spaces between the bushes to get back to where the man lay with his back against the trunk of a birch tree. He’d been beaten, and badly. His face was misshapen with broken bones, his eyes purple and swollen shut. Blood drenched the front of his shirt, making it hard to tell what color it had been originally. One of his legs lay at an unnatural angle, suggesting a break or a dislocation.

Seth touched the man’s throat and found a faint pulse. He didn’t know what Davis Rogers looked like, but the proximity of the battered man and the discarded cell phone suggested a connection. He backed out of the bushes, reaching into his pocket for his own cell phone to dial 911.

But before his fingers cleared his pocket, something hit him hard against the back of the neck, slamming him forward into the bushes. His forehead cracked against the trunk of the birch tree, the blow filling his vision with dozens of exploding, colorful spots.

A second blow caught him near the small of his back, over his left kidney, shooting fire through his side. That was a kick, he realized with the last vestige of sense remaining in his aching head.

Then a hard knock to the back of his head turned out the lights.

AFTER TEN MINUTES had passed without a call back from Seth, Rachel’s worry level hit the stratosphere. There had been something in his tone when he’d rung off that had kept her stomach in knots ever since.

He’d sounded…grim. As if he’d just made a gruesome discovery.

Given the fact that he’d answered Davis’s phone a few seconds earlier, Rachel wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he’d found.

What if something bad had happened to Davis? He’d been her first real boyfriend, the first man she’d ever slept with. The first man she’d ever loved, even if it had ultimately been a doomed sort of love.

She might not be in love with him anymore, but she still cared. And if Seth’s tone of voice meant anything—

Forget waiting. She was tired of waiting. Seth had said he was at Sequoyah House. The bed-and-breakfast was five minutes away.

She grabbed her car keys and headed for the door. If she wanted to know what was going on, she could damned well find out for herself.

EVERYTHING ON SETH’S body seemed to hurt, but not enough to suggest he was on the verge of dying. He opened his eyes carefully and found himself gazing up into a rain-dark sky. He was drenched and cold, and his head felt as if he’d spent the past few hours banging it against a wall.

He lifted his legs one at a time and decided they were still in decent working order, though he felt a mild shooting pain in his side when he moved. Both arms appeared intact, though there was fresh blood on one arm. No sign of a cut beneath the red drops, so he guessed the blood had come from another part of his body.

He couldn’t breathe through his nose. When he lifted his hand to his face, he learned why. Blood stained his fingers, and his nose felt sore to the touch. He forced himself to sit up, groaning softly at the effort, and looked around him.

He was in the woods, though there was a break in the trees to his right, revealing the corner of a large clapboard house. Sequoyah House, he thought, the memory accompanied by no small amount of pain.

Some of his memories seemed to be missing. He knew who he was. He knew what day it was, unless he’d been out longer than he thought. He knew what he’d been doing earlier that day—he’d been hoping to talk to Rachel Davenport’s old friend Davis Rogers. But Rogers hadn’t been in his room, so Seth had given the desk clerk a message for Rachel’s friend and left the bed-and-breakfast.