Blood on Copperhead Trail

She didn’t sound as if she approved of that decision, either, but he couldn’t help that. Bitterwood had hired him to make those kinds of decisions. They’d hired Ellen to help him execute those decisions, not make them for him.

“Thank you, Ellen.”

Her frosty silence on the other end of the phone told him he’d apparently made another breach of police-department etiquette.

“Can you give me the cell numbers for Detectives Hawkins and Parsons?” he asked.

She rattled off the numbers quickly, and he punched them into the phone’s memory. “Will there be anything else, Chief Massey?”

“Yes, one more thing. Do you know if Bolen’s been able to reach the Adderly family with the news about Missy?”

“He hasn’t called in, but he headed over there about fifteen minutes ago, so I imagine he’s told them by now.” Her voice softened with her next question. “Chief, is there anything new on the other girl, Joy?”

“No, not yet. You’ll probably hear as soon as I do, if not sooner. If you do hear anything, please let me know at once.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Flatley, for your help.”

There was a hint of a smile in her voice when she answered. “Just doing my job. Do you want me to forward your calls to your cell?”

“No, just take messages, unless it’s urgent.”

He ended the call, then dialed Ivy Hawkins’s number.

She answered on the second ring, the connection spotty. “Hawkins.”

“This is Massey. Catch me up.”

“TBI crime-scene unit finally arrived. I sent some of them over to the trail shelter to get what they could find there, too. Parsons is with that crew. I’m sticking with the original scene, helping out with the grid search. But we’re running out of daylight.” Her voice tightened. “What’s the news on Janelle Hanvey?”

“Better than we had a right to hope for.” He outlined what the doctor had told them, keeping it vague in deference to the girl’s privacy rights. “She’s awake and the family’s with her.”

“I can be in Knoxville in about thirty minutes if you’d like me to question the girl.”

“I can handle it.”

There was a thick pause on the other end of the line, reminding him of the frosty reception he’d gotten from Ellen Flatley earlier. “Okay.”

“Is there a problem, Hawkins?”

“Permission to speak freely, sir?”

He grinned at the phone. “Please.”

“The job of chief of police is primarily a political position. You supervise, schmooze, shake hands with the town bigwigs and basically present a nice, trustworthy face for the public. Witness interviews, though—”

“We’re not a big city. We all have to wear different hats. The town council made that clear when they hired me. And how often do you get two violent-crime victims in one day?”

“Recently? More often than I like,” she answered drily. “But, understood, sir. We’re spread thin by this case already.”

“Call me at this number if you need me.” Ending the call, he looked at the round-faced clock on the waiting-room wall. After five already. But still thirty minutes before he could go to Janelle Hanvey’s hospital room and ask the questions drumming a restless rhythm in his brain.

Patience, he feared, was not one of his virtues.

* * *

“WHATABOUT MISSYand Joy? Where are they?”

Laney squeezed her sister’s hand gently. “I don’t know, sweetie.” She kept herself from exchanging looks with her mother, knowing that Janelle was bright enough to see the tension between them, even in her concussed state. “How about you? Head still hurting?”

Janelle smiled a loopy smile. “Not so much. The doctor said they stuck me with a local anesthetic, so the wound won’t be bothering me for a while.”

“Good.”

Janelle drifted off for a few minutes, just long enough for Laney to give her mother a look of relief. Then she stirred again and asked, for the third time since Laney had entered the room, “Laney, where are Missy and Joy?”

She squeezed Janelle’s hand again and repeated, “I don’t know, sweetie.”

There was a knock on the hospital-room door. Laney’s mother went to answer it. She came back and touched Laney’s shoulder. “Chief Massey would like to talk to you outside.”

She traded places with her mother and opened the hospital-room door to find Doyle Massey leaning against the corridor wall. He didn’t change position when he saw her, just turned his head and flashed her a toothy smile. “How’s your sister doin’?”

Damn, but he could turn on the charm when he wanted to. “As well as can be expected, I think. She’s still repeating herself a lot, but the doctor said that should pass soon.”

“Has she said anything about what happened up there?”

Laney shook her head. “But she keeps asking about her friends. All we’ve told her so far is that we don’t know where they are.”

Doyle pushed away from the wall, turning to face her. He touched her arm lightly. “The coroner’s picked up Missy Adderly’s body and called in the state lab to conduct the postmortem.”

“Has the family been contacted?”

“My assistant said Craig Bolen left to meet with them about forty-five minutes ago. So I’m sure they know by now.”

She shook her head, feeling sick. “Those poor people.”

His gaze slid toward the door of her sister’s hospital room. “She has a plate in her head?”

“Car accident when she was ten. It was bad.” Laney tugged her sweater more tightly around her, as if she could ward off the memories as easily as she could thwart a chill. But she couldn’t, of course. The memories of those terrible days would never go away. “The accident killed our brother.” She released a long sigh.

“I’m sorry.”

She looked up at him, seeing real sympathy in his eyes, not just the perfunctory kind. “I was a sophomore in college. I skipped a couple of semesters so I could come back home and help my mom deal with everything. Our dad had passed away from cancer only a year earlier. And then, so suddenly, Bradley was dead and Jannie was just hanging on by a thread—”

“Bradley was your brother?”

She nodded. “He was seventeen. Jannie had a softball game and Mama was working, so Bradley said he’d take her. He was a good driver. The police say there wasn’t anything he could have done. The other driver was wasted, slammed right through an intersection and T-boned Bradley’s truck. He was killed instantly, and Jannie had a depressed skull fracture. She had to relearn everything. Put her behind in school.”

“How far behind?”

“Three years. Jannie’s twenty. But she’s only seventeen in terms of her maturity and mental age. There were a few years when we didn’t think she’d ever get that far, but the doctors say she should develop normally enough from here on.” She glanced back at the closed door. “Unless this sets her back even more.”

“How does she seem?”

“Like herself,” Laney admitted. “A little disoriented, but normal enough.”

Doyle touched her arm again. It seemed to be a habit with him, a way to connect to the person he was talking to. Unfortunately, it seemed to be having a completely disarming effect on her. She’d just told him more about her family than she’d told anyone in ages, including the people she’d worked with now for almost five years.

Maybe he was a better cop than she had realized.

“You think it’s okay for me to go in there and talk to your sister now?” His hand made one more light sweep down her arm before dropping to his side.

“I think so. They’re not giving her anything like a sedative—they don’t want her to sleep much while they’re observing her for the concussion.”

He looked toward the door. “Did the doctors tell you whether or not it would be okay to tell her the truth about Missy Adderly?”

Laney recoiled at the thought. “They didn’t say, but—”

“I know you want to protect her, especially now. And if we didn’t have a missing girl out there somewhere—”

“I know.” She’d experienced only an hour’s worth of sick worry about her sister’s whereabouts. The Adderlys were still in that hell, made worse by knowing that one of their girls was dead. “Okay. But I want to be in there with you when you talk to her. I’m pretty sure my mother will want to be there, too.”

“Fine. But you have to let me ask her the hard questions. You know we’re working with a ticking clock.”

She knew. If there was any chance Joy Adderly was still alive, time was critical.

Her sister was awake when they entered the hospital room. Laney introduced Doyle to Janelle, explaining he was there to ask her some questions. Her mother looked worried, but Janelle looked almost relieved. “Do you know where Joy and Missy are?”

Doyle pulled up the chair Laney had vacated, getting down to Janelle’s eye level. “I know where Missy is, but it’s bad news.”

Janelle’s eyes struggled to focus on his face. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I’m sorry. We found Missy this morning, shortly before we found you.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Was she shot like I was?”

He nodded, his expression gentle with compassion and something else, some dark, private sadness hovering behind his green eyes.

Only the sound of Janelle’s soft sniffles dragged Laney’s gaze away from the sudden mystery the new chief posed. Laney grabbed a couple of tissues from the box the hospital supplied and handed them to her sister. Janelle wiped her eyes and cleared her throat. “What about Joy?”

“We haven’t found Joy yet.”

“You think she’s alive?” Hope trembled in Janelle’s soft voice.

“We hope she is,” he answered. “We’re looking for her. We have searchers up on the mountain right now.”

“I wish I could remember.” Janelle put her hand to her head. “It’s like I have bubbles in my head that keep popping and fizzing. It’s all I can hear or see.”

Laney crossed to her sister’s side and stroked her hair away from her face. “It’s the concussion, baby. It’ll clear up soon.”

“What’s the last thing you do remember?” Doyle asked.

“We were going hiking. It was Joy’s twenty-first birthday, and that’s how she wanted to celebrate.” Janelle’s pale lips curved in a faint smile. “That’s so Joy. She loves the mountains more than anything. She just got hired by the Ridge County Tourism Board—did you know that? She’s supposed to start work next Monday. If anyone can turn us into a tourism mecca, it’s Joy.”

Anger, fear and grief braided through the center of Laney’s chest.

“Do you remember reaching the first shelter on the mountain?” Doyle asked.

“Yeah. Joy wanted to camp out in the open, but Missy and I—” Her voice broke, but she cleared her throat and continued. “Missy and I told her it was too cold to sleep out in the open. So we stopped at the shelter.”

“Did you see anyone on the mountain before then? Other hikers?”

Janelle’s brow creased. “I don’t know. I remember reaching the shelter. I remember going to bed—that new sleeping bag Laney got me for Christmas was so warm, it was almost like being in my own bed.” She shot a grin at Laney, but it faded as fast as it had appeared. “I think I was the first one to fall asleep.”

“What about on the hike up—do you remember meeting anyone?”

“I think there might have been someone....” Janelle worried with the IV tube, wincing as it tugged the cannula in the back of her hand. “I can’t remember. I can’t.” She closed her eyes, her forehead still wrinkled.

“Can’t we let her rest?” Alice Hanvey had been quiet during Doyle’s questioning, but she rose now, a mother tiger pouncing to her cub’s defense.

“She can’t remember right now,” Laney agreed, putting herself in the narrow space between Doyle and her sister’s hospital bed. She lowered her voice. “In ten minutes, she’ll probably be asking us where Missy and Joy are, and we’re going to have to tell her the truth this time. I wish she could help you. I promise you, I do. But she can’t. Not yet.”

“Maybe not ever,” Alice warned in a half whisper. “The last time she had a head injury, she lost most of her memories. She had to relearn almost everything. We still don’t know how much damage the concussion’s going to do.”

“It was worth a shot.” Doyle stood, pinning Laney between his lean, hard body and the hospital bed. His eyebrows quirked as she took a swift breath.

He smelled impossibly good, given that he’d just hiked up and down a mountain. She herself felt rumpled and sweaty, but he smelled like the beach on a sunny day, all fresh ocean breezes and a hint of sunscreen.

“Join me outside a sec?” He cupped her elbow, nudging her toward the door.

“Ray,” Janelle murmured from the hospital bed.

Doyle froze, his hand still on Laney’s arm. “I’m sorry?”

Janelle’s eyes drifted open. “The guy we met. I can’t remember much about him, but he said his name was Ray.” Her eyes fluttered closed again.

Doyle stared at her in consternation, clearly tempted to wake her back up and ask more questions. Laney tugged his arm, pulling him with her toward the door. He followed, frustration evident in the fierce set of his features.

“Do you know anyone named Ray?” he asked outside the room.

“There are a few men named Ray around here, but she knows them all. Didn’t it sound as if she didn’t know this guy?”

He nodded slowly, looking unsatisfied. “I’ll run the information past my detectives. Maybe one of them will have an idea.”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking.” She glanced at the closed door to Janelle’s room and lowered her voice. “The doctors say once they get Janelle out of the danger zone with the concussion, they’ll probably start giving her pain medicine for the head wound, so I don’t know how helpful it’ll be for me to sit here at her side, hoping she tells us something solid we can use. I need to be doing something more active to help find Joy.”

“You want to join a search party?”

“I’m a good hiker. I know the mountains as well as anyone up there.”

“Good. Because I’m planning to join the search myself, and I don’t know a thing about these hills. I could use someone to show me the way.” He brushed his hand down her arm again, the touch almost familiar now. “But it won’t be tonight. They’ll shut down the search parties once the sun sets.”

“I can be ready at sunup.”

He smiled. “I’ll be there.”

Laney slipped back into the room, her heart catching as she saw her mother sitting with her head on Janelle’s leg, tears staining her cheeks.

She sat up quickly, giving Laney a sheepish smile. “My baby,” she said simply, fresh tears slipping down her cheeks.

Laney bent and gave her mother a fierce hug. “I’m going up the mountain to join the search for Joy in the morning, so I have to leave soon to get some sleep. Are you going to stay here tonight?”

Alice nodded, patting her cheek. “I’ll be fine. Go find that girl. The Adderlys have lost enough already, don’t you think?”

Laney kissed her mother’s damp cheek. “Take care of our girl.”

Remembering she’d driven her mother to the hospital, she pulled the car key from her key ring and handed it to Alice. “I’ll see if I can catch the chief and get a ride with him. If you need anything, take my car.”

Laney left her sister’s room and hurried down the corridor toward the elevator bank. Doyle was still there, she saw with surprise. “Chief, wait up.”

He turned to face her, a bleak look in his eyes. He was holding his phone with a tight-fingered grip.

Fear shot through her. “What’s wrong?”

“The searchers found another body.”

Chapter Four

Laney’s face blanched at his blunt words, and Doyle quickly closed his hand over her arm, bending to level his gaze with hers. “It wasn’t Joy Adderly. It’s a male, and it looks like he’s been up there awhile.”

He saw a flicker of relief in those baby blues, quickly eclipsed by grim curiosity. “How long?”

“Weeks at least.”

“Any ID?”

“Didn’t have any on him. The searchers have cordoned off the spot and one of my deputies is on the way up there.”

“There are only a couple of missing-persons cases outstanding in the county,” she said, looking less pale and more in charge. She would know, he realized, being part of the county prosecutor’s team.

“That part of the mountain is under Bitterwood’s jurisdiction,” he said firmly, in case she was thinking of starting a jurisdiction fight.

One side of her mouth curved. “I’m not sure the county sheriff will agree.”

“Bitterwood is still autonomous at the moment,” Doyle shot back, trying to keep his voice both light and firm. He didn’t want to antagonize her, but he didn’t want to let her walk all over him, either. Even though she had a way of getting under his skin without even seeming to try.

He’d always been a sucker for a pair of blue eyes and a Southern drawl. And her mountain twang was just different enough from the girls he’d known back home in south Alabama to add a hint of the exotic to her appeal. It was a potent combination, especially added to her obviously quick mind. He was going to have to be on his guard around Laney Hanvey.

The job ahead of him was difficult enough as it was. The last thing he could afford was another complication. Especially a complication who could cost him his job with one word to her bosses.

“I need to leave the car for my mother,” she told him as they stepped into the elevator together. “Think you could give me a ride?”

“To Barrowville?”

The look she sent blazing his way packed a punch. “To the crime scene.”

* * *

“YOU’RENOTACOP, you know.” Doyle sounded somewhere between frustrated and amused.

Laney kept her voice even and, she hoped, nonconfrontational. “The county government’s policies regarding public integrity investigations give me a great deal of leeway in police matters while your department is under scrutiny.”

“Even ride alongs under duress?”

“I’m not sure I’d term this ‘duress’—”

“You told me to shut up and drive,” he drawled.

“I did no such—” She stopped short when she spotted the slight curve of his mouth. “You’re a funny guy, Chief Massey. Real funny.”

He turned up that hint of a smile to full wattage. If she were a lesser woman, she might find herself utterly dazzled by that grin. “Here’s what I’ve learned about police work, Public Integrity Officer Hanvey. There ain’t much to smile about, so you have to create your own opportunities.”

He was right about one thing. There hadn’t been much to smile about since she’d returned to Bitterwood to look into police corruption. Maybe the county administrator was wrong to think she was the best person for the job. There just might be too much history between her and this town for her to ever be fully objective.

“Think this body belongs to that missing P.I. from Virginia?” Massey asked a moment later, his grin having faded with her silence.

She didn’t have to ask whom he meant. Peter Bell’s disappearance was all tangled up with the police-corruption case she was investigating. “Depends on how long the body’s been up there. Do you know?”

“At least a month, but probably not much more than three or four.”

She nodded. “That fits the timeline for Peter Bell’s disappearance. He was last seen in this area in late October of last year.”

“Shortly after he observed Wayne Cortland meeting with Paul Bailey.”

She slanted a look at him. “You know a lot about the Cortland case.”

He met her gaze with a quirked eyebrow. “You think I’d take this job without doing my homework?”

Actually, she had figured him as the sort of guy who avoided homework every chance he got. But maybe she’d assumed too much about him based on his outward appearance and his laid-back attitude.

The road ended at the trailhead about halfway up Copperhead Ridge. Doyle parked his truck and turned to look at her. “I’m not a mountain goat. So go easy on me. Get me safely up that mountain and back.”

She bit back a smile. “I’ll do what I can. But those sea-level lungs may have a little trouble with the change in altitude.”

At least he was appropriately dressed, in a fleece-lined weatherproof jacket and heavy-duty hiking boots. Her own attire was similar, as she’d changed clothes at Ledbetter’s Diner before she and Ivy headed up the mountain earlier that day. Her travel bag was still in her car in the hospital parking deck.

With nightfall, the temperatures on the mountain had plunged below freezing, making the hike up the ridge trail a headlong struggle into a biting wind. Up this high, the tendrils of mist that shrouded the peaks turned into a freezing fog that stung the skin and made eyes water. Laney tugged the collar of her jacket up to protect her throat and lower face, squinting through tears.

“Damn, it’s cold,” Doyle muttered.

“Just wait till it snows again.”

One of the search parties scouring the ridge had found the body about thirty yards east of the second trail shelter, about eight miles from where they’d found Missy Adderly’s body. Since Laney was the native, Doyle let her lead the way. Despite his occasional self-deprecating comments about the hike, he didn’t have any trouble keeping up, and his sea-level lungs seemed to be doing just fine at nearly five thousand feet. He seemed to be adapting quickly to his new surroundings.

They found some of the search-party members had remained on the mountain, huddled together under the shelter for warmth and a little respite from the freezing fog. Laney recognized a few of them, including Carol Brandywine and her husband, James, who ran a trail-riding stable. No horses out here tonight, Laney noted with grim amusement. The Brandywines wouldn’t subject their precious four-legged babies to conditions like these.

“Delilah and Antoine are with the body.” James pointed east, where blobs of light moved in the woods.

“Stay here if you like,” Doyle told Laney, giving the sleeve of her jacket a light tug—a variation on his arm-touching habit, she thought. “That body’s not likely to be pretty.”

“I’ve spent time on the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee,” she told him. “I’ve probably seen more bodies in various degrees of decay than you have.”

His eyebrows lifted slightly, but he didn’t try to talk her out of it when she fell into step with him as they headed toward the flashlight beams ahead. Halfway there, he murmured, “If I go all wobbly kneed at the sight of the body, promise you’ll catch me?”

She glanced at him and saw the smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. “You think I overstated my credentials a bit?”

He looked at her. “No. But it’s possible you’ve underestimated mine.”

“Ridley County’s not that big. And you weren’t even the sheriff. You were a deputy.”

“I was captain of investigations, with several years of experience as an investigator. I’m plenty qualified to lead a small-town department.”

On paper, perhaps. But did he have the temperament to run a police department that had already been rocked by scandal?

“So serious,” he murmured, as if reading her thoughts on her face. She tried to school her expressions to hide her musings, succeeding only in making him smile. “There are many ways to get things done, Public Integrity Officer Hanvey. Sometimes a smile is more useful than a frown.”

And now he was implying she was a grim dullard, she thought with a grimace as they reached the clump of underbrush where Antoine Parsons and fellow Bitterwood P.D. detective Delilah Hammond stood a few feet from a pair of TBI evidence technicians examining the remains.

The body was clearly that of a male and, except for a few signs of predation, was in remarkably good shape, given how long it must have been in the woods. “Temps up here have been pretty cold since October,” Delilah said when Doyle commented on it. “The TBI guys say the body’s fairly well preserved.”

“Looks like the only things that’ve been messing with the body were small carrion eaters like raccoons,” Antoine added. “Could’ve been worse if the black bears weren’t hibernating now.”