Blood on Copperhead Trail

Doyle found his gaze traveling back to Laney Hanvey’s huddled figure. He left his detectives discussing the case and crossed to where she stood.

She looked up at him, fear bright in her eyes. “Chief.”

“It’s not your sister.”

A visible shudder of relief rippled through her, but the fear in her eyes didn’t go away. “One of the Adderly girls?”

“Detective Hawkins says it’s Missy Adderly.”

Laney lifted one hand to her mouth, horror darkening her eyes. “God.”

“Your sister was hiking up here with the Adderly sisters this weekend?”

Laney nodded slowly, dropping her hand. “They left Friday night to go hiking and camping. My mother said Janelle and the girls had planned to be back home first thing this morning so Jannie and Missy could get to school on time.” Her throat bobbed nervously. “Jannie’s senior year. She was so excited about graduating and going off to college.”

“She’s a good student?” he asked carefully.

Laney’s gaze had drifted toward the clump of detectives surrounding the body. It snapped back to meet Doyle’s. “A very good student. A good girl.” Her lips twisted wryly as she said the words. “I know that’s what most families say about their kids, but in this case, it’s true. Janelle’s a good girl. She’s never given my mother any trouble. Ever.”

There’s always a first time, Doyle thought. And a good girl on the cusp of leaving home and seeing the world was ripe for it.

“Was it an accident?” There was dreadful hope in Laney’s voice. Doyle felt sick about having to dash it.

“No.”

She released a long sigh, her breath swirling through the cold air in a wispy cloud of condensation. “Then you may have three victims, not just one.”

He nodded, hating the fear in her eyes but knowing he would be doing her no favors to give her false hope. “We’ve already called in local trackers to start looking around for the other girls.”

“I called her cell phone. Back at the diner. Someone answered but didn’t speak.” Laney hugged herself more tightly.

Doyle felt the unexpected urge to wrap his own arms around her, to help her hold herself together. “Could it have been your sister on the other end?”

“I want to believe it could,” she admitted, once again dragging her straying gaze away from the body and back to him. “But I don’t think it was.”

“Did you hear anything at all?”

“Breathing, I think. The sound of rustling, like the wind through dead leaves. Nothing else. Then the call cut off.”

“Anything that might give us an idea of a location?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think.”

“It’s okay.” He put his hand on her shoulder, felt the nervous ripple of her body beneath his touch. She was like a skittish colt, all fear and nerves.

He knew exactly what that kind of terror felt like.

“No, it’s not.” She shook off his hand and visibly straightened her spine, her chin coming up to stab the cold air. “I know the clock is ticking.”

Tough lady, he thought. “You said you heard rustling. What about birds? Did you hear any birds?”

Her eyes narrowed, her focus shifting inward. “No, I didn’t hear any birds.”

“What about the breathing? Could you tell whether it was a man or a woman?”

“Man,” she answered, her gaze focusing on his face again. “He didn’t vocalize, exactly, but there was a masculine quality to his breathing. I don’t know how to explain it—”

“Was he breathing regularly? Slow? Fast?”

“Fast,” she answered. “I think that’s what was so creepy about it. He was almost panting.”

Panting could mean a lot of things, Doyle reminded himself as a cold draft slid beneath the collar of his jacket, sending chill bumps down his back. It could have been a hiker who wasn’t in good shape. Might not have been anyone connected to this murder or the girls’ disappearance, for that matter. Maybe someone had found the phone, answered the ring but was too out of breath to speak.

Or maybe he was breathing hard because he’d just chased down three teenage girls like the predator he was.

He tried not to telegraph his grim thoughts to Laney Hanvey, but she was no fool. She didn’t need his help imagining the worst.

“She’s not alive, is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“But the odds are—”

“I’m not a gambler,” he said firmly. “I don’t deal with odds. I deal with facts. And the facts are, we have only one body so far.”

“Who’s out looking for the other girls?”

At the moment, he had to admit, no one was. It took time to form a search party. “We’ve put out the call to nearby agencies. The county boys, the park patrol, Blount and Sevier County agencies. They’re going to lend us officers for a search.”

“That’s not soon enough.” Laney turned and started hiking around the perimeter of the crime-scene tape, heading up the trail.

Doyle looked back at the crime scene and saw Ivy Hawkins looking at him, her brow furrowed. She gave a nod toward Laney, as if to say she and Parsons had the crime scene covered.

He was the chief of police now, not another investigator. While Bitterwood might be a small force, he didn’t need to micromanage his detectives. They’d already proved they could do a good job—he’d familiarized himself with their work before he took the job.

Meanwhile, he had a public-relations problem stalking up the mountain while he waffled about leaving a crime scene that was clearly under control.

He ducked under the crime-scene tape and headed up the mountain after Laney Hanvey.

* * *

“I’MNOTGOINGto be handled out of looking for my sister,” Laney growled as she heard footsteps catching up behind her on the hiking trail.

“I’m just here to help.”

She faltered to a stop, turning to look at Doyle Massey. He wasn’t exactly struggling to keep up with her—life on the beach had clearly kept him in pretty good shape. But he was out of his element.

She’d grown up in these mountains. Her mother had always joked she was half mountain goat. She knew these hills as well as she knew her own soul. “You’ll slow me down.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing.”

She glared at him, her rising terror looking for a target. “My sister is out here somewhere and I’m going to find her.”

The look Doyle gave her was full of pity. The urge to slap that expression off his face was so strong she had to clench her hands. “You’re rushing off alone into the woods where a man with a gun has just committed a murder.”

“A gun?” She couldn’t stop her gaze from slanting toward the crime scene. “She was shot?”

“Two rounds to the back of the head.”

She closed her eyes, the remains of the cucumber sandwich she’d eaten at Sequoyah House rising in her throat. She stumbled a few feet away from Doyle Massey and gave up fighting the nausea.

After her stomach was empty, she crouched in the underbrush, battling dry heaves and giving in to the hot tears burning her eyes. The heat of Massey’s hand on her back was comforting, even though she was embarrassed by her display.

“I will help you search,” he said in a low, gentle tone. “But I want you to take a minute to just breathe and think. Okay? I want you to think about your sister and where you think she’d go. Do you know?”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue to wipe her mouth. Before she’d finished, Massey’s hand extended in front of her eyes, holding out a roll of breath mints.

“Thank you,” she said, taking one.

“I understand you don’t live here in Bitterwood.”

She looked up at him. “I live in Barrowville. It’s about ten minutes away. But I grew up here. I know this mountain.”

“But do you know where your sister and her friends would go up here?”

“I called my mother on the drive here. She said Jannie and the others were planning to keep to the trail so they could bunk down in the shelters. They’re sort of like the shelters you find on the Appalachian Trail—not as nice, but they serve the same basic purpose.” She waved her hand toward the trail shelter a half mile up the trail, frustrated by all the talking. “Has anyone looked up there?”

“Not yet.” He laid his hand on her back, the heat of his touch warming her through her clothes. She wanted to be annoyed by his presumptuousness, but the truth was, she found his touch comforting, to the point that she had to squelch the urge to throw herself into his arms and let her pent-up tears flow.

But she had to keep her head. Her mother was already a basket case with fear for her daughter. Someone in the family needed to stay in control.

“Ivy called in the missing-person report on Jannie.” She stepped away from his touch, straightening her slumping spine. “Has anyone contacted the Adderlys?”

The chief looked back at the crime scene. “No. I guess I should be the one to do it.”

“No,” she said firmly. “You’re new here. You’re a stranger. Let one of the others do it. Craig Bolen and Dave Adderly are old friends.”

Massey’s green eyes narrowed. “Bolen...”

“Your new captain of detectives,” she said.

“I knew that.” He looked a little sheepish. “I’ll call him, let him know what’s up.” He pulled out his cell phone.

“You probably can’t get a signal on that,” she warned. “Go tell Ivy to call it in on her radio.”

His lips quirked slightly as he put away his phone and walked back down the trail to the crime scene. He turned to look at her a couple of times, as if to make sure she wasn’t taking advantage of his distraction to hare off on her own.

The idea was tempting, since she could almost hear the minutes ticking away in her head. She hadn’t gotten a good look at Missy’s body, but she’d seen enough of the blood to know that the wounds were relatively fresh. Even taking the cold weather into account, the murder couldn’t have happened much earlier than the night before, and more likely that morning.

Which meant there might be time left, still, to find the other girls alive.

“Bolen’s going to go talk to the Adderlys.” Massey returned, looking grim. “He was pretty broken up about it when I gave him the news.”

“He’s seen the girls grow up. Everyone here did.” She glanced at the grim faces of the detectives and uniformed cops preserving the crime scene as they waited for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation crime-scene unit to arrive. “This place isn’t like big cities. Nobody much has the stomach for whistling through the graveyard here. Not when you know all the bodies.”

“I’m not from a big city,” he said quietly. “Terrebonne’s not much more than a dot on the Gulf Coast map.”

“So this is a lateral move for you?” she asked as they started back up the trail, trying to distract herself from what she feared she’d find ahead.

“No, it’s upward. I was just a deputy investigator on the county sheriff’s squad down there. Here, I’m the top guy.” He didn’t sound as if he felt on top of anything. She slanted a look his way and found him frowning as he gazed up the wooded trail. She followed his gaze but saw nothing strange.

“What’s wrong?”

His eyes narrowed. “I don’t know. I thought—” He shook his head. “Probably a squirrel.”

She caught his arm when he started to move forward, shaking her head when he started to speak. Behind her, she could still hear the faint murmur of voices around the crime scene, but ahead, there was nothing but the cold breeze rattling the lingering dead leaves in the trees.

“No birdsong.” She let go of his arm.

“Should there be?”

She nodded. “Sparrows, wrens, crows, jays—they should be busy in the trees up here.”

“Something’s spooked them?”

She nodded, her chest aching with dread. All the old tales she’d heard all her life about haints and witches in the hills seemed childish and benign compared to the reality of what might lie ahead of them on the trail. But she couldn’t turn back.

If there was a chance Jannie was still alive, time was the enemy.

“Let’s go,” she said. “We have to chance it.”

“I’m not going to run into a pissed-off bear out there, am I?”

She could tell from the tone of his voice that he was trying to distract her from her worries. “It’s not the bears that scare me.”

“You don’t have to go now. We can wait for a bigger search party.”

She looked him over, head to foot, gauging his mettle. His gaze met hers steadily, a hint of humor glinting in his eyes as if he knew exactly what she was doing. Physically, there was little doubt he could keep up with her pace on the trail, at least for a while. He looked fit, well built and healthy. And she wasn’t in top form, having lived in the lowlands for several years, not hiking regularly.

But did he have the internal fortitude to handle life in the hills? Outsiders weren’t always welcomed with open arms, especially by the criminal class he’d be dealing with. Most of the people were good-hearted folks just trying to make a living and love their families, but there were enclaves where life was brutal and cruel. Places where children were commodities, women could be either monsters or chattel and men wallowed in the basest sort of venality.

She supposed that was true of most places, if you scratched deep enough beneath the surface of civilization, but here in the hills, there were plenty of places nobody cared to go, places where evil could thrive without the disinfectant of sunlight. It took a tough man to uphold the law in these parts.

It remained to be seen if Doyle Massey was tough enough.

“You want to wait?” she asked.

“No.” He gave a nod toward the trail. “You’re the native. Lead the way.”

Copperhead Ridge couldn’t compete with the higher ridges in the Smokies in terms of altitude, but it was far enough above sea level that the higher they climbed, the thinner the air became. Laney was used to it, but she could see that Doyle, who’d probably lived at sea level his whole life, was finding the going harder than he’d expected.

Reaching the first of a handful of public shelters through the trees ahead, she was glad for an excuse to stop. She’d grabbed some bottled waters from the diner when she and Ivy left, an old habit she’d formed years ago when heading into the mountains. She’d stowed them in the backpack she kept in her car and had brought with her up the mountain.

Now she dug the waters from the pack and handed a bottle to Doyle as they reached the shelter. He took the water gratefully, unscrewing the top and taking a long swig as he wandered over to the wooden pedestal supporting the box with the trail log.

She left him to it, walking around the side of the shelter to the open front.

What she saw inside stole her breath.

“Laney?” Doyle’s voice was barely audible through the thunder of her pulse in her ears.

The shelter was still occupied. A woman lay facedown over a rolled-up thermal sleeping bag, blood staining her down jacket and the flannel of the bag, as well as the leaves below. Laney recognized the sleeping bag. She’d given it to her sister for Christmas.

Janelle.

The paralysis in Laney’s limbs released, and she stumbled forward to where her sister lay, her heart hammering a cadence of dread.

Please be breathing please be breathing please be breathing.

She felt a slow but steady pulse when she touched her fingers to her sister’s bloodstained throat.

“Laney?” Doyle’s voice was in her ear, the warmth of his body enveloping her like a hug.

“It’s Janelle,” she said. “She’s still alive.”

“That’s a lot of blood,” Doyle said doubtfully. He reached out and checked her pulse himself, a puzzled look on his face.

“She’s been shot, hasn’t she?” Laney ran her hands lightly over her sister’s still body, looking for other injuries. But all the blood seemed to be coming from a long furrow that snaked a gory path across the back of her sister’s head.

“Not sure,” he answered succinctly, pulling out his cell phone.

“Can you get a signal?” she asked doubtfully, wondering how quickly she could run down the mountain for help.

“It’s low, but let’s give it a try.” He dialed 911. “If I get through, what should I tell the dispatcher?”

“Tell them it’s the first shelter on Copperhead Mountain on the southern end.” Laney’s hands shook a little as she gently pushed the hair away from her sister’s face. Janelle’s expression was peaceful, as if she were only sleeping. But even though she was still alive, there was a hell of a lot of damage a bullet could do to a brain. If even a piece of shrapnel made it through her skull—

“They’re on the way.” Doyle put his hand on her shoulder.

But they couldn’t be fast about it, Laney knew. Mountain rescues were tests of patience, and a victim’s endurance.

“Hang in there, Jannie.” She looked at Doyle. “Do you think it’s safe to move this bedroll out from under her? We need to cover her up. It’s freezing out here, and she could already be going into shock.”

She saw a brief flash of reluctance in Doyle’s expression before he nodded, helping her ease the roll out from beneath Janelle. She unzipped the roll, trying not to spill off any of the collected blood. The outside of the sleeping bag was water-resistant, so she didn’t have much luck.

“Sorry to ruin your crime scene,” she muttered.

“Life comes first.” He sounded distracted.

She looked up to find him peering at a corner of something sticking out from under the edge of the bedroll. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and grasped the corner, tugging the object free.

It was a photograph, Laney saw, partially stained by her sister’s blood. But what she could still see of the photograph sent ice rattling through her veins.

The photo showed Janelle and her two companions, lying right here in this very shelter, fast asleep.

Doyle turned the photograph over to the blank side. Only it wasn’t blank. There were three words written there in blocky marker.

Good night, princesses.

Chapter Three

Doyle hated hospitals. He’d visited his share of them over the years, both as a cop and a patient. He hated the mysterious beeps and dings, the clatter of gurney wheels rolling across scuffed linoleum floors, the antiseptic smells and the haggard faces of both the sick and the waiting.

He hated how quickly everything could go to hell.

He sat a small distance from Laney Hanvey and her mother, Alice, a woman in her late fifties who, at the moment, looked a decade older. Mrs. Hanvey looked distraught and guilty as hell.

“I shouldn’t have let her go camping. It was so stupid of me.”

Laney squeezed her mother’s hand. “You don’t want to stifle her. Not when she’s made so much progress.”

Doyle looked at her with narrowed eyes, wondering what she meant. But before he’d had a chance to form a theory, the door to the waiting room opened and a man in green surgical scrubs entered, looking serious but not particularly grim.

“Mrs. Hanvey?” he greeted Laney’s mother, who had stood at his entrance. “I’m Dr. Bedford. I’ve been taking care of Janelle in the E.R. The good news is, she’s awake and relatively alert, but she’s sustained a concussion, and given her medical history, we’re going to want to be very careful with that.”

Doyle looked from the doctor’s face to Laney’s, more curious than before.

“So the bullet didn’t enter her brain?” Laney’s question made her mother visibly flinch.

“The titanium plate deflected the path of the bullet. It made a bit of a mess in the soft tissue at the base of her skull, but it missed anything vital. We did have to shave a long patch of her hair. She wasn’t very happy to hear that,” Dr. Bedford added with a rueful smile, making Laney and her mother smile, as well.

Doyle couldn’t keep silent any longer. “Does she remember what happened to her?”

The doctor looked startled by his question. “You are—?”

“Doyle Massey. Bitterwood chief of police. The attack on Ms. Hanvey took place in my jurisdiction.”

The doctor gave him a thoughtful look. “She remembers hiking, but beyond that, everything’s pretty fuzzy.” He turned back to Laney and her mother. “She keeps asking about her two friends, but all we could tell her is that they weren’t with her when she was brought in. Just be warned, she’s in the repetitive stage of a concussion, so she may ask you that question or another several times without remembering you’ve already answered her.”

“Were you able to retrieve a bullet?” Doyle asked.

“Actually, yes,” Dr. Bedford answered. “The TBI has already put in a request for it. They’re sending a courier.”

“How soon do you think she can go home?” Mrs. Hanvey asked.

“Because of her medical history and the trauma of being shot, I’d really like to keep her here at least a couple of days. Even beyond her concussion, the path of the bullet wound is pretty extensive and we’re going to work hard to prevent infection. We’ll see how her injuries respond to treatment and make a decision from there.”

“Can we see her?”

“She’s probably on her way up to her room. Ask the nurse at the desk—she’ll tell you where you can find her.”

Doyle followed Laney and her mother out of the waiting room behind the doctor, trying to stay back enough to avoid Laney’s attention.

He should have known better.

Laney whipped around to face him as her mother walked on to the nurse’s station. “You’re not seriously following us into her room?”

“I need to talk to her about what happened on the mountain.”

“You heard the doctor. She doesn’t remember.”

“Yet.”

Laney’s lips thinned with anger. “I know it’s important to talk to her. But can’t you give us a few minutes alone with her? When we came here this morning, we weren’t sure we were ever going to see her alive again.”

Old pain nudged at Doyle’s conscience. “I know. I’m sorry and I’m very happy and relieved that the news is good.”

Laney’s eyes softened. “Thank you.”

“But there’s still a girl unaccounted for. And anything your sister can remember may be important. Including what happened before they were attacked.”

Laney glanced back at her mother, who was still talking to the desk nurse. She lowered her voice. “I don’t think we’ll find Joy Adderly alive. Do you?”

He didn’t. But he hadn’t expected to find Janelle alive, either. Not after seeing Missy Adderly’s body in the leaves off the mountain trail.

“I think we have to proceed as if she’s still alive and needs our help,” he said finally. “Don’t you?”

She looked at him, guilt in her clear blue eyes. “Yes. Of course.”

He immediately felt bad for pushing her. Her priority had to be her sister, not his case. “Look, I need to make some calls. I’ll give you and your mother some time alone with your sister if you’ll promise you’ll come get me in an hour to ask her a few questions. Just do me a favor, okay?”

“What’s that?”

“Try not to talk about what happened up on the mountain. Just talk about anything else. I don’t want to contaminate her memories before I get a chance to talk to her.”

“Okay.” She reached across the space between them, closing her hand over his forearm. “Thank you.”

He watched her walk to the elevator with her arm around her mother’s waist. As they entered and turned to face the doors, she graced him with a slight smile that made his chest tighten.

The doors closed, and he felt palpably alone.

Shaking it off, he walked back to the waiting room and called the police station first. His executive assistant was a tall reed of a woman with steel-gray hair and sharp blue eyes named Ellen Flatley. Apparently she’d been assistant to two chiefs of police before him and would probably outlast him, as well. She saw the police station as her own personal territory and had a tendency to guard it like a high-strung German shepherd.

“There are two teams of eight searchers each on the mountains, but it’s a lot of territory and slow going.” She answered his query in a tone of voice that suggested he should have known these facts already. “Plus, the sun will be going down soon, and they’ll have to stop the search. The coroner’s picked up poor Missy Adderly’s body, God rest her soul. He said he’s going to call in the state lab to handle the postmortem, like you asked.”