Blood on Copperhead Trail

Laney tamped down a shudder. She’d seen the kind of damage a black bear could do to a campsite. Her earlier bravado aside, she didn’t want to know what one could do to human remains.

“No ID on the body?”

“Won’t know for sure until the techs move him, but so far, no. No wallet, no watch, no jewelry, no nothing,” Delilah answered. She glanced up and did a double take when she spotted Laney.

“Hi, Dee,” Laney said with a smile, recognizing the look on the other woman’s face. That look that said, “Don’t I know you?” Delilah Hammond was five years older than Laney, and the last time they’d seen each other, Laney had been twelve years old, with a mouth full of braces and a pixie haircut. Delilah had been her idol, a smart, beautiful high school senior who’d volunteered to coach Laney’s softball team.

Then Delilah’s daddy had blown up the family home in a meth-lab explosion, burning Dee’s brother Seth and killing himself. Delilah had left town soon after to go to college somewhere in the East. She hadn’t been back to Bitterwood since, until she’d shown up a couple of months earlier and ended up taking a job on the Bitterwood detective squad.

“Laney Hanvey,” she supplied, smiling as recognition sparked in Delilah’s dark eyes. “Bitterwood Rebels—”

“Fight, fight, fight,” Delilah answered with a wide smile.

“You remembered.”

“How could I forget my star third baseman?”

“Third base, huh?” Doyle murmured, making it sound a little dirty. The fierce look she zinged his way triggered that half smirk again. But it disappeared quickly, and he transformed in an instant to the man in charge, shotgunning a series of questions at the two detectives.

In a few seconds, he’d gleaned a great deal of information about the body, from who had found it and whether or not they’d moved the body to the particulars of hair color, eye color and most likely cause of death.

“Defects in chest and head. Won’t know until autopsy, but I think they’ll turn out to be bullet holes,” Delilah answered.

“Does he match the description of Peter Bell?”

“At first blush, yes. The Virginia State Police have Bell’s dental records and DNA—his wife supplied both when she reported him missing. We should know one way or the other soon,” Antoine answered.

There was a photo of Bell on the missing-persons wall at the Ridge County Sheriff’s Department. Laney had seen it several times over the past few months. She stepped to the side, closer to where the busy evidence technicians worked methodically around the body, and tried to catch a glimpse.

Death was never pretty. Even the deceleration afforded by the colder temperatures up on the ridge hadn’t spared the body the ravages of decomposition. It was impossible to compare the photo of a smiling, handsome, very much alive Peter Bell to this corpse.

She hated to think about Bell’s wife looking at those remains and trying to recognize her husband in them.

As she stepped back toward the others, she felt the intensity of Doyle’s gaze before she even lifted her eyes to meet his. “Recognize him?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Well preserved is not the same as lifelike.”

“Do you think this death has anything to do with Missy Adderly’s murder?” Antoine asked.

“I don’t see how,” Delilah answered. “If this is Peter Bell, he was probably killed because he caught Cortland conspiring with Bailey on video and someone found out about it.”

Bell had been investigating lumberyard owner Wayne Cortland, a suspect in a drug trafficking and money laundering case the U.S. Attorney’s office in Abingdon, Virginia, had been investigating. Tailing Cortland had led Peter Bell to Maryville, a small city near Bitterwood, where Bell had recorded a meeting between Cortland and a man named Paul Bailey on video.

Bailey had later proved to be the mystery man behind a series of murders for hire, which should have put Cortland in the crosshairs of a murder investigation. But Bell had disappeared somewhere in the Bitterwood area, and the video had vanished with him.

“If it’s Bell,” Laney said quietly, “what are the chances he hid a copy of that video he claimed to have?”

“Private eyes can be paranoid types,” Antoine said, “but anybody who’d kill a man to get the video off his phone would probably be pretty thorough about shaking him down for any copies.”

“Besides, both Paul Bailey and Wayne Cortland are dead,” Delilah added.

“Cortland’s body hasn’t been identified yet,” Doyle said.

All three sets of eyes turned to him.

“The confidence y’all show in my investigative abilities is touching,” Doyle drawled. “Really, it is.”

By the time the TBI technicians finished their work, midnight was fast approaching, along with a deepening cold that had long since seeped through Laney’s coat and boots. Her toes were numb, her fingers nearly useless, and when Doyle told them to go home and get some sleep because the next day was going to be a long one, she nearly wilted with relief.

The walk back to the chief’s truck got her blood pumping, driving painful prickles of feeling back into her toes and fingers. Doyle turned the heat up to high and gave a soft, feral growl of pleasure as warm air flooded the truck cab. “I think I’ve turned into a cop-sicle.”

Laney couldn’t stop a smile at his joke. “Regretting the job change already?”

He slanted a suspicious look her way. “Do you have some sort of bet riding on my job longevity?”

“Betting is a sucker’s game.”

“So it is.” He continued looking at her, a speculative gleam in his eyes, which glittered oddly green from the reflected light of the dashboard display. His scrutiny went on so long, she began to squirm inwardly before he finally said, “I’m guessing you were an honor student. Straight A’s, did all your homework without being told to, played sports because you’re competitive but also because it helped round out your CV when it was time to get into a good college. UT for undergrad. I’d bet you went somewhere close by for law school—you haven’t lost much of your accent. But somewhere prestigious because you were bright enough to score admission. Virginia, Duke or Vandy.”

Her inward squirming nearly made it to the surface, but she held herself rigidly still.

“Duke,” he said finally. “Vandy’s too close. Virginia’s not close enough to a big city. Durham’s just right. Small-town–like in some ways, so you don’t feel too much like a fish out of water. But those trips into Raleigh for the clubs and bars made you feel downright cosmopolitan.”

She didn’t know whether to be angry or impressed. She went with anger, because it was safer. “Nice parlor trick.”

“I prefer to call it ‘profiling.’”

“I chose Duke because they offered a scholarship. And I didn’t go to clubs in Raleigh because I had to work two jobs at night to help pay for the rest.”

“Avoiding the big school loans? Even smarter than I thought.”

He sounded sincerely impressed, damn him. Just when she was working up a little righteous outrage, he had to go and say something nice about her.

“Sunrise is, what? Around eight?” He changed the subject with whiplash speed as he put the truck in gear.

“Thereabouts,” she agreed. “But there’ll be enough light for the search earlier. Maybe around a quarter till seven.”

“There’s a chance of bad weather tomorrow.”

She knew. The local weathermen had been tracking something called a “cold core upper low” that had the potential to dump a lot of snow in the southern Appalachian mountains. “Hard to predict where it’ll fall. All the more reason to get up on the mountain early and see if we can find Joy Adderly.”

He nodded. “Wear your long johns.”

* * *

THECROWDGATHEREDat the foot of Copperhead Ridge was larger than Doyle had expected, given the increasing probability of snowfall that had greeted him that morning when he turned on the local news. He’d made the call to assign all but a skeleton staff of patrol officers to the search, a decision that had seemed a no-brainer to him but had proved controversial among some of the staffers who were gathered for the search assignments. He made mental note of the grumblers for later; he wasn’t going to put up with people who thought the job beneath them.

He’d put the Brandywines in charge of mapping out the search grids, based on a suggestion from Antoine Parsons the night before when he’d called the detective from home to get his input on the next day’s task. “The Brandywines take people up and down this mountain all the time on horseback. They know just about all the nooks and crannies. They can tell you the best places to look and the best ways to do it.”

“Twenty-two people,” Carol Brandywine said after a quick head count. “Let’s split into groups of four where we can. I want an experienced mountaineer in each group.”

James, her husband, went through the group quickly, pulling out the people he considered capable of leading a search team. He ended up with six people, including, Doyle noted with interest, Laney Hanvey. “The rest of you, pick a leader and team up. No more than four on a team.”

Doyle went straight to Laney’s side. Her blue eyes reflected the gray gloom of the clouds overhead. “Chief.”

“Public Integrity Officer.”

Her lips curved the tiniest bit, sending a little ripple of pleasure darting through his gut. She was just too damned cute for her own good.

Or for his.

He shouldn’t have been surprised when the other searchers joined other leaders, leaving him and Laney in a group by themselves. Nobody, it seemed, was inclined to join a group that included the new chief of police.

“I took a bath this morning,” he muttered to Laney, who wore a look of consternation. “Used deodorant and everything.”

She looked up at him, her lips curving in a smile. “Maybe they figure, you being a flatlander and all, you’ll hold ’em back.”

He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Poor you, stuck with the beach bum.”

Her eyes flickered open a little wider, as if surprised to hear him use the term that just about everyone in town was using to describe him. Did she think he was oblivious to the whispers?

“I know what they call me,” he added softly. “I don’t mind. I’d probably call you a mountain goat if you’d been voted sheriff of Ridley County. Nobody likes change.”

“And yet it’s inevitable.” Laney turned away, taking a loosely sketched map from Carol Brandywine, who was handing out the search assignments. “Oh, goody. We get the boneyard.”

He looked at the map. He could make little of the squiggles and lines drawn there, but she seemed to know exactly where they were supposed to go. He picked up his pack of supplies and caught up with her as she started toward the trailhead.

“What’s the boneyard?” he asked, falling in step with her.

The look she darted his way was full of barely veiled amusement. “I thought you were the guy who did his homework.”

“It’s a graveyard?” he asked doubtfully.

“Well, sure, you could get that much from the name.” Her voice lowered to a half whisper, an almost dead-on impression of his own teasing style of speech. “But not just any graveyard.”

He played along. “Are we likely to run into haints?”

She grinned then, mostly at his less-than-successful attempt at a mountain twang. “Not just any haints. Cherokee haints. This land was their land first. They have a lot to be upset about.”

“What should I expect from this boneyard?”

She lifted her flashlight, putting the beam just under her chin to light up her face in spooky shades of dark and light. “Terror,” she intoned.

He grinned at her. “You got a good report from the hospital this morning.”

Her grin morphed into consternation. “How do you do that?”

“Like you’d be playing haunted trail guide with me if things weren’t better with your sister?”

She smiled. “If her vitals continue looking good, she’ll go home tomorrow.”

“Any progress on her memory?”

“Not so far. But my mom says she’s a lot clearer about the things she does remember.” Her smile faded as she looked up the mountain. “Uh-oh.”

He followed her gaze, seeing only a pervasive mist that swallowed the top of the ridge. “What?”

“See that cloud?” She pointed toward the mist.

“Yeah?”

“It’s not a cloud.” She pulled her jacket more tightly around her. “Hope you like hiking in the snow.”

Chapter Five

“Should I call off this search until the weather improves?”

Laney looked behind her. Doyle had been smart enough to bring a cap with him in his pack. It was keeping the snow off his head, though his uncovered ears blazed bright red from the raw cold. His weatherproof coat was covered with snow, and he looked cold, miserable and worried.

“We were assigned one of the highest points on the mountain, so we’re the ones getting the snow. Most of the other parties are below the snow line. They’re just getting mist and rain.”

“Are you still okay? Warm enough?”

He seemed genuinely concerned rather than asking after her comfort as a way to express his own discomfort. She decided to show him some mercy and dug a spare set of earmuffs out of her pack. “Here. Put these on.”

He looked at the bright green earmuffs for a second, his thought processes playing out candidly in his conflicted expression. On one hand, he wanted warm ears. On the other hand, sticking bright green fuzzy earmuffs on his ears would be an egregious assault on his masculinity.

Comfort won out. He took the earmuffs and put them on, replacing his cap. He looked ridiculous but warmer.

“Smokin’ hot,” she said under her breath.

“What?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

He gave her a suspicious look.

She turned back to the trail, grinning to herself.

As they neared the Cherokee boneyard, she decided to keep that fact to herself. He wouldn’t be able to see much from the trail with snow falling this hard. They were already struggling to stick to the trail as it was. They were in near whiteout conditions, and she was beginning to think he had been right to question the wisdom of trying to search the mountain in this much snowfall.

“Maybe we should go back,” she said, turning to look at him.

But he wasn’t behind her.

“Doyle?” She started back down the trail, her boots slipping on the snow-covered path. She couldn’t see Doyle’s tracks behind hers for several yards. Then she spotted a churned-up disturbance in the snow near a short drop-off.

She edged carefully to the lip of the drop and saw Doyle flattened out against the steep incline, inching his way back up to the trail. Had he called out to her when he’d fallen? The whistle of the wind and the sound-deadening effects of her earmuffs must have hidden the sound of his mishap. She took the offending ear protectors off.

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