“We’ve been trekking through snow for almost five hours, and last I looked, it wasn’t letting up.”

“I’d say it’ll be over before dark falls.”

“And then we go back down the mountain?”

She shot him an apologetic look. “Not after dark. Way too treacherous. We’ve got enough wood to keep us warm. We can stay here until daylight.”

Looking around the room, he spotted one narrow bed. “And sleep where?”

She looked at the bed and back at him. “You were saying something about body heat?”

His heart flipped a couple of times.

Blood on Copperhead Trail
Paula Graves

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Alabama native PAULA GRAVES wrote her first book, a mystery starring herself and her neighborhood friends, at the age of six. A voracious reader, Paula loves books that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she works as a creative director for a Birmingham advertising agency and spends time with her family and friends. She is a member of Southern Magic Romance Writers, Heart of Dixie Romance Writers and Romance Writers of America.

Paula invites readers to visit her website, www.paulagraves.com.

For the day job gang, Lisa, Amanda and Jessica, for putting up with my distraction and all that writing and editing I do during my lunch hour.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Excerpt

Chapter One

The trail shelter wasn’t built for cold weather, but the three girls occupying the small wooden shed were young, healthy and warmly tucked inside their cold-weather sleeping bags. Overnight, the mercury had dropped into the mid-thirties, which might have tempted less-determined hikers off the trail and into their warm homes in the valley below. But youth and risk were longtime bedfellows.

He depended on it ever to be so.

Overhead, the moon played hide-and-seek behind scudding clouds, casting deep blue shadows through the spindly bare limbs of the birch, maple and hickory trees that grew on Copperhead Ridge. The air was damp with the promise of snow.

But not yet.

His breath spreading a pale cloud of condensation in front of his eyes, he pulled the digital camera from his pack. A whimsical image filled his mind. Himself as a mighty, fierce dragon, huffing smoke as he stalked his winsome prey.

The camera made a soft whirring sound as it autofocused on the sleeping beauties. He held his breath, waiting to see if the sound was enough to awaken the girls. A part of him wished it would wake them, though he’d have to move now, rather than later, cutting short his plans. But the challenge these young, fit women posed excited him to the point that his carefully laid plans seemed more an impediment than a means to increase his anticipation.

Slow and steady wins the race, he thought. The experience would be better for having waited.

He snapped off a series of shots from different angles, relishing each composition, imagining them in their finished state. Despite the quick flashes of light from his camera, the princesses slept on, oblivious.

He stepped away from the shelter, punching buttons to print the shots he’d just snapped. They came out remarkably clear, he saw with surprise. He hadn’t been sure they would.

Or maybe he’d been hoping he’d have to sneak over to the shelter again.

A clear acrylic box, cloudy with scuff marks from exposure to the elements, stood on a rickety wooden pedestal outside the shelter. It housed a worn trail logbook similar to those found farther east on the Appalachian Trail. The latest entry was dated that day. The girls had recorded their arrival and their plans for the next day’s hike home.

He slipped the snapshots into the journal, marking the latest entry.

A snuffling sound from within the open-faced shelter froze him in place. He couldn’t see the girls from where he stood, so he waited, still and silent, for a repeat of the noise.

But the only sound he heard was the cold mountain breeze shaking the trees overhead, the leafless limbs rattling like bones.

After a few more minutes of quiet, he slipped away, a dark shape in the darker woods, where he would bide his time until daybreak.

And the girls slept on.

* * *

“I’MNOTTHEENEMY.” Though Laney Hanvey was using her best “soothe the witness” voice, she couldn’t tell her efforts at calm reassurance were having any effect on the dark-eyed detective across the tearoom table from her.

“Never said you were.” Ivy Hawkins arched one dark eyebrow, as if to say she saw right through Laney’s efforts at handling her. “I’m just saying I don’t know whether anyone besides Glen Rayburn was on Wayne Cortland’s payroll, and the D.A. sending a nanny down here to spank our bottoms and teach us how to behave ain’t gonna change that.”

Laney didn’t know whether to laugh at Ivy’s description of her job or be offended. “The captain of detectives killed himself rather than face indictment. The chief of police resigned, an admission that he wasn’t in control of his department. Surely you understand why the district attorney felt the need to send a public integrity officer down here to ask a few questions.”

“We have an internal affairs bureau of our own.”

“And I know how well police officers admire their internal affairs brethren.”

Ivy’s lips quirked, a tacit concession. “Why did you single me out?”

“Who says I did?”

Ivy looked around the airy tearoom of Sequoyah House, then back at Laney. “You’re telling me you bring all the cops to the fanciest restaurant in town for pretty little cucumber sandwiches and weak, tepid dishwater?”

Laney looked down at the cups of Earl Grey in front of them and smiled. “You’re laying on the redneck a little thick, aren’t you?”

Ivy’s eyes met hers again. “I’m not the one putting on airs, Charlane.”

Touché, Laney thought.

Ivy’s expression softened. “You’ve gotten better at your poker face. I almost didn’t see you flinch. You’ve come a long way from Smoky Ridge.”

“I didn’t bring you here to talk about old times.”

Ivy leaned across the table toward her. “Are you sure? Maybe you thought invoking a little Smoky Ridge sisterhood might soften me up? Make me spill all my deep, dark secrets?”

“I don’t suspect you of anything, Ivy. I just want to pick your brain about whom you might suspect of being Glen Rayburn’s accomplice.”

“And I told you, I don’t suspect anyone in particular.” Ivy’s mouth clamped closed at the end of the sentence, but it was too late.

“So you do think there may be others who were on Cortland’s payroll.”

“I think the possibility exists,” Ivy said carefully. “But I don’t know if I’m right, and I sure don’t intend to toss you a sacrificial lamb to get you off my back.”

“Fair enough.” Laney sat back and sipped the warm tea, trying not to think of Ivy’s description of it. But the image was already in her mind. She set the teacup on the saucer and forced down the swallow.

“The cucumber sandwiches weren’t too bad,” Ivy said with a crooked smile. “But I’m going to have to grab something from Ledbetter’s on my way back to the cop shop, because I’m still hungry. Want to join me?”

An image of Maisey Ledbetter’s chicken-fried steak with milk gravy flooded Laney’s brain. “You’re an enabler,” she grumbled.

Ivy grinned. “I’m doing you a favor. You’re way too skinny for these parts, Charlane. People will start trying to feed you everywhere you go.”

“Laney, Ivy. Not Charlane. Even my mama calls me Laney these days.” Laney motioned for the check and waved off Ivy’s offer to pay. “I can expense it.”

They reconvened outside, where Ivy’s department-issue Ford Focus looked a bit dusty and dinged next to Laney’s sleek black Mustang.

Ivy grinned when Laney started to open the Mustang’s driver’s door. “I knew you still had a little redneck in you, girl. Nice wheels.”

Laney arched her eyebrows. “Can’t say the same about yours.”

Ivy didn’t look offended. “Cop car. You should see my tricked-out Jeep.”

The drive from Sequoyah House to Ledbetter’s Diner wasn’t exactly a familiar route for Laney, who’d grown up poor as a church mouse and twice as shy. Nothing in her life on Smoky Ridge had ever required her to visit this part of town, where Copperhead Ridge overlooked the lush hollow where the wealthier citizens of the small mountain town had built their homes and their very separate lives.

The Edgewood part of Bitterwood was more suburban than rural, though the mountain itself was nothing but wilderness broken only by hiking trails and the occasional public shelter dotting the trails. People in this part of town usually worked elsewhere, either in nearby Maryville or forty-five minutes away in Knoxville.

Definitely not the kind of folks she’d grown up with on Smoky Ridge.

Ivy hadn’t been joking. She pulled her department car into the packed parking lot of Ledbetter’s Diner and got out without waiting to see if Laney followed. After a perfunctory internal debate, Laney found an empty parking slot nearby and hurried to catch up.

All eyes turned to her when she entered the diner, and for a second, she had a painful flashback to her first day of law school. A combination of academic and hardship scholarships had paid her way into the University of Tennessee, where she’d been just another girl from the mountains, one of many. But law school at Duke University had been so different. Even the buffer of her undergrad work at UT hadn’t prepared her for the culture shock.

Coming back home to Bitterwood had proved to be culture shock in reverse.

“You coming?” Ivy waited for her near the entrance.

Laney tamped down an unexpected return of shyness. “Yes.”

Ivy waved at Maisey Ledbetter on her way across the crowded diner. Maisey waved back, her freckled face creasing with a big smile. Her eyebrows lifted slightly as she recognized Laney, as well, but her smile remained as warm as the oven-fresh biscuits she baked every morning for the diner’s breakfast crowd.

“I don’t come back here to Bitterwood as often as I used to,” Laney admitted as she sat across from Ivy in one of the corner booths. “Mom and Janelle have started coming to Barrowville instead. Mom likes to shop at the outlet mall there.”

“Never underestimate the lure of a brand-name bargain.” Ivy shoved a menu toward Laney.

Laney shoved it back. “Maisey Ledbetter never changed her menu once in all the time I lived here growing up. I don’t reckon she’s changed it now.”

“Well, would you listen to that accent,” Ivy said softly, her tone teasing but friendly. “Welcome home, Charlane.”

The door to the diner opened, admitting a cold draft that wafted all the way to the back where they sat, along with a lanky man in his thirties wearing a leather jacket and jeans. He was about three shades more tanned than anyone else in Bitterwood, pegging him immediately as an outsider and one from warmer climes at that.

“Is that him?” Laney asked Ivy.

Ivy followed her gaze. “Well, look-a-there. Surfer boy found his way to Ledbetter’s.”

Laney stole another glance, trying not to be obvious. Sooner or later, she was going to have to approach Bitterwood’s brand-new chief of police in order to do her job, but it wouldn’t hurt to take his measure first.

Her second look added a few details to her first impression. Along with the tan, he had sandy-brown hair worn neatly cut but a little long, as if he were compromising between the expectations of his new job title and his inner beach bum. He was handsome, with laugh lines adding character to his tanned face and mossy-green eyes that turned sharply her way.

She dropped her gaze to the menu that still lay between her and Ivy. “I haven’t been able to set a meeting with Chief Massey yet.”

“He’s been keeping a low profile at the station,” Ivy murmured. “I get the feeling he wants to get his feet under him a little, scope out the situation before he has a big powwow with the whole department.”

“He’s pretty young for the job.” Doyle Massey couldn’t be that much older than her or Ivy. “He’s what, thirty?”

“Thirty-three,” Ivy answered, looking up when Maisey Ledbetter’s youngest daughter, Christie, approached their table with her order book. Ivy ordered barbecue ribs and a sweet tea, but Laney squelched her craving for chicken-fried steak and ordered a turkey sandwich on wheat.

When she glanced at the door, Chief Massey had moved out of sight. She scanned the room and found him sitting by himself at a booth on the opposite side of the café.

“Maybe you should go talk to him now,” Ivy suggested. “While he’s a captive audience.”

Laney’s instinct was to stay right where she was, but she’d learned long ago to overcome her scared-squirrel impulse to freeze in place if she ever wanted to get anywhere in life. “Good idea.”

She pushed to her feet before she could talk herself out of it.

He saw her coming halfway across the room, his deceptively somnolent gaze following her as she approached, like an alligator waiting for his dinner to come close enough to snap his powerful jaws. She ignored the fanciful thought and kept walking, right up to the booth where he sat.

She extended her hand and lifted her chin. “Chief Massey? My name is Laney Hanvey. I’m an investigator with the Ridge County District Attorney’s office. I’ve left you a couple of messages.”

He looked at her hand, then back up to her. “I got them.”

She was on the verge of pulling her hand back when he leaned forward and closed his big, tanned hand around hers. He had rough, dry palms, suggesting at least a passing acquaintance with manual labor.

He let go of her hand and waved toward the empty seat across from him in the booth. “Can I buy you lunch?”

Not an alligator, she thought as she carefully sat across from him. More like a chameleon, able to go seamlessly from predator to charmer in a second flat. “I’m actually having lunch with one of your detectives.” She glanced at the corner where Ivy sat, shamelessly watching them.

Chief Massey followed her gaze and gave a little wave at Ivy.

Ivy blushed a little at being caught staring, but she waved back and then pulled out her cell phone and made a show of checking her messages.

“Good detective, from what I’m told.” Massey’s full mouth curved. “She’s the one who broke the serial-murder case a couple of months ago.”

“She didn’t have much help from her chief of detectives.”

Massey’s green-eyed gaze snapped forward to lock with hers. “Let’s just get things out in the open, Ms. Hanvey. Can we do that?” His accent was Southern, but sleeker than her own mountain twang she’d worked so hard to conquer. He’d come to Bitterwood from a place called Terrebonne on the Alabama Gulf Coast.

“Get things out in the open?” she repeated.

“You may think you’re here to ferret out the snakes in our midst. But you’re really here because your bosses in the county government have been wanting the Ridge County Sheriff’s Department to swallow up small police forces like Bitterwood P.D. for a while now. Ridge County could justify the tax increase they’re wanting to impose if they suddenly had a bigger jurisdiction to cover.”

Laney hid her surprise. For a guy who looked like all he wanted to do was catch the next big wave, Doyle Massey had clearly done his homework about Ridge County politics. “Technically, Ridge County Sheriff’s Department already covers Bitterwood.”

“If invited to participate in investigations,” Massey corrected gently.

“Or if the department in question is under investigation,” she shot back firmly. “Which you are.”

He gave a nod of acceptance. “Which we are. But I don’t see the point of fooling ourselves about this. You and I may both want to clean up the Bitterwood Police Department. But we’re not on the same team.”

“Maybe not. But if you think my goal here is to shut your department down, you’re wrong. And if you think I’ll go along with whatever my bosses tell me to do, you’re wrong about that, too. I’m looking for the truth, wherever that leads me.”

He lifted his hands and clapped slowly. “Brava. An honest woman.”

She felt her lips curling with anger at his sarcastic display. She pushed to her feet. “I expect full cooperation from the police department in my investigation.”

He rose with her. “You’ll have it.”

Frustration swelled in her chest, strangling her as she tried to think of something to say just so he wouldn’t have the last word. But the trilling of her cell phone broke the tense silence rising between them. She grabbed the phone from her purse and saw her mother’s phone number.

“I have to take this,” she said and moved away, lifting the phone to her ears. “Hi, Mama.”

“Oh, Charlane, thank God you answered. I’ve been tryin’ not to worry, but she was supposed to be home hours ago, and she’s always been so good about being on time—” Alice Hanvey sounded close to tears.

“Mama, slow down.” Laney dropped into the booth across from Ivy, giving the other woman an apologetic look. “Janelle’s late coming home from somewhere?”

“She and a couple of girls went hiking two days ago, but they were supposed to be home this morning in time for her to get to school. I knew I should have insisted they come home last night instead.”

“Hiking where?”

“Up on Copperhead Ridge. At least, that’s what she said. I’ve been trying to encourage her to get out and do things with her friends, like you said I should. I know I can be overprotective, but you can’t be too careful these days—”

“She’s old enough to go hiking with some friends. What do you know about these girls she went with?”

“They’re good girls. You know the Adderlys—they live over on Belmont Road near the church? Their daddy’s a county commissioner. I think you may have gone to school with his cousin Daniel—”

“I know them. They were supposed to be back home in time for school?” Laney interrupted before her mother went through the whole family tree. She knew the Adderlys well, even socializing with them sometimes as part of her job with the district attorney’s office.

“Joy and Missy are crazy about hiking club, and you know Janelle’s been walking up and down those mountains since before she could talk good, so I didn’t think it would be a problem. She’s so good about keeping her word—”

“You’ve tried calling her on her cell phone?”

“Of course, but you know how reception can be in the mountains.”

“Are you sure there weren’t any boys going with them? Or maybe they were meeting some boys up on the mountain?”

“She’s been sort of dating Britt Lomand, but I already called over there, and Britt’s home. He’s just getting over the flu—his mama said he’s been home all weekend.”

“Missy Adderly has a boyfriend.”

“They broke up a month ago,” Alice corrected. “Should I call the police and report her missing? It was awful cold last night on the mountain.”

Laney glanced at Ivy, who was watching her through narrowed eyes. “The police don’t normally drop everything to look for a teenager who’s a little late getting home, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Please call me if you find out anything.”

“You call me if you hear from her. I’ll talk to you soon, Mama. Try not to worry too much. Jannie’s probably just lost track of the time, or maybe she was running late and went straight to school.”

“I never thought of that,” Alice admitted. “I’ll call the school, ask if she’s showed up.”

“Good idea. Call when you know something.” She shut off her phone and met Ivy’s curious gaze. “My sister went hiking up in the hills over the weekend with a couple of girlfriends, and she’s late getting back home. She was supposed to be home in time to shower and dress for school.”

“Cutting it close.”

Laney saw the conflicted thoughts playing out behind Ivy’s expressive eyes. “Yeah, I know. At that age, they think they get to make their own rules. But Janelle’s pretty levelheaded.”

“Guess that runs in the family.”

Laney wasn’t sure whether Ivy meant the comparison as a compliment. Being thought of as a Goody Two-shoes wasn’t exactly the goal of any high school student—she herself had chafed under the moniker through her high school years. Calling someone a good girl back then had been the same as calling her dull.

Maybe Janelle was rebelling against the perception herself by skipping school and making everybody worry?

She punched in her sister’s cell phone number and waited for an answer. It didn’t go immediately to voice mail as it usually did when Janelle’s phone was out of range of a cell signal. After four rings, there was a click.

But it wasn’t her sister’s voice she heard on the other line. Nor was it Janelle’s overly cute voice-mail message.

Instead she heard only the sound of breathing and, faintly in the distance, the rustle of leaves.

“Hello?” she said into the receiver.

The breathing continued for a moment. Then the line went dead.

“Did she answer?” Ivy asked.

Laney shook her head. “But someone was on the other end of the line—”

Ivy’s phone rang, the trill jangling Laney’s taut nerves. Ivy shot her a look of apology and answered. “What’s up, Antoine?”

The detective’s brow creased deeply, and she darted a look at Laney so full of dread that Laney’s breath caught in her chest.

“On my way,” Ivy said and hung up the phone. “I’ve got to run.”

“What is it?” Laney asked, swallowing her dread as Ivy dug in her pocket for money, carefully not meeting Laney’s eyes.

“Someone called in a body. I’m heading to the crime scene to see what we can sort out.” Ivy put a ten on the table. “Ask Christie to box up my order and put it in the fridge. I’ll pick it up later.”

Laney caught Ivy’s arm. “Where’s the crime scene?”

Ivy’s gaze slid up to meet hers. “Up on Copperhead Ridge.”

Chapter Two

“What’s she doing here?” Doyle Massey asked Ivy Hawkins as she crossed to where he and Detective Antoine Parsons stood near the body.

On the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape, Laney Hanvey stood with her arms crossed tightly over her body as if trying to hold herself together. Her face was pale except where the hike up the cold mountain had reddened her nose and cheeks. Her blue eyes met his, sharp with dread.

Ivy looked over her shoulder. “Her sister went hiking up here over the weekend and didn’t show up this morning when she was supposed to. I couldn’t talk her out of coming.”

He dragged his gaze from Laney’s worried face and nodded at the body. “Female. Late teens, early twenties. Do you know what the sister looks like?”

Ivy edged closer to the body, trying not to disturb the area directly around her. “It’s not Janelle Hanvey. It’s Missy Adderly. No ID?”

“Not that we’ve found. We’ve tried not to disturb the body too much,” Detective Parsons answered for Doyle.

“TBI on the way?” Ivy asked.

It took Doyle a moment to realize she was talking about the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. He’d have to bone up on the local terminology. “Yeah.”

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.”

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.”

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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