“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.”
* * *
“Y
OU
’
RE
NOT
A
COP
,
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.”