Blood on Copperhead Trail (11 page)

She had an idea where to start.

Down the second small aisle of the gift shop she found a plush pony the color of copper pennies. It reminded her of Sugar, Janelle’s favorite horse at the Brandywines’ trail-riding stable. Even though a stuffed toy was far too juvenile a gift for a young woman of twenty, she bought it anyway. At least it was cute and, if nothing else, Janelle could concentrate on feeling miffed at being treated like a baby rather than thinking about the details of her ordeal.

She paid for the stuffed horse, waved off the cashier’s offer of a bag and headed back to the elevators. The doors nearest to her slid open with a dinging noise, and Doyle stepped out, nearly running into her.

He put his hand on her arm to steady her, looking down at the stuffed horse she held tucked under one arm with a quirk of his eyebrows. “Nice pony. I didn’t realize your sister was still twelve.”

She made a face at him. “How is she?”

“Sleeping. Sutton Calhoun’s up there watching over her with Ivy. And your mother arrived as I was leaving.”

“You’re going home?” She hadn’t meant the question to sound as needy as it had come out.

If he noticed the desperation in her voice, he didn’t show it. “I came to look for you. Your mother said you would try to stay here tonight and that I should try to talk you out of it.”

She looked up at him skeptically. “Do you always do what people tell you to do?”

“Only if I agree.” He ran his hand slowly down her arm, from shoulder to elbow. “How much sleep have you had since we left the cabin this morning?”

“I napped in Jannie’s room.”

“For what, an hour?”

“Something like that.”

“Let’s get you home.”

The temptation to do as he suggested was more powerful than she’d expected. The truth was, she was exhausted, her exertions of the day before conspiring with her lack of sleep during their long, cold night in the cabin to wipe out most of her stamina.

“Okay, but there’s one thing I want to do first. Two things, actually. At some point, I need to take Sugar here up to Jannie.”

“But first?”

“First, I’d like to go talk to hospital security.”

* * *

T
HE
HOSPITAL
SECURITY
office consisted of one small room with six video monitors, two of which covered the lobby and the parking entrance full-time, and the other four rotating between cameras in the elevator alcoves of each of the hospital’s eight floors.

“We don’t cover the hallways so much, since there are nurses and other personnel on duty at all times,” the head of security, Roy Allen, explained. “We mostly cover the ways in and out so we have a record of who’s coming and going at any given time.”

A security technician manned the live feeds at all times. The one on duty now continued doing so, while Roy Allen, who had told them he was a retired police sergeant as if he felt the need to provide his bona fides, had pulled that day’s video covering Janelle’s floor and set it to play for them at double speed on a smaller monitor set apart from the live feeds.

“There.” Doyle pointed to the security monitor as a man in dark green scrubs walked into view of the security camera positioned in one corner of the elevator alcove. He had shaggy brown hair, a thick mustache and horn-rimmed glasses, and he kept his head down as if aware of the camera. “Why does that guy look familiar?”

“He doesn’t,” Laney said, frowning at the screen. “Does he?”

Doyle frowned, wondering why the man had caught his eye. Something about the curve of the head, maybe.

About ten minutes later in the recording, Delilah Hammond appeared on the surveillance camera and entered the elevator.

“There goes Delilah,” Laney said. “Have you heard anything from the station about who might have called her?”

“None of the dispatchers have copped to it. Delilah’s pulling the records for her cell phone to see if we can get a number, but that could take a while.” He paused as the camera image running across the monitor caught the same man with the mustache heading into the elevators a few minutes after Delilah’s departure. He looked the same as before, but there seemed to be something dark sticking out from the pocket of his pants. “Pause the video,” he said.

Allen hit Pause. “Back it up?”

Doyle nodded. “To where the man steps into the picture. Can you run it at a slower speed?”

“Sure.” Allen backed up the video to where Doyle had asked. The man in the scrubs came into view.

“Pause,” Doyle said.

Allen pushed a button and the video froze.

“What’s that in his pocket?” Laney asked, bending closer to the monitor.

The video picture wasn’t clear enough to tell. But whatever it was bulged in the pocket, suggesting it had some size to it. It was too big and bulky to be a cell phone. Not the right shape to be a pistol.

“Maybe a camera?” Roy Allen suggested.

Doyle and Laney exchanged a look. He saw excitement, liberally tinged with worry, shining in her blue eyes. He knew they were both remembering that Polaroid photo they’d found on the mountain. Someone had targeted Laney, in a very personal and specific way.

Could this be the same man? The man who’d taken the photos on the mountain? The man who’d killed Missy Adderly, tried to kill Janelle and done God only knew what with Joy Adderly?

“Maybe we should get a screen grab of the best shot we have of the guy,” Laney suggested. “We could show it to the desk nurse, see if anyone saw the guy lurking outside Janelle’s room.”

“Good idea.” Doyle looked at Roy Allen, who immediately told the technician to get them a screen grab of the best image and print it out. Ten minutes later, they left the security center with a large printout of the man in the green scrubs, his face partially lifted toward the camera, enough to make out shaggy brown hair, a thick brown mustache and glasses with brown plastic rims.

So far, none of the desk nurses could tell them anything about him, though one remembered seeing him. “I just figured he was a new orderly,” she’d said without much interest. “His badge looked right. I didn’t look closely, though.”

Doyle made a mental note to check if any of the hospital’s regular employees was missing a badge, and went with Laney back to Janelle’s room to show the photo to Ivy, Sutton and Laney’s mother, Alice, who joined them near the door to hear what was going on. None of them had been there when the man showed up on the video feed, but Doyle hoped maybe one of them would recognize him.

“Never seen him before,” Ivy commented when Doyle showed them the image. Alice Hanvey shook her head, as well.

“Doesn’t that look like a disguise?” Sutton asked.

They looked at the image again. Doyle realized Sutton was right. “It does.”

Alice’s blue eyes searched her daughter’s face. “Are you okay, Charlane? You look a little shaky.”

Doyle looked from Alice’s concerned expression to Laney’s pale face, where spots of red had risen in her cheeks. Charlane, he thought. So that was what
Laney
was short for.

“I’m fine,” Laney answered. “Just tired.”

Alice gave her arm a squeeze and headed back across the room to the chair by Janelle’s bed, leaving Doyle and Laney with Ivy and her fiancé.

“Nice horse.” Sutton reached out and flicked the tail of the stuffed horse still tucked under Laney’s arm, a teasing light in his eyes.

Laney gave his arm a light punch. “I know where you can get one if you need a cuddle buddy.”

His gaze slanted toward Ivy. “Oh, I’ve got one of those already.”

“Too much information,” Doyle drawled. He glanced at the bed, where Janelle lay with her back to the door. “How’s Janelle?”

“She’s been asleep most of the time you were gone,” Ivy answered just as quietly. “Although if my calculations are correct, she’s due for another visit from the nurse, so she won’t get to sleep much longer.”

She might as well have cued the nurse’s arrival, for within seconds, a smiling licensed practical nurse came through the door with her machine to check Janelle’s temperature, blood pressure and oxygen level. After she left, Janelle frowned at the four of them huddled in the doorway of her room.

“What’s going on?” she asked, sounding a little groggy.

Laney went to her sister’s side. “Everything’s fine. I brought you something.” She handed over the stuffed horse.

Janelle pulled a face. “Oh, look. A baby toy.”

“I thought she looked like Sugar.”

Janelle’s expression softened. “Okay, in that case...” She took the stuffed horse and hugged it to her, looking more like a scared kid than a twenty-year-old. Doyle supposed, after all she’d been through, she was allowed a little bit of emotional regression.

But he needed her to be grown-up for just a few minutes longer. He took the screen-grab printout from Sutton and crossed to Janelle’s bedside. “Janelle, do you think you could take a look at this and tell me if you’ve ever seen this man before?”

Laney shot him a look of displeasure, and even Alice seemed surprised that he would bring up the subject, but he couldn’t let their overprotectiveness stop him from doing his job. He handed the printout to Janelle, who looked at it intently, her brow furrowed.

“It’s not a great picture,” she said after a few seconds of consideration, “but it might be him.”

“Might be who?” Laney asked.

“Ray.” Janelle handed the photo back to Doyle. “Remember? I told you about him. The guy we ran into on the trail the day before...” Her words faltered, her expression darkening. “Before the shootings.”

Laney caught her sister’s hand, her tone urgent. “Are you sure?”

“No, not entirely. This guy looks a little older, but the glasses and mustache are the same. And the hair. My memory isn’t exactly running on all cylinders.”

“This isn’t the guy who shot Missy, is it?” Doyle asked.

“No.” She seemed certain about that much. “That guy was a lot older. Looked entirely different—he was nearly bald, for one thing. No mustache or glasses.” Her mouth flattened. “I’d definitely remember the shooter if I saw him again.”

Doyle and Laney exchanged glances.

“Where did you get that picture?” Janelle asked. “Is that in the hospital?”

“Yes,” Laney answered. “Just down the hall, as a matter of fact.”

Janelle looked suddenly excited. “Did you get to talk to him? Maybe he saw or heard something on the mountain—”

“We haven’t located him,” Doyle answered.

“But how did you get the picture?”

“We were looking into something else,” Laney answered before Doyle could. “Something unrelated, and we happened across this photo.”

“Did I describe him to you before? Is that how you recognized him?”

She hadn’t described him before, Doyle realized. Laney had been so intent on rushing him out of Janelle’s hospital room that first day that all he could remember about someone named Ray was that the girls had run into him on the trail at some point before the shootings.

He should have followed up, but they’d found the other body, and then he and Laney had gotten caught in the snowstorm and ended up hiding in a cave from a gunman. He’d been a little distracted.

So why had he thought the man looked familiar?

Chapter Eleven

After taking the photo back from Janelle, Doyle handed it to Ivy, who was pulling on her jacket in preparation to leave. “Can you run this back to the station on your way home? We need to get an APB out on this guy.”

“On what grounds?” Ivy asked quietly as he and Sutton walked out of the room with her. “Walking through the hospital with a camera? That’s not against the law. And this isn’t even our jurisdiction.”

“He was on the mountain the day before the shootings. That means he might be a material witness. He could have seen someone else on the mountain.”

“Good point.” Ivy turned to Sutton and rose to kiss him lightly. “See you when you get home.”

Sutton released a long, slow breath through his nose, his gaze following Ivy’s small, curvy form down the hall.

“You two have a date set yet?” Doyle asked.

Sutton dragged his gaze away from his fiancée’s backside and looked at Doyle. “Next weekend, we’re driving to Gatlinburg and doing the quickie-wedding thing. Her mama was getting kind of nuts with the planning and my dad isn’t exactly the ‘going to the chapel’ kind anyway. So we’re going to take Seth and Rachel as our witnesses and just go ahead and get hitched.”

“Seth is Detective Hammond’s brother? The former con man?” Doyle asked, trying to place the names.

“Right. And Rachel is Rachel Davenport.”

“Ah, the trucking-company heiress.” A few months ago, threats to Rachel had exposed the dark underbelly of the Bitterwood P.D., causing the upheaval that had brought Doyle to town in the first place. “And Seth and Rachel are together now, right?”

Sutton grinned. “Ivy and I may end up racing them to the altar. Seth’s always been pretty competitive.”

“Thanks for filling in for us here tonight. We’re spread pretty thin these days to begin with, and I don’t want to pull people off the mountain search to guard Janelle.”

“Happy to do it,” Sutton assured him.

Doyle went back into Janelle’s hospital room and found Janelle had already started to doze off again. Alice and Laney had their heads together, Alice’s expression firm and Laney’s tinged with a hint of rebellion.

Alice looked up at Doyle as he came closer. “Tell her she needs to go home and get some sleep.”

“I’m fine,” Laney said.

Doyle sighed. She was half-asleep, only worry and stubbornness keeping her upright. “I know you’re fine,” he said, adding an exaggerated leer to his voice, eliciting, as he’d hoped, a roll of her weary blue eyes. “But nothing’s changed since we agreed earlier that it was time for you to go home.”

“Of course things have changed,” she disagreed.

“I’ve put out an APB for our mustachioed friend. Sutton’s out there, looking like a grizzly guarding this room. Your mama’s here to give your sister all the TLC she can handle,” he added, earning a smile from Alice. “It’s time to get you home and into bed.”

Laney’s eyebrows lifted at his choice of words, but with her mother listening, she said nothing in reply. But he could see her thinking up at least six sassy retorts she’d have shot back at him if they were alone.

“Okay, fine. I know when I’m outnumbered.” She turned to give her mother a hug and a kiss. “I’ll be back in the morning to spell you.”

“Take care of yourself, Charlane. I don’t want to have to split my hospital time between my girls.”

Laney didn’t question Doyle when he walked her to her car, though he saw her looking around the parking deck for his truck. “Are you going to follow me home, too?”

He nodded, taking her keys from her and unlocking her car door. “Got a problem with that?”

Conflicts played out behind her eyes. “Yeah, sort of. But not enough to kick up a fuss.” She took the keys back from him and sat behind the steering wheel, looking up at him as he continued to stand there with the door open. “You want me to wait outside the pay booth?”

“I do,” he said. “Will you actually wait?”

That earned him a whisper of a smile. “Maybe.”

He leaned into the car, brushing her temple with a light kiss. “If you wait, I might be talked into tucking you in and reading you a bedtime story.”

Her blue eyes blazed up at him. “Tease.”

Smiling, he dropped another kiss on her forehead and backed out of the door, letting her close it. His truck was up a level; he bypassed the elevators, taking the stairs two at a time.

He held his breath as he steered toward the final turn at the parking-deck exit, peering through the shadowy dusk past the toll booth until he spotted a pair of taillights about ten yards beyond the tollgate. He paid the parking charge, drove under the rising gate and pulled up behind her little black Mustang, trying not to think too long or too hard about what he planned to do when they got to Laney’s place in Barrowville.

He’d seen promise in her eyes, but also a bone-deep weariness that had sounded an echo in his own tired body. The spirit might be willing to see where the night might take them, but he had a feeling the flesh might not be up to it.

And that was okay, he realized, even though his sex life was in the middle of a bit of a drought these days. It was a mostly self-imposed bout of celibacy, a combination of the recent upheavals in his professional life and a lack of interesting women in his personal life.

Laney Hanvey was the first woman who’d sparked his imagination in a long time. Just his luck, the first woman he’d really wanted in a long time was one of the last people in the world he should pursue.

* * *

“I
T
COULD
USE
a little dusting.” Laney cast a critical eye over her cozy living room, trying to see it through Doyle’s eyes. The house was a Craftsman-style bungalow on a small cul-de-sac near the southern edge of town, chosen as much because it cut five minutes off her drive to Bitterwood as for its quaint charms. She had converted one of her two bedrooms to an office, but she did most of her work from home in the living room, her laptop perched on a small tray table so that she could work from her comfortable armchair in front of the fireplace.

“It’s fine.” Doyle closed the door behind them, shutting out the cold wind whistling past her eaves.

“It’s cold in here.” Laney rubbed her arms, telling herself it was the cold, not her rattled nerves, that sent shivers dancing up and down her spine. She busied her trembling hands with firewood from the bin beside the hearth, tossing a couple of logs atop the half-burned remains of her last fire.

Doyle took the last log from her hands, dropping it into the fireplace. He caught her hands in his. She looked up at him, trapped between wariness and a slow burn of desire that had taken up residence at her core. “Nothing has to happen tonight,” he whispered, even as his face moved closer, his eyes dipping to her lips.

She tightened her grip on his hands. “I know. I’m not sure what I want.”

“There are very good reasons why I should walk out that door,” he agreed. “And at least one good reason I should stay.”

“Doyle....”

He eased away from her, though he still held on to her hands. “If the man at the hospital was the same man who took the photos on the mountain—”

“He’s not. You heard Janelle. That’s not the man who shot them.”

“I believe that was a camera in his pocket.”

She shook her head. “You think it’s possible, maybe, but you couldn’t tell anything from that video grab. It was too blurry. You could be seeing what you expect to see.”

“It’s no coincidence that the man from the mountain showed up near your sister’s hospital room.”

“Maybe he saw news stories about the attack on her. Maybe he thought he’d drop by and see how she was, then realized he didn’t really know her well enough for that and didn’t want to scare her.”

“Do you really believe that?” Doyle looked skeptical.

No, she had to admit, at least to herself. She didn’t really believe it. “He didn’t do anything to Laney while Delilah was gone.”

“You were there.”

“I was asleep part of the time,” she admitted, a flutter of anxiety shimmering through her brain when she recalled waking up at her sister’s side. She’d dreamed something, she remembered, although the details of the dream were gone, leaving only a bitter aftertaste of unease.

He brushed his knuckles down her cheek, his brow furrowing as if he picked up on her disquietude. “You need sleep.”

“So do you.”

“Yeah, I do. Mind if I crash on your sofa?”

Her gaze, which had drifted down to the curve of his full lower lip, snapped up to meet his. “The sofa?”

“You have another suggestion?” His voice was as warm as a flannel blanket, wrapping itself around her like a snare.

Part of her wanted to tell him to go home and leave her in peace, but beneath the sexy heat of his voice, she heard a darker thread of concern. He might be willing to go as far as she allowed his gentle seduction to take them, but he was here primarily as a wall between her and whoever had been out there in the woods gunning for them.

“You’ve assigned yourself as my bodyguard.”

He didn’t deny it. “Two birds, one stone,” he murmured, bending closer until his lips brushed lightly over hers.

She groaned deep in her throat. The sound sparked an answering growl that rumbled through Doyle’s chest as he pulled her closer, his mouth moving over hers with stronger intent.

He felt good, she thought, sliding into the curve of his arms as if she belonged there, as if she’d come into the world in that strong, hot embrace and any time spent away from it was time wasted.

She was loopy, she thought, even as she slipped her cold hands under the hem of his sweater and sought out the hot silk of his skin beneath.

He hissed against her mouth. “Cold hands.”

“Hot body,” she answered, flicking her tongue across his lower lip.

He smiled against her mouth as he started to walk her toward the sofa. “Thank you.”

They stumbled over the corner of the coffee table and landed with a soft thud onto the sofa’s overstuffed cushions. Doyle shifted until he was half lying across the sofa and positioned her over him. “Comfy?”

“Be careful. If I get too comfy, I might doze off.”

He caught her face between his hands as she bent to kiss him again. “I’m okay with that, you know.”

She looked deep into his gaze and saw the truth there. “You mean, you’d be willing to just cuddle all night?” she asked, her voice tinted with humor.

“I could do that.”

“Could you cuddle naked all night?” she asked, mostly to wipe that suddenly serious look off his handsome face.

“Um, no.” He rewarded her with a glint of humor in those mossy eyes.

“Okay, so that’s ground rule number one. No nakedness without intent.”

He pulled his head back as she once again started to dip her mouth to his. “Ground rules? We have ground rules?”

“Of course. Rules are important, you know. They tell you the limits of your boundaries.”

He cocked his head, humor still lighting up his eyes. “What if you don’t like your boundaries to have limits?”

“Then you’re an anarchist and you’re dangerous as hell.”

“Dangerous can be good.” He lowered his voice, dropping his eyelids until he gazed at her through his dark eyelashes. “Dangerous can be sexy.”

“Danger is usually destructive,” she answered.

His mouth curved. “You are so damned sexy when you’re prim.”

She pushed against his chest. “I’m not prim.”

He tugged her back against him. “But you are. Prim and decent and so very controlled.” He slid his hand down her side, letting it come to a rest against the curve of her hip. “Makes a man want to see what it takes to break that control.”

Not very much, she thought, her heart jumping as his thumb played slowly over the ridge of her hip bone, moving dangerously close to her center with each light stroke. Her body felt combustible beneath his touch.

When Doyle spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “You were talking about ground rules.”

“What ground rules?” she murmured against his throat. She slid her hands under the front hem of his sweater this time, her fingers tangling in the coarse thatch of hair that grew in a line up his belly. She traced the path upward, flattening her fingers across the hard muscles of his chest.

He kissed her deeply, intently, his fingers going still against her hip as if he wanted to concentrate all of his focus on her mouth. The last of her resistance seemed to melt away, until she felt boneless against him, helpless to contain the wildfire of desire filling every cell of her body.

The trill of a cell phone jarred through her body like an electric shock. Doyle growled a curse against her mouth and gently set her away from him, sitting up to pull the phone from his pocket.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured as he punched the button. “Massey.”

He listened for a second, his brow furrowed, then waved his hand toward the television. “What channel?”

Laney read his gestures and pulled the television remote from a drawer in the coffee table. She turned on the television. “What channel?”

“Nine,” he answered. The look of concern in his eyes was starting to scare her.

She switched the channel to the Knoxville television station. The evening news was on; a still image of a man’s face filled the screen. Below the picture, a caption read, “Ridge County man found dead in Knoxville.”

The grainy image of the man seemed to be a driver’s license photo blown up to fit the screen. He looked to be in his fifties, with thinning fair hair and light-colored eyes.

Laney’s phone rang, giving her a start. She saw a Knoxville number on the screen and realized it was her sister’s hospital room. “Hello?”

“It’s him, Laney.” Janelle’s voice was shaky and full of tears.

“Who?”

“The man on the TV. Are you watching? It’s him.”

Laney looked at the screen just as the image switched to a live shot from outside a Knoxville restaurant, where the reporter was standing just outside a taped-off crime scene. Within the yellow tape, police had cordoned off a rectangular section of the restaurant building, where a dark blue Dumpster sat near the wall.

“The restaurant owner found Richard Beller’s body in the Dumpster at six this morning, but police say the body could have been there for as long as a couple of days, as the restaurant has been closed the past week for renovations. Mr. Beller, age fifty-eight, who lived in Melchior, Kentucky, until recently, had not been reported missing. Police are investigating his death as a homicide.”