Blood on Copperhead Trail

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.

* * *

“IT 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.”

“That’s him,” Janelle repeated through the phone, her voice strangled. “That’s the man who shot Missy.”