Blood on Copperhead Trail

Chapter Thirteen


Janelle’s already pale face whitened further as she looked away from the trail shelter and met Doyle’s concerned gaze. “I was reaching into my pack for my camp knife,” she said in a strained voice. “I don’t know why I thought a knife could be any sort of protection against a man with a gun. Just instinct for survival, I guess.”

She leaned her head against the horse’s neck. The chestnut mare snuffled softly but didn’t move away.

Doyle looked at Laney to gauge her reaction. But Laney wasn’t looking at her sister. Instead, she was looking at something she held in one shaking hand, her face as pale as her sister’s.

Dismounting from the black gelding, he crossed to her side and looked at what she was holding. It was another photograph. Of Laney and her sister in the Knoxville hospital.

“I want this son of a bitch taken down,” she growled, shoving the photo at Doyle and walking her horse over to Janelle’s side.

He and Laney were both wearing gloves, but he still held the photo by the edges in case the photographer had left fingerprints, though the other two photos had been clean of any prints or trace evidence. He took a closer look, realizing the photo had to have been taken during the period of time between Delilah’s departure from the hospital and his arrival. Laney had mentioned falling asleep then.

That was the time the man in the scrubs had shown up on the hospital security cameras. The man he was now certain had been carrying a camera.

“What’s wrong?” Janelle picked up on the sudden tension.

“Nothing,” Laney said. “This was a bad idea. Let’s go home.”

Janelle pulled away from her sister and crossed to Doyle. He briefly considered hiding the photograph from view, but doing so would only upset her more, as she’d wonder what they were keeping from her.

“Doyle,” Laney warned as he started to show the photograph to Janelle.

He ignored her, feeling a certain kinship with Janelle. The accident that had killed his parents was still, to this day, something of a blank space in his memory. He hadn’t been there, of course, but even the secondhand version of their accident was a blur in his mind. He’d been twenty, just like Janelle, old enough to join the army if he’d wanted to, or get his own place, but the authorities had glossed over so many of the details that he wasn’t even sure, to this day, what had really caused his parents’ car to go off Purgatory Bridge into the river gorge below.

“She has a right to know everything that’s happening to her,” he said. “Good or bad. She’s old enough to make a choice how she wants to handle it.”

Janelle stared at the photograph, her lower lip trembling. “Who could be doing this now? Richard Beller is dead. We saw him on television.”

“I don’t think Richard Beller has been doing anything since shortly after he killed Missy and shot you,” Doyle confessed.

Janelle’s look of horror made his stomach squirm, but he held her gaze. Laney muttered a low profanity and hurried to her sister’s side, grabbing the photograph away from Doyle and wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders.


Janelle shrugged her sister’s arm away. “I’m not a baby. And this is crazy. Where the hell is Joy? If Beller’s gone, why haven’t we found her?” She pushed away from Laney and mounted Sugar, giving the mare a light kick in the ribs that spurred her into an uphill canter.

“Jannie, what are you doing!” Pocketing the photo before Doyle could get it back from her, Laney hurried to catch the reins of her own mount, which was sidestepping energetically as if ready to sprint off after the mare.

Doyle grabbed the reins of the black gelding before Satan could dart off after them. Hauling himself on the horse’s back, he tried to catch up, but despite his assurances to the Brandywines earlier that morning, he wasn’t nearly as good a horseman on uphill, rocky trails as he was on flat land. Satan seemed to be sure-footed as he navigated the winding mountain path, but Doyle’s own unease with the terrain kept him moving at a slower pace than Satan wanted to go.

Laney and Janelle seemed to have no such caution, putting distance between themselves and him at an alarming pace. He lost sight of them where the trail curved around a large shale boulder, and by the time he rounded the outcropping, they had disappeared from sight completely, though the trail ahead was visible for several hundred yards.

He looked off the path and thought he caught a glimpse of Janelle’s bright orange riding helmet, but the trees on this part of the mountain were young growth evergreens, survivors of the blights and pests that had hit so many of the trees in the Smoky Mountains. How Janelle and Laney were even riding through this thicket, he had no idea.

“Laney!” he called, but the ever-present wind blowing down the trail seemed to whip his voice backward into his face.

He tried to lead the black gelding off the trail, but the big horse balked, as if he knew he wasn’t supposed to wander off track. Growling a curse, Doyle dismounted and wrapped the gelding’s reins around a nearby tree. “If you run off, you stubborn piece of rawhide, I’ll have you arrested. You hear me?”

Satan rolled his eyes with annoyance, clearly unimpressed with Doyle’s show of authority.

Doyle started to thread his way through the underbrush, trying to follow the trail of broken twigs and flattened plants Janelle and Laney had left in their wake, but no matter how far into the woods he walked, he never seemed to catch sight of them. Worse, he began to question his own tracking skills, which had been honed in swamps and marshlands rather than a rock-infested alpine rain forest.

He’d lost sight of the hiking trail longer ago than he liked to think about, and if he didn’t start backtracking, he might end up lost in these woods for hours if not days. Unlike Laney, he hadn’t thought to bring trail markers, nor had he dropped any bread crumbs to show him how to get out of the woods. He was, to his utter dismay, a complete greenhorn when it came to hiking the Smokies.

But he did have the map he’d stuck in the pocket of his jeans before they left the police station, he remembered with relief.

As he reached into his pocket to retrieve the map, he felt two sharp stings in his back and his right thigh. Simultaneously his whole body seized up, every muscle bunching in a symphony of pain. Losing all control of his limbs, he fell forward into the underbrush, hitting the ground face-first with a thud, saved from a bone-shattering impact only by the bill of his riding helmet.

He screamed with pain, except he was pretty sure that the cry ringing through his brain hadn’t made it out of his mouth. Then, after what seemed a lifetime, the cramping, zapping pain went abruptly, blessedly away.

But he still couldn’t move.

Taser, his buzzing brain deciphered.

But knowing what had just hit him didn’t help. He knew from past experience that his limbs might not work for another few seconds, and that was all his attackers needed.

First, rough hands jerked him up by the collar of his shirt, nearly choking him as they pushed off the riding helmet and shoved a musty-smelling cloth sack over his head. A different set of hands grabbed his limp arms and secured his hands over his head. His tingling limbs wouldn’t cooperate with his attempt to fight back, twitching more than moving in response to his brain’s commands.

By the time the feeling came back to his body, he was trussed up and being dragged through the bushes. His shouts earned him a sharp kick to his ribs, knocking the breath right out of him as pain blasted through his side.

By the third kick, he decided to bide his time and see where his captors were taking him. He just hoped, wherever he was going, Laney and her sister were far, far away.

* * *

“WHY DID YOU do that?” Laney tried not to shout at her sister, but after hurtling headlong into the thick woods, more adrenaline than blood seemed to be pumping through her veins. “Have you lost your mind?”

Janelle had finally pulled the mare to a stop, sobbing like a hopeless child. She slid from the panting horse’s back and met Laney halfway, wrapping her arms around her sister’s waist and pressing her tearstained face against Laney’s neck. “I’m sorry. I just—I freaked. I’m sorry.”

Laney stroked Janelle’s hair, murmuring soothing words as she tried to figure out just how far off the trail they’d come. Fortunately, they were still in the middle elevations, a long way from the snowy top, and a cursory glance at their surroundings convinced her they hadn’t come nearly as far as she’d thought from the hiking trail. She saw Widow’s Walk, the bald rock face near the summit, and estimated they were a good three miles from there. Widow’s Walk faced south, so if she kept moving due west, they should find the trail sooner or later.

“Who killed Richard Beller?” Janelle asked a few moments later, as her tears subsided. “And if Beller’s dead, who left that photo of us?”

“I don’t know,” Laney admitted. “Right now, we need to get back to the trail and find Doyle.” She forced a smile. “You know he’s a flatlander. He might be lost and need us to find him.”

“Nah, Satan won’t let him go off trail,” Janelle said confidently, wiping her eyes and grabbing Sugar’s reins.

Laney gave her sister a leg up to the saddle. “I forgot about that. You’re right. He’s probably stuck on the trail with that stubborn horse, cussing us both.”

Sure enough, when they reached the hiking trail, Satan was still there, his black coat dappled by the midday sun peeking through the trees overhead.

But apparently Doyle hadn’t let Satan’s recalcitrance stop him, because he was nowhere in sight.

“Uh-oh,” Janelle murmured, slanting an anxious look at her sister.

Laney looked around, spotting only the tracks of their own horse ride into the woods. But if Doyle had gone in search of them on foot, he’d have probably tried to stick to their trail, wouldn’t he?

Then why hadn’t they run into him on the way back?

“Should we go look for him?” Janelle asked.

Laney glanced at her sister, alarmed to see that her face was pale, dark circles forming under her eyes. “He’ll have to fend for himself for a while,” Laney said, even though her guts were starting to twist with worry. “It’s time to get you back home and in bed for some rest.”

“I’m okay,” Janelle said, but she wasn’t able to infuse her protest with any conviction.

“You just got out of the hospital. You’re going home. Carol and James can run you by the house on their way back to the stables.”


“So we’re taking Satan with us?”

“Yes.” No point in leaving the horse up here, Laney thought. If Doyle made it back to the trail, he was strong enough to walk back down the mountain. And if he didn’t make it back to the trail, Satan standing there tied to a tree would do him no good.

Carol and James were surprised to see Laney and Janelle return with three horses and no chief of police, but Laney’s terse explanation sent them into action. “Should we contact the other search teams?” Carol asked as she settled Janelle into the front seat of the truck while James started leading the horses into the trailer.

“Not yet,” Laney answered after a brief pause for thought. She didn’t know for sure that Doyle was in trouble. He was just, for the moment, lost. And the last thing he needed, as the new chief of police, was to become the butt of jokes around the watercooler at the police station. “He may still be out looking for us. If I don’t run into him pretty soon, I’ll call for help.”

She crossed to the truck to talk to Janelle while Carol went to help James with the other horses. Her sister sat with her head back against the car seat, her eyes closed. She looked up when she heard Laney’s footsteps nearing the truck. “You’re going back to look for him.” It wasn’t a question.

Laney nodded. “Flatlanders,” she said with a forced smile.

Janelle wasn’t smiling. “You’re in that photo, too, Laney. You shouldn’t be out there by yourself.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“You can’t know that.”

Laney didn’t bother arguing. Janelle was right. She couldn’t know whether or not she’d be okay. She only knew that Doyle was out there somewhere in the woods, quite possibly lost. On the mountain, it was easy enough to step off a blind drop and break an arm or leg or, God forbid, a neck. He could run across a bear up early from its winter slumber. Or step on a copperhead or a timber rattler.

She turned to Carol, who was approaching the truck. “If I don’t call you in two hours, contact the search teams and tell them what’s going on. Tell them I’m looking for the Bitterwood chief in the woods off the hiking trail just past the first trail shelter. But give me two hours, okay?”

Carol looked alarmed but nodded. “You sure you don’t want James or me to go up there with you? Or maybe keep one of the horses?”

She might be slower without the horse, but she could go more places on foot. And neither Carol nor James was nearly as good a hiker as she was. They’d just hold her back. “I need y’all both to take care of Jannie. If there’s not a policeman parked outside my mom’s house, please go check with my mom to find out why. And don’t let Jannie go in by herself. One of y’all walk her in.”

“Laney, for Pete’s sake,” Janelle grumbled.

“Humor me, okay?” She squeezed Janelle’s arm through the open window, then looked at Carol. “Two hours.”

“Got it.”

Laney gave Carol’s arm a quick squeeze, as well, realizing only after she was heading back up the trail that she’d unconsciously mimicked one of Doyle’s people-handling habits.

He’s just lost, she told herself as she headed up the trail at a clip.

But deep in her gut, she didn’t quite believe it.

* * *

BY THE TIME Doyle’s captors finished hauling him uphill, he was bruised all over and his ears were still ringing from a particularly vicious kick delivered by whichever of his captors was holding his arms. The man at his feet let go of his legs without warning, letting them thump painfully to the ground.

“Who the hell are you?” Doyle asked, not raising his voice this time, since yelling seemed only to piss off his captors and drive them to greater violence.

There was no answer, only the sound of the wind rushing through the trees, making a clattering noise that sounded for all the world like rattling bones, reminding him of Laney’s tale of the Cherokee boneyard on their earlier hike up the mountain. Just three days ago, he thought with surprise. It felt like another lifetime.

Hands still held his wrists, keeping his torso partially upright. He tried to use his feet to push to a standing position, but they seemed to be bound together, and his effort earned him a quick, hard slap to the side of his face.

“Cut it out!” he growled, giving a hard jerk of his hands. They came loose from his captor’s grasp, but he wasn’t prepared, and all his insubordination got him was a hard thump on the back of his head when it hit a pair of steel-toed boots.

“Shut up.” It was the first time either man had spoken. Doyle didn’t recognize the voice, but he had been in Bitterwood only a few short days. There were several people in his own department he’d met maybe once so far. He certainly couldn’t have picked their voices out of a crowd.

Hands grabbed his wrists again and started tugging him backward through the underbrush. Rocks dug into his bottom and the backs of his thighs, sharp in places and cold as a tomb, sending shivers rolling up his spine in waves. He tried to dig his heels in, to make it harder for the man with the hard hands to do whatever he was trying to do.

Nobody tried to pick up his feet or stop his kicking attempts at rebellion. Had the second person left after dropping Doyle’s feet?

That would make the odds more even, but as long as he was hog-tied and hooded, he was still at a huge disadvantage. And too many more clouts to the head like the last one might make it even harder for him to fight back if the opportunity ever presented itself.

The pain of being dragged backward over the ground increased as the rough terrain started putting rips in his jeans, exposing his bare skin to the sharp-edged rocks littering the ground beneath him. He tried using his feet to lift his backside off the ground but couldn’t get enough of a foothold to make much difference. He nearly wept with relief when darkness descended, and the ground beneath his bottom smoothed out.

The man who’d been dragging him let go of his hands again. This time, however, Doyle anticipated the move and was able to stop his head from slamming into the ground. He heard footsteps moving away from him, and he struggled to roll over onto his stomach, hoping to get his knees under him enough to push to a standing position. To his surprise, nobody tried to stop him.

The footsteps receded. There was a loud creaking noise, and what little light had been filtering through the bag over Doyle’s head disappeared completely.

He lifted his hands to his neck, his gloved fingers coming into contact with something holding the hood in place. Duct tape, he realized as he gave a clumsy tug and the adhesive pulled the skin on his neck. But a little pain was worth the effort, and within a few seconds, he’d pulled the offending bag from his head and had his first look around.

There was nothing but darkness, any direction he looked.

No, he thought a few seconds later. That wasn’t quite true. Behind him, in the direction where his captor had disappeared, he thought he could make out dots and slivers of light, faint but tantalizing. But his first attempt at moving in that direction landed him facedown again, his hobbled feet giving him no way to balance.

He rolled onto his back this time and sat up, using his teeth to pull off his gloves. His fingers ached in response to the damp cold, but they were far more agile bare, and he made much quicker work of the duct tape wrapped around his ankles than he had the tape around his neck.


He pushed to his feet again and walked over to the whispers of light his adjusting eyesight had spotted. Reaching out, he felt the rough wood of a door. Following the surface, he found the door ended on either side in damp, solid rock.

A cave with a door? Or was he in an abandoned mine shaft?

Even when he found the handle that should have opened the door, he couldn’t make the slab of wood move. It must be locked on the outside.

Okay. So he was stuck here for a little while. Not exactly good news, but at least he was still alive. He wasn’t sure why, exactly, his attackers hadn’t shot him dead instead of subduing him with a Taser, but he decided not to waste time trying to figure it out. Small victories were better than none.

Using his hands to explore the contours of his dark prison, he decided he was in a cave, not a mine. Someone had apparently put a door into the cave entrance to shut people out, and judging by how far he’d been dragged uphill through the underbrush, this place wasn’t anywhere near a well-beaten path.

The men who’d tied him up had frisked him first, he remembered, the hazy memories of those mind-numbed moments after the Taser attack starting to roll back into his brain. They’d taken his Kimber 1911 for sure. Had they taken his keys, too? He tried his right jeans pocket, where he usually kept the keys. Nothing.

He tried his left pocket, half hoping he’d put the keys there for some reason he couldn’t remember. He hadn’t, but to his surprise, he felt the contours of his cell phone, which he normally kept in his back pocket. He’d put the phone there, he remembered, rather than sit on it while in the saddle and risk butt dialing everyone on his contact list.

Though he knew there was no chance of a phone signal inside this mountain cave, he tugged the phone from his pocket and hit the power button. The display lit up, casting a dim blue glow in the area directly around him. But he could do better than that, he thought with a grin of triumph. He slid his fingertip across the face of the phone and opened a flashlight app. Seconds later, bright light flowed from the tiny flashbulb beneath the phone’s camera lens.

Playing the light around the cave, he saw that it was roughly circular, the walls ending about ten feet from where he stood. Only a second sweep of the light revealed a dark opening that suggested another cavern lay beyond that back wall. He crossed there slowly, his legs still feeling rubbery after the dual ordeal of the Taser shock and the skin-shredding drag through the woods. The dark opening was narrow but large enough for him to slip through easily. Beyond, there was another, smaller chamber, with the same damp brown walls and slightly slanted floor.

But this room was different in one important respect.

It was already occupied.

She was curled up against the far wall, her knees up to her chest and her face averted from the bright light. Her hair was dirty and tangled, her cold-weather clothing grimy and torn in places. She made soft mewling noises of pure fear that ripped a new hole in Doyle’s heart.

Her own mother might not recognize her if she saw her, he thought, but he’d been looking at her photograph enough over the past few days to know exactly who she was. Directing the light away from her eyes, he slowly approached, crouching as he neared her. Keeping his voice gentle, he said her name. “Joy.”

She looked up at him, her eyes wide with fear. She’d cried a lot over the past few days. He saw the evidence in her puffy, red-rimmed eyes.

“That’s your name, isn’t it?” he asked. “You’re Joy Adderly, right?”

“What do you want?” she whimpered, looking away.

“The same thing you do,” he answered. “To get us out of here.”