Blood on Copperhead Trail

Chapter Eight


For a moment, there was no more sound at all, except the pounding of Doyle’s pulse in his ears. He steadied the barrel of his Kimber 1911 Pro Carry II, telling himself that the .45 ammo would stop an intruder with a minimum of rounds. The intruder would be highly visible in the light coming through the opening, while he and Laney would be dark shadows in a dark cave, hard to target.

The lingering silence at the mouth of the cave suggested the intruder had come to the same conclusion. Either he’d retreated quietly or he was waiting in the cave entrance for them to venture out to see if he was gone.

Doyle shielded Laney’s body behind him and waited, unwilling to make the first move. If the shooter wanted a standoff, Doyle was happy to give him one as long as he and Laney remained in the better tactical position.

He felt more than heard Laney’s soft, rapid exhalations against the back of his neck. He didn’t know if she’d pulled her own weapon, and he couldn’t afford to turn around and check. The one thing he didn’t worry about was her firing the gun by accident. If there was anything he’d learned about Laney Hanvey over the past couple of days, it was that she was almost radically competent.

The thunder of his pulse was nearly loud enough to drown out a distant shout coming from somewhere outside the cave. But he definitely heard the second shout, as well as the faint crunch of footsteps on the dirt-packed floor of the cave entrance. The cans didn’t rattle again, and seconds later, the footfalls had faded into silence.

More shouts came, forming words he could make out. Someone was calling their names.

He felt Laney give a start behind him, but he reached back quickly, holding her still. “Not yet,” he whispered.

The shouts came closer. “Laney!”

The female voice sounded familiar.

“That’s Ivy,” Laney whispered. “You know she’s not the one who was shooting at us.”

“I don’t know anything,” he whispered in response.

“I do,” she said firmly. “Trust me on this, okay?”

He didn’t want to lower his weapon, but now that she’d identified the voice calling outside the cave, he recognized it, as well. And from everything he’d heard about Ivy Hawkins since he’d agreed to take the job, she was one of the good guys.

He took a deep breath and let it out in a shout. “In here!”

He heard several voices, talking in low chatter as they came closer to the cave. Seconds later, two silhouettes filled the opening.

Doyle didn’t drop his weapon. “Don’t move any closer.”

Both figures stopped. The one on the left was shorter and, despite the bulky clothing, identifiably more feminine. Ivy, he thought.

“I’m going to reach into my jacket pocket for a flashlight,” Ivy’s voice said. She moved slowly, her hand going into her pocket.


A moment later, a flashlight came on, the beam directed not at them but at herself, illuminating her features. “Chief, are you okay?”

“We’re fine,” Laney answered for Doyle. “Sorry for the caution. But someone was shooting at us less than an hour ago.”

* * *

DOYLE BRUSHED ASIDE the offer to call in paramedics to check his shrapnel wound. “It’s nothing but a splinter,” he said dismissively, looking both frustrated and a little sheepish. Laney guessed he felt embarrassed at having to be rescued by the men and women he was supposed to be leading.

She was just glad to get off the mountain, however it had happened, and back to the hospital in Knoxville to check on her sister.

Delilah Hammond was still there guarding Janelle’s room, though she’d clearly been in touch with her fellow detectives, for she stopped Laney for a quick postmortem of her experiences on the mountain.

“Must have been pretty scary up there,” she said with sympathy before letting Laney enter her sister’s room.

“Yeah, but do me a favor and don’t let Jannie or my mom know how bad it was.” She went on into the room, where her sister greeted her with a hug and a big smile. She was markedly better—more alert, more herself. She’d even put on a little makeup, looking far more put together now than Laney herself, who’d stopped at home only long enough for a hot shower and a fresh change of clothes before rushing to the hospital.

“Where have you been?” Her mother looked relieved to see her.

“I told you I was going to join a search party.”

“All night?”

“Mom, you’re talking to her like she’s a teenager who broke curfew,” Janelle said with a laugh.

Alice didn’t smile back. “And look what happened the last time one of my daughters didn’t show up on time.”

Feeling guilty, especially given her ordeal over the past twenty-four hours, Laney gave her mother a fierce hug. “Sorry. I got snowed in up near the summit of Copperhead Ridge and had to overnight in the old Vesper cabin.”

Janelle and her mother both exclaimed over her bad luck, and Janelle asked if she’d had to share the cabin with other searchers.

“Just one. I was with Chief Massey.”

“Ooh,” Janelle said with a smile. “He’s cute.”

Laney made a face at her sister, hoping she wasn’t blushing. “Enough about my night in the snow. How are you? You’re looking tons better.”

“I’m feeling tons better,” Janelle assured her. “I was running a fever last night, so the doctor won’t sign off on letting me go. But I’m not even running a fever now.” She looked frustrated.

“It won’t hurt you to stay another night, just to be sure,” Alice reminded her younger daughter. “Things could have been a lot worse.”

Janelle’s frown faded into sadness. “I know. When I think about what happened to Missy and what might be happening to Joy—”

Laney sat on the bed beside her sister, brushing away the tears falling down Janelle’s cheeks. “We’re not giving up on Joy yet. The police are back out there right now in the lower elevations, and as soon as there’s some more melt-off up near the summit, they’ll be heading back up there, too.”

“I wish I could remember what happened. What if I saw or heard something that could help the police?”

“You can’t worry about that right now,” Alice told her. “You worry about getting better and the police will worry about what happened to Missy and Joy.”

“Mom’s right,” Laney said. “You concentrate on you.”

And I, she added silently, will do everything I can to keep you safe.

* * *

“IT LOOKS LIKE the same photo paper to me,” Antoine Parsons told Doyle after taking a long look at the photograph of Doyle and Laney that Laney had found at the trail shelter. “I’ve sent some evidence techs up to that shelter to see if there’s anything to be found.” He didn’t sound hopeful.

“Is there any way to be sure whether or not that photo and the photo of Janelle Hanvey and the Adderly girls came from the same camera?” Doyle asked.

“We’ll send both photos to the crime lab in Knoxville to see what can be done about matching them.” Ivy Hawkins was the one who answered his query. She and Antoine Parsons were the only ones with Doyle in his office at the Bitterwood Police Department, selected purposefully because they were two of the three people on the force that he felt, instinctively, he could trust.

The other person he decided he could trust was Delilah Hammond, based on the good word his old friend and former Ridley County deputy Natalie Cooper put in for the detective. Natalie’s husband, J.D., was an on-call pilot for Cooper Security, where Delilah had worked before taking the job with the Bitterwood P.D. Natalie and J.D. both spoke highly of the woman and assured Doyle she could be trusted.

Delilah was currently in Knoxville, watching over their surviving witness. She’d called in a few minutes earlier to let him know that Laney had arrived safely to see her sister. Now all three of the Hanvey women were safely in one place and he could concentrate on his primary job.

“I think we go with the premise that you and Laney are targets,” Ivy said, eyeing him warily as if uncertain how he’d react.

“Or that’s what someone wants us to think,” Doyle countered.

“Someone shot at you right after you found the photo. It seems that might be what happened with Janelle Hanvey and the Adderly girls, too,” Antoine pointed out.

“They were shot with a pistol.” Ballistics was still looking over the bullets retrieved from Missy’s body and Janelle’s head wound, but the technicians had already reported that the slugs had been .38s and had almost certainly come from a semiautomatic pistol. “The guy shooting at us was using a rifle.”

“Maybe he’s flexible about his weaponry.” Antoine shrugged. “I just don’t think you can say it’s two different assailants without more evidence.”

“Maybe we should assign someone to guard Laney and her sister full-time,” Ivy suggested. “Although we’re already shorthanded now that Craig Bolen’s been moved to chief of detectives.”

Hiring a new detective to take Bolen’s place had been high on Doyle’s list of priorities until this murder. Maybe he needed to stop micromanaging the investigation and wrap his head around the paper-pushing end of his job.

Natalie had warned him he might have trouble with the transition from investigator to administrator when he’d asked her advice on the job offer. “I know you, Doyle. You like to get in there and get your hands dirty. It’s not going to be like that when you’re the guy in the office making hiring and firing decisions and worrying about whether or not there’s enough paper for the copier.”

But small-town departments were different. It was the only reason he’d decided to take the job. He could still get involved in investigations, especially ones as high profile as the murder of Missy Adderly and the apparent kidnapping of her sister. The townspeople would expect to see his face in the newspaper and hear him on the local radio shows.

“Chief, maybe you should guard Laney Hanvey yourself,” Antoine said.

Doyle looked up at his detective, surprised. “You think so?”

“Well, you’re equipped to do it, obviously. But beyond that, she’s been sent here by the county to judge whether or not the Bitterwood Police Department even needs to exist anymore. I figure, it can’t hurt to give her a firsthand look at how seriously and personally we take our jobs.”


“You mean, offer myself as her bodyguard as some sort of PR stunt?”

Antoine made a face. “Well, when you put it like that—”

“You’ve already protected her,” Ivy pointed out. “And you seem to be getting along okay now.”

Doyle tried not to think about the kiss he and Laney had shared in the dark, cold recesses of the cave on Copperhead Ridge. He was pretty sure that kiss wasn’t the kind of personal service Antoine was talking about. “Laney Hanvey doesn’t strike me as a woman who’d appreciate being followed around by a cop all day.”

“So don’t let her know that’s what you’re doing,” Antoine said.

“That’ll never work,” Ivy countered. “She’s not stupid.”

“Well, he’s got to find a way to keep her from getting killed,” Antoine argued, “because if we can’t even protect the person sent to keep an eye on us, there’s no way we’re going to be able to convince the county we can pull our own weight.”

“Patronizing her won’t help anything,” Ivy argued.

“You two figure it out and let me know what you decide.” Doyle pushed to his feet and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Ivy asked, turning to watch him go.

“I haven’t had a decent meal since breakfast yesterday.” He grabbed his jacket from the coatrack by the door of his office. “I’m going to lunch.”

* * *

LEDBETTER’S DINER WAS only a block down Main Street from the police department, an easy walk even with muscles as sore and tired as Doyle’s. He’d taken his lunch hour early enough that the normal midday crowd had not yet filled the diner, so he had his choice of tables.

He picked one near the door and sat with his back to the wall, an old law-enforcement habit he’d picked up from his father long before he’d ever pinned on his first badge. Cal Massey had been an Alabama state trooper until his death, and he’d raised all three of his children as if they were going to follow in his footsteps.

“Never sit with your back to the door,” he’d told them. “You need to always keep an eye on who’s coming and who’s going.”

Doyle and his older sister, Dana, had both taken their father’s lessons to heart. Only David, the youngest, had chosen another path.

Tragic, Doyle thought, that the only one of them who’d never strapped on a gun and a badge had been the one to die young.

The bell over the door rang, drawing Doyle’s gaze up from the menu. His chief of detectives, Craig Bolen, entered the diner with a man and a woman in their late forties. The man was tall and heavyset, dressed in a dark suit. When he took off the sunglasses he was wearing, his eyes looked red-veined and tired.

The woman beside him wore a shapeless black dress and black flats. Her sandy hair was pulled back in a tight coil at the back of her head, her pale face splotchy from crying. Dark smudges beneath her eyes could have been the remnants of mascara, he supposed, but he suspected they were more likely the result of sleeplessness and grief.

These were the Adderlys, he understood instinctively. Dave and Margo.

He rose as they looked for a table, dreading what he knew he should do. Craig Bolen caught sight of him first, a glint in his eyes, and nodded a greeting.

“Mr. and Mrs. Adderly?” Doyle steeled himself against the wave of sorrow he knew would flow from them. He may not have held the title of chief of police before, but he’d dealt with grieving families and knew what to expect.

Which was why the shifty look in Dave Adderly’s eyes caught him flat-footed.

“Dave,” Craig said, “this is Chief Massey—”

“I know who you are,” Adderly said bluntly.

“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Adderly,” Doyle began.

“You have a funny way of showing it.”

Margo Adderly put her hand on her husband’s arm, a shocked look on her tear-ravaged face. “Dave.”

Craig Bolen frowned at his friend. “Dave, Chief Massey has been out all night looking for Joy—”

“He’s not out there now, is he?” Adderly walked stiffly to a table nearby, sitting deliberately with his back to Doyle. Margo Adderly darted a troubled look at Doyle and joined her husband, laying her hand on his arm. He shrugged the touch away.

Bolen looked apologetic. “He and Margo had to pick out a casket for Missy this morning.”

“Understood.” Doyle waved his hand toward the table, giving Bolen leave to join the Adderlys. He returned to his own table, his appetite gone. When the waitress came for his order, he settled for a grilled cheese sandwich and water, and asked for them to go.

As he left with his food, he glanced across the dining room at the Adderlys. Dave Adderly had turned in his chair to stare at him, his expression hard to read. It wasn’t hostility, exactly, at least not the same blatant unfriendliness he’d displayed before. He almost looked as if he wanted to say something, but he finally turned back around and murmured something to his wife.

Doyle spent most of his walk back to the office trying to figure out what that brief confrontation with Adderly was all about.

“That was fast.” Ivy was still in his office when he returned, in the middle of jotting a note. “I was just leaving you a message.”

“Anything important?”

“The TBI called with the results of the ballistics test on the slugs from both Missy Adderly’s body and Janelle’s head wound. Both came from the same weapon, and they’re pretty sure it’s a pistol because of the polygonal rifling and the size of the slugs. If we find the weapon, they should be able to identify it.”

“If we find the weapon.” Doyle sank into the well-worn leather of his inherited desk chair and set his food and water on the desk. He eyed the brown paper bag without enthusiasm. “I ran into the Adderlys at Ledbetter’s Diner.”

Ivy shot him a sympathetic look. “How were they holding up?”

“What do we know about the relationship between Adderly and his daughters?” Doyle asked.

Ivy’s eyes widened. “You mean, should we be looking at him as a suspect rather than a grieving father?”

“Something about the way he responded to me this afternoon made me think he really, really doesn’t want to talk to me about the case. And if I were a father with one daughter dead and another missing, I don’t know that there’s anything else I would want to talk about besides the case and what the police were doing to find my missing child.” Doyle pushed the wooden letter opener lying on his blotter from one side of the desk to the other. “Ever been any rumors about that family?”

“You mean like sexual abuse? Never that I’ve heard.”

“Some families go to great lengths to cover up that kind of thing.”

Ivy shook her head. “Both girls were well-adjusted. No trouble in school, both good students and good kids. Definitely not typical of abuse victims.”

“No,” he conceded. “But I don’t think I’m wrong about Adderly. There’s something on his mind he does not want to talk about, especially with me.”

“It might have something to do with his job,” Ivy suggested. “He’ll be voting on whether or not the county will attempt to take over the police department and move it under the Ridge County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Adderly’s on the county commission?”


“You didn’t know that?” Ivy sounded as if he’d looked up at the sky and somehow failed to notice it was blue.

“I’m new.” He was only five days into the job. Surely he had a grace period before he’d be expected to know everybody’s business the way the natives did.

Ivy shot him a grin, as if reading his mind. “Maybe we should put together a study book for you. Map out the family trees, outline all the deep, dark secrets.”

“Yeah, you get right on that. After you go check on the progress of the search parties. They’re supposed to reconvene at the staging area around one to get some food and take a breather. I need someone to gather all the status reports and compile them for me.”

“I was going with Antoine to talk to some of Missy and Joy’s friends.”

“Antoine can grab one of the uniforms to go with him. Tell him to pick one who might be good as a detective. We still have a space to fill on the force, and I’m all for promoting from within.”

“I thought you’d have wanted to talk to the searchers yourself.”

“I would,” Doyle agreed, rising from his desk. “But I can’t be two places at the same time. So I need you to be my eyes and ears on the mountain.”

“Where are you going?” Ivy asked, following him out of his office.

He shrugged on his jacket. “I’m going to go watch the back of a stubborn public integrity officer without her knowing it.”

* * *

“LANEY.” JANELLE’S VOICE was a soft singsong in Laney’s ear. She opened her eyes to see the spring-green curtains of her sister’s bedroom. Janelle sat on the bed beside her, writing in a bright blue spiral-bound notebook.

Laney lifted her face from the pillow, feeling cotton-headed. “I must have dozed off.”

“That’s what I thought, too. But then I realized I was just fooling myself.” Janelle looked up briefly from her notebook and gave Laney a pitying look. “You’ll have to come to the understanding yourself, though. I can’t do it for you.”

Laney cocked her head, confused. “What are you saying?”

“People don’t get shot in the head and survive.”

“Of course they do. You did. The bullet hit the plate in your head—”

“And people don’t get shot at in the woods without getting hit.” Janelle turned to look at the bright sunshine pouring through the bedroom window, revealing the gory mess where the back of her head should have been.

Laney’s stomach lurched, and she clapped her hand over her mouth. When she pulled her hand away, it was coated with blood. She looked down and saw blood drenching her white blouse, still seeping from a large hole in her chest.

Fear seized her, flooding her emptying veins with panic.

“Laney. Sleepyhead.” Janelle’s voice filled her ears like a taunt.

Her body gave a jerk, and she was suddenly awake, really awake, staring up at her smiling sister. Gone was the bright bedroom, replaced by the muted glow of the light over Janelle’s hospital bed. Laney pushed herself up to a sitting position, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands.

“Wow, you were dead to the world,” Janelle said with a chuckle.

Laney shuddered at her sister’s turn of phrase. “What time is it?”

“About one.”

The last thing Laney remembered was the food-services aide bringing Janelle her lunch. Alice had taken advantage of Laney’s presence to run home for a shower and a nap. Laney had taken over the chair by Janelle’s bed and...that was the last thing she remembered.

“You should have awakened me earlier.”

“Why? You looked tired. I wanted to watch TV anyway, so, win-win.” Janelle grinned at her.

“Has the doctor come by yet?”

“Nope. I asked the nurse about it, and she said that if he hadn’t come by to release me at this point, it probably meant he wanted to keep me one more day.” Janelle grimaced. “I’m getting sick of this place.”

“I know, sweetie, but you don’t want to take chances with a head wound.” The creepy sensation left over from Laney’s strange dream began to dissipate. “And here, you’ve got an armed guard watching out for you.”

“You mean Delilah?” Janelle asked. “She’s not here anymore. She left about fifteen minutes ago.”