Murder in the Smokies

chapter Eleven



Davenport Trucking looked deserted when Sutton drove into the lot and parked in front of the main office. “Are you sure she’s here?” he asked Ivy, who was balancing their bags of takeout on her knees in the passenger seat.

“She said she’d be in the back office and to ring the bell.” Ivy carefully shifted the bags as she reached for the door handle. One of the sweet teas started to tip over in its carrying tray, and Sutton snaked out a hand to snare it before it spilled, stretching close enough to Ivy that he could smell the lingering aroma of apple-scented shampoo in her dark hair.

She turned to look at him, her pupils wide. He knew the signs of arousal, saw the flush in her cheeks, the way her lips trembled apart and the pulse in her throat began to race. He felt his own body’s quickening response and considered how easy it would be to let nature take its course.

But would it be wise? Sexual attraction was one of those things that the mind couldn’t always control, and the object of desire could sometimes come as a disconcerting surprise.

“What are you thinking?” Ivy asked, her dark eyes narrowing slightly.

“How much I want to kiss you,” he answered before he could stop himself. The flush in her cheeks spread to the hint of skin he could see in the V of her cotton sweater.

“Sutton—”

He sat back, turning to face the windshield. Frustration sang in his blood but he willed himself to stay controlled. “What are we doing here? Is that what you were going to ask?”

“I guess you find my caution tedious,” she said in a prim tone that made him want to laugh. But laughter had hurt her feelings before, and the one thing he knew beyond a doubt was that he didn’t want to hurt Ivy Hawkins.

“I don’t find anything about you tedious,” he said truthfully. “There’s not a second I spend in your company that I regret.”

“You do have your daddy’s talent for pretty talk,” she said with a lopsided smile that made his chest ache.

“I’m just telling you the truth.”

“Then admit my caution frustrates you.”

He slanted a helpless look at her. “Yeah. It definitely frustrates me.”

“I guess a guy like you doesn’t get stop signs very often.”

“Often enough,” he assured her with a wry smile.

“I’m just not good at this—this whatever it is that’s going on between us,” she said. “I don’t know how to be smart or sophisticated about it.”

“I guess it’s my turn to ask a question,” he said, suddenly curious to hear her answer. “What do you want to get out of whatever this is that we have between us?”

She gazed back at him as if the question had confused her. “I’ve learned not to have expectations about relationships.”

Because of her mother, he realized. Even back when he was a boy, Arlene Hendry had been known as a serial sweetheart, one of the kinder terms used to describe her. She’d never married Ivy’s father, though she’d given Ivy his last name, despite his refusal to acknowledge his paternity. She’d gone from one man to the next, ever the starry-eyed romantic certain that this one would be Mr. Right. It was one of the reasons Ivy had turned to him for friendship and understanding—they’d both known what it was like to have to live down their families’ reputations.

“You have a right to expectations,” he said in a gentle tone.

Her expression fell. “Don’t pity me.”

“I don’t pity you any more than I pity myself.” He shook his head. “Neither of our parents did us any favors.”

“How am I supposed to trust myself to make good decisions? Where would I have learned such a lesson? I’ve watched my mother fall in love dozens of times, with all the staying power of a piece of cheap gum.” She tightened her grip on one of the food bags as it started to slip, her knuckles turning white. “She gets hurt every single time, but she just keeps on. I don’t want to be that woman. I don’t want to get hurt over and over again and keep going back for more.”

“The last thing I want to do is hurt you.”

“But you will. Everyone hurts everyone else. That’s just part of the game.” She nudged the tray of drinks toward him. “Here, take these.”

He took them from her lap. She slid out of the front seat and landed lightly next to the truck, still holding on to the bags. He hurried around to catch up with her as she walked up the sidewalk to the office front door.

“I don’t think it has to be part of the game,” Sutton said as she pushed the doorbell. “I don’t think relationships have to be a game.”

She looked up at him, her expression thoughtful in the harsh glow of the parking lot lights. “Don’t you?”

Movement from inside the office gave him an excuse not to answer, a good thing, since he wasn’t sure he knew how to argue a concept he’d never believed himself. Love, in his experience, created more problems than it solved. It weakened the soul, addled the brain and generally caused nothing but grief for everyone involved.

At least, he’d always thought that until he’d started working for Cooper Security. The Coopers had somehow found a way to combine satisfying, challenging work and happy marriages without the world ending. Maybe it helped that they and their spouses worked in the same general field. Maybe it was just blind luck, although what were the odds that a whole family would be so lucky? Sutton didn’t know the answer.

He just knew he had never seen himself as a good candidate for happily ever after, even if he’d recently begun to wonder what he might be missing.

“I’m about halfway through the list,” Rachel said as greeting as she opened the door. She looked tired, Sutton thought. She wasn’t wearing any makeup that might hide the purple shadows under her reddened eyes. Her connection to all four of the murder victims had to have taken a toll on her emotions.

“We brought food.” He pulled one of the teas from the carrier. “Hope you like sweet tea.”

She looked at the cup of tea. “Thank you. I forgot to eat lunch, and here I was about to skip dinner, as well.”

“That’s not good for you. I know you’ve had a lot to handle, between losing your friends and your father’s illness, but you have to make time to take care of yourself,” Ivy said, her voice tinted by real concern. “Barbecue and chips aren’t the most nutritional things we could have given you, but at least it’s fuel, right?”

“Thank you.” Rachel managed a faint smile as she took the cup from Sutton. “I hate to be antisocial, but if I’m going to finish working out the list for you tonight, I need to be without distractions, so...”

“So be quiet and don’t bother you?” Ivy finished with a laugh.

Rachel made a regretful face. “Well, I wouldn’t have said it that way, but...”

Sutton handed her a wrapped barbecue sandwich and a bag of potato chips. “How quiet should we be?”

“You don’t have to be quiet.” Rachel managed a real smile. “I’ll be playing music—it helps me concentrate. So don’t feel as if you need to whisper.”

“Are there that many rented trucks that qualify for your list?” Ivy asked, her brow furrowed. She was probably thinking about how much legwork she and Antoine would have to do to mark all the names off that list, Sutton thought. He didn’t envy her the grunt work, but he sure would like to get his hands on that list.

He wouldn’t, unfortunately. Ivy had been clear with him about that point on the drive to Maryville. “She’s allowing this without a warrant because she trusts me to be discreet. I’m not going to ask her to include you in that mix. You’re just going to have to trust that I’ll do my job.”

He did trust her, he realized, despite having seen her in action such a short time. She was smart, she was driven and she was stubborn, all good qualities in a detective. She wanted the case solved, with far less financial incentive than Sutton himself had to close the case.

“More than I realized,” Rachel answered Ivy’s question. “I’m having to include some trucks that are on a long-term rental contract, since you’re looking for all Davenport trucks that could be on the road during the time period, right? Not just trucks rented during that period.”

“Right,” Ivy agreed quickly. “We’ll stay out here and let you work.”

“You can use the conference room table to eat—first door on the right.”

As Rachel went into the back office and closed the door behind her, Sutton nodded toward the door Rachel had indicated. “Shall we?”

They settled at one end of a long, well-polished oak table in an otherwise spare, utilitarian conference room, Ivy at the head of the table and Sutton taking the chair at her right. Ivy slanted a look at him. “You must be wondering why I called this meeting,” she intoned.

He groaned at the old joke.

Ivy laughed, opening the bag of food. “I have a feeling I’d better eat up. If that list of names is as long as I think it’s going to be, Antoine and I will be hoofing it for days, trying to talk to everyone and account for their whereabouts during the murders. Or, I guess, we’re really going to be accounting for the whereabouts of the trucks they’ve rented, since it’s possible someone other than the renters could have access to the vehicles.” Her brow wrinkled. “Goody.”

“If you asked, Rachel Davenport would probably agree to let me help you and Antoine out with the legwork.”

She stopped in the middle of unwrapping a sandwich. “You’re right. She’d probably agree, and sure, Antoine and I could use the help beating the bushes. But if Rayburn even knew you were sitting here with me while I waited for this list, he’d take me off the case. And I don’t want off this case.”

He felt like a jerk for pressuring her now. She’d been more accommodating than he’d have been in her position. “You’re right. I should be following my own leads.”

“Except your leads are my leads,” she said in a resigned tone. Lowering her voice, she added, “I’m not alone in thinking it’s strange that all four of the victims were connected to Rachel Davenport in some way, am I?”

“No, you’re not.” He’d been thinking about the coincidence ever since they’d discovered that Rachel had considered Marjorie Kenner a close friend. “That poor woman—she’s lost four friends in the last month or so, and her father is dying of liver cancer. No wonder she looks beaten down and tired.”

“If we hadn’t brought her food, I wonder if she’d have bothered to eat.”

“You remember how I told you about Seth Hammond getting approached to do a contract killing?”

“I do. Which reminds me, I need to have a long talk with him about keeping that kind of information to himself.” Ivy’s lips flattened with annoyance for a moment, then her brow furrowed. “Oh. I get where you’re going. It’s all about the victim. And all the victims were close to Rachel Davenport.”

Sutton nodded. “What if these killings are really all about one victim? Rachel Davenport.”

“But why? Does that poor woman in there really seem like someone who’d inspire that level of malice? She doesn’t even look capable of hurting a fly, much less drawing enough wrath to warrant a contract killing.”

“But they’re not trying to kill her. The contract isn’t out on her.”

“Isn’t it?” Ivy put down her half-eaten sandwich and leaned toward him, close enough that he got another whiff of warm, clean scent. “What if it really is targeting her in some way? Look at how hard she’s taken these deaths. If you wanted to punish her, to make her suffer—”

“So this is some sort of twisted stalker thing? Hurting her by hiring someone to kill the people she cares about?” Sutton couldn’t hide his skepticism. The idea sounded crazy.

“I don’t know!” Ivy’s voice rose with frustration. She lowered it, glancing toward the door. “I don’t know. I just know that all of this has something to do with Rachel Davenport. Whether she’s the trigger that’s setting this killer off or she’s the target of some sort of backhanded murder-for-hire scheme, I cannot shake the conviction that these murders are somehow about her.”

Sutton wanted to argue with her. Contract murders were generally about getting an inconvenient person out of the way or punishing someone for a perceived wrong. They weren’t about torturing a person with grief.

But contract murders also didn’t play out like serial murders, with clear signatures and identical M.O.s. Yet he’d been seriously considering the idea that the four Bitterwood murders may have been committed by someone hired to do so.

Make it look like anything but a hit....

“Maybe we should just table all the crazy theorizing until I get my hands on that list and see where it takes me,” Ivy said, picking up her sandwich again.

They fell quiet while they ate, strains of music from the office down the hall filling the silence. Rachel Davenport’s taste ran to classic rock, apparently, and the evening DJ on the classic rock station was playing a commercial-free set of Southern rock ballads. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” was the current choice, evoking memories of lazy summer nights parked at Summerford Overlook, listening to the classic rock station out of Knoxville and trying to get past second base with whatever pretty little mountain girl he’d been seeing at the time.

“Makes me wish I had a lighter to wave,” he murmured, winning a grin from Ivy.

“My mother has all kinds of stories about seeing Skynyrd in concert.” Ivy finished off her sandwich and rolled the wrapper into a neat ball. Her smile faded. “I’m fairly sure she met at least one of my many ‘uncles’ at a concert.”

“I just remember envying you for even having a mother,” Sutton admitted. “Maybe she made bad decisions and screwed up her life, but she was there for you when you fell down and skinned your knees. Remember?”

Ivy’s expression softened. “She was. She tried to give me a family, really. That’s what all those men were about. Not just her wanting to feel loved but also wanting me to have something my own daddy didn’t stick around to give me. I know all that.”

“Still, it’s hard to forget the bad stuff.” He thought about his father, stuck there in his house, in a body that wouldn’t work right anymore and a voice, once his most powerful resource, that couldn’t weave a story any longer. He felt sorry for him, but he couldn’t forgive him. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

He tore his mind away from the unpleasant past and rose to his feet, holding out his hand to Ivy as an Eagles song replaced Lynyrd Skynyrd on the radio. “Take It to the Limit”—one of his favorites.

Ivy eyed his outstretched hand, her expression wary.

“Come on, Hawkins. Everybody can handle a slow dance. Even a clumsy little mountain girl like you.”

Her eyes narrowed with mock outrage. “Oh, now you’ve asked for it.” She took his hand and let him pull her to her feet, moving willingly into the circle of his arms. She lifted her chin, her dark eyes flashing a challenge he wanted more than anything to meet.

She had a natural feel for the music, her body catching the rhythm and making it part of her. And damn, she felt good in his arms. He wondered what would have happened if he’d stuck around all those years ago instead of leaving. When she was seventeen and he was twenty, would he have taken her to her high school prom?

Would they have been married with babies by the time they reached their thirties?

But he’d left. And those were questions that would never get answered now. Still, there were some questions she could answer for him, at least. Answers about the years of her life he’d missed because he’d left Bitterwood behind.

“Who took you to your prom?” he asked, bending closer to whisper in her ear, trying to remember some of the kids her age in town. “Tommy Adler, maybe? I know, Josh Belholland. He was always sniffing around you back in the day—”

“Who said I went to the prom?”

“The boys ’round here are idiots, then.” She felt warm and soft pressed against him, moving in gentle sways to the music. He felt his hand creeping downward, toward her backside, and almost let it reach its goal before stopping right at the curve of her waist. She was in his arms, one hand moving in light, shiver-inducing circles across his lower back. He’d be an idiot himself to do anything to change that situation.

“Maybe if you’d stuck around Bitterwood, you could’ve asked me.” She said it lightly, as if making a joke, but there was a serious undertone to her voice.

“I was just thinking about that myself,” he said, infusing his words with a smile. “I’d have been a little old for you at the time, maybe, but as we got older, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure you’d have looked at me any differently when I was seventeen and you were twenty. Our relationship was never like that.”

“By that time, your mama pretty much hated the name ‘Calhoun,’ didn’t she? Remember how you had to sneak around to see me toward the end?”

“I remember.” She laid her head against his shoulder. He breathed in the scent lingering in her hair. “I still haven’t told her you’re back in town.”

“Afraid she’d forbid you from seeing me?”

Ivy looked up, flashing him a look full of amused consternation. “If she was smart.”

He brushed his lips against her temple as he pulled her closer. “Then I’m glad she doesn’t know.”

They danced quietly through another ballad, this one a plaintive plea for forgiveness from .38 Special. “I think I’d have wanted you back then,” Sutton whispered in her ear. “Lord knows I want you now.”

Her breath came out in a shaky little hiss as she lifted her head to meet his gaze. “Sutton.”

He bent his head slowly, giving her time to change her mind. But she rose to her toes, her lips parting as she curled her fingers around his neck.

Lights flashed suddenly through the conference room window from outside, painting the wall with bright streaks. Sutton turned in time to see a truck moving past the front of the building out of sight.

“We can’t be this lucky,” Ivy murmured, already moving out of his arms.

Sutton followed her out of the conference room and through the front door, his hand settling on the butt of his Glock where it nestled in a waistband holster behind his back. Ivy had drawn her weapon, moving fast but with stealth, angling her approach from the side of the building to maintain cover as long as possible.

A truck had come to a stop at the self-serve cleaning station, the back doors angled just in front of the drain.

While they’d been inside the building, the last of twilight had faded into inky darkness, punctuated by circles of muddy yellow light cast by the tall lamps that flanked the parking lot. Close to the building, however, darkness reigned, rendered even blacker when compared with those oases of light.

Ahead, Ivy was little more than a compact silhouette creeping through the gloom. She’d changed out of her work suit into a pair of dark jeans and a black cotton sweater that hugged her curves in all the right places but served as a successful bit of camouflage in the night. From behind, he could see only the pale flesh of her hands and the occasional flash of skin beneath the wavy mass of her ponytail.

From the angle where they were, the corner of the office building nearly hid the cleaning bay from view. Only the back end of the truck remained visible as they moved closer. So far, nobody had gotten out to open the truck and commence with the washing.

Ivy slowed to a stop at the corner and Sutton slipped into place behind her. One hand reached out behind her, as if to reassure herself he was there. He touched her fingers, and she squeezed hers around his for a moment, before drawing away to sneak a peek around the corner.

She ducked back quickly, flattening herself against the building as a man came into view. He was tall and lean, in his early forties and dressed in dirty gray coveralls spotted with what looked, in the artificial light, like splashes of ink.

“Let him show us what’s inside,” Ivy whispered, her voice little more than a breath against his cheek.

The man unlocked the back door of the truck, stepping back quickly as he swung it open. Thick, dark red liquid began to trickle out immediately, aided by gravity from the truck’s slightly inclined position.

Sutton’s gut tightened. Even from the distance of several feet, the sickly metallic odor was unmistakable.

Blood.