Blood on Copperhead Trail

by Paula Graves

  Doyle grinned. “I wouldn’t let a twelve-year-old play this game.” He pushed the tray table closer and sat on the end of the bed across from Janelle. “I have a friend—used to work with her, matter of fact. Anyway, she got married a while back and invited me to the wedding. She married into this big family—her husband has six brothers and sisters. And the night before the wedding, I got suckered into playing this game they play called Popsmack.”

  “Popsmack?” Laney mimicked her sister’s earlier look of skepticism.

  “The groom’s twin brothers made it up, apparently.”

  “Why’s it called Popsmack?” Janelle asked, curiosity getting the better of her grumpy mood.

  “I’m told that when the brothers and sisters played the game when they were younger, they’d inevitably end up in a tussle. Hence the pop. And the smack.”

  Laney sat by Doyle at the foot of the bed, giving him a stern look. “You’re not suggesting that’s the expected outcome. Because I don’t think it would be very politic of a police chief to pop or smack a young woman in a hospital bed.”

  “I think we can keep it nonviolent,” Doyle assured her with a grin. He nudged Laney’s shoulder with his. “Three can play this game.”

  Based on the wicked gleam in his eyes, she wasn’t sure playing Popsmack with him was a good idea. But the idea seemed to make Janelle forget about being stuck in the hospital for a while, at least, so what could it hurt?

  “Okay,” she said. “How do we play?”

  * * *

  “WHY, WHAT’S THAT? That’s the queen of spades.” Janelle shot Doyle a wicked grin that made him smile. He’d bought the cards in the hospital gift shop to give Janelle a way to pass the time, but his spur-of-the-moment brainstorm about playing Popsmack had turned out to be a mood changer for the patient. It even had Laney laughing, a delightful bonus.

  Plus, thanks to the distraction, neither of the Hanvey women had protested having him stick around to play bodyguard.

  He laid his card on the tray table. Ten of hearts. Janelle waggled her eyebrows at him.

  Laney played her own card—jack of diamonds. She shot a grin at Doyle. “Guess you’re in the hot seat, Chief.”

  “Hmm.” Janelle seemed to give her question some thought. They’d been playing for half an hour already and had gone through the obvious questions—age, schooling, favorite food and color. If he were playing with Laney alone, he might have been inclined to cheat in order to get answers to a few of the more intimate questions he’d like to ask, but Janelle’s presence put a damper on seduction by card game.

  Maybe later, when he had to convince Laney to let him go home with her....

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” Janelle asked.

  He’d braced himself for the question earlier, but neither had thought to ask it before. “Two,” he answered. “A brother and a sister.”

  He didn’t clarify that only one of them was still alive.

  “What are their names?” Janelle asked as he prepared to show his next card.

  “Dana and David.”

  “Older or younger?”

  “Dana’s older by a year. David...” He stopped, realizing that if he stuck around Bitterwood long enough, they’d know all his secrets anyway, and it didn’t seem fair to start out by hiding this one, inescapable truth about his life. “David was three years younger.”

  “Was?” Laney slanted a look at him.

  “He was working with a charity group in South America when a drug cartel targeted the village where he was working. They wanted to make an example of people who tried to thwart them.”

  Janelle put her hand over her mouth, while Laney’s expression was more grim than horrified. She worked for a county prosecutor, so she’d probably seen her share of brutality, though he doubted she’d ever seen the kind of carnage that had greeted the army patrol that had stumbled on the ruins of the tiny jungle village in Sanselmo.

  “He was twenty-three.”

  “Your poor family.” Laney’s gaze drifted to her sister, and Doyle realized she probably understood what he’d gone through better than most people. She’d lost a brother herself, and almost lost her sister twice.

  “My parents had died a few years earlier.” Small blessings, he thought.

  “But you and your sister—”

  He nodded sharply, ready to move to a cheerier topic. He waved his next card at them. “We ready to deal again?”

  Laney squeezed her sister’s hand. “Sure.”

  He laid down a card, forcing a grin when he saw it was a king. “Y’all are in trouble now.”

  Janelle dealt a nine of hearts and grimaced. “Ugh.”

  Laney looked as if the last thing she wanted to do was play any more games, but she lifted her chin, smiled at her sister and put down a card. Three of clubs.

  “Uh-oh.” Janelle’s grin was downright wicked.

  Laney looked at Doyle, her blue eyes still soft with sympathy. Any thought of giving her a hard time vanished, and he tossed her an easy question. “Loony Tunes or Disney?”

  “Loony Tunes,” she said emphatically.

  “Mickey Mouse scared her,” Janelle said with a grin.

  “Oh?” Doyle quirked his brows at Laney. “What was it? The big ears? The white gloves? The enormous shoes?”

  “It wasn’t Mickey Mouse as such,” she answered, glaring at her sister. “If you have to know, it was the movie Fantasia. Mom took me to see it when I was really little, and I guess it was too intense for me. I’m told I woke from a few nightmares screaming about Mickey Mouse trying to kill me.”

  Doyle bit back a smile. Fantasia had scared him the first time he saw it, too. Only later had he come to appreciate its magic. “So, Mickey gives you the heebie-jeebies?”

  “I got over it,” she defended quickly. “Mickey’s the man and all that. Yay, Disney!”

  “She hates to admit having any weaknesses,” Janelle said with a sisterly shrug. “It can be annoying, but what can you do?”

  The fact that he found Laney more endearing than annoying was starting to scare him. He wasn’t quite sure what it was about the pretty blue-eyed mountain girl that had gotten under his skin, but there wasn’t much point in denying the fact that he found her damned near irresistible.

  Considering the power she held over his job, any sort of personal relationship between them was risky as hell. He should be running hard and fast the other way, but he couldn’t exactly do that now, could he? Not with someone targeting her and her sister.

  A knock on the door sent a jolt down his spine, and he reached for his holster, not relaxing until the door opened a few inches and Ivy Hawkins stuck her head through the opening. “Everybody decent?”

  “Depends who you’re asking,” Doyle said with a smile.

  Ivy grinned at him as she entered the room. She was carrying a folder, which she handed to Doyle before turning her smile on Janelle. “Hey there, Jannie. You’re looking a lot better than the last time I saw you.”

  “I’m feeling better,” Janelle assured her. “Although my stupid doctors won’t let me out of here.”

  “The doctors are not stupid.” Laney’s voice held a hint of sternness that Doyle recognized from his own dealings with his bossy older sister. He let the sisters sort things out between them while he opened the folder Ivy had given him.

  Compiled inside, he saw with a glance, were typed reports from the search parties on Copperhead Ridge. He flipped through them, looking for anything new but seeing more of the same. The searchers had so far stuck mostly to the trails, but there were no signs of the missing girl.

  He supposed soon they’d have to send searchers off the beaten paths, as dangerous as that might prove to be. For all any of them knew, the girl could be miles away from Bitterwood by now, assuming she was ev
en still alive.

  And he was fast losing any hope that she could be.

  “Thought you might want these today,” Ivy said in a quiet tone.

  “Thanks. You still on duty?”

  Ivy glanced at her watch. “My shift ended on the way here, but you know we’re always on call. You need something?”

  He nodded toward the door, and she walked with him over there so they could talk without Janelle overhearing. Doyle felt Laney’s gaze follow him across the room, as tangible as a touch.

  “I doubt Laney’s eaten anything since we came off the mountain. I thought I’d take her out for dinner, but I need to arrange for another guard for Janelle.”

  Ivy frowned. “Yeah, I heard someone lured Delilah away. Strange.”

  “It might have been a misunderstanding,” Doyle told her, though the more he thought about it, the less he was inclined to think so. Dispatchers didn’t normally take it upon themselves to interpret a vague mention of wanting to gather his detectives as an order to call one of them off a guard assignment.

  “You want me to keep an eye on Janelle while you take Laney out on a date?” Ivy asked, her expression neutral but her dark eyes twinkling.

  “Insubordination, Hawkins,” he warned, but he couldn’t put much authority behind the words, since she was mostly right.

  “If you need someone to take the night shift, I could call Sutton and see if he could do it,” Ivy suggested. “He had a late shift at the detective agency last night, but he was off today and is off tomorrow. He napped earlier today, so he should be rested and alert. He could stay until we can pull someone else off the job to take over guard duty.”

  “I can’t pay him,” Doyle warned.

  “He’d do it for free. We’ve known Laney and her family for years. She’s from up on Smoky Ridge,” she added, as if that meant something to Doyle. It clearly meant something to her.

  “I’ve got to see who would be available. Mind if I pass the names by you? I want to make sure whoever we assign to guard Janelle is someone I can trust. And right now, there are only a few people here I know well enough to trust.”

  “I’m honored to be considered one of them.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “I am one of them, right?”

  “You are.” He smiled. “Even if you’re incorrigibly sassy mouthed and prone to meddling in your superior’s personal business.”

  “I’ll call Sutton and get him here for the evening shift. That’ll give you time to assign someone overnight. Meanwhile, I’ll stay until you and Laney finish your, um, dinner.” She stopped there, but he still saw the gleam of humor in her eyes.

  He had to be careful, he thought. His laid-back style of police work had made him a favorite on the Ridley County Sheriff’s Department back in Alabama, even with some of the criminals he’d dealt with, but he knew it might not serve him well as a chief of police. He didn’t need to become friends with the people under his supervision, even if it was his inclination to do so. In some cases, too much familiarity could definitely breed contempt.

  But he also didn’t believe that authoritarianism for its own sake was an effective management style.

  He’d have to figure it out on the fly, he supposed.

  He stepped back into the hospital room. “Laney, when was the last time you ate anything?”

  She looked up, surprised by the question. “I had some crackers around noon.”

  “Grab your coat,” he said. “We’re going out to dinner.”

  * * *

  “THIS BOSSY STREAK of yours is a little disconcerting,” Laney commented as she and Doyle left behind the warmth of the Thai restaurant and headed across the street to where he’d parked his truck. She’d figured when he coaxed her out of Janelle’s room for dinner that they’d grab something in the hospital cafeteria. But he’d insisted on getting all the way out of the hospital, assuring her that Ivy would take good care of her sister.

  She’d been the one to suggest the Thai place, half expecting he’d be reluctant. Or maybe she’d been hoping for it, for some sign that he was unsuitable as an object of the desire she was having more and more difficulty ignoring.

  But he’d foiled her hopes, ordering with ease and even coaxing her into trying one of the more exotic dishes she’d never had the guts to sample before. Pla sam rot tasted much better than it looked; the fish—fried whole, head and all, and served in a spicy sweet tamarind sauce—had been delicious.

  “I spent some time in Thailand after college,” he’d told her. “A college pal’s father worked for Chevron in Thailand, and he invited me to visit awhile. We taught English in one of the smaller cities for about a year. It was an adventure.”

  So much for dampening her interest in him. Now he was more intriguing than ever.

  When he slid his arm around her shoulders as she shivered in the cold wind, she couldn’t have kept herself from snuggling closer to him if she’d wanted to. “Bossy, huh?” he asked. “I’m practicing my people-handling skills. How am I doing?”

  “Not bad,” she admitted.

  “Brrr.” He made a show of shivering as he dug in his pocket for his truck keys. “How long before spring?”

  “By late April, it’ll be a lot less chilly,” she promised. “I guess you’re used to warmer weather down on the gulf.”

  “It gets cold, but not like this.” He helped her into the cab before he walked around and slid behind the steering wheel. He turned to look at her, his expression thoughtful. “You thought I’d balk at Thai food, didn’t you?”

  She couldn’t have felt more naked if she’d been literally free of clothing, standing in the middle of the street. Either he was uncannily perceptive or she needed to do a little work on her poker face.

  “I was hoping you would,” she admitted.

  “Why?” The glint in his moss-green eyes suggested he already knew the answer, but he seemed intent on making her admit it.

  She sighed and tugged her coat more tightly around her. “I don’t need a complication in my life.”

  “And I’m a complication?”

  “Yes.” A big, good-humored, impossibly sexy complication.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I’m not really looking for complications, either.” But even as he said the words, he leaned closer to her, the heat of his body washing over her, his eyes glittering with feral intent.

  “No?” she breathed, her chest tight with anticipation.

  “No,” he answered, his lips brushing hers.

  Her fingers curling in his hair, she tugged him closer, her body humming with pleasure. He leaned in, ignoring the console that sat inconveniently between them. He grumbled as his rib cage hit the gear shift, but he didn’t stop kissing her, and she felt her control slipping away in a heated rush.

  It took a second to realize the vibration against her hip came from her phone. Groaning, she pulled away and tugged the offending instrument from her pocket. Recognizing the number as her sister’s hospital-room extension, she put her hand on Doyle’s chest and pressed the answer button. “Jannie?” She sounded as breathless as if she’d run a race.

  “Please come back, Laney. Please.” Janelle sounded teary.

  “On my way, sweetie. Has something happened?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Janelle’s voice turned into a soft wail. “I think I remember what happened that night.”

  Chapter Ten

  Janelle looked pale and red eyed, but Doyle was glad to see she hadn’t fallen apart completely while waiting for them to return from dinner. She held out her arms to Laney, who gave her younger sister a fierce, protective hug while Ivy and Doyle stood a few feet away, allowing the sisters a moment.

  Laney cradled Janelle’s face between her hands. “Are you okay, baby?”

  “Yes. I just—” Janelle closed her eyes tightl
y, as if she could shut out whatever it was she’d remembered. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  Laney exchanged a quick glance with Doyle. He gave her an encouraging smile as she turned back to her sister. “I’m right here. Tell me what you remembered.”

  “The aide brought my dinner just after you left, and you know I get sleepy after I eat—” Janelle cut herself off abruptly, as if she realized she was stalling. She took a deep breath. “I dreamed about the camping trip. It was so real. And then I remembered his face.”

  “Whose face?” Laney asked.

  “The man who shot Missy.” Janelle’s throat bobbed with emotion. “The man who shot me.”

  Laney looked at Doyle again, her blue eyes haunted. He stepped forward, pulling a chair closer to the bed, near enough to Laney to touch her if he wanted. But he kept his hands to himself, despite the urge to offer his comfort.

  Janelle looked at him. “I can tell you what he looks like, but I don’t know who he is.”

  “He’s not someone from around here, then?”

  “No.” Her fingers tightened around Laney’s, her knuckles whitening. “He was older, like in his forties or fifties. He had blond hair, or maybe it was blond with gray. Thinning but not completely bald.” She closed her eyes a moment, as if trying to conjure up the picture from her memory. “I think he had blue eyes, or maybe gray. It was early morning, and still kind of dark, so I can’t be sure.”

  “And you’re sure this is a memory and not just a dream?” Laney asked.

  “I’m sure. I was getting my gear together—we had to get a move on if Missy and I were going to make it to school on time. Missy was outside the shelter, about to write something in the logbook when she started cussing.”

  Doyle glanced at Laney and saw that she was making the same connection he was. He wasn’t surprised by Janelle’s next words and neither was Laney.

  “She’d found this photograph of the three of us sleeping in the shelter.” Janelle shuddered. “Someone must have taken it the night before. It was so creepy. Missy showed it to me and then, suddenly, he was there.”