Blood on Copperhead Trail

by Paula Graves

  So far, none of the desk nurses could tell them anything about him, though one remembered seeing him. “I just figured he was a new orderly,” she’d said without much interest. “His badge looked right. I didn’t look closely, though.”

  Doyle made a mental note to check if any of the hospital’s regular employees was missing a badge, and went with Laney back to Janelle’s room to show the photo to Ivy, Sutton and Laney’s mother, Alice, who joined them near the door to hear what was going on. None of them had been there when the man showed up on the video feed, but Doyle hoped maybe one of them would recognize him.

  “Never seen him before,” Ivy commented when Doyle showed them the image. Alice Hanvey shook her head, as well.

  “Doesn’t that look like a disguise?” Sutton asked.

  They looked at the image again. Doyle realized Sutton was right. “It does.”

  Alice’s blue eyes searched her daughter’s face. “Are you okay, Charlane? You look a little shaky.”

  Doyle looked from Alice’s concerned expression to Laney’s pale face, where spots of red had risen in her cheeks. Charlane, he thought. So that was what Laney was short for.

  “I’m fine,” Laney answered. “Just tired.”

  Alice gave her arm a squeeze and headed back across the room to the chair by Janelle’s bed, leaving Doyle and Laney with Ivy and her fiancé.

  “Nice horse.” Sutton reached out and flicked the tail of the stuffed horse still tucked under Laney’s arm, a teasing light in his eyes.

  Laney gave his arm a light punch. “I know where you can get one if you need a cuddle buddy.”

  His gaze slanted toward Ivy. “Oh, I’ve got one of those already.”

  “Too much information,” Doyle drawled. He glanced at the bed, where Janelle lay with her back to the door. “How’s Janelle?”

  “She’s been asleep most of the time you were gone,” Ivy answered just as quietly. “Although if my calculations are correct, she’s due for another visit from the nurse, so she won’t get to sleep much longer.”

  She might as well have cued the nurse’s arrival, for within seconds, a smiling licensed practical nurse came through the door with her machine to check Janelle’s temperature, blood pressure and oxygen level. After she left, Janelle frowned at the four of them huddled in the doorway of her room.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, sounding a little groggy.

  Laney went to her sister’s side. “Everything’s fine. I brought you something.” She handed over the stuffed horse.

  Janelle pulled a face. “Oh, look. A baby toy.”

  “I thought she looked like Sugar.”

  Janelle’s expression softened. “Okay, in that case...” She took the stuffed horse and hugged it to her, looking more like a scared kid than a twenty-year-old. Doyle supposed, after all she’d been through, she was allowed a little bit of emotional regression.

  But he needed her to be grown-up for just a few minutes longer. He took the screen-grab printout from Sutton and crossed to Janelle’s bedside. “Janelle, do you think you could take a look at this and tell me if you’ve ever seen this man before?”

  Laney shot him a look of displeasure, and even Alice seemed surprised that he would bring up the subject, but he couldn’t let their overprotectiveness stop him from doing his job. He handed the printout to Janelle, who looked at it intently, her brow furrowed.

  “It’s not a great picture,” she said after a few seconds of consideration, “but it might be him.”

  “Might be who?” Laney asked.

  “Ray.” Janelle handed the photo back to Doyle. “Remember? I told you about him. The guy we ran into on the trail the day before...” Her words faltered, her expression darkening. “Before the shootings.”

  Laney caught her sister’s hand, her tone urgent. “Are you sure?”

  “No, not entirely. This guy looks a little older, but the glasses and mustache are the same. And the hair. My memory isn’t exactly running on all cylinders.”

  “This isn’t the guy who shot Missy, is it?” Doyle asked.

  “No.” She seemed certain about that much. “That guy was a lot older. Looked entirely different—he was nearly bald, for one thing. No mustache or glasses.” Her mouth flattened. “I’d definitely remember the shooter if I saw him again.”

  Doyle and Laney exchanged glances.

  “Where did you get that picture?” Janelle asked. “Is that in the hospital?”

  “Yes,” Laney answered. “Just down the hall, as a matter of fact.”

  Janelle looked suddenly excited. “Did you get to talk to him? Maybe he saw or heard something on the mountain—”

  “We haven’t located him,” Doyle answered.

  “But how did you get the picture?”

  “We were looking into something else,” Laney answered before Doyle could. “Something unrelated, and we happened across this photo.”

  “Did I describe him to you before? Is that how you recognized him?”

  She hadn’t described him before, Doyle realized. Laney had been so intent on rushing him out of Janelle’s hospital room that first day that all he could remember about someone named Ray was that the girls had run into him on the trail at some point before the shootings.

  He should have followed up, but they’d found the other body, and then he and Laney had gotten caught in the snowstorm and ended up hiding in a cave from a gunman. He’d been a little distracted.

  So why had he thought the man looked familiar?

  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 g
et 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 co
ffee 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.