Blood on Copperhead Trail. Paula Graves
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sent blazing his way packed a punch. “To the crime scene.”
* * *
“YOU’RENOTACOP, you know.” Doyle sounded somewhere between frustrated and amused.
Laney kept her voice even and, she hoped, nonconfrontational. “The county government’s policies regarding public integrity investigations give me a great deal of leeway in police matters while your department is under scrutiny.”
“Even ride alongs under duress?”
“I’m not sure I’d term this ‘duress’—”
“You told me to shut up and drive,” he drawled.
“I did no such—” She stopped short when she spotted the slight curve of his mouth. “You’re a funny guy, Chief Massey. Real funny.”
He turned up that hint of a smile to full wattage. If she were a lesser woman, she might find herself utterly dazzled by that grin. “Here’s what I’ve learned about police work, Public Integrity Officer Hanvey. There ain’t much to smile about, so you have to create your own opportunities.”
He was right about one thing. There hadn’t been much to smile about since she’d returned to Bitterwood to look into police corruption. Maybe the county administrator was wrong to think she was the best person for the job. There just might be too much history between her and this town for her to ever be fully objective.
“Think this body belongs to that missing P.I. from Virginia?” Massey asked a moment later, his grin having faded with her silence.
She didn’t have to ask whom he meant. Peter Bell’s disappearance was all tangled up with the police-corruption case she was investigating. “Depends on how long the body’s been up there. Do you know?”
“At least a month, but probably not much more than three or four.”
She nodded. “That fits the timeline for Peter Bell’s disappearance. He was last seen in this area in late October of last year.”
“Shortly after he observed Wayne Cortland meeting with Paul Bailey.”
She slanted a look at him. “You know a lot about the Cortland case.”
He met her gaze with a quirked eyebrow. “You think I’d take this job without doing my homework?”
Actually, she had figured him as the sort of guy who avoided homework every chance he got. But maybe she’d assumed too much about him based on his outward appearance and his laid-back attitude.
The road ended at the trailhead about halfway up Copperhead Ridge. Doyle parked his truck and turned to look at her. “I’m not a mountain goat. So go easy on me. Get me safely up that mountain and back.”
She bit back a smile. “I’ll do what I can. But those sea-level lungs may have a little trouble with the change in altitude.”
At least he was appropriately dressed, in a fleece-lined weatherproof jacket and heavy-duty hiking boots. Her own attire was similar, as she’d changed clothes at Ledbetter’s Diner before she and Ivy headed up the mountain earlier that day. Her travel bag was still in her car in the hospital parking deck.
With nightfall, the temperatures on the mountain had plunged below freezing, making the hike up the ridge trail a headlong struggle into a biting wind. Up this high, the tendrils of mist that shrouded the peaks turned into a freezing fog that stung the skin and made eyes water. Laney tugged the collar of her jacket up to protect her throat and lower face, squinting through tears.
“Damn, it’s cold,” Doyle muttered.
“Just wait till it snows again.”
One of the search parties scouring the ridge had found the body about thirty yards east of the second trail shelter, about eight miles from where they’d found Missy Adderly’s body. Since Laney was the native, Doyle let her lead the way. Despite his occasional self-deprecating comments about the hike, he didn’t have any trouble keeping up, and his sea-level lungs seemed to be doing just fine at nearly five thousand feet. He seemed to be adapting quickly to his new surroundings.
They found some of the search-party members had remained on the mountain, huddled together under the shelter for warmth and a little respite from the freezing fog. Laney recognized a few of them, including Carol Brandywine and her husband, James, who ran a trail-riding stable. No horses out here tonight, Laney noted with grim amusement. The Brandywines wouldn’t subject their precious four-legged babies to conditions like these.
“Delilah and Antoine are with the body.” James pointed east, where blobs of light moved in the woods.
“Stay here if you like,” Doyle told Laney, giving the sleeve of her jacket a light tug—a variation on his arm-touching habit, she thought. “That body’s not likely to be pretty.”
“I’ve spent time on the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee,” she told him. “I’ve probably seen more bodies in various degrees of decay than you have.”
His eyebrows lifted slightly, but he didn’t try to talk her out of it when she fell into step with him as they headed toward the flashlight beams ahead. Halfway there, he murmured, “If I go all wobbly kneed at the sight of the body, promise you’ll catch me?”
She glanced at him and saw the smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. “You think I overstated my credentials a bit?”
He looked at her. “No. But it’s possible you’ve underestimated mine.”
“Ridley County’s not that big. And you weren’t even the sheriff. You were a deputy.”
“I was captain of investigations, with several years of experience as an investigator. I’m plenty qualified to lead a small-town department.”
On paper, perhaps. But did he have the temperament to run a police department that had already been rocked by scandal?
“So serious,” he murmured, as if reading her thoughts on her face. She tried to school her expressions to hide her musings, succeeding only in making him smile. “There are many ways to get things done, Public Integrity Officer Hanvey. Sometimes a smile is more useful than a frown.”
And now he was implying she was a grim dullard, she thought with a grimace as they reached the clump of underbrush where Antoine Parsons and fellow Bitterwood P.D. detective Delilah Hammond stood a few feet from a pair of TBI evidence technicians examining the remains.
The body was clearly that of a male and, except for a few signs of predation, was in remarkably good shape, given how long it must have been in the woods. “Temps up here have been pretty cold since October,” Delilah said when Doyle commented on it. “The TBI guys say the body’s fairly well preserved.”
“Looks like the only things that’ve been messing with the body were small carrion eaters like raccoons,” Antoine added. “Could’ve been worse if the black bears weren’t hibernating now.”
Laney tamped down a shudder. She’d seen the kind of damage a black bear could do to a campsite. Her earlier bravado aside, she didn’t want to know what one could do to human remains.
“No ID on the body?”
“Won’t know for sure until the techs move him, but so far, no. No wallet, no watch, no jewelry, no nothing,” Delilah answered. She glanced up and did a double take when she spotted Laney.
“Hi, Dee,” Laney said with a smile, recognizing the look on the other woman’s face. That look that said, “Don’t I know you?” Delilah Hammond was five years older than Laney, and the last time they’d seen each other, Laney had been twelve years old, with a mouth full of braces and a pixie haircut. Delilah had been her idol, a smart, beautiful high school senior who’d volunteered to coach Laney’s softball team.
Then Delilah’s daddy had blown up the family home in a meth-lab explosion, burning Dee’s brother Seth and killing himself. Delilah had left town soon after to