Blood on Copperhead Trail

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 go to college somewhere in the East. She hadn’t been back to Bitterwood since, until she’d shown up a couple of months earlier and ended up taking a job on the Bitterwood detective squad.

“Laney Hanvey,” she supplied, smiling as recognition sparked in Delilah’s dark eyes. “Bitterwood Rebels—”

“Fight, fight, fight,” Delilah answered with a wide smile.

“You remembered.”

“How could I forget my star third baseman?”

“Third base, huh?” Doyle murmured, making it sound a little dirty. The fierce look she zinged his way triggered that half smirk again. But it disappeared quickly, and he transformed in an instant to the man in charge, shotgunning a series of questions at the two detectives.

In a few seconds, he’d gleaned a great deal of information about the body, from who had found it and whether or not they’d moved the body to the particulars of hair color, eye color and most likely cause of death.

“Defects in chest and head. Won’t know until autopsy, but I think they’ll turn out to be bullet holes,” Delilah answered.

“Does he match the description of Peter Bell?”

“At first blush, yes. The Virginia State Police have Bell’s dental records and DNA—his wife supplied both when she reported him missing. We should know one way or the other soon,” Antoine answered.

There was a photo of Bell on the missing-persons wall at the Ridge County Sheriff’s Department. Laney had seen it several times over the past few months. She stepped to the side, closer to where the busy evidence technicians worked methodically around the body, and tried to catch a glimpse.

Death was never pretty. Even the deceleration afforded by the colder temperatures up on the ridge hadn’t spared the body the ravages of decomposition. It was impossible to compare the photo of a smiling, handsome, very much alive Peter Bell to this corpse.

She hated to think about Bell’s wife looking at those remains and trying to recognize her husband in them.

As she stepped back toward the others, she felt the intensity of Doyle’s gaze before she even lifted her eyes to meet his. “Recognize him?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Well preserved is not the same as lifelike.”

“Do you think this death has anything to do with Missy Adderly’s murder?” Antoine asked.

“I don’t see how,” Delilah answered. “If this is Peter Bell, he was probably killed because he caught Cortland conspiring with Bailey on video and someone found out about it.”

Bell had been investigating lumberyard owner Wayne Cortland, a suspect in a drug trafficking and money laundering case the U.S. Attorney’s office in Abingdon, Virginia, had been investigating. Tailing Cortland had led Peter Bell to Maryville, a small city near Bitterwood, where Bell had recorded a meeting between Cortland and a man named Paul Bailey on video.

Bailey had later proved to be the mystery man behind a series of murders for hire, which should have put Cortland in the crosshairs of a murder investigation. But Bell had disappeared somewhere in the Bitterwood area, and the video had vanished with him.

“If it’s Bell,” Laney said quietly, “what are the chances he hid a copy of that video he claimed to have?”

“Private eyes can be paranoid types,” Antoine said, “but anybody who’d kill a man to get the video off his phone would probably be pretty thorough about shaking him down for any copies.”

“Besides, both Paul Bailey and Wayne Cortland are dead,” Delilah added.

“Cortland’s body hasn’t been identified yet,” Doyle said.

All three sets of eyes turned to him.

“The confidence y’all show in my investigative abilities is touching,” Doyle drawled. “Really, it is.”

By the time the TBI technicians finished their work, midnight was fast approaching, along with a deepening cold that had long since seeped through Laney’s coat and boots. Her toes were numb, her fingers nearly useless, and when Doyle told them to go home and get some sleep because the next day was going to be a long one, she nearly wilted with relief.

The walk back to the chief’s truck got her blood pumping, driving painful prickles of feeling back into her toes and fingers. Doyle turned the heat up to high and gave a soft, feral growl of pleasure as warm air flooded the truck cab. “I think I’ve turned into a cop-sicle.”

Laney couldn’t stop a smile at his joke. “Regretting the job change already?”

He slanted a suspicious look her way. “Do you have some sort of bet riding on my job longevity?”

“Betting is a sucker’s game.”

“So it is.” He continued looking at her, a speculative gleam in his eyes, which glittered oddly green from the reflected light of the dashboard display. His scrutiny went on so long, she began to squirm inwardly before he finally said, “I’m guessing you were an honor student. Straight A’s, did all your homework without being told to, played sports because you’re competitive but also because it helped round out your CV when it was time to get into a good college. UT for undergrad. I’d bet you went somewhere close by for law school—you haven’t lost much of your accent. But somewhere prestigious because you were bright enough to score admission. Virginia, Duke or Vandy.”