Blood on Copperhead Trail

Her frosty silence on the other end of the phone told him he’d apparently made another breach of police-department etiquette.

“Can you give me the cell numbers for Detectives Hawkins and Parsons?” he asked.

She rattled off the numbers quickly, and he punched them into the phone’s memory. “Will there be anything else, Chief Massey?”

“Yes, one more thing. Do you know if Bolen’s been able to reach the Adderly family with the news about Missy?”

“He hasn’t called in, but he headed over there about fifteen minutes ago, so I imagine he’s told them by now.” Her voice softened with her next question. “Chief, is there anything new on the other girl, Joy?”

“No, not yet. You’ll probably hear as soon as I do, if not sooner. If you do hear anything, please let me know at once.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Flatley, for your help.”

There was a hint of a smile in her voice when she answered. “Just doing my job. Do you want me to forward your calls to your cell?”

“No, just take messages, unless it’s urgent.”

He ended the call, then dialed Ivy Hawkins’s number.

She answered on the second ring, the connection spotty. “Hawkins.”

“This is Massey. Catch me up.”

“TBI crime-scene unit finally arrived. I sent some of them over to the trail shelter to get what they could find there, too. Parsons is with that crew. I’m sticking with the original scene, helping out with the grid search. But we’re running out of daylight.” Her voice tightened. “What’s the news on Janelle Hanvey?”

“Better than we had a right to hope for.” He outlined what the doctor had told them, keeping it vague in deference to the girl’s privacy rights. “She’s awake and the family’s with her.”

“I can be in Knoxville in about thirty minutes if you’d like me to question the girl.”

“I can handle it.”

There was a thick pause on the other end of the line, reminding him of the frosty reception he’d gotten from Ellen Flatley earlier. “Okay.”

“Is there a problem, Hawkins?”

“Permission to speak freely, sir?”

He grinned at the phone. “Please.”

“The job of chief of police is primarily a political position. You supervise, schmooze, shake hands with the town bigwigs and basically present a nice, trustworthy face for the public. Witness interviews, though—”

“We’re not a big city. We all have to wear different hats. The town council made that clear when they hired me. And how often do you get two violent-crime victims in one day?”

“Recently? More often than I like,” she answered drily. “But, understood, sir. We’re spread thin by this case already.”

“Call me at this number if you need me.” Ending the call, he looked at the round-faced clock on the waiting-room wall. After five already. But still thirty minutes before he could go to Janelle Hanvey’s hospital room and ask the questions drumming a restless rhythm in his brain.

Patience, he feared, was not one of his virtues.

* * *

“WHATABOUT MISSYand Joy? Where are they?”

Laney squeezed her sister’s hand gently. “I don’t know, sweetie.” She kept herself from exchanging looks with her mother, knowing that Janelle was bright enough to see the tension between them, even in her concussed state. “How about you? Head still hurting?”

Janelle smiled a loopy smile. “Not so much. The doctor said they stuck me with a local anesthetic, so the wound won’t be bothering me for a while.”

“Good.”

Janelle drifted off for a few minutes, just long enough for Laney to give her mother a look of relief. Then she stirred again and asked, for the third time since Laney had entered the room, “Laney, where are Missy and Joy?”

She squeezed Janelle’s hand again and repeated, “I don’t know, sweetie.”

There was a knock on the hospital-room door. Laney’s mother went to answer it. She came back and touched Laney’s shoulder. “Chief Massey would like to talk to you outside.”

She traded places with her mother and opened the hospital-room door to find Doyle Massey leaning against the corridor wall. He didn’t change position when he saw her, just turned his head and flashed her a toothy smile. “How’s your sister doin’?”

Damn, but he could turn on the charm when he wanted to. “As well as can be expected, I think. She’s still repeating herself a lot, but the doctor said that should pass soon.”

“Has she said anything about what happened up there?”

Laney shook her head. “But she keeps asking about her friends. All we’ve told her so far is that we don’t know where they are.”

Doyle pushed away from the wall, turning to face her. He touched her arm lightly. “The coroner’s picked up Missy Adderly’s body and called in the state lab to conduct the postmortem.”

“Has the family been contacted?”

“My assistant said Craig Bolen left to meet with them about forty-five minutes ago. So I’m sure they know by now.”

She shook her head, feeling sick. “Those poor people.”

His gaze slid toward the door of her sister’s hospital room. “She has a plate in her head?”

“Car accident when she was ten. It was bad.” Laney tugged her sweater more tightly around her, as if she could ward off the memories as easily as she could thwart a chill. But she couldn’t, of course. The memories of those terrible days would never go away. “The accident killed our brother.” She released a long sigh.

“I’m sorry.”

She looked up at him, seeing real sympathy in his eyes, not just the perfunctory kind. “I was a sophomore in college. I skipped a couple of semesters so I could come back home and help my mom deal with everything. Our dad had passed away from cancer only a year earlier. And then, so suddenly, Bradley was dead and Jannie was just hanging on by a thread—”

“Bradley was your brother?”

She nodded. “He was seventeen. Jannie had a softball game and Mama was working, so Bradley said he’d take her. He was a good driver. The police say there wasn’t anything he could have done. The other driver was wasted, slammed right through an intersection and T-boned Bradley’s truck. He was killed instantly, and Jannie had a depressed skull fracture. She had to relearn everything. Put her behind in school.”

“How far behind?”

“Three years. Jannie’s twenty. But she’s only seventeen in terms of her maturity and mental age. There were a few years when we didn’t think she’d ever get that far, but the doctors say she should develop normally enough from here on.” She glanced back at the closed door. “Unless this sets her back even more.”