The Smoky Mountain Mist

Seth looked through the driver’s window. The car’s interior looked spotless, with nothing to identify the owner. If Ivy Hawkins weren’t on administrative leave for another week, Seth might have risked calling her to see if she could run down the plate number. She’d investigated the murders that had started this whole mess, after all. She’d damned near fallen victim to the killer herself. She might be persuaded.

But her partner, Antoine Parsons, had no reason to listen to anything Seth had to say. And what would it matter, really? Seth already knew Davis was staying at Sequoyah House. Though if the car with the Virginia plates was his, it did raise the question—if he wasn’t in his room, and he wasn’t in his car, where exactly was he?

As he headed back toward the Charger through the cold rain, a ringing sound stopped him midstep. It seemed faint, as if it was coming from a small distance away, but he didn’t see anyone around.

He followed the sound to a patch of dense oak leaf hydrangea bushes growing wild at the edge of the tree line. The cream-colored blossoms had started to fade with the onset of colder weather, but the leaves were thick enough to force Seth to crouch to locate the phone by the fourth ring. It lay faceup on the ground.

Seth picked up the phone and pressed the answer button. “Hello?” he said, expecting the voice on the other end to belong to the phone’s owner, calling to locate his missing phone.

The last thing he expected was to hear Rachel Dav-enport’s voice. “Davis?”

Seth’s gaze slid across the parking lot to the car with the Virginia plates. His chest tightened.

“Davis?” Rachel repeated.

“It’s not Davis,” he answered slowly. “It’s Seth Hammond.”

She was silent for a moment. “This is the number Davis Rogers left on my cell phone. Where is he? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I heard the phone ringing and answered, figuring the owner might be looking for his phone.”

“Where are you?”

“Outside Sequoyah House.” He pushed to his feet and started moving slowly down the line of bushes, looking through the thick foliage for something he desperately hoped he wouldn’t find.

“What are you doing there?” She couldn’t keep the suspicion from her tone, and he couldn’t exactly blame her.

“I went and talked to Joe Breslin at Smoky Joe’s Sa-loon. He remembered seeing you there with a man last night. So he looked up the man’s credit card receipt and got a name for me.”

“I was at Smoky Joe’s with Davis?” She sounded skeptical. “That is definitely not his kind of place.”

“Maybe it’s yours,” he suggested, remembering her sing-along with the bluegrass CD.

“Did you talk to Davis?”

“The clerk said he wasn’t in his room, so I left him a message to call me.” He paused as he caught sight of something dark behind one of the bushes. “I used your name. Hope you don’t mind.” He hunkered down next to the bush and carefully pushed aside the leaves to see what lay behind.

His heart sank to his toes.

Curled up in the fetal position, covered in blood and bruises, lay a man. Seth couldn’t tell if he was breathing. “Rachel, I have to go. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

He disconnected the call and put the cell phone in his jacket pocket. The tightly packed underbrush forced him to crawl through the narrow spaces between the bushes to get back to where the man lay with his back against the trunk of a birch tree. He’d been beaten, and badly. His face was misshapen with broken bones, his eyes purple and swollen shut. Blood drenched the front of his shirt, making it hard to tell what color it had been originally. One of his legs lay at an unnatural angle, suggesting a break or a dislocation.

Seth touched the man’s throat and found a faint pulse. He didn’t know what Davis Rogers looked like, but the proximity of the battered man and the discarded cell phone suggested a connection. He backed out of the bushes, reaching into his pocket for his own cell phone to dial 911.

But before his fingers cleared his pocket, something hit him hard against the back of the neck, slamming him forward into the bushes. His forehead cracked against the trunk of the birch tree, the blow filling his vision with dozens of exploding, colorful spots.

A second blow caught him near the small of his back, over his left kidney, shooting fire through his side. That was a kick, he realized with the last vestige of sense remaining in his aching head.

Then a hard knock to the back of his head turned out the lights.

AFTER TEN MINUTES had passed without a call back from Seth, Rachel’s worry level hit the stratosphere. There had been something in his tone when he’d rung off that had kept her stomach in knots ever since.

He’d sounded…grim. As if he’d just made a gruesome discovery.

Given the fact that he’d answered Davis’s phone a few seconds earlier, Rachel wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he’d found.

What if something bad had happened to Davis? He’d been her first real boyfriend, the first man she’d ever slept with. The first man she’d ever loved, even if it had ultimately been a doomed sort of love.

She might not be in love with him anymore, but she still cared. And if Seth’s tone of voice meant anything—

Forget waiting. She was tired of waiting. Seth had said he was at Sequoyah House. The bed-and-breakfast was five minutes away.

She grabbed her car keys and headed for the door. If she wanted to know what was going on, she could damned well find out for herself.

EVERYTHING ON SETH’S body seemed to hurt, but not enough to suggest he was on the verge of dying. He opened his eyes carefully and found himself gazing up into a rain-dark sky. He was drenched and cold, and his head felt as if he’d spent the past few hours banging it against a wall.

He lifted his legs one at a time and decided they were still in decent working order, though he felt a mild shooting pain in his side when he moved. Both arms appeared intact, though there was fresh blood on one arm. No sign of a cut beneath the red drops, so he guessed the blood had come from another part of his body.

He couldn’t breathe through his nose. When he lifted his hand to his face, he learned why. Blood stained his fingers, and his nose felt sore to the touch. He forced himself to sit up, groaning softly at the effort, and looked around him.

He was in the woods, though there was a break in the trees to his right, revealing the corner of a large clapboard house. Sequoyah House, he thought, the memory accompanied by no small amount of pain.

Some of his memories seemed to be missing. He knew who he was. He knew what day it was, unless he’d been out longer than he thought. He knew what he’d been doing earlier that day—he’d been hoping to talk to Rachel Davenport’s old friend Davis Rogers. But Rogers hadn’t been in his room, so Seth had given the desk clerk a message for Rachel’s friend and left the bed-and-breakfast.

He remembered walking back to the parking area where he’d left the Charger.

What then?

His cell phone rang, barely audible. He pulled it out from the back pocket of his sodden jeans and saw Adam Brand’s name on the display. Perfect. Just perfect.

Then an image flashed through his aching head. A cell phone—but not this cell phone. Another one. He’d heard it ringing and come here into the woods to find it.

But where was the cell phone now?

He answered his phone to stop the noise. “Yeah?” The greeting came out surly. Seth didn’t give a damn—surly was exactly how he felt.

“You were supposed to check in this morning,” Brand said.

“Yeah, well, I was detained.” He winced as he tried to push to his feet. “And the case has gone to hell in a handbasket, thanks for asking.”

“What’s happened?”

“Too much to tell you over the phone. I’ll type you up a report. Okay?”

“Is something wrong? You sound like hell.”

Seth spotted a rusty patch in the leaves nearby. His brow furrowed, sending a fresh ache through his brain. “I’ll put that in the report, too.” He hung up and crossed to the dark spot in the leaves.