LITMIR.BIZ

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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.”

      Her inward squirming nearly made it to the surface, but she held herself rigidly still.

      “Duke,” he said finally. “Vandy’s too close. Virginia’s not close enough to a big city. Durham’s just right. Small-town–like in some ways, so you don’t feel too much like a fish out of water. But those trips into Raleigh for the clubs and bars made you feel downright cosmopolitan.”

      She didn’t know whether to be angry or impressed. She went with anger, because it was safer. “Nice parlor trick.”

      “I prefer to call it ‘profiling.’”

      “I chose Duke because they offered a scholarship. And I didn’t go to clubs in Raleigh because I had to work two jobs at night to help pay for the rest.”

      “Avoiding the big school loans? Even smarter than I thought.”

      He sounded sincerely impressed, damn him. Just when she was working up a little righteous outrage, he had to go and say something nice about her.

      “Sunrise is, what? Around eight?” He changed the subject with whiplash speed as he put the truck in gear.

      “Thereabouts,” she agreed. “But there’ll be enough light for the search earlier. Maybe around a quarter till seven.”

      “There’s a chance of bad weather tomorrow.”

      She knew. The local weathermen had been tracking something called a “cold core upper low” that had the potential to dump a lot of snow in the southern Appalachian mountains. “Hard to predict where it’ll fall. All the more reason to get up on the mountain early and see if we can find Joy Adderly.”

      He nodded. “Wear your long johns.”

      * * *

      THECROWDGATHEREDat the foot of Copperhead Ridge was larger than Doyle had expected, given the increasing probability of snowfall that had greeted him that morning when he turned on the local news. He’d made the call to assign all but a skeleton staff of patrol officers to the search, a decision that had seemed a no-brainer to him but had proved controversial among some of the staffers who were gathered for the search assignments. He made mental note of the grumblers for later; he wasn’t going to put up with people who thought the job beneath them.

      He’d put the Brandywines in charge of mapping out the search grids, based on a suggestion from Antoine Parsons the night before when he’d called the detective from home to get his input on the next day’s task. “The Brandywines take people up and down this mountain all the time on horseback. They know just about all the nooks and crannies. They can tell you the best places to look and the best ways to do it.”

      “Twenty-two

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