by Paula Graves
* * *
LUNCH TURNED OUT to be a couple of peanut-butter sandwiches and two juice boxes. Doyle had found them in a paper sack near the mouth of the cave when it became clear their captors weren’t going to return with food. Apparently the small sack of supplies had been tossed in along with Laney, overlooked in the spectacle of her arrival.
Doyle shared his sandwich and juice with Laney, agreeing with her silent assessment that Joy needed food more than either of them, after several days in captivity. She also needed sleep, having been largely sleep deprived since her abduction, too fearful of the unknown to be able to sleep for more than an hour at a time. She’d nodded off after eating, and Laney had followed Doyle from the interior cavern to the larger one near the entrance in order to speak without disturbing her.
“I didn’t think we’d find her alive,” she confessed in a whisper, leaning against Doyle as they settled with their backs to the cave wall.
He wrapped his arm around her, lending extra warmth. “Neither did I.”
“What do they want from her father?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. He’s on the county commission, right?”
“Yeah.” She nestled closer, wishing they had something warmer to sit on than the grimy cave floor. “You think it has to do with the upcoming vote on the status of the Bitterwood Police Department?”
“From what I understand, he may be the deciding vote. Everyone else on the commission seems pretty set on a particular course.”
“So swinging his vote one way or another could be a viable goal.”
“But which way do they want to swing it?” Doyle asked. “For Bitterwood P.D. or against?”
“I think it has to be for,” Laney said after a moment’s thought. “If Craig Bolen is corrupt—and I think we can conclude he is, at this point—he’d be inclined toward preserving his job, wouldn’t he? Maybe he was working with Glen Rayburn on Wayne Cortland’s payroll.”
“He was Rayburn’s direct underling,” Doyle agreed. “Obvious choice for chief of detectives, taking Rayburn’s place after Rayburn’s suicide.”
“But here comes the new chief, threatening to upset the order of things,” Laney murmured.
“And a county public integrity officer’s suddenly assigned to the department for extra scrutiny,” Doyle added.
“So they have reason to want us out of the way,” she agreed. “But why keep us alive?”
Doyle took a deep breath, as if bracing himself for what he had to say. “Until you dropped in on us, I thought there was a real chance they were going to let Joy live. The only face they think either of us saw was Ray’s, and I think we all agree he’s wearing some sort of disguise.”
“But I saw Craig Bolen.”
He nodded, his cheek brushing against her temple. He tightened his hold on her. “Now I wonder if I was just being naive, thinking they’d let Joy live.”
“Still gets us back to the question at hand—why are they keeping us alive?”
“The vote doesn’t happen for another three days,” he answered.
“And they might need Joy alive as leverage, in case her father demands to see her,” Laney said. “But if they kill her, won’t her father just tell the world what he was forced to do?”
“Maybe, but who’s he going to blame? I’m damned sure he doesn’t know Bolen’s behind all this. I saw them together the other day, and he didn’t show the slightest antagonism toward Bolen. He seemed more angry at me.”
“Because you’re part of the reason his daughter was taken, in his mind,” Laney said, understanding the thought process even though she knew it was deeply unfair. “He’s being forced to maintain your job. Maybe he even wonders if you could be behind his daughter’s kidnapping.”
Doyle sighed. “I wonder if maybe I’m being set up as the fall guy.”
She turned toward him, even though there was far too little light in the cave for her to be able to make out more than the faintest outline of his profile. “How?”
“Maybe Bolen’s been hinting to Adderly that I could be behind the kidnapping. Maybe that’s what’s behind the hostility I noticed.”
“But why would he believe that? It’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? I’m new in town. An outsider. A flatlander. I came from a sheriff’s department that had its own issues with corruption. I showed up just days before the girls were shot. I have a vested interest in keeping the Bitterwood P.D. alive and kicking. And now I’ve gone AWOL, along with you. The woman the county sent to spy on me.”
“I wasn’t sent to spy on you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You think Bolen or Ray plan to use your weapon to kill Joy and me,” she said with a sinking heart.
“They have it. They took it off me when they Tasered me.”
“I guess maybe they didn’t think I’d be packing,” she murmured.
“Lucky for us.” He’d taken over her pistol and holster, with her blessing, after a quick grilling established that he was the more experienced shooter.
“It would tie up a lot of loose ends. Plus put Bolen in prime position to step into the chief’s job,” Laney admitted.
“He’d be next in line. The only reason he didn’t get it this time was that the county commission wanted to look outside the area for their next chief.”
“But if you turned out to be even worse than Rayburn, they might not feel that compunction a second time.”
“Exactly.”
Laney rubbed her gritty eyes. “This is so crazy.”
“What I don’t get,” Doyle added a few moments later, “is how this connects to Wayne Cortland. If Bolen was working for Cortland, and Cortland is dead, what’s his plan now?”
“Maybe that’s where Ray comes in.”
“Maybe. He could be Cortland’s successor, although the feds didn’t think there was such a person. They thought the whole cartel died with him.”
“Well, clearly the pieces of that whole are still around. What if they’ve found a new leader?”
“A new leader who can pull all those mismatched pieces together?” Doyle sounded skeptical.
He was probably right, she knew. The prevailing theory about Cortland’s criminal enterprise was that Cortland’s ruthless control had held the disparate groups involved together. Militia groups, meth dealers and anarchist hackers hardly made ideal partners, but Cortland had somehow brought those groups together, massaging egos and convincing each group that their goals would be met if they went along with his plans.
But could someone else maintain that delicate, improbable balance?
“Maybe not,” she admitted. “Probably not.”
“Doesn’t mean someone isn’t trying,” Doyle countered.
Laney pushed the stem of her watch, lighting up the dial. Just after three o’clock. Based on what Joy had told them, their captors would bring them something to eat around five, as daylight was beginning to wane.
“What if all they do is throw the food in here?” she asked Doyle. “What good does it do to have a weapon if we can’t get close enough to use it?”
“Joy and I had a plan before you arrived.” His voice was a rumble in her ear, sending a shudder of feminine awareness dancing down her spine despite the less-than-ideal situation. “She was going to scream bloody murder near the back of the cave to lure someone inside. I’d be hiding near the door, ready to jump.”
“Dangerous.”
“Desperate times,” he said, a shrug in his voice.
“What if they both come in?” she asked.
“Then it gets a little more difficult.”
* * *
WHEN LANEY FELL SILENT, her head drooping against Doyle’s shoulder, he was loath to move, even though his legs were starting to cramp from sitting in one position so long. Ti
me was ticking toward their next chance to make an escape, and if she needed a nap to restore her strength, he didn’t want to disturb her.
So he was surprised when she sat up abruptly and said, “Oh.”
“Oh what?” he asked when she didn’t say anything else.
“I think I know what this place is.”
“Yeah?”
She looked over at the heavy wood door closing them in. “When we were kids, my mother used to tell us every Halloween before we went out trick-or-treating, ‘Y’all be careful, or Bridey Butcher’ll get you!’”
“Bridey Butcher?” he asked, pricked by déjà vu.
“Yeah. Bridey Butcher was a big, strappin’ mountain girl who lived up this way back during Prohibition. She and her daddy ran a moonshine still and scared off a lot of the other moonshiners with a little well-applied violence and threats of more. Anyway, one day a city slicker from over Knoxville way came up here looking to employ some men on a public works project, and for Bridey, it was love at first sight.”
Listening to Laney’s accent broaden as she warmed to the tale, Doyle’s sense of familiarity bloomed into memory. “But he did her wrong.”
Laney paused in her story. “That’s right. He led her on, made her think he was going to marry her and take her out of these mountains, but when the time came to go, he told her he had a girl back in Knoxville.”
“And Bridey lured him up here for a goodbye, or so he thought,” Doyle continued, the story coming to life in his mind, as if his mother were whispering in his ear. “She and her daddy had built a door in the mouth of a cave where they hid their still from the revenuers. But she’d moved the still somewhere else, and when she lured her lover inside the cave, she’d knocked him out and locked him inside. She left and never came back, leaving her lover to die slowly, the same way he’d killed her love.”
“How do you know that story?” Laney asked, her eyes wide with surprise.
“My mother used to tell it,” he said. “I’d forgotten. When I was old enough to be thinking about girls, she told me about the girl done wrong and how she got her revenge. But she never said what mountain.”
“I bet you were afraid to date after that,” Laney said.
He smiled back at her. “For a while. I’m pretty sure that was my mother’s intention.”
“How did your mother know about Bridey Butcher?”
He shrugged, not sure. “I know she was from somewhere in eastern Tennessee. Maybe she heard the story there.”
“It’s pretty specific to Bitterwood, since it actually happened here—” Laney stopped short, her face turning toward the doorway. “Footsteps,” she whispered.
Doyle clicked on his phone and saw that it was only three-thirty. Their captors were way too early to be bringing their evening meal.
He had a sick feeling that time had just run out.
Chapter Sixteen
Doyle nearly dumped Laney onto the floor of the cave in his haste to get to his feet, though he held her arm to make sure she didn’t fall as she scrambled up. She felt his tremble of hesitation, then suddenly he was handing her the pistol she’d given him earlier.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
His response was to flatten himself against the wall closest to the door.
What had been the plan? Joy was going to scream, right?
But Joy wasn’t awake.
Laney scrambled back deeper into the cave, trying to get out of the line of sight. She wasn’t much for screaming, but if that was what it took—
The door opened and she saw a silhouette enter the cave, shorter than Craig Bolen. Leaner, with a headful of hair that Craig Bolen would have envied even ten years earlier. The wig, she thought. Ray’s disguise—and Craig’s disguise, too, that one time in the hospital.
That was why Janelle hadn’t been quite sure the man in the hospital was the same man she’d seen on Copperhead Trail, she realized. Because they’d been different men in the same disguise.
In one hand Ray held a pistol, in the other a flashlight. He flicked on the light, piercing the gloom of the cave with its bright beam.
Shoving her own pistol behind her back, she squinted, turning her head away from the blinding light.
Suddenly, from the back of the cave came a soul-piercing howl. It filled the cavern, rang along the walls and sent tremors racing up Laney’s spine, as if the earth had opened up and the agony of a thousand souls filled the still air of the cavern.
She heard a scuffle of footsteps moving toward her from the front of the cave, punctuated abruptly by a bone-rattling thud of body meeting body.
The flashlight crashed to the floor of the cave, the beam extinguished. It rolled toward Laney, but she ignored it, her gaze fixed on the struggling silhouettes backlit by the open doorway.
Doyle and Ray were struggling for Ray’s pistol, a tangle of grappling arms and kicking legs. The hard lines of the deadly weapon were easy to distinguish, so she kept her eyes on that particular silhouette, aware that whoever had the gun had the upper hand.
She left her own weapon where it was, tucked behind her back, knowing it was useless to her while Doyle and his opponent were locked by battle into a single, writhing organism.
Ray pulled free for a moment, and he swung the gun toward Doyle.
Laney brought her own weapon in front of her, ready to shoot.
Then Doyle launched himself at Ray, slamming him into the wall by the open door. The gun went off, the bullet ricocheting against the hard stone wall. Laney pressed herself flat against the door, praying Joy wasn’t standing in the open, then dared another look.
The men were no longer inside the cave.
And the door was slowly swinging shut.
Laney raced forward, catching the heavy door before it closed. It pinched her left hand hard enough to make her cry out in pain, but she gritted her teeth and pulled the door open with her uninjured hand.
Outside, the sunlight was blinding, the pain of her contracting pupils almost eclipsing the agony of her smashed hand. She heard the sound of fighting long before she could open her squinted eyes enough to see what was happening only a few yards away.
At first she could make out only dark figures, locked in a fierce battle of crashing fists and tangling legs. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw details. Doyle’s bloody mouth. The gash across Ray’s cheek. His wig was hanging half off his head; Doyle’s next blow knocked it to the ground, revealing short blond hair that had hidden beneath the brown wig. The glasses he’d worn were gone, as well.
Neither man seemed to be holding the pistol. But the danger was greater than ever, Laney realized with a jolt of alarm, for their fight had taken them dangerously close to what looked like a steep drop-off. The tree line ended feet away, with nothing but sky and the velvet blue outlines of distant mountains stretching out beyond.
Ray threw himself at Doyle with a vicious head-butt. Doyle’s head snapped back, and suddenly they were teetering at the edge of the bluff.
“No!” Laney cried, pushing her sluggish feet into action.
But it was too late.
Both men tumbled over the side and disappeared.
* * *
IN HIS THIRTY-THREE YEARS, Doyle had felt the cold finger of death on the back of his neck twice before. Once, at the age of nine, when he had gone swimming in the Gulf of Mexico and ignored an undertow warning. He’d made it back alive, though there had been several minutes of choking on salt water and praying for deliverance before that had happened.
The second time, he’d been in the swampy woods of Terrebonne, the sleepy little town in south Alabama where he’d spent most of his life. He’d been on a manhunt for a drug dealer the coast guard had chased ashore. He’d ended up pinned down between well-armed and ruthless Colombians and
an equally well-armed and ruthless group of DEA agents. Bullets had rained from the sky in all directions, ripping to shreds the fallen log behind which he’d taken cover. When the battle ended, he’d been bloody from splinters but, by some miracle, untouched by gunfire.
Today, death came in the form of a fifty-foot drop down the side of a mountain.
He clawed at the rocky side of the bluff, trying not to hear the bone-cracking thuds of Ray’s body bouncing down the incline below him. Doyle’s own fingers had caught on an exposed tree root, keeping him from following, but his feet dangled below him, gravity and his own weight conspiring to wrench him free of his desperate hold on life. He tried to go completely still, to stop his body’s swaying movements, and that was when his ankle cracked against something hard embedded in the side of the bluff.
Ignoring the sharp sting of pain, he glanced down and saw the flat, narrow outcropping of shale just above his dangling feet.
He bent one knee, putting his foot on the outcropping, and pushed down, expecting the rock to crumble under the pressure. But it held.
Lifting the other foot, he put more weight on the ledge. No give. The rock was solid, and it seemed to be firmly embedded in the side of the bluff.
“Doyle!” Laney’s voice rang above him. He looked up and found her pale face and wide blue eyes staring back at him.
“Are you okay?” Her gaze slid past him to focus on something below.
He dared a quick look downward and saw that Ray had finally stopped tumbling, his crumpled body lying motionless against the outcropping that had stopped his descent.
Footsteps scurried above, and he looked up to see Joy Adderly crouching next to Laney. Her breath caught at the sight of Doyle hanging precariously on the steep side of the bluff.
“How’s your foothold?” Laney asked. Doyle could tell she was struggling to stay calm and focused, but she couldn’t hide the fear in her eyes or the tremble of her voice.
“My feet are on a narrow ledge,” he told her. “It seems to be holding pretty well, but I can’t get any leverage to climb. You don’t happen to have a rope, do you?”
“In my backpack. Which those bastards took.” Her lips pressing to a grim line, she stripped off her jacket. Her body immediately trembled—whether from cold or fear, Doyle didn’t know. Holding one sleeve of the sturdy jacket, she flung the coat toward him.