The Smoky Mountain Mist (4 page)

“He’s not from here,” Bailey said with a dismissive wave. “Probably couldn’t work out a sale anyway before he heads back to Virginia.”

Seth had a vague memory that Rachel had gone to college somewhere in Virginia. So, maybe an old college friend.

Maybe even an old boyfriend.

A sliver of dismay cut a path through the center of his chest. He tried to ignore it. “Thanks anyway.” He left the office before Paul Bailey started to wonder why one of his fleet mechanics was suddenly asking a lot of nosy questions.

He stopped in the fleet garage, where he and the other mechanics shared a small break room. The three mechanics working in the garage today were out in the main room, so he had the place to himself.

Grabbing the phone book they kept in a desk drawer, he searched the hotel listings, bypassing the cheaper places. Joe Breslin had described Davis Rogers as a slicked-back frat boy, which suggested he’d stay at a nice hotel.

Was that Rachel’s type? Preppy college boys with their trust funds and their country club golf games?

Drop it, Hammond. Not your concern.

She wasn’t exactly what he considered his type, either. She was attractive, clearly, but quiet and reserved. And maybe if he hadn’t begun to put clues together that suggested the recent Bitterwood murders were connected to Davenport Trucking, he might never have allowed himself to think about Rachel Davenport as a person and not just a company figurehead.

But ever since he’d given up the con game for the straight and narrow, he’d shown an alarming tendency to take other people’s troubles to heart. And Rachel Davenport’s life was eaten up with trouble these days.

An old twelve-step guy he knew had told him overcompensation was a common trait among people who felt the need to make amends for what they’d done. They tended to go overboard, wanting to save the whole damned world instead of fix the one or two things they could actually fix.

And here he was, proving the guy right.

Using his cell phone, he called Maryville hotels with no luck. He was about to start calling Knoxville hotels when he remembered there was a bed-and-breakfast in Bitterwood that offered the sort of services a guy like Davis Rogers would probably expect from his lodgings. The odds were better that he was staying in Knoxville, but Sequoyah House was a local call, so what would it hurt?

The proprietor at Sequoyah House put him right through to Davis Rogers’s room when he asked. Nobody answered the phone, even after several rings, but Seth had the information he needed.

He had a few tough questions for Davis Rogers, and now he knew where to find him.

Chapter Four

On the ride back to Bitterwood, Rachel realized she had no idea where her car was parked. Seth had said he’d found her on Purgatory Bridge, so it made sense that she’d left her car somewhere in the area. Delilah agreed to detour to the bridge to take a look.

Sure enough, as soon as they neared the bridge, Delilah had spotted the Honda Accord parked off the road near the bridge entrance, just as Seth had said.

“Do you have your keys?” Delilah asked as she pulled the truck up next to Rachel’s car.

“Yeah. I found them in my pocket.” God, she wished she could erase the last twenty-four hours and start fresh. But then, she’d have to face her father’s funeral all over again. Feel the pain of saying goodbye all over again. The stress of staying strong and not breaking. Not letting anyone see her crumble.

What would those mourners at the funeral have thought, she wondered, if they’d seen her acrobatics on the steel girders of Purgatory Bridge last night?

She shuddered at the thought, not just the idea of making a spectacle of herself in front of those people, but also the idea of Purgatory Bridge itself. Crossing the delicate-looking truss bridge in a car was nerve-racking enough. Standing on the railings with land a terrifying thirty feet below?

Unimaginable.

The morning rain had gone from a soft drizzle to sporadic showers. Currently it wasn’t raining, but fog swirled around them like lowering clouds. As Rachel crunched her way across the wet gravel on the shoulder of the road, Delilah rolled down the passenger window. “You sure you feel up to driving?”

“I’m fine,” she said automatically.

“Take care of yourself, okay?” Delilah smiled gently as she rolled the window back up, shutting out the damp coolness of the day. Rachel watched until the truck disappeared around the bend before she slid behind the wheel of the Honda.

The car’s interior seemed oppressively silent, her sudden sense of isolation exacerbated by the tendrils of fog wrapping around the car. Outside, the world looked increasingly gray and alien, so she turned her attention to the car itself, hoping something would jog her missing memory.

What had she done the last time she was in her car? Why couldn’t she remember anything between standing at her father’s gravesite and waking up in a strange room with Seth Hammond watching her with those intense green eyes?

A trilling sound split the air, making her jump. She found the offending noisemaker—her cell phone, which lay on the passenger floorboard. Grinning sheepishly, she grabbed it and checked the display. She didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Rach! Thank God, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

“Davis?” The voice on the other end of the line belonged to her grad school boyfriend, Davis Rogers. She hadn’t heard from him in years.

“I thought maybe you regretted giving me your number and were screening my calls. Did you get home okay?” Before she could answer, he continued, “Of course you did, or you wouldn’t be answering the phone. Look, about last night—”

Suddenly, there was a thud on the other end of the line, and the connection went dead.

Rachel pulled the phone away from her face, startled. She looked at the display again. The number had a Virginia area code, but Davis had spoken as if he was here in Tennessee.

She tried calling the number on the display, but it went to voice mail.

He’d said he’d been trying to call her. She checked her own voice mail and discovered three messages, all from Davis. The first informed her where he was staying—the Sequoyah House, a bed-and-breakfast inn out near Cutter Horse Farm. She entered the information in her phone’s notepad and checked the other messages.

In the last message, Davis sounded upset. “Rachel, it’s Davis again. Look, I’m sorry about last night, but he seemed to think you might be receptive. I’ve really missed you. I didn’t like leaving you in that place. Please call me back so I can apologize.”

She stared at the phone. What place? Surely not Smoky Joe’s. Why was her ex in town in the first place—for her father’s funeral? Had she seen him yesterday?

And why had his call cut off?

* * *

S
EQUOYAH
H
OUSE
WAS
a sprawling two-story farmhouse nestled in a clearing at the base of Copperhead Ridge. Behind the house, the mountain loomed like a guardian over the rain-washed valley below. It was the kind of place that lent itself more to romantic getaways than lodgings for a man alone.

But maybe Davis Rogers hadn’t planned to be alone for long.

Most of the lobby furnishings looked to be rustic antiques, the bounty of a rich and varied Smoky Mountain tradition of craftsmanship. But despite its hominess, Sequoyah House couldn’t hide a definite air of money, and plenty of it.

The woman behind the large mahogany front desk smiled at him politely, her cool gray eyes taking in his cotton golf shirt, timeworn jeans and barbershop haircut. No doubt wondering if he could afford the hotel’s rates.

“May I help you?” she asked in a neutral tone.

“I’m here to see one of your guests, Davis Rogers.”

“Mr. Rogers is not in his room. May I give him a message?”

“Yes. Would you tell him Seth Hammond stopped by to see him about a matter concerning Rachel Davenport?”

He could tell by the flicker in her eyes that she recognized his name. His reputation preceded him.

“Where can he reach you?”

Seth pulled one of the business cards sitting in a silver holder on the desk. “May I?” At her nod of assent, he flipped the card over and wrote his cell phone number on the back.

The woman took the card. “I’ll give him the message.”

He walked slowly down the front porch steps and headed back to where he’d parked in a section of the clearing leveled off and covered with interlocked pavers to form a parking lot. Among the other cars parked there he spotted a shiny blue Mercedes with Virginia license plates.

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 Davenport’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 Saloon. 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.

* * *

A
FTER
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.

* * *

E
VERYTHING
ON
S
ETH
’
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.