The Smoky Mountain Mist (15 page)

She didn’t reach the phone before the caller started leaving a message. “Mr. Hammond, this is Wally from Brantley’s Garage. Your car is ready to pick up.”

She grabbed the phone. “Wally, Mr. Hammond isn’t here, but I’ll be sure he gets the message. Thanks.” Bracing herself, she hung up the phone and turned to look at her stepbrother.

He stared at her, his expression disbelieving. “Why would the garage call here to reach Seth Hammond?”

“Because he was staying here with me.”

Paul stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Why?”

She sighed, realizing she was going to have to tell someone everything that had happened, sooner or later. There was no point in trying to hide from her choices any longer. She’d made them, and if they turned out to be mistakes, she’d have to live with them, because she had no intention of apologizing.

“It’s a long story,” she said. “And it started a couple of nights ago on Purgatory Bridge.”

Chapter Fifteen

“Are you charging me with something?” Seth blurted before Ivy Hawkins and Antoine Parsons asked the first question.

“Should we?” Ivy asked.

“Charge me or let me go,” he said flatly.

“We can hold you for twenty-four hours without charging you for anything,” Antoine said in a quiet tone. “I’d rather not do either, frankly. I’d like to believe you’ve gotten your act together, because I remember you as being an okay guy back in the day, before all that mess went down with your dad and you got sucked into Cleve Calhoun’s world.”

So,
Seth thought,
Parsons gets to be the good cop.
He looked at Ivy, who was watching him with thoughtful eyes. “I’ve told you everything. Meanwhile, Rachel Davenport is home alone at a house that’s been broken into at least once, after over a month of incidents targeting her and the people around her. Including five murders.”

“Why did the FBI want you to keep an eye on Rachel Davenport?” Antoine asked.

“Adam Brand didn’t say. All he told me was that it wasn’t an official FBI inquiry.”

“Was that unusual?”

“Never happened before,” he admitted.

“And you didn’t question the order?” Ivy interjected.

“Of course I did. But look—Adam Brand’s an FBI agent, which means he’s a secretive guy by default. He tells me only what he thinks I need to know in order to do the job he gives me. I didn’t need to know why I was keeping an eye on Rachel.”

“You weren’t even curious?” Ivy sounded doubtful.

“Honestly? I didn’t care. I was already keeping an eye on Rachel before he called.” He gave her a pointed look. “But you already know that.”

He saw Antoine slant a quick look at Ivy and realized the pretty little police detective apparently hadn’t done much talking with her partner about Seth’s part in bringing down serial killer Mark Bramlett. He supposed she might not have had time to tell him much before the police department put her on administrative leave.

“I certainly didn’t know you were stalking her,” Ivy denied.

“I’m not stalking her,” he protested, though he supposed that an outside observer might think so. He’d been spending many of his off-work hours keeping an eye on Rachel Davenport and the people around her, ever since he’d started putting two and two together about the serial killer victims, all of whom had shared a connection with Rachel.

“You’ve been following her. Taking photos of her. Insinuating yourself in her life. Know what that sounds like to me?” she asked.

“Like a con man picking out a new mark,” he answered.

She looked a little surprised to hear him say it out loud. “Then you see the issue I have with your story.”

“And here’s the issue I have with the way your department has handled this investigation,” he snapped back. “It took four murders before you’d so much as admit in public you were looking for a serial killer. And it took you longer still to tie all four people to Rachel Davenport.”

“You knew earlier?” Antoine asked with a slight rise of one dark brow.

“Y’all never step foot into any of the beer joints around these parts, do you?” He shook his head. “You like to sit here in your nice, clean police station and pretend there’s not any crime in these parts, not like there is in the big city, even though these hills are full of desperate, poor people. That’s why someone can offer twenty grand to kill someone and you’ll never hear a word of it, because you’re too scared to get down in the dirt where the bad guys wallow.”

Antoine looked surprised. But not Ivy. Because she was sleeping with Sutton Calhoun, of course. They were talking marriage and babies and the whole sappy lot, from what Seth had heard. Of course, Sutton had told her what Seth had told him about the twenty-grand hit he’d heard about.

“Sutton told me about that,” Ivy said quietly. She gave Antoine an apologetic look. “I should have told you. I’m sorry. It was only hearsay, and Sutton didn’t know who Seth had talked to.”

“It would have helped with our investigation,” he said. “You want to tell us who told you?”

“The guy’s nowhere around these parts anymore. He got out of town not long after that happened. I don’t even know his real name. Just the name he went by when we crossed paths now and then. Calls himself Luke, but he’s fast to tell you it’s short for Lucifer, because he’s a fallen angel.” Seth grimaced. “My theory, he’s some poor preacher’s black sheep son. His mama probably prays for him every night and cries about him every day.”

“What did Luke tell you, exactly?” Antoine asked.

“That he had been offered a hit job.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this to us before now?”

“Luke didn’t take the job, and if you snatched him up, he’d know I was the one who told. I might need information from him in the future.”

Ivy’s brow furrowed. “Information for what?”

“Anything. Everything.” Seth leaned forward. “You don’t know what it’s like living outside proper society, do you? Sure, your mama’s got a bit of a reputation for bringing home deadbeats, but people mostly understood that was just because she wanted someone to love her. They may not have approved, and I’m sure some of them thought she was stupid, but nobody ever thought she was a bad person.”

Ivy gave a slight nod.

“Right now, I can’t depend on society to see me as anything but trouble. And I’m not lookin’ for sympathy when I say that—I know I brought on my own troubles. But it doesn’t change my situation. There are times when I have to depend on people you wouldn’t want to be seen with. Hell, I don’t want to be seen with ’em, not anymore, because it makes it that much harder for me to try to fit in with good people.” He shook his head. “But my opinion of what constitutes good people and bad people can be a little fluid.”

He saw a hint of sympathy in Ivy’s dark eyes. “Did you press Luke about who tried to hire him?”

“Not at the time. I hadn’t connected it to the Davenports then. I was trying to keep my nose clean, stay out of messes, and I didn’t want to know anything more.” He felt a sharp pang of guilt. “If I’d pushed a little harder, maybe I could have stopped it. But I just wanted to stay clear of trouble.”

“You should have told us,” Antoine agreed. “Do you have any idea how to find this Luke person again?”

“I tried to find him a few weeks ago, but he wasn’t anywhere around. I talked to some mutual acquaintances and they told me Luke had gone to Atlanta for a while to see if he could get any work down there.”

“What kind of work did he do?”

Seth shot Antoine a pointed look.

“The kind of work you used to do?”

“Yeah, he runs cons when he can. If you can get your hands on Atlanta area mug shots from bunco arrests in the past three weeks, I could maybe pick him out of a lineup.”

“We’ll look into that,” Ivy said. “Meanwhile, there’s the issue of the photos you took of the funeral.”

“I told you what that was about.”

“And conveniently, your so-called contact at the FBI is out of pocket.”

“Not very damned convenient for me,” Seth disagreed. “And how many times do we have to go back over this same ground? You do realize you’ve left Rachel Davenport by herself, unprotected, in order to chase me around in circles for no good reason?”

Ivy and Antoine exchanged looks. As if they’d reached a silent agreement, Antoine got up and exited the interview room, leaving Ivy alone with Seth.

“Where’s he going?”

“He’ll get someone to check on Ms. Davenport.”

“Look, Ivy—Detective.” He couldn’t help but make a little face as he corrected himself, a picture in his mind of Ivy Hawkins as a snub-nosed thirteen-year-old with shaggy hair, skinned knees and a crooked grin. It was hard to take her seriously as a police officer when he’d known her as a tagalong for so many years. “I know why you have to bring me in and ask me these questions. I’m trying to be patient and cooperative. I am. But you and Sutton painted a really bad picture of me for Rachel. I’ve been trying to help her, not hurt her. And it’s got to be hard for her to trust anyone, especially someone like me—”

Ivy’s eyes widened. “Oh my God. Are you involved with her?”

He sat back in consternation.

“Oh my God.” Ivy sat back, too, staring across the table at him through widened eyes. “What exactly did we interrupt this afternoon?”

He made himself as opaque as he could and didn’t answer.

“Oh my God.”

“Will you please stop saying that?” he asked.

Ivy brought her hand up to her mouth, covering it as if it were the only way to keep from blurting out her shock again. The resulting image would have been comical if Seth hadn’t been so worried.

A knock on the door drew Ivy out of her seat. A uniformed officer told her something, and she turned to Seth. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

“Is something up?”

“I’ll be back in a minute.” Ivy left the interview room, closing the door behind her.

Seth put his head in his hands, frustrated by the delay. Rachel probably thought the worst of him right now. And who could blame her? He’d kept things secret, as usual, not trusting her with the full measure of truth. He talked a good game about trying to earn her trust, but when it came right down to it, he hadn’t trusted her enough to be completely honest.

And now, he had to pay for it. He just prayed Rachel didn’t have to pay for it, as well. Because she’d already been alone in that house for too long, without anyone to protect her from whoever wanted to do her harm.

* * *

“Y
OU
SHOULD
HAVE
told me about all of this.” Paul gave Rachel a stern look softened slightly by the sympathy in his brown eyes. “Why did you try to go through all of this alone?”

“I wasn’t alone.”

“And trusting a man like Seth Hammond is even crazier.”

“He was very kind to me. He’s taken some risks to help me out,” she defended Seth, wondering why she was bothering. Paul would look at the evidence and assume the worst. Seth had tried to warn her that’s how it would be. To anyone on the outside, all the evidence would seem to point to Seth’s playing games with her. If she hadn’t spent the past few days getting to know Seth intimately, she might concur.

Intellectually, she could see the warning signs, but she couldn’t connect them to the Seth Hammond she knew. He had been nothing but kind to her, even when telling her a few hard truths. He’d been genuinely remorseful about the ways he’d hurt people in the past. He’d told her the truth when a lie would have served him better.

“Why would someone do all of this to you?” Paul asked her.

“I think it must have something to do with Davenport Trucking. Or, more specifically, my job there.”

Paul’s brow furrowed. “In what possible way?”

“Paul, what do you know about my father’s will?”

He shrugged. “Only what scuttlebutt at the office says. Your father wanted you to be CEO when he died, and so you will be.”

“Have you ever heard anyone speculating about what might happen if I weren’t able to take the job?”

“Not that, exactly.” Paul pressed his mouth into a thin line. “I guess people are wondering why you’d want the job. You always loved being a librarian. I think some people thought George was being unfair to ask you to take over his dream by leaving your own dream behind.”

She’d felt the same way, at first. And felt a hell of a lot of guilt about it, considering her father’s deteriorating condition. “I need them to realize I’m doing this job because I want to, not because I feel obligated to.”

“Is that really how you feel?” Paul looked unconvinced.

“At least for the next few years.”

“And then?”

“And then we’ll see.” She had a feeling she’d go back to the library sooner or later. But not before she was certain her father’s legacy was in the best hands possible. She owed her father’s memory that much.

He was silent for a long moment. “It would be easier on you if you stepped down.”

“I’m not going to let someone scare me away from a job I’ve decided to do.” She lifted her chin.

“You really think these murders are about you?”

“I know it sounds crazy.”

“It sounds narcissistic,” he said.

“It’s neither. It’s just what the evidence is pointing to. You think I want to believe people have been murdered to get to me? Believe me, I don’t.”

“But you’ve been listening to Seth Hammond. He’s not exactly the most reliable of tale-tellers. What if he’s playing his own game with you?”

“I’ve thought about that.” She’d thought about it a lot, especially over the past hour, testing her faith in him against the logic her father had taught her. “I just don’t see what he gets out of it.”

“Do you know how he used to make a living?”

“He was a con man.”

“He was a particular kind of con man. He preyed on vulnerable women. Convinced them that he wanted them, that he loved them. That they should trust him. He bilked them, and then he was gone.”

She didn’t answer, knowing he wasn’t telling her anything that Seth would deny.

“You’re not falling for him, are you?”

“I know what he is,” she answered. Her cell phone rang. She dug it from her pocket and saw an unfamiliar local number.

Was it Seth? He might be stuck at the police station, using his one phone call to get in touch with her. She punched the button and answered the call.

It wasn’t Seth. It was a police officer. “Ms. Davenport, this is Jerry Polito with the Bitterwood Police Department. Detective Antoine Parsons asked me to check on you, see if you’re okay there by yourself.”

“I’m not by myself, Officer,” she answered with a look at Paul. “My stepbrother is here.”

“Good.” The policeman sounded relieved. “Detective Parsons suggested you might want to have someone stay with you, given all that’s been happening to you.”

“Thank you.” She hung up and turned to Paul. “The police. They were concerned about having left me here alone.”

“You’re not alone.” Paul put his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll stick around tonight, okay?”

He had stayed there plenty of times during his mother’s marriage to her father, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d prefer to be alone than to have Paul stick around for the night. Maybe it was as simple as wanting to be free from scrutiny or unwelcome pity for a while.