Paula Graves - The Secret of Cherokee Cove

She scrambled for the dropped weapon, but by the time she closed her hands around the grip, the two dark figures running away across the front yard entered the woods and disappeared almost immediately into the gloom.

Grimacing with pain, she sat up and assessed her condition. She’d have a big bruise across her shoulders in the morning and a lump on the back of her head. Plus, she’d broken a heel on a brand-new pair of shoes. But it could have been much worse.

She could have been dead.

She entered the cabin with care, finding the light switch next to the door and flicking it on. To her surprise, the living room seemed virtually untouched by the intruders she’d just startled.

The same could not be said for the next room she checked. It was a corner room with big windows looking out on the dark woods. In the daytime, she supposed, the windows would probably let in a lot of light, which was probably why Doyle had chosen this particular space as his home office.

Here the intruders had concentrated their efforts. All of the drawers had been pulled out of the walnut desk against the wall, their contents lying scattered across the hardwood floor. File cabinets stood open, spilling papers and files haphazardly from their metal depths. A framed photograph lay torn in its broken frame, a jigsaw puzzle of glass covering the floor in front of it. On the wall above, there was a combination safe. It remained safely shut, though clearly someone had tried to crack the code.

Dana backed out of the study and checked the rest of the house. The kitchen drawers had all been opened and searched, some of their contents now lying in a jumble on the counter and floor. Likewise, Doyle’s bedroom had been tossed, an explosion of clothes covering every available surface, thrown aside to assist a thorough search of the chest of drawers by the bed. A second bedroom had received similar treatment, although the mess there was limited because all the drawers and the closet were empty.

Back in Doyle’s bedroom, Dana moved aside a faded Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and sank on the end of the bed, pulling out her phone to dial 911. But before she pressed the first number, she changed her mind and called another number instead.

Natalie Cooper answered on the second ring. “Dana. Hi.”

“Hi. Are you still at the hospital?”

“Yeah. The doctor just stopped in to reassure us that Doyle was doing fine. They’re letting him wake up a little more from the reduction and then they’ll put him in a regular room.”

“Good,” she said, genuinely relieved. Her little brother was strong and tough, but things could still go wrong during any medical procedure. “By any chance is Walker Nix still there?”

“Tall, dark and silent?” Natalie asked, lowering her voice a little.

“That’s the one.”

“He’s across the room staring stoically out the window,” Natalie answered in a wry tone. “Why?”

“I need him to call me as soon as possible. Give him my cell number.”

“Is something wrong?”

Dana didn’t know how to answer that question without potentially sucking Doyle’s old friend and former partner into a procedural mess, so she hedged. “Nothing big. I just need to ask Detective Nix something about an ongoing investigation Doyle’s been involved with. Can you give him my message?”

“Sure.” Natalie hung up and Dana ended the call from her own end, trying not to be immediately impatient for the callback.

It came before she started chewing her nails. “Natalie Cooper said you wanted me to call you?” Nix’s gravelly voice rumbled like distant thunder across the telephone line.

“I know you’re there to guard Doyle and Laney,” Dana said, already beginning to second-guess her decision to bypass emergency response. “Never mind. I’ll figure out something else.”

“Wait,” Nix said before she could end the call. “Something’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” she admitted, looking at the chaos surrounding her in Doyle’s bedroom. “Something’s very wrong.”

* * *

DESPITE THE CHAOTIC condition of the chief’s study, it was the bloody mass of hair at the back of Dana Massey’s head that drew Nix’s immediate attention. “Your head is bleeding.”

Dana turned away from the mess and lifted her hand to the back of her head, looking surprised to find blood on her fingers. “I didn’t realize.”

She looked a little stunned all the way around, Nix thought. She might be a tough lady, but nobody could walk in on a burglary in progress and not be affected. That she’d had the presence of mind to snap a bunch of photos with her cell phone was notable enough. That she’d done it with a goose egg on the back of her head was damned near amazing.

“Am I dripping blood all over the crime scene?” she asked.

“No, seems to be oozing, mostly. It’s in your hair and on your shirt.”

“Damn it! This blouse is silk.”

“I’ve called a TBI unit in to process the place.” The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation offered crime scene investigation for small departments that didn’t have the manpower or need for a full-time evidence-retrieval staff.

She frowned. “At this time of night?”

“It’s not their usual procedure on a nonviolent case, but with your brother’s crash and the possible connection to Merritt Cortland—”

“Yeah,” she said with a nod. “I guess that might light a fire under them.”

“Why don’t we clear out and go somewhere until they can come in and do their work?”

“The burglars might come back.”

“So we’ll wait for the TBI on the front porch and I’ll see what I can do about that bump on your head.”

She gave him a look of frustration that he interpreted as irritation that she hadn’t caught the intruders single-handedly when she had the chance. He stifled a smile and led her out to the front porch, settling her on the steps while he went to his car to retrieve a first aid kit. When he came back, she had unzipped her bag and was trading out her pumps for a pair of tennis shoes. She waved one of the pumps at him, displaying a broken heel, before she shoved it into her bag.

She sighed and turned the back of her head toward him to give him better access. “How bad is it?”

“Not too bad, really,” he said after he’d used some antiseptic to clean the abraded area on the back of her head. “Did they hit you with something?”

She waved her hand toward the porch railing. “They knocked me back into the railing. I hit my head on the bottom rail on the way down. I thought it was just a little bump.”

“It is. It’s just a bloody one.” He applied some antibiotic ointment to the scrape, trying to ignore the way her lightly floral perfume was making his blood run hot. Her hair was thick but soft, sliding over his fingers with the same sensuous texture as warm silk. Her skin was velvety and fragrant, tempting him to bury his face in the curve of her neck and just breathe.

He’d never been a man prone to indulging his every sexual whim, but this particular dose of desire was taking a toll on his legendary self-control, and she wasn’t even showing that much skin or giving him any indication that she found him equally attractive.

He backed away, giving himself room to breathe. “I think the bleeding’s stopped now. But that shirt may be beyond hope.”

She turned on the porch step to face him. “Thanks.”

Something intriguing glittered in her eyes, pale and mysterious in the moonlight trickling through the trees. Nix knew it would be folly to speculate what that intriguing something might be. But he’d never been any good at turning his back on a puzzle. Especially one that smelled like wildflowers.

The TBI van came rumbling down the road and parked behind Dana’s dark green Chevy Malibu. Nix recognized one of the evidence techs as a man he’d known during his time in the marine corps. He dug in his memory and came up with PFC Brady Moreland. He and Moreland had been at Stone Bay, Camp Lejeune, at the same time about eight years earlier. He and the private had played pool together a few times at Maggie’s Drawers, the rec center at Stone Bay.