Paula Graves - Blood on Copperhead Trail

Ivy grinned. “I’m doing you a favor. You’re way too skinny for these parts, Charlane. People will start trying to feed you everywhere you go.”

“Laney, Ivy. Not Charlane. Even my mama calls me Laney these days.” Laney motioned for the check and waved off Ivy’s offer to pay. “I can expense it.”

They reconvened outside, where Ivy’s department-issue Ford Focus looked a bit dusty and dinged next to Laney’s sleek black Mustang.

Ivy grinned when Laney started to open the Mustang’s driver’s door. “I knew you still had a little redneck in you, girl. Nice wheels.”

Laney arched her eyebrows. “Can’t say the same about yours.”

Ivy didn’t look offended. “Cop car. You should see my tricked-out Jeep.”

The drive from Sequoyah House to Ledbetter’s Diner wasn’t exactly a familiar route for Laney, who’d grown up poor as a church mouse and twice as shy. Nothing in her life on Smoky Ridge had ever required her to visit this part of town, where Copperhead Ridge overlooked the lush hollow where the wealthier citizens of the small mountain town had built their homes and their very separate lives.

The Edgewood part of Bitterwood was more suburban than rural, though the mountain itself was nothing but wilderness broken only by hiking trails and the occasional public shelter dotting the trails. People in this part of town usually worked elsewhere, either in nearby Maryville or forty-five minutes away in Knoxville.

Definitely not the kind of folks she’d grown up with on Smoky Ridge.

Ivy hadn’t been joking. She pulled her department car into the packed parking lot of Ledbetter’s Diner and got out without waiting to see if Laney followed. After a perfunctory internal debate, Laney found an empty parking slot nearby and hurried to catch up.

All eyes turned to her when she entered the diner, and for a second, she had a painful flashback to her first day of law school. A combination of academic and hardship scholarships had paid her way into the University of Tennessee, where she’d been just another girl from the mountains, one of many. But law school at Duke University had been so different. Even the buffer of her undergrad work at UT hadn’t prepared her for the culture shock.

Coming back home to Bitterwood had proved to be culture shock in reverse.

“You coming?” Ivy waited for her near the entrance.

Laney tamped down an unexpected return of shyness. “Yes.”

Ivy waved at Maisey Ledbetter on her way across the crowded diner. Maisey waved back, her freckled face creasing with a big smile. Her eyebrows lifted slightly as she recognized Laney, as well, but her smile remained as warm as the oven-fresh biscuits she baked every morning for the diner’s breakfast crowd.

“I don’t come back here to Bitterwood as often as I used to,” Laney admitted as she sat across from Ivy in one of the corner booths. “Mom and Janelle have started coming to Barrowville instead. Mom likes to shop at the outlet mall there.”

“Never underestimate the lure of a brand-name bargain.” Ivy shoved a menu toward Laney.

Laney shoved it back. “Maisey Ledbetter never changed her menu once in all the time I lived here growing up. I don’t reckon she’s changed it now.”

“Well, would you listen to that accent,” Ivy said softly, her tone teasing but friendly. “Welcome home, Charlane.”

The door to the diner opened, admitting a cold draft that wafted all the way to the back where they sat, along with a lanky man in his thirties wearing a leather jacket and jeans. He was about three shades more tanned than anyone else in Bitterwood, pegging him immediately as an outsider and one from warmer climes at that.

“Is that him?” Laney asked Ivy.

Ivy followed her gaze. “Well, look-a-there. Surfer boy found his way to Ledbetter’s.”

Laney stole another glance, trying not to be obvious. Sooner or later, she was going to have to approach Bitterwood’s brand-new chief of police in order to do her job, but it wouldn’t hurt to take his measure first.

Her second look added a few details to her first impression. Along with the tan, he had sandy-brown hair worn neatly cut but a little long, as if he were compromising between the expectations of his new job title and his inner beach bum. He was handsome, with laugh lines adding character to his tanned face and mossy-green eyes that turned sharply her way.

She dropped her gaze to the menu that still lay between her and Ivy. “I haven’t been able to set a meeting with Chief Massey yet.”

“He’s been keeping a low profile at the station,” Ivy murmured. “I get the feeling he wants to get his feet under him a little, scope out the situation before he has a big powwow with the whole department.”

“He’s pretty young for the job.” Doyle Massey couldn’t be that much older than her or Ivy. “He’s what, thirty?”

“Thirty-three,” Ivy answered, looking up when Maisey Ledbetter’s youngest daughter, Christie, approached their table with her order book. Ivy ordered barbecue ribs and a sweet tea, but Laney squelched her craving for chicken-fried steak and ordered a turkey sandwich on wheat.

When she glanced at the door, Chief Massey had moved out of sight. She scanned the room and found him sitting by himself at a booth on the opposite side of the café.

“Maybe you should go talk to him now,” Ivy suggested. “While he’s a captive audience.”

Laney’s instinct was to stay right where she was, but she’d learned long ago to overcome her scared-squirrel impulse to freeze in place if she ever wanted to get anywhere in life. “Good idea.”

She pushed to her feet before she could talk herself out of it.

He saw her coming halfway across the room, his deceptively somnolent gaze following her as she approached, like an alligator waiting for his dinner to come close enough to snap his powerful jaws. She ignored the fanciful thought and kept walking, right up to the booth where he sat.

She extended her hand and lifted her chin. “Chief Massey? My name is Laney Hanvey. I’m an investigator with the Ridge County District Attorney’s office. I’ve left you a couple of messages.”

He looked at her hand, then back up to her. “I got them.”

She was on the verge of pulling her hand back when he leaned forward and closed his big, tanned hand around hers. He had rough, dry palms, suggesting at least a passing acquaintance with manual labor.

He let go of her hand and waved toward the empty seat across from him in the booth. “Can I buy you lunch?”

Not an alligator, she thought as she carefully sat across from him. More like a chameleon, able to go seamlessly from predator to charmer in a second flat. “I’m actually having lunch with one of your detectives.” She glanced at the corner where Ivy sat, shamelessly watching them.

Chief Massey followed her gaze and gave a little wave at Ivy.

Ivy blushed a little at being caught staring, but she waved back and then pulled out her cell phone and made a show of checking her messages.

“Good detective, from what I’m told.” Massey’s full mouth curved. “She’s the one who broke the serial-murder case a couple of months ago.”

“She didn’t have much help from her chief of detectives.”

Massey’s green-eyed gaze snapped forward to lock with hers. “Let’s just get things out in the open, Ms. Hanvey. Can we do that?” His accent was Southern, but sleeker than her own mountain twang she’d worked so hard to conquer. He’d come to Bitterwood from a place called Terrebonne on the Alabama Gulf Coast.

“Get things out in the open?” she repeated.

“You may think you’re here to ferret out the snakes in our midst. But you’re really here because your bosses in the county government have been wanting the Ridge County Sheriff’s Department to swallow up small police forces like Bitterwood P.D. for a while now. Ridge County could justify the tax increase they’re wanting to impose if they suddenly had a bigger jurisdiction to cover.”