She didn’t answer.
“You’re sitting off here by yourself, away from your friends. You sent Laney away so you could handle my questions alone.”
“You seem to know something, or think you know something, about the break-in. So spill it.” She kept her voice low, her hand still drawing soothing circles around her son’s back.
“I know your husband died seven months ago.”
“He was
murdered
seven months ago,” she corrected quietly. Her voice had an oddly detached tone, making him wonder about the state of the relationship at the time of Johnny Blackwood’s murder.
“You weren’t a suspect?”
Her gaze flicked toward him. “I had an alibi.”
“Work?” She’d still been the emergency services night-shift dispatcher at the time of Johnny’s death.
She nodded. “Plenty of security video to establish my whereabouts.”
“But you had a motive?”
She took a quick, sharp breath through her nose. “Is there a point to this line of questioning?”
He supposed there wasn’t, other than curiosity. He knew the basics about Johnny Blackwood’s goings and comings during the months leading up to his murder. It was how he’d latched on to Johnny in the first place—reading through the case notes and seeing signs of a potential connection to another case he was looking into. But the personal details in the case file were scarce, perhaps because Briar was part of the Bitterwood P.D. family. Personal matters not pertaining to the case would have been minimized and even left out to protect her privacy.
Like the state of the marriage at the time of his death. The cops would have wanted to know if there had been trouble in her relationship with her husband. And Dalton knew that on Johnny’s side, at least, there had been trouble to spare.
But did his wife know what Dalton knew?
As he puzzled through how best to ask her such a delicate question, a doctor in a white jacket over green scrubs entered the waiting room. “Mrs. Franklin’s family?”
Briar’s whole body seemed to snap to tautness at the sound of the doctor’s voice. She stood, clutching her small son more tightly to her, and crossed to meet the doctor halfway.
Dalton trailed behind her, catching up in time to hear the doctor say, “We’ll want to keep her until tomorrow because she lost consciousness, but she’s not showing any continuing mental confusion, which is a very good sign. She did sustain a fracture of both bones in her lower right arm, however. We’ve reset the bones and applied a fiberglass cast to just above the elbow. She’ll need to wear the cast for at least four weeks.”
“Can I see her?” Briar asked.
“Check with the nurse at the front desk in the E.R.—she’ll tell you what room she’ll be in.” The doctor smiled, gave Briar a comforting pat on her shoulder and left the waiting room, moving at a clip.
“Good news,” Dalton murmured.
Briar turned her gaze toward him, her eyes narrowing. “You’re still here.”
“Yes, I am,” he said, not taking offense. He knew he was making a nuisance of himself by coming here at this hour of night to bother her, but it couldn’t be helped. She might hold the key to his uncertain future without even realizing it.
“I have to go check on my aunt.” She turned away from him and crossed to where Laney sat, murmuring something before she handed off her son to the other woman.
Dalton watched her straighten her back and leave the waiting room with her shoulders squared and her chin up, like a soldier readied for battle. It struck him, in that brief glimpse of her steel core, that Briar Blackwood was a woman who thrived on challenges that made other people collapse.
Could that trait of hers be useful to him?
As Dalton started out the door after her, Doyle Massey rose from his chair and moved into his path. He was smiling as he did so, in that charming snake-oil salesman way of his, all teeth and beach tan and ulterior motives.
“Where are you going?” Doyle asked.
“That’s none of your business.” Dalton tried to take a step around him, but Doyle shifted, staying in his path.
“I don’t know what you’re up to or why you’ve suddenly taken an interest in my newest recruit, but don’t drag our bad blood into it.”
Dalton couldn’t help smiling at the chief’s choice of words. “Bad blood, huh?”
“Dana and I get that you don’t want to be part of our family, and you know, we can live with that. But don’t think that means we’ll let you screw with our lives and the lives of people around us.”
“Your faith in my integrity is touching.”
“I have no faith in you at all,” Doyle snapped back, dropping all pretense of friendly civility. “What brought you here tonight?”
“A case.” Dalton lifted his chin, daring the chief to start a fight.
“Which case is that?”
Dalton glanced to his right as Walker Nix rose from his seat and headed for the waiting room door. Off to see after the Blackwood widow and her aunt, he guessed. Maybe take the older woman’s statement.
He’d wanted to be there for that statement himself, but clearly the chief had other ideas.
“Why don’t you both try being straight with each other?” Laney rose from her chair and moved to turn their tense twosome into a threesome.
They both looked at her, and she lifted her eyebrows in response.
Doyle looked back at Dalton, his eyebrows mimicking his fiancée’s. “Well? What case are we talking about?”
Dalton was tempted to just leave without answering. But with so much on the line—not just his own ambitions but the safety of all the people he’d sworn justice for—he couldn’t afford to let his emotions muck up the works.
“I’ve been trying to piece together a conspiracy case against the people we suspect were involved in the Wayne Cortland crime network,” he said finally, lowering his voice by habit. “You know that Blake Culpepper has been fingered as one of the people involved.”
“And you come here in the middle of the night to a hospital waiting room to ask Blake’s distant cousin questions about his criminal activity?” Doyle sound unconvinced.
“Not about Culpepper.” Dalton tamped down a smile at the thought that he actually knew something his know-it-all half brother didn’t. “I came here to ask her questions about her late husband.”
“You have questions about Johnny? Why?”
“Because odds are good he was part of Cortland’s organization.”
Chapter Two
Briar had never liked hospitals, even before her mother’s death from breast cancer. The antiseptic smells, the dim artificial lights, the rhythms of machines that beat like the pulse of some giant predatory beast—they were alien to the life she knew, a life of fresh air, changing seasons, the loamy essence of earth and trees and the feel of wind in her hair.
In the white-sheeted hospital bed, her aunt looked like a thin, sickly child instead of a strong, wiry woman in her late fifties. Her shiny silver-streaked black hair looked dull and brittle beneath the single light shining over her bed, and when Jenny turned her tired gaze to Briar, she looked as if she’d aged a decade overnight.
The cast on her right arm was bulky and the color of old paper, not quite white, not quite yellow. “Does it hurt?” Briar asked, resting her hand on the rough-textured surface of the cast.
“Not at the moment.”
There was a knock on the door behind her. Then it inched open and Walker Nix’s face appeared in the opening. “Is it okay to come in?”
Briar looked at her aunt. “I think Walker wants to ask you some questions about what happened.”
“Of course.” Jenny flashed the detective a wan smile as he entered and came to stand at the foot of her bed.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked Jenny, briefly squeezing Briar’s shoulder before dropping his hand to his pocket to pull out a notebook.
“I’m not feeling much of anything at the moment,” Jenny admitted, making Briar smile. “I guess you want to know what I remember.”
“As much as you can.”
Briar’s aunt lifted her left hand to her brow. “I’d just put Logan to bed when there was a knock on the door.” Jenny’s gaze slanted to meet Briar’s. “I know you say never to answer the door at night, but the person on the other side said he was Doyle Massey, and you know that light on the porch went out night before last.”
Briar gave herself a mental kick. “I meant to put a new bulb in before I left tonight.”
“You can imagine what I was thinking.” Jenny reached out to Briar, clasping her hand when she offered it. “It was your second week on the police force, and here was the chief of police knocking at the door in the middle of the night....”
It had been a ruse guaranteed to get Jenny to open the door, which meant the intruders were familiar enough with her life to know it would work, Briar realized with a shudder of dismay.
“Did you get a good look at the intruders?” Nix asked.
“They wore face paint and dark camouflage. One of them had a skull cap kind of hat—black, I think. It was dark and it all happened so fast. His hair was up under the cap, so I couldn’t tell you what color it was. I think his eyes were dark—they didn’t really give me much time to look at them, to be honest. Just pushed me inside, turned out the lights and started throwing me around.”
Anger built like a fire in the pit of Briar’s gut. “Did you fight them?”
Jenny shook her head, looking stricken. “First blow, they broke my arm. Felt like they’d torn it clear off. Then I guess I hit my head on the hearth, because the next thing I remember is waking up when you came into the bedroom to check on me. I don’t even know how I got there.”
The intruders had probably dragged her there so they wouldn’t have to step over her body while they ransacked the place, Briar thought. “The hospital has her clothes. They’ve bagged them up for evidence,” she told Nix.
He nodded, his dark eyes reflecting the fire she felt roiling in her gut. “Miss Jenny, is there anything else you can remember? Did the men say anything when they were pushing you around?”
Jenny reached up and dashed away tears that had welled in her eyes. “I’m not sure—it was all such a blur....”
Briar squeezed her aunt’s hand. “You never know what might make sense to someone else.”
Jenny gave her hand a little squeeze back. “The other man said something about books.”
Nix and Briar exchanged glances. “What books?” Nix asked.
“I don’t know.” Jenny shook her head, wincing as the motion apparently made her headache flare up. “He just said something like ‘The books could be anywhere.’”
“What kind of books do you have?” Nix asked Briar curiously.
“Nothing valuable,” she assured him. “Some of Logan’s picture books, all my books from community college, some novels. Johnny didn’t do a lot of reading for pleasure, so I don’t even know if I have any of his books left. But none of them would be worth breaking into a cabin and beating up a woman for. Believe me.”
Jenny’s eyelids were drooping, Briar noticed, though she was trying not to show her weariness. Turning to Nix, Briar gave a little nod of her head toward the door.
“Miss Jenny, thank you for the information. I’m going to head out now and let you get some rest.” Nix closed up his notebook and put it back in his pocket. “You just let me know if you remember anything else.”
“I don’t know how much help I’ve been,” Jenny said with a sigh.
“You’ve been a big help,” Briar assured her. “Now I want you to concentrate on feeling better. Okay?”
“Who’s going to keep Logan for you while I’m all trussed up in this thing?” Jenny feebly lifted the heavy cast on her broken arm.
Briar hadn’t had time to think that far ahead. “I’ll figure it out, Aunt Jenny. You know I always do.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have opened the door.”
As Nix headed for the door, Briar bent and kissed her aunt’s furrowed brow. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t fret yourself about it, okay?”
She waited by her aunt’s bedside until the older woman had drifted back to sleep. Then she tiptoed out of the room.
Nix was waiting outside the door, leaning against the wall. “She’s lucky to be alive.”
“I know.” Briar pushed back the springy curls that had slipped the bonds of her ponytail holder to fall in her face. She’d already had a rougher night off duty than she’d had on patrol. “What are the odds this break-in isn’t related to the previous one?”
Nix fell into step with her as she started down the hallway toward the waiting room. “I don’t know. We thought the last break-in was related to Dana’s visit, remember?”
“The Cumberland curse,” she murmured. Shortly after Dana had made a visit to Briar’s cabin, someone had broken in and trashed the place. Briar had assumed the break-in might have been an act of malice, to punish her for letting Tallie Cumberland’s daughter into her home.
The people of her small community, Cherokee Cove, had come to blame the Cumberlands for almost everything that went wrong in their world. Dana Massey’s mother, Tallie Cumberland, had become the target of a ruthless wealthy family after she’d accused them of stealing her child.
Dalton Hale’s family, in fact.
It didn’t matter that Tallie had told the truth. Subtly but unmistakably, Sutherlands and Hales had let it be known that any friend of a Cumberland was an enemy. And their influence in Bitterwood was far and wide. Nobody defied them without consequences. Tallie had left Bitterwood before the age of twenty, driven from town along with her family.
When Dana Massey had come to Bitterwood a couple of months ago, looking so much like her mother, a new round of Cumberland-curse fever had commenced. At the time of the last break-in, Briar and Nix had assumed one of her Cherokee Cove neighbors had been leaving her a message about mixing with Cumberlands.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
“Is Dalton Hale still here?” she asked Nix.
“He was still in the waiting room when I left.”
Great,
she thought.
Just great.
What the hell did he want with her, anyway? Why had he been asking questions about Johnny’s murder? That mystery had been languishing in cold-case territory for months now.
Why was the Ridge County prosecutor’s office suddenly interested in the murder again?
* * *
D
ALTON
H
ALE
HAD
never seen himself as an angry man. Passionate, yes. Forceful in the pursuit of justice. But not one who possessed the kind of bitter rage that destroyed the lives and families of those who passed through his world.
But he was angry now. Fury burned in his gut like acid, eating away at every vestige of the man he’d once believed himself to be. It had poisoned his relationship with his father and grandfather until he’d found himself struggling to speak to them with any semblance of civility. It had ripped holes in the solid foundation of his career, taking him overnight from golden boy to uncertain risk in the eyes of the men and women who could make or break his future.
And for what? For a lie told years ago and a truth buried for over three decades. The vindication of a woman long dead and the total destruction of a man whose name had once meant something, not just here in Tennessee but all the way to the steps of the United States Capitol.
In a world where very little in life was fair, Dalton had spent his own life trying to even the odds for people without power or privilege.
People like the woman who had given birth to him.
And now he was angry at her, too. For having existed. For having come back here nearly fifteen years ago for one last look at the son she’d left behind. For becoming, with her husband, a victim of his grandfather’s steely will and his father’s emotional weakness.
And for giving birth to another son and a daughter who had invaded his well-planned world and asked inconvenient questions about a truth that should have remained buried.
They had made him into a man he didn’t recognize anymore.
And he was angry at himself, most of all, for letting them.
Maybe if he’d been brought up by earthy, straight-talking mountain folk like his birth mother, he could have vented all this rage in one rip-roaring, glass-smashing, fist-flying explosion. Gone on a tear and let the fury have reign. Got it out of his system and been done with it.
But he’d been raised by Nina Hale, not Tallie Cumberland. And Hales didn’t throw angry fits. They kept their emotions under control, functioning on reason and behaving at all times with civility and good manners.
Except when they were killing inconvenient people, he reminded himself as he faced his half brother with clenched fists and fought the urge to take a swing.
“What evidence do you have to support your theory about Johnny Blackwood?” Doyle’s calm tone was deceptive. Dalton didn’t miss the dangerous gleam of anger in the chief’s green eyes, eyes so like his own that he’d all but given up hoping the past couple of months had all been one nightmarish mistake.
“I’m not prepared to try my case before you, chief.”
“In other words, you’re talking out your—”
Laney put her hand on Doyle’s arm, stopping him midsentence. “Dalton’s been looking into the Wayne Cortland case,” she told her fiancé. “He’s been trying to unravel the Tennessee side of the organization, see if he can build criminal cases against everyone involved.”
Doyle’s expression took on a slight grudging hint of admiration that caught Dalton by surprise. Even worse, he felt an answering flutter of something that might be satisfaction deep in the pit of his gut, as if the chief’s approval actually mattered. He beat back the sensation with ruthless determination.
“I have to confess, I don’t know a lot about Johnny Blackwood,” Doyle said in a less confrontational tone. “I know he was murdered several months ago, and the case went cold pretty quickly.”
“It’s not his murder that interests me,” Dalton answered before he remembered he didn’t want to share any information with the chief. He sighed, knowing what he’d said would only make Massey more, not less, interested in Johnny Blackwood’s possible connection to Cortland.
Fortunately, Briar Blackwood chose that moment to return to the waiting room. She looked tired and angry, her black curls spilling into her face from her untidy ponytail as she strode into the room. Her storm-cloud eyes locked with his, and she gave a curt backward nod of her head, a silent invitation to join her outside. She murmured something to Nix and then walked out of the waiting room again.
“I have to go,” Dalton murmured, already moving toward the door.
“Be careful. She’s tougher than she looks.” Doyle’s words sounded more like a taunt than a warning.
His back stiffening, Dalton left the waiting room and looked up and down the corridor for the Blackwood woman.
She stood at the window at the far end of the hall, her back to him. She had a neat, slim figure accentuated by snug jeans and a curve-hugging long-sleeved T-shirt. The messy ponytail had almost given up, gathering only a small clump of curls at the back of her neck while the rest of her hair spilled free across her shoulders. As he walked toward her, she reached back and pulled the elastic band free, letting the rest of her hair loose to tangle and coil around her neck.
An unexpected tug in his groin caught Dalton by surprise. His steps faltered before he caught himself.
Not an option, Hale. Not even close to an option.
Unfortunately, the more he tried not to think about Briar Blackwood as a woman, the more of her feminine features he noticed. Like the perfect size of her breasts, neither too large nor too small for her compact frame. Or the flare of her hips and curvy contours of her bottom.
She had a fine face, too—more interesting than conventionally pretty, with lightly tanned skin splashed with small cinnamon freckles and large black-fringed eyes currently the color of antique pewter.
Fire flashed in those gray eyes as she turned to look at him. “Mr. Hale, I don’t know what you think you know about my husband or his murder, but if you think it’s a way to get back at your brother and sister—”
“Don’t call them that.”
Her dark eyebrows notched slightly upward. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. I don’t sugarcoat the truth. You and the chief share a mother. You don’t have to like it. I don’t reckon he likes it much himself, but there you are anyway. And if you’re messing around in my life because you think it’ll piss off your brother, you can just move along and find somebody else to use. I won’t be party to it.”
He wanted to be angry at her for her bluntness, but in truth, he found it something of a relief. Everybody else he knew, friends and colleagues he’d known for years, seemed to walk around on eggshells around him, as if they feared speaking plainly about the train wreck his life had become. He might not like what Briar Blackwood had to say, but at least she was saying it aloud and without apology.