Murder in the Smokies

chapter Twelve



For a moment, Sutton thought Ivy was going to slingshot out from the shelter of the building and take down the man by herself. But even as her muscles bunched to strike, she swung around suddenly toward him, her eyes glimmering in the low light.

“No jurisdiction,” she breathed, even that tiny bit of sound thick with frustration.

He hadn’t even thought of jurisdiction, he realized. He’d been too focused on getting a better look at what the man was up to.

“I don’t need jurisdiction,” he whispered in her ear, his lips brushing the delicate curve of cartilage.

She clutched the front of his shirt. “Sutton—”

He pressed a swift kiss on her forehead and moved out into the open, keeping his hand on the Glock. He walked quietly, his gaze on the man who now stood with his back to the building, watching the blood drip out of the inclined truck.

“May I help you?” Sutton asked.

The man jumped at the sound of Sutton’s voice, and he whirled to face him. “Who are you?”

“Security,” Sutton answered. It wasn’t a complete lie.

“Oh.” The man relaxed. “Look, I know this is after hours, but I’ve done this before and nobody ever complained, so I didn’t think—” He stopped rambling and took a deep breath. “The butcher was late getting to my hogs, which meant I was late getting them to the meat market. I couldn’t wait till morning, see? I don’t have cold storage anywhere big enough.”

Sutton listened to the man’s explanation, studying his body language with a practiced eye. He seemed relaxed enough, if a little flustered. “What’s your name?”

“David Pennock. My brothers and I run Pennock Farm over in Walland.”

“Nice place.” Ivy came into the open, her weapon holstered and her hands by her sides. “I went to college in Chattanooga with your brother a few years back.”

Pennock’s smile looked friendly. “Must’ve been Kevin. Only one of us with a damn bit of brains.”

“You’ve done this before?” Sutton asked.

“You mean clean out the truck after hours?” Pennock nodded. “Not real often, but sometimes if things get backed up at Merchant Brothers—that’s the butcher we use—we get behind delivering the fresh cuts of meat to the area markets that carry our products.”

“Aren’t there sanitation rules about carrying raw meat?” Ivy asked, moving around the truck to look at the open doors at the back. Sutton crossed to her side and looked into the truck.

There were large electric coolers built into the inner walls of the truck, he saw. “If you carry the meat products in there, why is there all this blood in the truck?”

“One of our pallets broke when we were loading a couple of dressed whole hogs—we have a couple of customers who prefer to do the processing themselves, so we let Merchant Brothers slaughter the hogs and drain their blood. Apparently one big old fellow had an aneurysm somewhere in his system that didn’t bust until we dropped him on the way into the truck. Made an unholy mess, but since all the other meat is kept in the coolers, which are sanitized daily, I figured we could wait until after delivery to clean out the mess in the truck.” Pennock looked defensive. “Other people do it, too. I mean, nobody ever said there was a rule about it.”

“Other people?” Ivy asked. “You’ve seen other trucks being cleaned out after hours?”

Pennock’s brow furrowed. “You’re security, too?”

“Actually, she’s a police officer.” Sutton didn’t mention the different jurisdiction.

“Oh. This is against the law or something?” Pennock looked alarmed. “I swear I didn’t know. I won’t ever do it again.”

“Did you see other trucks cleaned out after hours?” she repeated, ignoring his sudden nervousness.

Pennock glanced at Sutton, as if looking for moral support. “A time or two.”

“Recently?”

“I saw one maybe a month ago,” Pennock answered. “Is there something going on?”

“Do you remember anything about the truck you saw a month ago?” Ivy pressed.

He shook his head. “It was just a truck. They were parked here and some guy was mucking out the back. That’s how I got the idea it was okay to clean up after hours.”

“Do you remember what was in the back?”

Pennock’s alarm was back. “No. Just something wet. I didn’t get a good look. I don’t even remember if there was any sort of sign on the side.”

Ivy looked at Sutton, frustration lining her features. As she opened her mouth to say something, Sutton’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He gave her an apologetic look and moved away from them, checking the number. It was a local Tennessee area code, the number unfamiliar. Sutton almost ignored the call. But at the last moment before it went to voice mail, he answered. “Sutton Calhoun.”

“Sutton, it’s Seth. Your daddy’s had a fall and he’s in the E.R.”

* * *

“IT’S A CLEAN BREAK of the humerus, about three inches above the elbow.” Cleve Calhoun’s doctor was a very young orthopedic surgeon who had introduced himself as Dr. Choudry. What he lacked in age and experience, he made up for in composure and confidence. “Right now he’s stable and resting under a mild sedative. We were able to realign the bones without surgery, but given his age and his stroke-related disabilities, we’ll want to keep him in the hospital for at least three more days, until we’re satisfied he can deal with the cast and its limitations on his movement.”

Sutton wanted to feel relieved that his father’s injury wasn’t far worse. It certainly could have been—Seth had looked pale and pinched when he greeted Sutton’s arrival to the River Bend Medical Center, as if the past few hours had taken years off his life span. “He tried walking on his own,” Seth had explained on the elevator ride to the fourth-floor waiting room.

“Why would he do such a thing?”

Seth had looked reluctant to answer.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Sutton had pushed.

“He kept yelling your name as he got up,” Seth had replied. “I heard him all the way from the kitchen, but by the time I got there, he’d already taken a tumble.” Seth had led him down the hall to the waiting area, where several other people sat in groups of two or three around the large room, but it wasn’t so crowded that they’d had trouble finding a couple of seats to themselves away from the others.

“You heard him say my name?”

“One of the clearest things I’ve heard him say,” Seth had admitted.

“What do you think it means?” The question had spilled from his lips before he could stop it.

“Maybe seeing you reminded him of what he used to be like,” Seth had suggested. “Could be he wants to be like that again.”

They’d waited another half hour before Dr. Choudry had arrived to catch them up on his father’s condition.

“Do you have any questions?” Dr. Choudry asked.

It was Seth, not Sutton, who answered. “His head was bleeding like it had cracked open. You didn’t even mention that.”

“It was a superficial cut. Head wounds can often bleed profusely. But the EMTs said he hadn’t lost consciousness, and the CAT scan showed no signs of a closed head injury. We’ll keep an eye on his vitals, but I don’t see any reason for concern. You’re free to visit with him until visiting hours are over. Just be aware that the medication we gave him to ease the pain of his break will make him drowsy, so he may not be in a sociable mood.”

After the doctor left, Seth started toward the door immediately, but all Sutton could do was drop into the nearest seat, leaning forward, his head resting on his hands.

“You’re not going with me to visit him?” Seth sounded incredulous.

Sutton looked up at the other man. “There’s a lot of bad blood between Cleve and me. You know that.”

“He’s a sick old man who could use a little human kindness.” Seth’s expression shifted to a smile as false as the anxiety in his green eyes was real. “Lord knows, he won’t get much human kindness from an old scammer like me, right?”

“He always liked you.”

Seth shrugged. “Kindred souls.”

“You’ve taken care of him.”

“So?” Seth’s tone was defensive.

“So, thanks.”

Sutton could tell that Seth didn’t know how to respond to gratitude. He probably hadn’t gotten many kind words of any sort in a long time. Not that Sutton could feel very sorry for him. Seth Hammond had made his choices with his eyes wide open. He’d hurt his share of innocent people over the years, following in Cleve’s duplicitous footsteps. He’d earned his bad reputation fair and square.

“I think he’d like to see you,” Seth said a moment later, filling the uncomfortable silence.

“I think he’d like to see you more.”

“It’s not a competition.”

Maybe it wasn’t. But if his father had risked his neck trying to prove his manhood just because Sutton had bothered to come around after fourteen years of silence, the old man probably wouldn’t appreciate Sutton bearing witness to his failure.

“You can tell him I’m here. If he wants to see me, I’ll go.”

Seth studied him through narrowed eyes. “Okay. You’re right. That’s the way to handle it.”

Sutton waited until Seth left the waiting room to pull out his cell phone and check his messages. He had a routine check-in call from the office. He handled that with a quick text to Jesse Cooper, reassuring him that everything was okay. The only other message was a text from Ivy.

Got the list and headed home. How’s your dad?

He smiled at the brief message. A woman of few words, his Ivy.

He sent back a message reassuring her that his father was doing well, considering, then sent a second message asking her to let him know if she found anything interesting in the list Rachel Davenport had given her.

He settled into his chair for a long wait, acutely aware of just how much he wished Ivy were there to keep him company.

* * *

THE BLOOD DRIPPED SLOWLY from the back of the truck, looking like crude oil in the glow of the high-pressure sodium vapor lamps that punctured the darkness in the parking lot with circles of yellow light. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with the sweet metallic tang.

A flicker of movement from inside the building drew his attention away from his task. He didn’t stare directly at the window where the woman stood, little more than a silhouette hovering at the edge of the frame. Instead, he framed her in his peripheral vision and went back to his cleaning.

He wished he had his rifle. It amplified his natural power, the weapon with its deadly load an appendage entirely under his control. Knives were toys. Exciting and stimulating. But like toys, their uses were largely limited to recreation. Yes, they could kill as well as entertain, but they were grossly inefficient as tools.

Rifles were coldly effective death-bringers. Utilitarian. Unsexy. But brutally efficient.

With a single shot, he could drill the life from the woman hovering at the window, watching him with a blend of curiosity and fear.

But this was the wrong situation for the rifle. He was too out in the open. Someone would hear and see.

The shadow in the building moved again. The knife in his pocket, wiped clean of all but the most microscopic of blood transfer, felt heavy and alive. How easily, he wondered, could he subdue her and put her in the back of the truck without drawing attention?

So easily...

Ivy woke without transition, one second asleep and the next awake. But the dream lingered, along with the metallic smell of blood. She knew it was just an olfactory memory of the pig blood that had spilled from David Pennock’s rented truck. Before she’d let Pennock leave, she’d collected a blood sample on a clean square of gauze she’d taken from Davenport Trucking’s on-site first-aid kit. It was currently air-drying in preparation for her taking it to the Bitterwood Police Department’s small crime scene unit, which had kits that could rule out the possibility that the blood she’d collected was human blood.

She was pretty sure Pennock had been telling the truth. Rachel Davenport had positively identified him as one of the company’s longtime clients, and with a few calls she had confirmed most of the rest of Pennock’s story. The blood test would simply provide a little reassurance that her instincts were on target.

She’d fallen asleep at her desk again, her face pressed into the list of names and businesses Rachel Davenport had supplied. A quick check of her watch explained the ache in her back; it was four-thirty in the morning. She’d been asleep hunched over the desk for most of the night, ever since Rachel had taken pity on her and delivered her home to Bitterwood after Sutton—and her ride home—had headed for the hospital in Knoxville.

She wondered if he was still there. She hadn’t heard from him other than a couple of brief text messages earlier that evening. Groaning, she rose from the desk chair and stretched, promising herself that as soon as she closed this case, she’d take a whole week off and do anything she wanted. Which at this rate might be to sleep all day and all night.

Going back to sleep at this hour would only make her feel groggy all day, so she settled for a quick shower and two cups of strong, hot coffee to get her going. She took time to scramble a couple of eggs and toast slices of wheat bread for breakfast, settling at the kitchen table with the list of names she’d gotten from Davenport Trucking.

None of the names had caught her interest the first time through, and the second pass wasn’t proving to be any more enlightening. She and Antoine would just have to go at the list the old-fashioned way—hoofing it from company to company to ask a few questions about where their rented trucks had been on the dates and times of the four murders.

She set the list aside and opened the file she’d compiled on the murders. The newest additions were color printouts of the images the surveillance crew covering the cemetery had sent her the day before. She’d already looked through them twice so far, but she flipped through the pages one more time, taking in the faces, many of them familiar, that had passed through the cemetery since she’d assigned the surveillance crew almost two weeks earlier.

Some of the faces she hadn’t initially recognized were starting to become familiar now that she’d studied the photos for a while. There was a gray-haired woman who seemed to make daily visits to a grave located a few plots away from Amelia Sanderson’s final resting place. Ivy jotted a note to herself to check who was buried there.

A teenage boy, tough-looking and rawboned, appeared in one of the photos. He caught Ivy’s eye because his outer appearance seemed so at odds with the image he presented of a lost, terrified child as he stretched out on a plot of grass near Coral Vines’s grave, his hand seeming to stroke the flat granite marker beneath his cheek.

She dragged her attention from that heartbreaking image and went to the next photo. In contrast, there was nothing particularly attention-catching about this photo, which looked like an outtake, a photo taken just to finish up a roll of film, though she knew it couldn’t be anything like that, since the surveillance team used digital cameras.

It was a photo of people walking along the gravel-paved pathways between graves, none of them doing anything noteworthy. Unless you counted the buxom brunette near the center of the shot, she realized with a sudden flash of understanding. The dress she wore was thin and formfitting. It was also mostly see-through in the sunlight, and the photo had captured the full sheerness of the dress, revealing a low-cut demi-bra and tiny bikini panties beneath the flimsy fabric.

“Pigs,” she muttered and started to move the photo aside. But something about the image snagged her attention. There were men in coveralls at work near the edge of the photo, planting what looked like pansies in small, round bucket planters that dotted the gravel walking paths at strategic intervals.

She backtracked through the previous images and found a few more shots of the landscapers at work. In one shot, the back of the coveralls was distinct enough that she could read the name of the company embroidered into the khaki fabric. Bramlett Nurseries.

Straightening, she grabbed the list of names she’d gotten from Davenport Trucking, running her finger down the column of renters until she found it. Bramlett Nurseries. Located right there in Bitterwood.

So Bramlett was the landscaper the cemetery used to maintain the grounds. And Bramlett rented a box truck from Davenport Trucking.

That had to mean something, didn’t it?

She dug through the case file until she found a photo of the belladonna plant she’d snapped at the cemetery after Marjorie Kenner’s funeral. The plant was healthy and well-groomed, as if someone maintained it with care.

Someone like a horticulturist with his own nursery and landscaping company?

If workers from Bramlett Nurseries were tending to the plants at the grave sites, as they seemed to do in some of the surveillance pictures she’d quickly flipped through, would they recognize deadly nightshade for what it was?

* * *

IT WAS TOO EARLY TO GO to Bramlett Nurseries so she finished eating and dressed for work, heading in an hour and a half early to get a head start on the day. She had the detective’s office to herself for only a few minutes, however, before Antoine Parsons wandered in with a doughnut, a cup of iced coffee and the morning paper. He looked surprised to see her there.

“Did you break the case?” he asked hopefully.

“Remains to be seen,” she answered with a half smile. She waved him over and he pulled up a chair by her desk, listening with interest as she caught him up on what had happened since she’d left the office the day before. “It may mean nothing,” she said after showing him the photos of the Bramlett Nurseries employees at work. “But it’s at least an interesting coincidence that the nursery is a long-term renter from Davenport Trucking.”

“That assumes you’re right that the killer is using rented trucks as his killing field.”

“Granted. But I think I am.”

Antoine was quiet for a moment, his silent scrutiny making her feel like a germ under a microscope. Finally, he nodded. “I think you are, too.”

“I’ve done a little preliminary checking this morning, made a few calls. Bramlett’s been in business for years, although they were mostly a feed and seed shop until old Mr. Bramlett died last year. He didn’t have any children, so the company went to his nephew Mark.” She checked her notes. “I haven’t been able to do much of a check on him, but the source who told me about old man Bramlett says the nephew lived in the Nashville area and moved here to take over the company.”

“And changed up the way they did things, I take it?”

“Looks like. Modernized, added more decorative and landscaping plants for consumers, that sort of thing. The folks at Padgett Memorial said he’s the one who pitched the groundskeeping job to them. They seem to think he’s a nice guy.”

“Nice guys can be killers,” Antoine murmured.

Her cell phone rang. She checked the display. Sutton’s name and number filled the small window. “Hawkins,” she answered.

“Sorry I left you in a lurch. How’d you get home?”

“Rachel drove me,” she answered casually, aware of Antoine’s interest in the conversation. “How’s your father?”

“Ornery, but the doctors seem sure he’ll heal up quickly enough. It just can’t be much fun to be in the hospital when you can’t move around easily on your own.” Sutton sounded nearly as frustrated as Ivy imagined his father must be feeling. “I slept in the waiting room. The sofas aren’t as bad as they look.”

“Really.”

He made a soft huffing noise. “No, not really. They’re as uncomfortable as sleeping on a pile of rocks. Is it okay if I go to your place and crash for a few hours?”

“Of course,” she said. “I showed you where the key is.”

“Thanks. You’re a lifesaver. Any luck on the truck list yet?”

“Maybe.” She didn’t want to catch him up on all the details, not with Antoine listening in. She was already walking a razor-thin edge where Sutton and her investigation were concerned. “I’m going to spend the morning following up on a few things.”

“You’ll let me know what you learn?” There was a sexy undertone to his request, a reminder that his father had always been damned good at coaxing gullible women to fall in with his ideas and schemes—including her own mother once upon a time.

“I’ll see you soon and we’ll catch up.” That was as much as she was willing to commit to. For all she knew, her visit to Bramlett Nurseries would prove to be a complete bust, and she’d have nothing to tell him at all.

Antoine was game when she suggested they head to Bramlett Nurseries first thing in order to be there when the place opened. “Catch them without any warning, and maybe we’ll learn something useful.”

Antoine drove while Ivy used her cell phone to look up Bramlett Nurseries on the internet. The company had a small, low-rent website, little more than a placeholder page with its address, phone number and hours of business. The nursery opened at eight, which meant they’d arrive right around the start of business.

The nursery was nestled in a pretty, tree-lined valley about five miles outside the Bitterwood city limits but still within the police department’s jurisdiction. Behind the building, the Smoky Mountains slumbered like blue velvet giants, their softly rounded peaks shrouded by the pale morning mists that gave the mountain range its name.

The main building was boxy and rectangular, its utilitarian shape tempered by the quirky choice of colorful river stones as the primary building material. Behind the main building, three large greenhouses reflected the blue mountains and pearl-gray sky above them.

Inside the main building, Ivy and Antoine found a lone man behind the counter, his head down as he organized what looked like seed packets on the polished glass countertop. He didn’t look up until he’d finished the task, his gray eyes calm and his expression neutral as he offered them a polite smile.

“Sorry for making you wait. But if I’d lost count, I’d have had to start over again.” He swept the packets of seeds into a display box marked Bramlett Savoy Spinach and set them on the counter. “Can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to whoever’s in charge of your truck fleet.”

The man at the counter smiled. “Fleet? We have a single truck for deliveries and landscaping jobs.”

Ivy showed the man her shield. “I’m Detective Hawkins of the Bitterwood Police Department. This is Detective Parsons. Are you the manager?”

“Owner-operator,” the man answered with a smile. “Mark Bramlett. Nice to meet you, Detectives. How can I help you?”

He did look like a nice guy, Ivy had to admit. Mid-thirties, sandy brown hair, tall and slim with friendly gray eyes. She’d probably buy a potted plant from him, she conceded, even though she had a notoriously brown thumb.

“Nice to meet you, too, Mr. Bramlett. We’d like to ask you some questions about the truck you rent from Davenport Trucking in Maryville.”