Murder in the Smokies - By Paula Graves Page 0,43

advantage of the situation to close his fingers over Ivy’s below the table. She shot him a questioning look and he returned it with a wicked half smile.

“You think someone is killing these people because of my family?” Rachel looked horrified by the thought. “But I thought it was a serial killer or something. You think it’s not?”

“I didn’t say that,” Ivy said quickly. “We’re just trying to figure out if there could be some sort of connection in the way the killer chooses his victims. Maybe he lives close to the business, for instance. Or rents a truck from you now and then.”

“We rent out a lot of trucks,” Rachel said doubtfully. “Most of our customers are business owners who don’t need a truck enough to warrant buying a company vehicle, though. Normal people.”

Seemingly normal people could commit heinous crimes, Sutton knew. Some of the most notorious serial killers in history had struck their neighbors as perfectly normal people.

“I asked your father to let us see the rental records for the past month or so,” Ivy said. “He didn’t want to—privacy concerns, he said. I totally respect that, but if we knew who the renters were—”

“You think the killer could be one of our renters?”

“We think it might be,” Ivy said, apparently unwilling to elaborate on their suspicions about how the rental trucks were really being used. Sutton didn’t blame her. That was a lot of nightmarish speculation to lay on a civilian.

“I guess it makes sense. If he rents from us, he could have seen all of his victims there at the office,” Rachel conceded. “Three of them worked there, and Marjorie often dropped by to take me to lunch when she was in town.”

Sutton didn’t say it aloud, but there was still something about Marjorie Kenner’s murder that didn’t fit. Even if she dropped by now and then to take Rachel to lunch, what were the odds that she happened to be there at the same time as a truck renter? Or that she’d catch his eye when he seemed to be more focused on women in their late twenties and early thirties?

“I’ll talk to my father,” Rachel said. “Make him see that we need to give you those names.”

“We’ll be very discreet about interviewing them,” Ivy promised, a tremor of excitement underlying her calm tone.

Rachel pushed aside her coffee cup. “I’d like to go back to the cemetery now.”

“Okay,” Ivy agreed, glancing quickly at Sutton. He could tell she was worried she’d pushed too hard, but with Rachel’s next words, she visibly relaxed.

“I’ll talk to my father as soon as I get back to the office. If I can get him to agree, I’ll call you to pick up the list of renters.”

Rachel rode with Ivy back to the cemetery, while Sutton followed in his truck, keeping an eye out for any signs of outside surveillance. If there was anyone stalking him or Ivy, he didn’t spot them during the drive, and they returned to the cemetery without incident.

Rachel’s car was still parked just off the access road near Marjorie Kenner’s new grave. Hers was the only car left when Ivy pulled up and parked behind the Honda Accord; all of the other mourners had left already.

Ivy got out with Rachel and exchanged a few words that Sutton couldn’t hear. She waited outside the Jeep until Rachel was safely inside her car and driving away. But as she turned to get back into her Jeep, she stopped suddenly, her gaze directed toward the newly dug grave. Moving slowly at first, then gaining speed, she started walking up the modest incline toward the grave.

Sutton got out of the truck and followed, catching up at the grave. “What is it?”

Ivy crouched beside the grave and pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pocket. As he watched with confusion, she reached out and examined a small flowering green plant that seemed to have been planted at the head of the grave, close to where the small granite nameplate lay, a placeholder until the family could arrange for a proper grave marker.

“I saw this same plant at Coral Vines’s grave,” she told Sutton, pushing to her feet. She started walking across the graveyard, leaving him to keep up, and stopped a few plots away at a second grave. “See?”

He bent to examine the plant growing next to the simple gravestone. “I think I know what this is,” he told her, feeling a strange quiver in the middle of his