Murder in the Smokies - By Paula Graves Page 0,49
thinking it’s strange that all four of the victims were connected to Rachel Davenport in some way, am I?”
“No, you’re not.” He’d been thinking about the coincidence ever since they’d discovered that Rachel had considered Marjorie Kenner a close friend. “That poor woman—she’s lost four friends in the last month or so, and her father is dying of liver cancer. No wonder she looks beaten down and tired.”
“If we hadn’t brought her food, I wonder if she’d have bothered to eat.”
“You remember how I told you about Seth Hammond getting approached to do a contract killing?”
“I do. Which reminds me, I need to have a long talk with him about keeping that kind of information to himself.” Ivy’s lips flattened with annoyance for a moment, then her brow furrowed. “Oh. I get where you’re going. It’s all about the victim. And all the victims were close to Rachel Davenport.”
Sutton nodded. “What if these killings are really all about one victim? Rachel Davenport.”
“But why? Does that poor woman in there really seem like someone who’d inspire that level of malice? She doesn’t even look capable of hurting a fly, much less drawing enough wrath to warrant a contract killing.”
“But they’re not trying to kill her. The contract isn’t out on her.”
“Isn’t it?” Ivy put down her half-eaten sandwich and leaned toward him, close enough that he got another whiff of warm, clean scent. “What if it really is targeting her in some way? Look at how hard she’s taken these deaths. If you wanted to punish her, to make her suffer—”
“So this is some sort of twisted stalker thing? Hurting her by hiring someone to kill the people she cares about?” Sutton couldn’t hide his skepticism. The idea sounded crazy.
“I don’t know!” Ivy’s voice rose with frustration. She lowered it, glancing toward the door. “I don’t know. I just know that all of this has something to do with Rachel Davenport. Whether she’s the trigger that’s setting this killer off or she’s the target of some sort of backhanded murder-for-hire scheme, I cannot shake the conviction that these murders are somehow about her.”
Sutton wanted to argue with her. Contract murders were generally about getting an inconvenient person out of the way or punishing someone for a perceived wrong. They weren’t about torturing a person with grief.
But contract murders also didn’t play out like serial murders, with clear signatures and identical M.O.s. Yet he’d been seriously considering the idea that the four Bitterwood murders may have been committed by someone hired to do so.
Make it look like anything but a hit....
“Maybe we should just table all the crazy theorizing until I get my hands on that list and see where it takes me,” Ivy said, picking up her sandwich again.
They fell quiet while they ate, strains of music from the office down the hall filling the silence. Rachel Davenport’s taste ran to classic rock, apparently, and the evening DJ on the classic rock station was playing a commercial-free set of Southern rock ballads. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” was the current choice, evoking memories of lazy summer nights parked at Summerford Overlook, listening to the classic rock station out of Knoxville and trying to get past second base with whatever pretty little mountain girl he’d been seeing at the time.
“Makes me wish I had a lighter to wave,” he murmured, winning a grin from Ivy.
“My mother has all kinds of stories about seeing Skynyrd in concert.” Ivy finished off her sandwich and rolled the wrapper into a neat ball. Her smile faded. “I’m fairly sure she met at least one of my many ‘uncles’ at a concert.”
“I just remember envying you for even having a mother,” Sutton admitted. “Maybe she made bad decisions and screwed up her life, but she was there for you when you fell down and skinned your knees. Remember?”
Ivy’s expression softened. “She was. She tried to give me a family, really. That’s what all those men were about. Not just her wanting to feel loved but also wanting me to have something my own daddy didn’t stick around to give me. I know all that.”
“Still, it’s hard to forget the bad stuff.” He thought about his father, stuck there in his house, in a body that wouldn’t work right anymore and a voice, once his most powerful resource, that couldn’t weave a story any longer. He felt sorry for him, but he couldn’t forgive him. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
He tore his mind away from the unpleasant past and