THE SECRET OF CHEROKEE COVE Read Online Free Page A

brother was strong and tough, but things could still go wrong during any medical procedure. “By any chance is Walker Nix still there?”
    “Tall, dark and silent?” Natalie asked, lowering her voice a little.
    “That’s the one.”
    “He’s across the room staring stoically out the window,” Natalie answered in a wry tone. “Why?”
    “I need him to call me as soon as possible. Give him my cell number.”
    “Is something wrong?”
    Dana didn’t know how to answer that question without potentially sucking Doyle’s old friend and former partner into a procedural mess, so she hedged. “Nothing big. I just need to ask Detective Nix something about an ongoing investigation Doyle’s been involved with. Can you give him my message?”
    “Sure.” Natalie hung up and Dana ended the call from her own end, trying not to be immediately impatient for the callback.
    It came before she started chewing her nails. “Natalie Cooper said you wanted me to call you?” Nix’s gravelly voice rumbled like distant thunder across the telephone line.
    “I know you’re there to guard Doyle and Laney,” Dana said, already beginning to second-guess her decision to bypass emergency response. “Never mind. I’ll figure out something else.”
    “Wait,” Nix said before she could end the call. “Something’s wrong.”
    “Yeah,” she admitted, looking at the chaos surrounding her in Doyle’s bedroom. “Something’s very wrong.”
    * * *
    D ESPITE THE CHAOTIC condition of the chief’s study, it was the bloody mass of hair at the back of Dana Massey’s head that drew Nix’s immediate attention. “Your head is bleeding.”
    Dana turned away from the mess and lifted her hand to the back of her head, looking surprised to find blood on her fingers. “I didn’t realize.”
    She looked a little stunned all the way around, Nix thought. She might be a tough lady, but nobody could walk in on a burglary in progress and not be affected. That she’d had the presence of mind to snap a bunch of photos with her cell phone was notable enough. That she’d done it with a goose egg on the back of her head was damned near amazing.
    “Am I dripping blood all over the crime scene?” she asked.
    “No, seems to be oozing, mostly. It’s in your hair and on your shirt.”
    “Damn it! This blouse is silk.”
    “I’ve called a TBI unit in to process the place.” The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation offered crime scene investigation for small departments that didn’t have the manpower or need for a full-time evidence-retrieval staff.
    She frowned. “At this time of night?”
    “It’s not their usual procedure on a nonviolent case, but with your brother’s crash and the possible connection to Merritt Cortland—”
    “Yeah,” she said with a nod. “I guess that might light a fire under them.”
    “Why don’t we clear out and go somewhere until they can come in and do their work?”
    “The burglars might come back.”
    “So we’ll wait for the TBI on the front porch and I’ll see what I can do about that bump on your head.”
    She gave him a look of frustration that he interpreted as irritation that she hadn’t caught the intruders single-handedly when she had the chance. He stifled a smile and led her out to the front porch, settling her on the steps while he went to his car to retrieve a first aid kit. When he came back, she had unzipped her bag and was trading out her pumps for a pair of tennis shoes. She waved one of the pumps at him, displaying a broken heel, before she shoved it into her bag.
    She sighed and turned the back of her head toward him to give him better access. “How bad is it?”
    “Not too bad, really,” he said after he’d used some antiseptic to clean the abraded area on the back of her head. “Did they hit you with something?”
    She waved her hand toward the porch railing. “They knocked me back into the railing. I hit my head on the bottom rail on the way down. I thought it was just a little