“You shook his hand,” Keith said accusingly.
Cooper’s head jerked up.
“I’m aware of that,” Gretchen said.
“Do you realize what could have happened?”
“Yes.” Her voice was even colder than the wind outside. “It was a momentary lapse of sanity.”
“He could have pulled you towards him and gotten his cuffed hands around your neck,” Keith went on ruthlessly. “He could have broken your wrist. He could have—”
“I didn’t, though,” Cooper said.
“No one’s talking to you,” Keith said.
“You’re talking about me. And you’re a foot away, so it’s not like I can’t hear you.”
Keith huffed.
Gretchen said, “Keith, there’s no woman in law enforcement, anywhere, who needs you to spell out for her all the different ways she can get killed doing her job. I promise you, I know. I agree I shouldn’t have done it, and I only did it because I wasn’t thinking.”
“Then you should have been thinking.”
“Martin worked with him once,” Gretchen said to Cooper’s surprise. Whatever response he’d expected, it hadn’t been that. “He told me about it. It made him feel more familiar.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“We could have been colleagues in another world, that’s all. I let my guard down.”
“It’s a good thing you weren’t his colleague,” Keith said. “Then you could have wound up in the ground just like Phil Locke.”
Cooper closed his eyes.
Phil.
He didn’t want to think about Phil. They’d had their differences, but even if they would never have been friends outside of the office, they had still been partners. And now Phil was gone, and they would never have a chance to be anything more than that—and one of the last times they’d talked, they’d argued. Cooper had ticked Phil off, and Phil had blown up about it, and they’d never really had a chance to make things right.
He grabbed on to the nearest available distraction and said, “Martin?”
“My chief,” Gretchen said.
The name finally clicked. “Martin Powell?”
“Don’t talk to him,” Keith said.
“Keith, I don’t want to fight in front of a prisoner, but if you tell me one more time what to do or not do, I’m going to use language unbecoming a Marshal and also kick your ass out into the snow.” She took a deep breath. “Yes. Martin Powell.”
“I remember him,” Cooper said, and against all odds, he felt a smile tugging at his mouth. Could have been the fond memories of Martin, could have been Gretchen threatening to kick Keith’s ass, could have been both. “We tracked down Jeremiah Isaac Bronson together.”
“Oh, an ‘all three names’ guy, huh? You only see that with serial killers or assassins.”
“Well, in Bronson’s case, he did kill a state senator, so the ‘all three names’ approach got used right away, but it turned out that he only killed him because the senator cut him off in traffic, so he probably doesn’t really count as an assassin. But by the time we knew that, the name had already stuck.”
He could actually remember joking about that with Martin, on a long winter car trip that had strangely looked a lot like this one. They had tried out alternative names—Jerry, Jere, “Road Rage” Bronson.
“When was this?” Gretchen said.
Cooper tried to think back. “Almost ten years ago. I was fresh out of training at Glynco and didn’t even have a home office yet. Martin was working solo, and I think he just needed someone else to take some driving shifts, and a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed rookie would do. He was a good guy. I hope I didn’t annoy him too much.”
“It’s a shame he didn’t see what kind of person you are,” Keith said.
I’m not the person you think I am.
“Keith, chill out,” Gretchen snapped.
She probably just didn’t think a prisoner needed to be reminded every two seconds that, yep, he was still a prisoner and nobody liked him very much, but Cooper appreciated her defense of him all the same.
It gave him the guts to continue talking to her like this was even a halfway normal situation.
“I was so earnest when I first joined up,” Cooper continued. “I was practically a Boy Scout. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day, all brown-bagged like I was going to school. Shoes always polished. So eager to get in on everything that I was tripping everyone else up all the time. You ever see one of those videos where a puppy tries to run across a kitchen floor and winds up skittering and just sliding?”
Gretchen laughed, and the sound was so unexpectedly musical that Cooper immediately wanted to hear it again. “That was you, huh?”
“That was me. Just losing control and slip-sliding around like I was on ice. Martin was the best thing that could have happened to me. He had a steady hand with the rookies, I guess.”
“He still does,” Gretchen said. She cleared her throat. “He said you were good.”
It made a pang shoot through his heart. “At the job, I’m guessing,” he said lightly. “Not that I was a good person.”
No one was going to take a stand on that one. Not these days.
“That’s a hard thing to judge, especially in someone you haven’t seen in years.”
Maybe. Although he knew if someone asked him right now, he’d have zero hesitation in saying Martin Powell was a good person: steady, funny, fair, and dogged. Exactly the right mentor for a kid Marshal still so overwhelmed by his good luck in landing his dream job that he’d had trouble staying focused on the gritty, unglamorous slog that the work sometimes demanded.
Martin had helped make him the Marshal he had eventually become, and despite everything that had happened, Cooper still believed that he had been, however briefly, someone worth becoming.
So he would say that Martin was a good guy, that he couldn’t have changed enough, not even in ten years, to be anything else. But it was easy for him to say that. After all, nobody had shown up with damning evidence to connect Martin with a murder and the biggest sin a Marshal
