“You want me to drive him,” she said easily. “Sure. I don’t mind long trips. I’m halfway through an audiobook of Moby Dick.”
She’d been halfway through it for the last six months, but she, like Ahab, had vowed to slay her white whale eventually.
“There’s something else, too,” Martin said. He took a deep breath. “I worked a job with him once, you know. A few years ago.”
She was stunned. “I had no idea.”
“I kept it quiet during his trial because—” He looked sheepish. “Because I played everything too close to the vest back then. And it made me uneasy, seeing him on the stand, looking guilty as sin, with that amount of evidence stacked up against him.”
It took a moment for the strange uncertainty on his face to sink in. And if she’d thought she was stunned before...
Gretchen said, “You don’t think he did it.”
“No, I do. I think. For a while, I tried not to, but I just don’t see any other way it all makes sense.”
“But?”
“But it’s hard for me to connect the things he’s done with the man I knew.”
“You only knew him for a few days,” Gretchen said gently. “And people have been wrong about that kind of thing before.”
“Sure, all the time. But I even thought about hiring him.”
That startled her. “He’s a shifter?”
“No, not as far as I know. But he seemed like the kind of guy who could be trusted to keep someone else’s secrets. That’s what I thought about him, anyway—and I’ve always thought of myself as a good judge of character.”
She’d always thought so too, which made his opinion of Cooper Dawes interesting to her. The evidence seemed so black-and-white, but on the other hand, she’d rarely known Martin to be wrong.
Martin continued, “I think he’s guilty because I can’t see another option, but I have to admit I’d like to. I was hoping that you could feel it out for me. Stridmont to Bergen’s a long drive. It’ll give you some time to get a feel for him.”
She could do that. It would be an interesting challenge. And besides, as improbable as it was, Gretchen had always liked prisoner transport. She was on the smaller side, and men—especially beefy guys with bad, violent habits—tended to underestimate her. There was something kind of satisfying about correcting them on that.
Plus, she liked to drive. She always had. Few things made her happier than the open road.
“Consider it done,” she said.
“Thank you. And you should take Keith with you. He needs the experience.”
Gretchen groaned.
“I know how he is,” Martin said gently. “But I think he’s just young. And a little sheltered. You were a rookie once too, Gretchen.”
“I was. And I never thought I knew the job better than everyone else just because I’d read the website more recently.” She glared at him. “You didn’t want to talk to him tonight either,” she added accusingly.
“Well, it’s a party,” Martin said. She was pretty sure the twinkle currently in his eyes qualified as mischievous. “Besides, what’s the point of being the chief if you can’t make your Marshals do the pain-in-the-ass stuff you don’t want to do?”
Gretchen scowled. “Okay, but if you’re making me ride around with Keith, you’re the one who has to watch my dogs while I’m doing it.” It was always a hassle to find someone to look after Frick and Frack, her two enormous wolfhound-looking mutts: the rest of her family got bristly around dogs, who tended to sense something fundamentally catlike about them. Being able to dump them on Martin would be a nice change. “And I’m going to tell Colby to stop nominating you for Chief of the Year.”
Colby was the only one in the office—and one of the only Marshals in the country—who paid any real attention to the honorary awards given out each December, which meant Martin’s victories had come in every year like clockwork. Colby was always threatening to cost Martin his streak, but they all knew it would never happen. Colby probably already had the nomination forms filled out for next year, even.
Her joke of a threat let them ease back into the party, but as they went inside, it crossed Gretchen’s mind to wonder what she would do if she did come away from all this thinking Cooper Dawes was innocent.
A jury of Cooper Dawes’s peers had delivered their verdict, and a judge had passed down his sentence. She couldn’t just overrule them. And she couldn’t torpedo her entire life by engineering a virtual jailbreak.
But it didn’t matter. Dawes was guilty. Even Martin thought so.
Her days in a car with him would just confirm that. These were interesting what-if angles to consider, but that was all they were.
3
“Wake up.”
An unfriendly finger prodded Cooper’s chest.
He opened his eyes, but that didn’t stop the guard from poking him again.
“I’m awake,” Cooper said. “I’ve been a light sleeper since I was repeatedly stabbed.”
“Yeah,” the guard said. “That makes sense. We were all trying to figure out how to describe that to people. What do you like better, ‘all stuck up like a pincushion’ or ‘like Caesar on the Ides of March’? You know, because that’s when Julius Caesar got ganged up on and stabbed by all those senators.”
“The second one’s a little long,” Cooper said.
The guard considered this piece of constructive criticism for a moment while Cooper struggled to sit up.
He’d never had to deal with this kind of slow, painful healing before. He guessed he should be grateful he was going through it now, because the usual speed of shifter healing would have attracted way too much attention. It would be disturbingly easy to be funneled from a federal penitentiary to some covert medical research facility.
But it was hard to be thankful that
