She almost winced at the exaggerated patience in her voice. He was fraying her last nerve, but that was still no reason for her, the more experienced member of the team, to keep showing it to this extent. She shouldn’t be treating him like a child. It was like something else was stressing her out, but she couldn’t put her finger on what that would be.
“Besides,” she went on, “if Dawes can work his way out of the backseat, through the barrier, and into the front to steal the car out from under us, then we have bigger problems. That means he could do it when we’re in the car, which could get us both killed. So the way I see it, temporarily leaving the heat on helps all of us and doesn’t hurt anyone.”
“You mean it helps Dawes,” Keith said, lifting his chin challengingly.
The trouble was, he wasn’t exactly wrong to be a little suspicious of her motives. Gretchen had to admit that while she was easier on their prisoners in general, she wasn’t usually quite this lenient.
She’d never shaken a prisoner’s hand before. She’d never gotten herself tangled up in a conversation about a prisoner’s guilt or innocence.
Gretchen was willing to stand by what she had said about Cooper. It was undeniably true that sometimes innocent people ended up in prison, and that was a horrible thing that it was probably worth keeping in mind as at least a slight chance.
But under normal circumstances, she would have refused to get dragged into that kind of discussion. She wasn’t a lawyer. Her job was to get the prisoner from point A to point B as smoothly as possible, and she did that as well as or better than anyone.
Keith was right. She was treating Cooper differently. And Keith didn’t even know the half of it.
He didn’t know that when Cooper had said he was innocent, Gretchen had believed him.
Only for a second. The length of a heartbeat. Then she had gone right back to uncomfortable ambiguity, unsure whether she could trust him or not, unsure whether Martin had been right about his character or right about the evidence piled up against him.
A heartbeat. That was the problem. She was thinking too much with her heart.
Keith was wrong about a lot of things, sure, but so was she. She couldn’t pretend otherwise, not to herself.
She took a deep breath. She needed to be honest with him. He was a rookie, sure, but for this road trip, he was also her partner. He deserved to know what was going on with her—if she could even figure it out herself.
It fee
ls more like Cooper’s my partner than Keith. That’s part of the problem.
“Okay,” Gretchen said quietly. “I do mean, a little, that it helps Dawes. I’m not going to apologize for not wanting a prisoner to turn into a popsicle. We’re responsible for him, and while we don’t need to baby him, there’s zero harm done by treating him like a human being as much as the situation allows. I feel like sometimes you don’t understand that.”
“But you—”
“I’ve been weird,” she admitted. “Martin liked him enough when they worked together that Coo—Dawes’s conviction really threw him for a loop, apparently. He wants to believe that Dawes is innocent, and he asked me to try to get a read on the situation. You deserve to know that that’s where I’m coming from. I went into this trip knowing that someone I really respect thinks that there’s a chance that Dawes didn’t do what he was accused of.”
Keith opened his mouth and then closed it.
“I didn’t know that,” he said finally. “But I still think he’s guilty.”
“That makes sense. He probably is. But if someone you trusted asked you to consider the alternative—”
She let the words hang in the air.
Keith said, “I don’t... I don’t really have anybody like that. Someone I trust like that.”
That deflated her a little. It just sounded so lonely. He really didn’t have anyone, did he?
Martin had taken her under his wing when she’d been a rookie. It sounded like he’d briefly taken Cooper under there, too. The least Gretchen could do was try to pass on the favor.
“Okay. Let’s just say, for right now, that we’ve both been screwing this up. I went too far, and I should have trusted you and told you the truth right from the start. But Keith, you need to get better with the people you meet on the job. Part of being a Marshal is serving the public trust—and you’ve got to be worthy of the public trust. You have to make people feel like they can trust you to treat them fairly and decently.”
“You leave the heat on for them,” Keith said. It was hard to tell whether or not he sounded skeptical.
“Yeah. Little things like that. You leave the heat on. You’re polite as long as they’re polite.” She patted his arm. “Give it a try, anyway. You’re new enough on the job that you can afford to try out different ways of doing things before you settle into your own pattern.”
“I don’t want to mess this up,” Keith said. His voice was low and intense. “My whole family is counting on me.”
She knew how that felt, more or less. Or at least she knew how it felt to feel the weight of expectations on her shoulders, to feel like she had to achieve more than everyone else and do it faster than everyone else, to make up for the fact that she was different. Trying to be perfect—even perfect at being normal—was stressful.