If Gretchen had feelings for Keith, then Cooper was even more obligated to hope the kid came through all this okay.
He made himself very firmly say, “Good,” before he looked frantically for a change of subject. Luckily, they weren’t short on options. He redirected to a classic: “So, um, who do you think is trying to kill us?”
“Besides my wizards suggestion from earlier?”
“Besides that. I’m keeping it in mind, though.”
“Whoever is trying to kill us is mostly trying to kill you,” Gretchen said, and Cooper could tell by the sound of her voice that she was thinking out loud, trusting him to act as a sounding board. “They had a go at you in Stridmont, and they didn’t give up there. Unless you think that was unrelated. The guard I talked to didn’t seem to have a clue why it had happened, but he didn’t strike me as somebody who wanted to break a sweat trying to figure it out, either.”
He told her everything he remembered about the incident in the exercise yard, but it all boiled down to the fact that it was hard to say for sure. The guy with the shiv had sure seemed like he’d had someone else pulling his strings—and helping him get high as a kite—but drugs could make people paranoid, and Ferret Face might have been seeing conspiracies where they didn’t exist.
“Occam’s razor, though,” Gretchen said. “Simplest explanation is always the best. That’s the rule that gave us the chameleon car, and I think it gives us a murder conspiracy here, too. Someone paid your Ferret Face guy to go after you, and when he didn’t get the job done, they either came after you themselves or sent someone else.”
“Yeah. I think so too.” He took a deep breath. “And I think—I’ve thought since they pulled me out of Stridmont—that the same person is behind everything else, too. Phil’s death. The leaked Witness Protection information. They framed me, but it wasn’t enough. They decided to get rid of me, too.”
Because why take any chances? If he ever did find someone to take his appeal, there was always the hope that some new evidence would come to light.
The actual culprit must have sweated each and every day Cooper was still alive. Their first murder attempt hadn’t worked, but they were rolling with the punches. They’d realized this long-haul trip was the perfect chance to stop all that nervousness once and for all.
“Well, good,” Gretchen said, more perkily than he would have guessed. “That consolidates things. We’re only in a chase with one guilty party. It’s nice to have a bright side.”
She was the only bright side he needed. The days in prison had been long, and the nights had been even longer. He’d known that much—but he hadn’t realized how narrow and dark his life had been before that, too. He hadn’t realized how long he’d really been lonely.
All his life—until her.
So as long as she was on his side, he didn’t know that he even cared about anything else. He could give up his freedom for her without even thinking about it. It wasn’t even about trading a sure-thing escape for an uncertain exoneration, it was about knowing that Gretchen Miller had found him to be somebody worth trusting. Gretchen, who could afford to pick and choose the people she cared about, had chosen him, even when there were a thousand reasons not to. She’d trusted him—she’d shaken his hand and taken his chains off.
Nothing else mattered even half as much as that.
But if there was some hope of being exonerated, however faint, he had to try for it.
I could live a whole life with her.
That was a fantasy. He might never get out. She might already like Keith, or she might already be dating someone he knew nothing about. But at least for right now, he could let himself
dream. It would be a little sweetness to cut through all the darkness they were dealing with.
“I like a bright side too,” Cooper said, letting himself look at her for just a second too long. He hoped she didn’t notice.
“So we have a long car ride to solve a mystery,” Gretchen said, still sounding purposefully upbeat. Cooper figured that meant that she was as worried about the gathering clouds as he was. “We’ll be like Nero Wolfe—some great detective who doesn’t even have to leave his house to solve a murder.”
“Brilliant traveling detectives,” Cooper agreed. “That’s us.”
“Only...” She trailed off.
“Only you don’t know where to start?”
“Not a clue. You?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been thinking it over for six months, and I haven’t gotten anywhere. The only people who would have normally been able to access the leaked files were me and Phil, and I know it wasn’t me—”
“I know that too,” Gretchen said.
Cooper couldn’t keep himself from smiling. He’d never get tired of hearing that she believed him. “And I don’t see how it could have been Phil. People who want to commit crimes and want to cover them up do a lot of things, but they don’t kill themselves and then hide the gun in someone else’s house. It’s a bridge too far.”
Thinking about Phil’s death definitely wiped the smile off his face.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said, glancing over at him. “I hadn’t really gotten to the part in my head where since you didn’t kill your friend, you lost him, instead. It must have been pretty hard to try to grieve him with everything else going on.”