Cooper didn’t even need her to ask the question, apparently. He turned to her. “You’re wondering if Phil was in on it. Then Monroe and Roger wouldn’t have needed to figure out how to hack our files—Phil could have just told them everything.”
Gretchen nodded. “It even works with what you were saying about them testing you to see if they could bring you in on whatever scam they had going selling the witness info. Phil liked you, at least a little, and he wanted to bring you into their creepy little fold—but when you chose helping a witness over grabbing a beer with him, he finally saw that you were never, ever going to be that guy. Maybe that’s why he got so mad.”
“But if he was in on it, why would Roger and Monroe ever kill him? He wouldn’t have turned them in if he had just as much to lose.”
“Maybe they fought over money,” she suggested. “He wanted more than his share, so they killed him. And since they knew the heat was on, they decided to seal the deal by making you their scapegoat. Or—” This thought hadn’t occurred to her until just now, and it made her grow cold.
It was impossible, right? It had to be impossible.
But then, a lot of people would say that giant snakes that made you hallucinate were impossible. A lot of people would say that shifting at all was impossible.
She had to say it, no matter how ridiculous it sounded. “Or maybe they didn’t kill him at all. Maybe he’s still alive.”
“That can’t be,” Cooper said slowly. “People saw his body. Plenty of people.”
“How many people saw it without Monroe there to help them along? How many of those people knew him well enough to tell the difference between Phil and a guy who just looked a lot like him? If we could find Phil alive, you’d instantly have to be exonerated, at least on the murder charge, and it would call everything else into question.”
“I sat around for months hating that there hadn’t been justice for him,” Cooper said. He sounded stunned. “One of the reasons I wanted to get out was so I could figure out who’d really killed my partner.”
Even thinking about it hurt him, Gretchen could tell. She couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to find out that even the man he’d been mourning had been part of the trap that had closed around him.
But Cooper was strong, and he took a deep, shaky breath and came through to the other side of whatever it was he’d been feeling.
“But I think you could be right,” Cooper finished, and he even managed to smile. “Which makes you two-for-two in this conversation.”
“I’ll try for three out of three. No one’s seen Phil in the last few months, but no one’s been looking for him, since they all thought he was dead. He could breathe easy, even if he couldn’t go back to his normal life. But your case got national attention. Unless Monroe was stuck at his side twenty-four-seven, Phil would be taking the chance of being recognized, and even one mistake would blow up their whole plan.”
“It’d be stupid to risk it,” Cooper agreed.
“Unless,” Gretchen said, “he could hide out someplace where they didn’t really get the news.”
Cooper blinked. “Like—Amish country?”
For a second, Gretchen considered it just because it was weirdly charming to think that they could vindicate Cooper by taking a long tour of horse-and-buggy country, eating shoofly pie at little cafes, and questioning men and women in starched, old-fashioned clothes. But unfortunately, that wasn’t what she was thinking, and they couldn’t exactly afford a vacation detour. She boxed up the thoughts of everything they could do after this was over—if it was ever over—and stayed on track.
“Like dragon country,” she said. “I know some mythic shifters form their own little communities, even more separatist than the Amish. Keith grew up in this tiny all-unicorn village, and Theo came from this snooty dragon one. Riell.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Cooper said cautiously. “Phil mentioned it. He wasn’t from there, but he used to say it might be a good place to retire. He made a joke about it having the best tax rates.”
Gretchen snorted. Considering it was a town made up solely of dragons, she was willing to bet that Phil was right: Riell would let a guy hold onto his gold coins.
“It’s not the only place a dragon on the run could go undercover, but it’s one of them. And Riell has housed fugitives before—for a price.” She frowned. “I don’t know that they’d do it again, though. Theo read them the riot act for it last time. And if I were Phil, I wouldn’t stay camped out in one of the only dragon towns that boasts a US Marshal as a hometown boy. But there are probably other counterparts to Riell scattered across the country. Phil could have gone to one of those.”
“Do we know how to find one of those?” Cooper asked reasonably enough.
“No,” Gretchen admitted, “but I know who to ask.”
*
Theo had directed them to his cousin Izzie—“Isabelle, technically,” he’d added as an afterthought, “but I keep
forgetting that”—who was attending college within an hour of Gretchen and Cooper’s current position. Isabelle would be their passage into dragon territory, which was usually guarded from the human world with a series of complex wards and spells that even Theo couldn’t explain.
They picked Isabelle up at the stone gate of her college. She was a tall girl with white-blonde hair and unusually timeless fashion sense: in a sea of students in bulky parkas and tattered jeans, Isabelle stood out in her cranberry wool trenchcoat and sophisticated trouser-suit.
Gretchen didn’t remember having herself put together that well in college—or even now, for that matter. Clothes seemed to wrinkle the second they touched her body, but with Isabelle, they looked like they wouldn’t dare.
“Hello,” Isabelle said, climbing into the car. She had an arch draconian accent, more noticeable than Theo’s, and Gretchen wondered where her classmates thought she was from. “I’m pleased to meet any colleagues of Cousin Theo’s, and obviously it’s very exciting to participate in ethical criminal activity for a change.”