was affable in a cliché, fatherly kind of way: he handed out shoulder pats and back slaps, he told bad jokes instead of making conversation, and he never said a harsh word about anybody. But underneath, there was never any real sense of warmth.
And when Roger concentrated on the thing he cared about the most—his research into shifter types—his chummy, dad-like looks had changed completely. In those moments, he had looked strange and relentless.
Roger’s slightly cheesy good nature had seemed real enough when it was all Cooper had had. But now that he’d spent time with Gretchen, now that he’d seen Martin Powell again, he could feel how flimsy Roger’s friendliness had always been.
Maybe—just maybe—Roger not warming up to him had had as much to do with Roger as it had with him.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said. She reached over and clasped his hand. “For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t have fit in. I like you. Martin likes you. Keith didn’t want to like you, but he still loosened up enough to make a joke with you, which means he likes you as much as I’ve ever seen him like anyone.”
He got a chuckle out of that but then immediately felt guilty about it, considering poor Keith was still back at the hospital with bandages wrapped around his head. “He is going to be okay, right?”
“One hundred percent. He’s... got good genes.”
Good genes?
His heart sank a little, and he scolded himself for it. If what Gretchen meant was that Keith, for all his prissiness, looked basically like a bronze statue of a Greek god, well, that wasn’t any of Cooper’s business. Maybe the sparring Gretchen and Keith had done was just a barbed form of flirting.
It was enough that Gretchen trusted him. He couldn’t possibly ask her to feel the same electric charge he’d felt.
She couldn’t possibly fall for him the way he’d fallen for her.
“Oh, sure,” he said. He was trying for “upbeat” and had landed more on “squeaky.”
“Are you okay?”
Get a grip, he advised himself.
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.