ran—runs, I guess, he’s still there as far as I know—cold. And Roger’s a hard person to understand once you get past the surface. He...” He didn’t know how to explain what was up with Roger without getting into the truth about shifters, and Gretchen had already dealt with enough today without finding out about all of that. “He’s a little weird,” he finished weakly.
He couldn’t think of a human equivalent for Roger. Those people who wanted to have surgeries to give themselves cat ears or make themselves look like Barbie or Ken dolls?
Gretchen didn’t push him on it, thankfully. “And Monroe?”
“Hard to read. He kept to himself a lot.”
The most he’d ever heard Monroe say at once, probably, was Monroe tearing into the legend that basilisk shifters could kill people by looking at them. That’s just a kid’s story, Monroe had said irritably. Our powers work like a scalpel, not like a sledgehammer. But he’d never elaborated more than that, which meant that the most Cooper had heard him say at once still wasn’t very much.
His old team had been a strange bunch, that much was true, and it was nice to think that he hadn’t been the problem. There was something kind of liberating in knowing that Gretchen thought that he’d deserved more friendship there than he’d gotten.
He had always felt inherently broken, like he hadn’t found a family or a circle of close friends because there’d been something wrong with him all along. But... maybe he’d just had bad luck.
If that was true, he could hope for something better someday.
Gretchen was thinking about something else, though. Her voice was cautious as she said, “And Roger and Monroe... would they have had access to the leaked files?”
Cooper started. In all the time he’d had to think, he’d never thought of that. They were all Marshals, and they were all shifters, and those common bonds had to mean some kind of loyalty, right?
Luckily, he didn’t have to think about it for more than a second.
“No. Not even Roger had access to our files—not that I know of, anyway. And Roger and Monroe couldn’t have hacked their way through wet paper bags. They’re both old-fashioned—without me or Phil or around, I don’t even know how they’re managing to check their email.”
“Then it has to be the mob.”
She sounded as relieved as he felt. No Marshal wanted to investigate other Marshals.
Though his old team had investigated him awfully quickly.
“They hacked the files, stole the info, and killed their witnesses. Once the heat was on, Phil must have noticed something, so they killed him and framed me for everything. That way...” Cooper grimaced. “It’s like we’re sitting on a ticking time bomb. If all this is true, then they probably still have a way to see all the witness information. They can pluck witnesses out of our system like getting an apple off a tree, anytime they want, because nobody would have overhauled the system when they thought that it was just one corrupt Marshal. All of this could happen again.”
And when it did, someone like Gretchen could be the scapegoat. He couldn’t let that happen.
The trouble was, it was a hell of a lot easier to accuse the mob than to convict them. No one but him had ever even been formally tried for the murder of the witnesses.
He said all that, and Gretchen nodded along, her expression grim.
“That explains why they’ve decided it’s too risky to keep you around. If you filed another appeal, maybe it would never lead to anybody on their side going to prison... but it could make the feds sniff around their business a little more. But if you were dead, the case would stay closed for good.”
That made sense to him—or at least as much sense as anything else. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were bending one or two of the puzzle pieces to make them snap into place. There were a few things still rattling around unresolved.
The fear gas, for one. Was it chemical or was it magical? Before all this, he’d never had any reason to think magic existed, not outside of whatever let shifters be shifters, but they had seen some strange things today. And he guessed if magic were real, the mob would use it as a weapon the same way they used everything else.
It was just that something didn’t feel quite right. But in a situation like this, what answer could feel completely right? No matter who