one thinks to suspect something like that. You walked into the middle of a conspiracy. You couldn’t have anticipated that.”
He sighed. “I wonder if they were vetting me. I was enough of a loner that they could have figured just being on a team could help bend me in their direction.”
“Sooner or later, they still would have figured out that you were never going to be a bad guy.”
“I could have been,” Cooper said. He was staring out at the road, but she didn’t know if he was really seeing it. “If Monroe had bothered to use his basilisk tricks to figure out how to play me...”
“No,” she said firmly, taking hold of his arm and squeezing it. “If it worked like that, they would have just gotten me to kill you, when I met them in the parking lot. It must be like hypnosis. They can’t make you do anything you really, really wouldn’t do. They have to work with what they have. And no matter what buttons they could have pushed, Coop, you wouldn’t have been like them.”
“How do you know?”
His voice sounded just the littlest bit lost, like after everything he’d been through, he couldn’t even hope for her answer to convince him.
Well, Gretchen was going to convince him anyway. Because even if he wasn’t sure, she was.
“I know,” she said firmly, “because when I met you, you’d gone through hell. You’d been disgraced, locked up, shot, and dragged out of a hospital bed before you could even heal up. You couldn’t find your griffin. Keith was hassling you and wouldn’t cut you a break. You had every reason to hate the world, Coop, but you didn’t. You were polite and funny, and when I was in trouble, when I wasn’t acting like myself, you were the one who noticed and tried to help. You wanted to escape, but you wouldn’t do it at the cost of hurting me or Keith, and you wouldn’t do it at the cost of abandoning us, either. You’re good, Coop.”
There was a hitch in his voice when he was finally able to thank her. He said, “You know something, I think I’m starting to believe you.”
“Good. I’m right.”
He laughed, and the laugh gradually turned into a long exhalation, like he was clearing out all the old lies and clutter inside his chest. A deep breath replaced them with something new: fresh air. Her.
“All right,” Cooper said. He sounded like a whole new person. Her Cooper, the real Cooper, the way she had become the real Gretchen.
Which was good, because she had to ask him a question she really didn’t want to ask, and unfortunately, she had to ask it now.
“You said Phil had worked with Roger and Monroe for a long time. That they were all really tight-knit.”
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?