The Griffin Marshal's Heart (U.S. Marshal Shifters 4)

It was too long of a trip to make in one day, so they would have to stop midway and book him into a local jail cell for the night. If it was a small enough town, that could mean a rickety cell with no security cameras and only a single, sleepy deputy on duty. Definite opportunity.

“You shook his hand,” Keith said accusingly.

Cooper’s head jerked up.

“I’m aware of that,” Gretchen said.

“Do you realize what could have happened?”

“Yes.” Her voice was even colder than the wind outside. “It was a momentary lapse of sanity.”

“He could have pulled you towards him and gotten his cuffed hands around your neck,” Keith went on ruthlessly. “He could have broken your wrist. He could have—”

“I didn’t, though,” Cooper said.

“No one’s talking to you,” Keith said.

“You’re talking about me. And you’re a foot away, so it’s not like I can’t hear you.”

Keith huffed.

Gretchen said, “Keith, there’s no woman in law enforcement, anywhere, who needs you to spell out for her all the different ways she can get killed doing her job. I promise you, I know. I agree I shouldn’t have done it, and I only did it because I wasn’t thinking.”

“Then you should have been thinking.”

“Martin worked with him once,” Gretchen said to Cooper’s surprise. Whatever response he’d expected, it hadn’t been that. “He told me about it. It made him feel more familiar.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“We could have been colleagues in another world, that’s all. I let my guard down.”

“It’s a good thing you weren’t his colleague,” Keith said. “Then you could have wound up in the ground just like Phil Locke.”

Cooper closed his eyes.

Phil.

He didn’t want to think about Phil. They’d had their differences, but even if they would never have been friends outside of the office, they had still been partners. And now Phil was gone, and they would never have a chance to be anything more than that—and one of the last times they’d talked, they’d argued. Cooper had ticked Phil off, and Phil had blown up about it, and they’d never really had a chance to make things right.

He grabbed on to the nearest available distraction and said, “Martin?”

“My chief,” Gretchen said.

The name finally clicked. “Martin Powell?”

“Don’t talk to him,” Keith said.

“Keith, I don’t want to fight in front of a prisoner, but if you tell me one more time what to do or not do, I’m going to use language unbecoming a Marshal and also kick your ass out into the snow.” She took a deep breath. “Yes. Martin Powell.”

“I remember him,” Cooper said, and against all odds, he felt a smile tugging at his mouth. Could have been the fond memories of Martin, could have been Gretchen threatening to kick Keith’s ass, could have been both. “We tracked down Jeremiah Isaac Bronson together.”

“Oh, an ‘all three names’ guy, huh? You only see that with serial killers or assassins.”

“Well, in Bronson’s case, he did kill a state senator, so the ‘all three names’ approach got used right away, but it turned out that he only killed him because the senator cut him off in traffic, so he probably doesn’t really count as an assassin. But by the time we knew that, the name had already stuck.”

He could actually remember joking about that with Martin, on a long winter car trip that had strangely looked a lot like this one. They had tried out alternative names—Jerry, Jere, “Road Rage” Bronson.

“When was this?” Gretchen said.