Page 43 of The Gift
She couldn’t help but laugh. “I didn’t agree to that.”
“Yeah, you did.”
She smiled. He wasn’t lying.
He kissed her once more, lighter this time, but no less deliberate. The imprint lingered as he walked away.
Erica sat behind the wheel, engine silent, long after he drove out of the lot, wondering exactly how far she would have let him go if the phone hadn’t rung. Her answer came in the hum of her body, still warm from his touch.
She wouldn’t have stopped him at all.
Chapter 12
By the time Coop pulled into the jail parking lot, the rain had slowed to a drizzle. Streetlights glared off the slick pavement as he hurried inside. The flag rope hit the pole with a steady clink-clink in the still-gusty breeze.
He shook the rain from his hat as he walked through the door. Then he felt the quiet.
O’Reilly stood near the booking desk, more reserved than usual.
“You saw them?” Coop asked.
“Yeah,” he said, face grim.
“You can hang back.”
He straightened, shaking his head. “I need to get used to it.”
“You don’t get used to it,” Coop said, moving past him.
“Yeah,” he repeated.
Two county deputies escorted them inside. No one was talking. There was no sense of urgency either, which was worse.
“What happened?” Coop asked.
“My guess is a suicide pact,” the older of the two guards said.
“You don’t know?”
“Cameras went down for eleven minutes,” O’Reilly said, handing him a pair of latex gloves.
Of course, they did.
They moved through the sally port, the first gate clanging shut behind them before the second opened. Behind bulletproof glass, a deputy sat at a bank of monitors. Another kept the maingate open for them, standing stiff and silent, like a sentinel. Behind them, the doors cycled shut with mechanical finality. Coop doubted he’d ever get used to that, either.
A deputy outside of Holding logged entries while cameras flashed and techs moved in and out in protective suits. Everything here was on schedule. A surveillance glitch was too convenient. Before he ever entered the cells, his gut told him someone with access had planned this then waited.
Coop signed in and grabbed boot covers from an open kit, pulling them on before he stepped through.
The air inside hit differently. Warmer, closer, smelling of sweat and familiar crime-scene chemicals, pungent enough to sting his throat. He didn’t react. Didn’t let himself. Two decades of this shit didn’t make it easier.
Moving from cell to cell, he kept to the perimeter, tracking details in sequence. Three bodies, different positions, same fatal ending.
In the first cell, the ticking had been stripped from the mattress and twisted into a noose knot, anchored cleanly to the upper bunk. No signs of a struggle.
The body in cell two slumped on the bench, head tipped to the side, blood streaming from the puncture wound in his throat, the bloody pencil still protruding.
The third body in the last cell looked the most suspicious. On the floor, the body lay straight, placed, not dropped, the neck angled wrong for a fall.
