Chapter 5
Jackson County Sheriff’s Office
Adeline sat in the dark for a moment.
She studied the four-story courthouse. Christmas lights were strung in the windows and wreaths hung on the doors.
As a kid, she’d gone to the courthouse many times with her dad when he had business to take care of.
The marble-floored main lobby, with its soaring ceiling, had enthralled her.
During the Christmas season, a towering tree stood in the center of the main lobby.
Sometimes Santa would hang out there and give away lollipops.
Despite her curiosity, the deputies walking around with their guns on their hips had sent her hiding behind her daddy’s legs. She’d been certain that bad people lived in the courthouse, even though Santa had made it one of his regular annual stops.
Funny, she’d found out much later that, to some extent, her childhood theory had been all too true.
Even at twenty she hadn’t fully realized that truth.
She’d been so damned excited to make the cut as a deputy for the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department.
At the time she was only the second female to have accomplished the feat.
She’d been damned naive. Truth and justice had been her ideals.
Her father had finally come around and at least pretended to be happy for her.
He’d wanted her to succeed. He just hadn’t wanted it to be in law enforcement.
His approval had been her ultimate goal, in spite of her fierce independence.
When she’d made the switch from tutus and tights to uniforms and service revolvers, he hadn’t been anywhere near ready to see it happen.
My little angel can’t be a cop.
A smile tugged at her lips. She’d always been her daddy’s little angel.
All the Cooper men hereabouts had boys. Adeline was the only girl for three generations.
The only Cooper offspring with blond hair and blue eyes, too.
Her mother had insisted that Adeline had gotten the blond hair and blue eyes from Great-Aunt Joan on her side of the family.
Long before becoming a cop, the frilly dresses and fancy bows her mother had insisted she wear as a child notwithstanding, Adeline had spent a whole hell of a lot of time trying to prove she could do anything the Cooper boys could do.
At eight, she’d cried her eyes out because all the boys had gotten guns and holsters for Christmas and she’d gotten a damned baby doll.
In school, she had found her way into more than her fair share of scrapes and scuffles, gotten caught smoking behind the boys’ locker room. All much, much to her daddy’s dismay. To top it off, she’d given up her virginity at the ripe old age of seventeen to Wyatt Henderson.
Tall, gorgeous. Captain of the football team. Wyatt had been the hometown hero who always carried the team to victory. She and her little world had worshipped him.
She blinked away the past, allowed her gaze to refocus on the courthouse. He was in there. She stared at the first-floor windows, the only ones still lit by more than strung-up holiday lights past the five-o’clock hour. Wyatt was waiting for her arrival.
During every minute of those six hours of hard driving, she’d played out how this would go down in about five hundred different ways. She would be her usual cocky self. Nine years had passed. They were both adults. She’d had plenty of sex with other men in the intervening time.
She was a cop. He was a cop.
There was an investigation to be dealt with.
What was the big deal?
Yet she sat here, her palms sweating and her pulse hammering as if it was Saturday night and she was still a sophomore anticipating her first kiss from the senior who just happened to be captain of the football team.
“That’s truly screwed up, Cooper.” She shoved the cell phone into her coat pocket and grabbed the sealed evidence envelope. The sooner she got this initial awkwardness over, the sooner they could get down to the business of investigating this case. She wasn’t here to reminisce.
She climbed out of her Bronco, pushed the door shut with her shoulder.
It wasn’t even eight o’clock and already the streets of downtown Pascagoula were rolled up for the night.
No one could deny the city’s Southern charm, with its lovely old antebellum homes and the sea as its lifeblood.
Even with industry hovering in the background amid the live oaks laden with Spanish moss, Pascagoula had all the quaint appeal of the fishing villages that dotted the New England coast.
Only this was the Gulf of Mississippi, where the drug trade thrived in that same sea.
The trouble wouldn’t be seen in the light of day, when those who lived and worked in Pascagoula swathed themselves in the city’s quiet dignity.
The devil’s work started after dark, deep in the bayous along those twisting riverbanks.
All the dirty little secrets and ugliness of living on the Gulf were played out in the places the sun never reached.
Drugs. Murder.
Most of it transpiring under the direction of Cooper law.
Adeline glanced over her shoulder twice as she crossed the street. Being here was a direct violation of that unwritten law. She might be a Cooper, but she wasn’t welcome on this side of the Alabama line.
She didn’t have to wonder if Cyrus Cooper knew she was here. He would know. And he wouldn’t be pleased.
That was tough.
It wasn’t like she’d come back because she wanted to.
She’d gotten a personal invitation. One she couldn’t decline, much less ignore.
The ground-floor door on the west side of the building that led directly into the sheriff’s department was unlocked. Usually by this hour it was locked, and all but the folks on night duty would have gone home. A buzzer allowed anyone with an emergency to make their presence known.
He had left it unlocked.
For her.
The department’s cramped lobby was empty.
A small Christmas tree in the corner twinkled with colored lights.
A few gifts lined the green skirt beneath it, giving the impression that the department operated like one happy little family.
And maybe it did . . . now. But that hadn’t been the case a decade ago.
The once-gray walls had been painted a pale blue that reminded her of the sky on a clear day.
That was one thing she missed about living on the Gulf.
The sky was a canvas that the weather spilled nature’s most vivid colors onto—far more vivid than any back in Huntsville.
The clouds seemed closer to the ground here.
As if God had purposely lowered heaven toward the earthly inhabitants along the Gulf.
Too bad the influence had done little to keep those inhabitants safe from the scum that flocked here, much less from tragedies like Hurricane Katrina.
Nothing like being back in paradise.
In the corridor beyond the small lobby, the first door to the right opened into the office of the sheriff’s secretary.
Adeline walked straight through the empty office and into the boss’s inner sanctum.
The large padded envelope she carried bumped the wreath on his door, and she stalled, reached out to right it.
Wyatt looked up from a pile of folders on his desk.
She’d made it to his desk and placed the package there by the time he stood. “Took me a half hour longer than I expected,” she said by way of greeting. “Traffic on 1-10 through Mobile was hell.”
“Addy.” He nodded, sized her up a moment. “You . . . look good.”
The pained expression on his face told her that wasn’t exactly what he’d intended to say.
“You, too, Sheriff Henderson.” And he did.
His coal-black hair was a little shorter.
He’d gained a couple more laugh lines around those hazel eyes.
Looked a few pounds heavier, not quite as wiry as he had been as a kid.
The official uniform was crisp, but then he’d always managed to keep that freshly dressed look all day. She never could.
He gestured to the package. “Let’s get this to the conference room—that’s where we’ve set up our command center—and have a look.”
“First you gotta sign.” She tugged the chain-of-evidence form from the top of the package and placed it on his desk. “I’m officially turning the evidence over to you. Something happens to it, it’s on you.”
He signed the form, the pen strokes bold and efficient. Then he passed a copy of the form back to her. “Now we’re official.”
“Thank you.” She folded her copy and stuffed it into her coat pocket.
“I’ll show you the timeline we’ve set up. Believe it or not, we know how to play by the rules down here, too.”
She didn’t rise to the bait. Her insistence that he sign the form wasn’t a personal jab. It was business. She had a chain of command. One internal affairs investigation this year was more than enough.
He reached for the envelope at the same time she did. Their fingers brushed, eliciting a series of warm pulses along her limbs. The traitorous reaction jacked up the tension already interfering with her ability to focus.
Ultimately she let him take the damned package.
He’d signed for it, after all. Mainly she hoped like hell he hadn’t heard her breath catch or seen the widening of her eyes when they touched.
Stupid and immature. Giving herself grace, she acknowledged that those letters—or coming back here; maybe both—had her more than a little off balance.
She followed him from the room. “You were going to bring me up to speed on where your investigation is,” she prompted. That was part of the deal. He’d assured her chief that he would give her a full-on briefing as soon as she arrived. No details withheld.