Grace looked like she was about to explode.
Grace stood at the door like a sentinel as Major and I moved to the side of the room, out of the way but still within eyesight of the door.
“What else did you find?” I asked quietly.
“Nearly every shoe print at the scene we were able to get fits the boots she was wearing,” Major explained. “Her fletchings match. Why she didn’t think to just take the arrow out of the animal, I don’t know. She even had these special pink ones that were made through a local vendor. The vendor confirmed that he was the one who made them, and that the only person he sold these particular colored arrows to lately was someone in state, and in town—Cody. Her vehicle was seen at almost every trailhead, but we dismissed it because it looked like she was clearing out the snow for the locals to park. With you finding her red-handed today, she’s going to jail for a while. There’s no way that she’s going to be able to talk herself out of this.”
I rubbed at my face. “What a shitshow.”
Alarms started to go off in the emergency room, and a team of doctors and nurses all went toward Cody’s room at a full-out sprint, nearly taking Grace out in the process.
“That doesn’t look good,” Gentry, who’d been silent up until now, mused.
“No,” I agreed. “It does not.”
Twenty-Seven
I swing both ways. Violently. With a bat.
—Birdee to Creed
Birdee
“Why do you think there are three bikers sitting on Creed’s back porch?” I wondered. “And why do you think that Odin’s been looking at you like you were his last meal for the majority of that?”
Because seriously, the man was hot as hell, and I was in a very happy relationship with a man sexier than him, yet I couldn’t stop myself from feeling all hot and bothered by the looks he was shooting Bernice’s way.
“I’m trying not to think about it,” Bernice admitted.
Mable arrived with drinks and set them down beside us.
They were nothing grand. Just packet hot chocolate, but it was special to me. Because Mable was here, with me, instead of at the hospital with her longtime best friend.
I felt seen for the first time by her in my life.
“What do you think about my cup?” Mable asked, sitting down with her own mug of hot chocolate.
She took a sip out of the coffee cup, and my lips twitched.
My coffee cup was pretty tame. Just a bull riding a cowboy. Bernice’s was slightly worse, a snail leaving a trail of slime while wearing a thong.
But Mable’s was downright hilarious.
It was a doctored photo turned into cartoon of Edward Cullen dropping it low on a stripper pole wearing a thong with the words “This is the skin of a killer, Bella” written on it.
“That’s…fantastic.” I giggled.
“I thought so, too,” she said. “I didn’t even see it. At first, it was a black mug.”
“I bought that for him a couple of years ago,” Bernice said softly as she took the cup in. “It was a long-standing Christmas tradition. I’d buy him a funny coffee cup. Sometimes it was just a really cute one I saw at the Dollar Store. And while he was in prison, I kept up the tradition and continued to buy them.” She wiped at a tear. “I was moving apartments one day last year and the box just disappeared out of my pile of boxes. I thought I’d left it at the old place, or someone stole it off the sidewalk when I’d been moving. It’d broken my heart to know that all his presents were gone. But seeing these…”
It had only occurred to me then that Bernice had gone unnervingly silent when Mable had brought the coffee cups in and set them down in front of us.
“Do you think he stole them?” I wondered aloud.
“Someone did.” Bernice smiled.
“You don’t think it was him?” Mable asked.
