The bitter bile strangled her as she retched it from her throat.
She’d made a pact with the devil ...
There would be a hefty price to pay. Just like before.
Irene prayed that Cherry Prescott had not been a part of that price.
5
Jackson County Sheriff’s Office
3104 Magnolia Street
Pascagoula, Mississippi; 7:20 p.m.
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 happyfor 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.Hewas 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.