Her Dangerous Revenge

CHAPTER 3

It was just Cooper's luck to stumble, literally, over a dead body.

"Tracy?" he asked stupidly, and then threw up all over the carpet.

Tracy Smith sat with her back propped against the wall, her legs

twisted at an unnatural angle. Her throat had been sliced open; a

fountain of blood spilled down her chest and saturated her baby

pink ballerina costume.

Her eyes, the most recognizable blue eyes in Greenwitch County,

stared sightlessly up at the ceiling. The expression on her face

was one of surprise, as if to say, I can't believe I'm dead.

Cooper backpedaled away from her body, and then realized, too

late, that he'd dropped his beer on the carpet. For some reason,

this seemed to be of vital importance. He'd dropped his beer on Tracy Smith's super expensive carpet, and now he was a dead

man.

It was official. He'd lost it.

He closed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair. He pulled his hand away from his head as if he'd been

burned, staring at his bloodstained fingers in horror.

"Get it together," he whispered, fighting the urge to run a hand

back through his hair. He couldn't let his compulsions get the best

of him. Not here.

"Think," he murmured, balling his hands into fists. "Think. I found a

dead body. Now..."

Now I need to call 911.

Cooper fumbled for his cell phone. The music two floors below

pulsed beneath his bloody sneakers, vibrating softly. He closed his

eyes and tried to block out the sound as the phone rang once, then

twice, and then:

"911, what's your emergency?"

"I found a dead body," Cooper blurted stupidly.

The emergency responder hesitated. "What's your location?"

"Um..."

Cooper panicked. He'd called 911, and now he had absolutely no

idea what to say.

Calm the hell down, you i***t, he thought.

"Yeah, um, I'm at Tracy Smith's house." He rattled off the address,

his voice shaking.

"Can you tell me what happened?" The responder sounded cagey,

disbelieving. But of course she didn't believe him. It was a Friday

night on Halloween. How many sick prank calls did the emergency

lines get on a night like this?

"She threw a huge party tonight," Cooper rambled. "I got here like

an hour ago, and I was just sitting in the kitchen bored out of my

mind, and Vincent told me to go upstairs. Tracy had this haunted

hall thing going on, but by the time I came up it was over, so I

decided to look for the bathroom because I really had to go, but it

was super dark and the strobe lights totally sucked. And I sort

of...tripped over her body. Tracy's body. The girl who—"

"Threw the party, yes." The responder still sounded doubtful, but in a town like Greenwitch, the last name Smith meant something.

"I'll send an officer down to check things out."

Cooper withheld a groan. Once the first kid caught sight of a cop

car cruising toward the house, everything would go straight to hell.

Mass panic.

A lot of kids would get in trouble tonight. And all of that would be

on Cooper.

Tracy Smith is dead.

"Please," he pleaded with the woman on the other end of the line.

"She's dead . I could—"

Could what? Send a selfie?

Cooper had the sudden wild mental image of him taking a picture

with Tracy Smith's corpse.

I'm losing it.

"An officer will be there in five minutes," the woman said.

The line went dead.

* * * * *

As predicted, all hell broke loose after the cop showed up.

Cooper couldn't quite remember how it happened. Looking back,

he would wonder why he went downstairs after that phone call.

Why, covered in a dead girl's blood, he sat down at the kitchen

table as if it were just another day. Did Vincent come over and urge

him to play a round of beer pong? He couldn't recall.

He did remember some time passing before the chaos erupted.

Whoever the first responder was, they'd taken a coffee break. Of

that, Cooper was certain.

Another random detail that would stick with him: Tom Sahein. Why

that skinny freshman from the yearbook committee stuck out as

an important memory from that night...Cooper would never

understand it. But even weeks after the incident, he would

remember Tom standing at the front door, his face awash in hues

of red and blue. He stood there like that for a time. Seventeen

seconds, by Cooper's recollection.

He could remember that. Yet he couldn't remember a single detail about that shadowy figure on the

staircase.

"Watch your head." Deputy Mitchell Pendowski tapped Cooper on

the head as he ducked into the back of the cruiser. The deputy—

who Cooper was positive lived in the same apartment complex as

he did, on Kerry Lane—closed the door as gently as possible, blue

lights dancing across his sharp features. Doubt and curiosity

marred the frown turning down the corners of his mouth.

But in the end, it was silence that won out. He climbed into the

driver's seat and threw the cruiser in reverse, carefully navigating

out of the swarm of vehicles that had gathered outside of the

Smith residence in the last forty minutes. Cooper counted fourteen

cruisers. Another two were speeding down the half-mile drive, dust kicking up in their wake.

He could see it in the eyes of Deputy Pendowski every time their

eyes met in the rearview. He could hear it in the silence as his

classmates were escorted to the front lawn for questioning. He

could taste it in the air—the thick stench of fear hanging over the

skyline like smog. Oppressive. And inescapable.

It was a question. The same question he kept asking himself.

Who killed Tracy Smith?

Cooper rode to the station in silence. Deputy Pendowski tried

taking pity on him by turning on the radio, but the signal was no

good. Cursing, the deputy punched the dash, plunging them into

the quiet of a soft engine.

It wasn't until they pulled up to the station that Cooper began to

wonder about Vincent. He hadn't seen him—or had he? Maybe he'd

gotten away. Or maybe he was already at the station, drunk and

confused. Cooper figured he'd find out soon enough.

Tracy's dead, he thought. And so am I, once Mom finds out where I

am.

Cooper bit back a sigh.

Deputy Pendowski undid his seatbelt and turned to face him. "Kid?"

It took Cooper a moment to collect himself. "Hmm?"

"Things are going to get a little crazy. Okay?"

"Sure," he muttered. It wasn't like he had any other choice but to

go inside and face the music.

What music? You found a dead body. You're not a murderer.

Pendowski guided Cooper out of the car and into the station. The

parking lot was empty. Pendowski assured him it wouldn't be

empty for long.

"Trust me," the deputy said, leading Cooper past a row of desks

and into the back hallway. "You're going to be glad I got you here

when I did."

Cooper would have to take his word for it. He told him as much, and the deputy laughed.

"You're funny," he observed. "Can you hold out your hands for me?"

Cooper went through the motions, allowing the deputy to take a

sample of the blood on his hands and in his hair. The ordeal took

less than ten minutes, which would have been great, had Cooper

been free to head home. Instead, the deputy had him sit back in

one of the station's six cells, four of which were currently being

used as storage for a variety of cardboard boxes.

Pendowski didn't bother locking the door to his cell and apologized

profusely for the "song and dance" of it all. Before he left, he

reminded Cooper that he would be free to leave soon.

That, as it turned out, was a lie.

Cooper sat on the cell's sole bench, his head in his hands. He

knew what this meant: the police cruiser, the personal escort, the

jail cell. As if finding the dead body of the most popular girl in

school wasn't bad enough, now he was a suspect—or at least

suspected of being involved somehow.

And in this town, that was enough. Come sunrise, all of

Greenwitch County would see his bloody hands, and then they

would whisper.

His fate had been sealed the moment he walked up that staircase.

That's how small towns worked. It didn't matter how the word

spread, or who spread it. All that mattered was that a pretty girl

was dead, and Cooper had been the one to find her.

He envisioned himself rotting away in this holding cell, sitting just

like he was for the rest of his long, miserable life. He could look like

a completely different person in jail. Not that it would matter, but

the idea appealed to him.

He could be a stranger. A stranger named Cooper Daniels.

You just had to trip over the dead body, didn't you, Coop?

Cooper rubbed his temples. It felt like a sledgehammer was doing

its best to blast a hole straight through his skull. Maybe that was

the shock. Or the exhaustion.

"Or both," Cooper muttered to himself.

"Coop."

Cooper looked up, straight into the tired eyes of Sheriff Marks. The

sheriff wore faded jeans and an old flannel shirt dotted with coffee

stains. He towered over Cooper, as thin and tall as a scarecrow.

Cooper opened his mouth, but he couldn't find his voice.

Sheriff Marks waved him off. "Don't. I don't want to hear it." He

scratched at his receding hairline. What little hair he had left was

grey. "Damn. Double damn, Coop. Do you have any idea what's

going on out there?"