They said “I love you” to each other, but the sentiment sometimes sounds stilted when one end of the conversation originates from inside the Hennepin County Jail.

Vikings cornerback Chris Cook and then-girlfriend Chantel Baker shared the tender moments at the end of each of three phone calls the afternoon after he was jailed on suspicion of strangling and assaulting her, and jurors in his trial got to hear the calls Monday.

Their demeanor ran from soft to sarcastic – Cook gruffly thanked her for putting him in jail and causing him to miss a game against the Green Bay Packers – and they talked about whether to break up or stay together.

At one point in one of the calls, she said she felt bad he was behind bars, but he scoffed.

“I’m sorry,” Baker told him.

“No you’re not,” he shot back.

“What?”

“I don’t think you are,” the player said.

The three phone calls were among the last exhibits entered by Hennepin County prosecutors Monday, the fourth day of testimony in Cook’s trial on charges of domestic assault by strangulation and third-degree assault.

The defense could finish its case today, and jurors could begin deliberations Wednesday afternoon.

Cook, 25, played his first season with the Vikings in 2010. The charges stem from a fight he and Baker had at the player’s Eden Prairie townhome Oct. 22; she got angry when he spent too much time with a stripper at a strip club, and he got mad that she was texting an ex-boyfriend.

In the minutes and hours after the incident, Baker, 21, told a police officer, a paramedic and an emergency room doctor that Cook had choked her twice during the argument and that she had trouble breathing during the second incident.

In one of his collect calls to Baker on the afternoon of Oct. 22, Cook told her that were it not for her claim that he strangled her, he’d be out of jail.

“It’s out of my hands,” she replied. “They asked me if you choked me and I said you choked me.”

Baker repeated the choking allegation to an Eden Prairie police detective Oct. 27. But by Nov. 10, her story had changed. On that day, she told the detective that her earlier statements about being choked were lies.

“The first statement…I had made was incorrect,” she told the detective in a recording of the call played for the jury. “I had lied about the whole choking incident. That never happened. I just wanted to let you know.”

That same day, prosecutors amended the criminal complaint against Cook to add a charge of third-degree assault. To get a conviction for it, prosecutors have to prove Cook inflicted “substantial bodily injury.”

Baker never explained to the detective why she lied, but she did say nobody had coerced her. Prosecutors have intimated that Cook and his longtime friend and current housemate, William Grishaw, acted to get her to change her story.

Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Liz Cutter called Grishaw as the state’s next-to-last witness Monday, and played him an excerpt from a 17-minute phone call he had with the jailed Cook on Oct. 24.

In the call, Cook told Grishaw that if Baker recanted her claim about the alleged strangulation, his legal troubles would be over.

“Do you want me to call her?” Grishaw asked his friend, who replied that he wasn’t allowed to have any contact with Baker. Moments later, Grishaw said, “I know what it is.”

“You know what it is. You and I are on the same page,” Cook replied. Later, he reassured Grishaw that if Baker recanted, “it would make it go away.”

But under Cutter’s questioning, Grishaw said he didn’t speak to Baker, and his seeming evasiveness rankled the prosecutor.

“Mr. Grishaw, you did do what you needed to do, didn’t you?” she finally asked him.

“Could you elaborate?” he said.

“Nothing further,” Cutter said curtly.

Under cross-examination by defense attorney David Valentini, Grishaw acknowledged that Cook said other things during the phone conversation, including, “That strangulation (expletive) is crazy. I didn’t choke the bitch.”

When Cutter got a chance to question him again, she asked Grishaw about a note Baker purportedly wrote and left at Cook’s townhome before she flew back home to Virginia. The defense objected, but Hennepin County District Judge Robert Small said the note could be read into the record.

In the note, Baker apologized to Cook and said she didn’t want to jeopardize his chances to play pro football.

“Baby, I’m sorry,” she wrote. She went on to say he was in jail because of her, and “Your career is on the line, all because of me.”

The career has been lucrative so far. Cook’s salary for last year was $450,000, and his four-year, $5.37 million rookie deal included a $1 million roster bonus for 2011.

“I love you so much, Chris,” Baker wrote. She also included the phrases, “You are all I have right now” and “You are who I want to be with.”

“His response was to refer to that, the word he used, was bull—-,” Cutter asked Grishaw of Cook’s response to the woman’s note.

“Correct,” he said.

Baker is a student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., and Cook had flown her into town to see the Vikings play the Packers the weekend they got into an argument at a strip club. She felt Cook was spending too much time with a stripper giving him a lap dance.

The argument escalated after he took her cellphone and discovered she’d been texting an old boyfriend. When they returned to his townhome, the fight turned violent; in her turn on the witness stand, Baker said she started the violence by throwing a lamp against a wall.

She said that when Cook restrained her, she fought back. She said she pulled out some of his shoulder-length dreadlocks, and said she still has one of them.

During the frenzy, Cook knocked Baker into a wall, rupturing one of her eardrums. The defense contends that the player’s actions were reflexive and done in self-defense and that he never choked her.

David Hanners can be reached at 612-338-6516.