James Patterson - Cross Justice

“A lot of it has to check out.”

“I promise you on my mother’s Bible, it will.”

“So let’s say your version of events is true. Who’s behind it?”

Stefan hesitated, and then said, “I don’t know. I’m hoping you’ll figure it out.”

“But you’ve got suspicions?”

“I do, but I’d rather not put them out there.”

“Stefan, your life is on the line here,” Naomi said. “We need it all.”

“What you don’t need is conjecture,” Stefan said. “That’s the word, right?”

“It is, but—”

He gestured at me with his manacled hands. “I’d rather have Alex go into this with no preconceived notions. Let the facts I’ve given him take him where they take him. That way, when he says he believes me, I’ll know he’s telling the truth.”

“Fair enough,” I said, and I checked my watch. It was past six.

Naomi went to the door, knocked twice. The guards came to get Stefan.

He said, “Tell Patty, my mom, and my dad that I love them and that I’m innocent.”

“Of course,” Naomi said.

“When will I see you again?” he asked us as the guards stood him up and unlocked his chains from the eyebolt on the floor.

“Tomorrow,” my niece replied.

“When I’ve got something to talk to you about,” I said.

“Fair enough,” my cousin said, and they led him out.

Naomi waited until we were outside the jail and moving toward her car before asking, “What don’t you believe?”

“I believe all of it until proven otherwise,” I said.

“But you seemed skeptical in there.”

“I’m skeptical of everything when the rape, torture, and murder of an innocent kid is involved,” I said matter-of-factly.

That seemed to upset her.

“Am I wrong to think this way?” I asked.

“No, it’s just that Stefan needs people in his corner,” Naomi said. “I need people in Stefan’s corner.”

“I know, but as I said, I am ultimately in Rashawn Turnbull’s corner. It’s the only way I work.”

It was twilight when we parked on Dogwood Road in Birney, only three streets east of Loupe. We walked down the block to a two-story duplex in need of attention, paint certainly, but with a lawn that was freshly mowed. The smell of grass was everywhere.

One of the porch lights was blinking when a middle-aged bleached-blond Caucasian woman wearing running shorts and a Charlotte Bobcats T-shirt exited the right door. She gave us the once-over as we came up onto the porch, said, “Friend or foe?”

“Friends,” Naomi said. “I’m Stefan’s lawyer.”

“Sydney Fox,” she said, shaking Naomi’s hand. “Neighbor and landlord.”

I introduced myself and explained the family connection to Stefan.

“Jesus, isn’t it awful,” Sydney said softly, her face saddening. “I love that guy. I really do. Stefan’s got soul and passion, you know? I just pray what they’re saying isn’t true. Break my heart if it was, and I don’t want to think what it would do to Patty. But I’d best be going to take my run. I like it when it’s cool like this. Nice meeting you, and anything I can do to help, you just call Sydney. Patty’s got the number.”

The blinking porch light went dead, casting her side in shadows.

“Shit,” Sydney said, and she had to fumble to get her key in the lock before going inside. “I guess my run will have to wait a couple of minutes.”

My niece rang the other bell. The curtain drew back a few moments later.

“It’s me and my uncle, Patty,” Naomi said.

The door opened. We slipped inside into a simple, tidy living area with a futon for a couch, a trunk for a coffee table, and a flat-screen on the wall. The door shut, revealing a fit, attractive blond white woman in her late twenties. She looked exhausted.

She studied me a beat before sticking out her hand. “Patty Converse. I’ve heard a lot about you, Dr. Cross.”

Eyeing the small diamond engagement ring, I said, “And I’ve heard very little about you other than what Stefan has told me.”

Her eyebrows shot up, and her voice turned yearning. “You saw Stefan? They haven’t let me see him in days. How is he?”

“Puffy and bruised but okay,” Naomi said. “He was attacked — unprovoked — first by inmates and then by guards.”

Her concern turned to anger. “There should be security cameras, tapes.”

“I’ll be going after those,” Naomi promised.

I made a note to myself to find out if the fact that Patty and Stefan were a mixed-race couple had anything to do with the case. Patty offered us coffee, which Naomi declined and I accepted. We followed her into a galley kitchen, and she made the coffee in a French press while answering a few of my questions.

“Stefan says you met the first day of school,” I said. “New teacher just like him.”

“That’s right,” she said, scooping coffee from a tin.

“Love at first sight?”

Patty blushed. “Well, it was for me. You’d have to ask Stefan.”

“It was for him too,” Naomi said.

Patty got teary, and her hand trembled as she covered her lips. “He didn’t do this. He loved Rashawn. We both did.”

“I know,” my niece said.

I asked, “How’d you come to take a job in Starksville?”

Patty said she’d been raised in a small town in Kansas and played softball on scholarship at Oklahoma State. She’d majored in exercise science and minored in education. When she graduated, she decided to move to the Raleigh area, where her older sister had settled, and look for a job.

“Closest openings were here,” she said. “They needed two gym teachers to cover high school and middle school.”

I said, “Seems fated that you and Stefan would take the jobs.”

Patty’s eyes welled up again, and she whimpered, “I love to think so.”

I waited until she’d calmed down and then said, “Tell me about Rashawn Turnbull and Stefan.”

“They were connected, right from the start,” she said as she poured me coffee. “And I admit that it bothered me because our relationship was just blossoming and Stefan seemed to give as much time to Rashawn and the other students he took an interest in as he did to me.”

On the third or fourth day of the school year, Patty said, Stefan found Rashawn sitting in the locker room, refusing to change for gym class. The boy was small for his age, and withdrawn. Both the black boys and the whites picked on him because his mother was white and a recovering addict while his father was African American and a crook.

“Rashawn felt alone, like he didn’t fit in anywhere,” she said. “Stefan said he’d felt similarly when he was young, you know?”

“Sure,” I said. “Stefan ever use drugs in your presence?”

“Never. He knew I wouldn’t stand for it.”

“But you knew about his past?”

She nodded. “He would never deal drugs. He hates what drugs stole from him and feared what it could steal from kids.”

“Did you ever find drugs in the house?”

“Never.”

“Did Stefan ever just disappear for hours at a time without telling you where he was going?”

She looked at something in her lap, said, “We love each other, but we’re not attached at the hip.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, agitated. “Yes. Sometimes he’d go off, said he had things to do.”

“When Stefan came back, where did he tell you he’d gone?”

She thought about that. “Usually for hikes or runs. There’s a path that parallels the train tracks that he likes. Too noisy for me. Other times he was staking out places in town where kids gathered.”