James Patterson - Cross Justice

“Nothing wrong with having two breakfasts in eight hours,” Nana Mama said. “You want anything, dear?”

“I can barely move from last night’s cholesterol bomb,” Naomi said, and then she looked at me. “Do you want to see where he was found? Rashawn?”

“Long as we can take in the sights along the way,” I said.

An hour later, temperatures were climbing into the eighties and it was growing stickier by the minute. I put the Explorer’s AC on arctic blast; Bree rode shotgun, and Naomi and Nana Mama were in the back.

We drove slowly north, zigzagging through Birney, which was still mostly as I remembered it, a few degrees shy of shabby and inhabited by black folks and a smattering of poor whites. On the east end of the neighborhood, Naomi pointed out a sad duplex, said, “Rashawn lived there. That’s Cece Caine Turnbull’s place.”

“When did his mom last see him alive?” Bree asked.

“That morning, when he went off to school,” Naomi said. “He was part of an after-school program at the YMCA, so she didn’t get alarmed when he wasn’t home by six. But at seven, Cece started calling his cell. He didn’t answer. His friends said they hadn’t seen him. So Cece called Stefan and the police.”

“The police look for him?” Bree asked.

“Halfheartedly, at best. They told Cece he was probably off somewhere with a girl or smoking pot.”

“At thirteen?” Bree asked.

“It happens around here,” my niece said. “Even younger.”

I drove north across the tracks and the arch bridge and through the neighborhoods into downtown. We passed a liquor store, and I noticed the name: Bell Beverages. I wondered whether this was one of the supposedly legitimate businesses Marvin Bell had bought with his drug profits.

We drove through the center of the city and into wealthier neighborhoods. It wasn’t wealthy in the New York or DC sense of the word, but there was a definite middle class there, with larger houses than the bungalows and duplexes in Birney and bigger and better-kept yards.

“It was just like this when I was a girl,” Nana Mama said. “You had the poor blacks in Birney and the whites up north here with all the jobs.”

“Who’s the big employer now?” Bree asked.

Naomi pointed through the windshield to a grassy hill surrounded by those middle-class neighborhoods and a vast brick-and-wrought-iron wall. Beyond the wall, a long, sloping lawn had been trimmed like a golf course. In the sun, the lawn seemed to pulse green, and it ran up the hill to the only structure in Starksville that you could legitimately call a mansion. A modern interpretation of an antebellum design, the house was brick-faced with lots of white arched windows and a portico. It took up the full crest of the hill and was ringed by low, blooming bushes and fruit trees.

“That’s the Caine place,” Naomi said. “The family that owns the fertilizer company.”

“Rashawn’s grandparents?” Bree asked.

“Harold and Virginia Caine,” Naomi confirmed.

“Big step down for Cece, then,” I said. “Living where she does.”

“Her parents say they had to practice tough love because of her drug and alcohol issues,” Naomi said.

“So Rashawn was an innocent victim even before he died,” Nana Mama said in a fretful tone. “I couldn’t stand this place fifty years ago, and I’m getting the feeling nothing’s changed. It’s why I had to get out after I left Reggie. It was why I wanted to get Jason out of here all along.”

I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw my grandmother wringing her hands and staring out the window. Reggie. It was one of the few times I’d heard her use my grandfather’s name. She rarely brought up her early years, her failed marriage, or my father, for that matter. Her history always seemed to begin when she got to Washington and into Howard. And she avoided talking about my dad, as if he were a scab she didn’t want to pick at.

“Take a right,” Naomi said.

We went around the hill below the Caines’ place and then veered off to the west, where there were fewer houses. The road went past a Catholic church where a groundskeeper was mowing the lawn.

“St. John’s,” Nana Mama said fondly. “I took my First Communion there.”

I glanced in the mirror again and saw she’d relaxed into some better memory of Starksville. Beyond the church, the road wound into woods.

“There’s a pull-off ahead, up on the left, beyond the cemetery,” Naomi said. “You’ll get the bird’s-eye view.”

We passed the open gate to St. John’s Catholic Cemetery. Up the hill I could see the pull-off.

“It’s a beautiful spot,” Nana Mama said, and I glanced in the mirror a third time, catching my grandmother looking into the cemetery. “Your uncle Brock’s buried there. He could have been at Arlington, but Connie Lou wanted him here with family.”

“He died in the Gulf War, right?” Bree asked.

“Green Beret,” Naomi confirmed. “Posthumous Silver Star for valor at Fallujah. It’s on the shelf in the front room.”

“And Connie never remarried?” Bree asked.

“She never saw the need,” Nana Mama said. “Brock was her soul mate, and her men friends all paled in comparison.”

“Men friends?” I said.

“None of your business.”

I knew better than to pursue the subject. Instead, I drove up and into the pull-off. About three hundred yards ahead, the ground gave way to pale white and irregular cliffs. Hardwood trees, maple and hickory, grew above the cliffs on the far rim. But on the near side, the bigger trees had been cut for lumber, the remaining stumps all but swallowed by raspberry brambles and sapling thickets.

Bree, Naomi, and I got out, aware of the building heat and insect whine all around. My grandmother rolled down the window and stayed put. “I’ll wait here, thank you,” she said. “I’ve taught too many thirteen-year-old boys; I can’t listen to what you all have to say out there.”

“We won’t be long,” Naomi promised, and she said to me: “You might want binoculars if you’ve got them.”

“I do,” I said, and from a compartment in the rear of the Explorer I retrieved the Leupold binoculars I’d bought when I was still with the FBI.

Naomi led us forward to a tall guardrail. We looked over into a large, deep, and abandoned limestone quarry that immediately set my heart racing. I once more flashed on myself as a boy running in the rain at night. I didn’t know where or why. Or I couldn’t remember.

Or wouldn’t.

In any case, I forced myself to calm down and really study the quarry even before Naomi spoke. It was eighty, maybe ninety feet deep. In some places, the bottom was choked with brush, and in others it was solid stone. A creek cut through and disappeared through a gap in the wall to our left.

Gang graffiti marred the lower limestone walls. Above, the cliffs were irregular and staggered where miners had cut out huge slabs of stone. In several spots, there were gaping, jagged holes in the rock face — entrances to caves. Water trickled from the caves and ran down the walls into the creek.

Naomi pointed to the largest bare section of the quarry bottom, a pale and sunbaked rubble field that reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Greek ruins. There were chunks of limestone lying everywhere. The squarer pieces were stacked haphazardly, and the broken stuff was strewn all about.

“See the tallest pile?” my niece asked. “Far out, slightly right? Come left of it toward center, that low stack there closest to us.”

“I see it,” I said as I trained the binoculars on five door-size pieces of cracked stone. The area around that stack was mostly clear of debris. There was a path of sorts leading from it to the gap in the wall to our left.