James Patterson - Cross Justice

“I was named after him,” I said.

“You were.”

“He was a blacksmith.”

“The best around these parts. Never wanted for work.” She sighed again, said, “I need to take a nap.”

“I know the feeling,” I said, putting the car in gear.

We rolled back toward Loupe Street and the bungalow with the car windows down. Along the way, we passed Rashawn Turnbull’s house. There was a gleaming, cream-colored Cadillac Escalade parked out front.

I spotted three people on the porch. A tall man with iron-gray hair wearing a blue suit and a blond, sharply dressed woman in her fifties were engaged in a furious argument with a sandy-haired younger woman in cutoff shorts and a red T-shirt.

The younger woman sounded drunk when she shrieked: “That’s bullshit! You never gave a shit about him alive! Leave my house and stay the hell out of my life!”

Bree and I waited almost an hour, had lunch, and made sure that Nana Mama had gone to take her nap before returning to Rashawn Turnbull’s house.

“So that was definitely Cece?” Bree asked when I pulled in where the Escalade had been parked.

“Sure fit the description,” I said, getting out.

We went up on the porch. A trash can had been turned over and was surrounded by broken beer bottles and old pizza boxes. Inside, a television blared the music from one of the Star Wars movies, Darth Vader’s theme.

I knocked, got no answer. I knocked again, much harder.

“Go the fuck away!” a woman screamed. “I never want to see you again!”

I yelled, “Mrs. Turnbull? Could you come to the door, please?”

Glass smashed inside before the television went quiet. Then the ratty yellow curtain on the near window was pulled aside. Rashawn’s mother peered blearily at us through the screen. You could tell at a glance that she’d been beautiful once, but now her hair was the color and consistency of loose straw, her yellowed teeth were ground down, and her skin was sallow.

Her sunken, rheumy hazel eyes drifted when she asked, “Fuck are you?”

“My name’s Alex Cross,” I said. “This is my wife, Bree.”

Cece lifted a cigarette, took a drag with contempt, said, “I don’t go for none of that Jehovah’s shit, so get your ass off my porch.”

Bree said, “We’re police detectives.”

Rashawn Turnbull’s mother squinted at us, said, “I know all the cops in Starksville and for three towns around, and I don’t know either of you two.”

“We’re from Washington, DC,” I said. “We work homicide up there, and I used to be with the FBI.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

I hesitated, then told her. “We’re looking into your son’s case.”

“What for?”

“Because my cousin is Stefan Tate.”

You’d have thought I punched her. Her head snapped back and then shot forward in rage. She hissed, “That evil sonofabitch is gonna die for what he did. And I am going to be there to see it happen. Now get off my porch before I find my granddad’s shotgun.”

The curtain fluttered shut.

“Mrs. Turnbull!” I yelled. “We do not work for Stefan. If my cousin killed your boy, I’ll be sitting right there beside you when they execute him. I told Stefan the same thing. We work for only one person. Your son. Period.”

There was no answer, and for a moment I thought she might indeed have gone in search of her granddad’s shotgun.

Bree called out, “Cece, will you please talk to us? I promise you we have no ax to grind. We just want to help.”

There was no answer for several beats.

Then a pitiful voice said, “There’s no helping this, or me, or Rashawn, or Stefan. No one can change any of it.”

“No, we can’t change what’s happened,” I said. “But we can make sure the right person suffers for the horrible things that were done to your boy. Please, I promise you we won’t take up much of your time.”

A few moments later, a bolt was thrown, and the door creaked inward.

In the course of my career, I have entered the homes of many grieving mothers and witnessed my share of shrines erected in mourning for a lost child. But I’d never seen anything quite like this.

Broken furniture. Broken liquor bottles. Shattered plates and mugs. The small living area was a complete shambles except for an oval coffee table that featured a green marble urn surrounded by a collection of framed photographs of Rashawn from infancy on up.

The older pictures all looked like yearly school portraits. In every one, Rashawn was grinning magnetically. Seriously, you did not want to take your eyes off that boy’s smile.

Around the entire edge of the table and surrounding the pictures like the spokes on a medicine wheel, there were toys, everything from an air-soft pistol to action figures, stuffed animals, and Matchbox cars. The only things on the table that looked like they hadn’t belonged to Rashawn were a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff vodka, two blackened glass pipes, a small butane torch, and a baggie of some white substance.

On the wall hung a sixty-inch flat-screen. It was split horizontally into two feeds. The lower one was playing The Empire Strikes Back, the volume turned down low. The upper one showed home videos of Rashawn as a young boy, four, maybe five. He was wearing a cape and jumping around swinging a toy lightsaber.

“He liked Star Wars a lot,” Bree said sympathetically.

Cece rubbed at her nose, sniffed, and curled the corners of her lips up in the direction of a smile. “He’d watch those movies over and over again. Like they were new every time. Sometimes we’d watch them together. He knew all the lines. I mean, all of them. Who can do that?”

“A very smart boy,” I said.

“He was that,” she said, putting out her cigarette. She scratched her arm and looked longingly at the pipes and the drugs.

“Tell us about Stefan Tate,” I said.

Cece hardened, said, “He’s a sadist and a cold-blooded killer.”

“Did you think he was a sadist before Rashawn died?”

“Who broadcasts they’re a sadist?” she asked.

“Good point,” I said. “But you had no warning?”

“If I’d had a warning, he wouldn’t have spent a second with my boy,” Cece said, going around the couch and almost reaching for one of the pipes. Then she seemed to realize the drugs were sitting there in the open and pushed the baggie under a teddy bear.

She lit another cigarette. We asked her about Rashawn and Stefan, and she corroborated what my cousin had told us: that they’d met at school and took an instant liking to each other, that Stefan had become a big brother/father figure to the boy, and that something had happened in the days before Rashawn’s death that made him want to sever his relationship with my cousin.

“Stefan says he doesn’t know what was behind it,” I said.

Cece took a drag, nodded to the urn, and said bitterly, “He came on to Rashawn, and Rashawn rejected him.”

“Rashawn told you that?” I asked.

“I’m just reading into the way Rashawn acted the last time I saw him.”

“Which was like what?” Bree asked.

“Like he’d seen something to be scared about,” Cece said, looking at the screen where Luke Skywalker was preparing to fight his father. “I’ve asked myself a million times since why I didn’t push Rashawn to tell me that morning. But I was late for an AA meeting. And trying to stay sober. And trying to do the right thing.”

She paused, and then a shudder went through her, and she choked and wept. “My last memory of my little boy is him staring into his cereal bowl like he was seeing things in the milk. Oh God!”

Cece snatched up the pipe, dug out the baggie, and with shaking hands tried to load whatever it was she meant to smoke. Bree came around to her and put her hand on her arm. She said in a soothing tone, “That’s not gonna help.”