James Patterson - Cross Justice

The place was packed for the opening arguments. Our family turned out in force. Pinkie was there with his mother. I sat with Aunt Hattie and Patty Converse, directly behind Naomi and Stefan, who came into court acting rattled.

He seemed particularly upset by the people sitting behind the prosecution. Cece Turnbull was there, drawn, weak, and holding on to Bree’s hand. Bree had spent the whole night with her and made sure she’d shown up sober.

Chief of police Randy Sherman sat on Cece’s other side and kept glancing at Bree, as if he were trying to figure out how she fit into the equation. Behind them were several reporters up from Raleigh and Winston-Salem, and another from the Associated Press.

Harry and Virginia Caine, the well-scrubbed couple I’d seen on Cece’s porch the prior day, were on hand in the third row. Her parents were dressed for business and seemed relieved to see their daughter’s sober condition.

Stark County Sheriff’s Office detective Guy Pedelini came in just as the opening arguments began and sat in the back near city homicide detectives Joe Frost and Lou Carmichael.

District attorney Delilah Strong gave the prosecution’s opening argument with Matt Brady as her cocounsel. Strong’s presentation of the case against my cousin was clear, concise, and damning.

She depicted Stefan Tate as a troubled individual thrown out of several schools and jobs because of substance abuse, then as a liar who hid his past on his application to teach in the Starksville school system, and then as a teacher who’d relapsed, dealt drugs to his students, and raped a student before sexually assaulting and butchering Rashawn Turnbull after the young boy rejected him.

When Strong was done, the jury members were taking lethal glances at my cousin. Cece Turnbull went berserk, screaming, “You’ll go to hell for what you did to my boy, Stefan Tate!”

It took Bree and a bailiff to get the victim’s mother out of the courtroom. When they brought Cece past her parents, she was bent over and weeping, and Harry and Virginia Caine looked tortured and lost.

Naomi asked Judge Varney for a recess and to instruct the jury to ignore Cece’s outburst. The judge gave the instructions but denied the recess and demanded she make her case.

My niece got uncertainly to her feet, saying, “The district attorney paints Stefan Tate as a drug-fueled homicidal maniac. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Gaining confidence, Naomi depicted my young cousin as a man who’d gotten off track, fought demons, and kept the circumstances of his addictions private on his school application because it was his right under the law. He’d come home to Starksville and found his passion as a teacher, and he cared deeply about his students. She described the drug overdoses at the school and Stefan’s efforts to fight and expose the drug dealers.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is the defense’s contention that Stefan Tate was getting very close to uncovering the presence of a major drug ring operating in and around Starksville,” Naomi went on. “For that, my client was framed, as a drug dealer himself, as a rapist, and as the brutal murderer of a boy he loved like a son.

“When you’ve heard the hard evidence, when you see how manufactured it all looks on close examination, you’ll realize without a doubt that Stefan Tate is no drug dealer, no rapist, and most certainly no murderer.”

Judge Varney called for a recess at noon.

My poor aunts and Nana Mama were exhausted. Patty Converse drove them home. After taking Cece Turnbull home, Bree joined Pinkie and me for lunch at the Bench, a barbecue joint that catered to the courthouse crowd.

“You thought any more about Finn Davis?” Pinkie asked after we took a booth and ordered.

“A little,” I admitted.

“What about Finn Davis?” Bree asked.

As he had with me the evening before, Pinkie filled Bree in on Sydney Fox’s ex. Born and raised in Starksville, Finn Davis had been orphaned when his parents died in a car crash. Marvin Bell, the man who’d hooked my parents on drugs, took Finn Davis in, treated the boy like his son.

“Marvin spoiled Finn, trained Finn, probably abused Finn,” Pinkie said. “You ask me, Finn turned out just like his adoptive dad. They can both turn on the charisma, make you forget what they are deep down.”

“And what’s that?” Bree asked.

Pinkie started to speak, but then stopped and stared over my shoulder. He muttered, “The devil himself just walked in.”

A thin, angular man, Marvin Bell put me in mind of the actor Bruce Dern as he walked up to our booth. Longish steel-gray hair. Gaunt, narrow face. Sharp nose. And opaque green eyes that, as Bree said, roamed all over you.

Marvin Bell ran those weird opaque eyes over me and then Bree, showing no reaction. Then he leveled his gaze at Pinkie.

“My two cents, Parks?” he said. “At funerals, all grudges are off. My boy had every right to grieve for Sydney and pay his respects.”

“Unless your boy shot her,” my cousin said. “Which, in my mind, goes along with his threat to piss on her grave.”

The muscles in Bell’s cheeks flickered with tension, but his voice remained calm when he said, “Finn signed the divorce papers. He’d moved on. There is no reason he’d do something like that to his ex-wife.”

“Oh, I think a case could be made for obsession,” Pinkie said. “But I’m thinking spite. You and your boy have never liked to lose face.”

Bell stood there a moment, looking as if it was taking all his control not to smash my cousin in the face. “Finn’s no murderer.”

Then he walked across the room to another booth.

“Think I’ll go introduce myself,” I said.

Bree said, “That a good idea?”

“Sometimes, you shake something, it rattles,” I said, getting up.

The waitress set a cup of coffee in front of Bell and walked away. I slid in across from him. If I unnerved him at all, he didn’t show it. If he’d been shaken by Pinkie’s accusations, he didn’t show it.

“Didn’t know I’d invited you to sit down, stranger,” Bell said, tearing open a sugar packet and tapping it into the coffee.

“We’ve met, Mr. Bell,” I said. “A long time ago.”

“That right?” he said, stirring the coffee and turning his weird green eyes on me. “I don’t recall you.”

“Alex Cross,” I said. “Jason Cross was my father.”

Bell cocked his head in reappraisal, tapped the spoon on the side of the cup, and smiled softly. “There now, I see the resemblance.”

“I’m a homicide detective in Washington, DC.”

“Long way from home, Detective Cross,” he replied, setting the spoon down. “And funny, I don’t recollect ever meeting you.”

“I was young,” I said. “It was about a year after my mother died.”

“You mean after she was murdered, don’t you?” he said in a straight tone delivered with an expression that revealed nothing.

“I remember that night,” I said. “You tied my father to your car with a rope, dragged him through the streets.”

Bell sipped his coffee, never taking his eyes off me. “It was another time. It was what you did to a man who’d kill his own wife in cold blood and call it good.”

I hadn’t expected that and said nothing while Bell talked on.

“I gave your father some of the punishment he deserved. And then I did the right thing and immediately turned him over to the police. Sad what happened next, but probably for the good of all. Even you. Even your brothers.”

I hadn’t expected that either, and it took a few beats before I could reply.

“You sold my mom and dad drugs,” I said. “Got them hooked.”