Cross Justice

Chapter 13

Palm Beach, Florida

“‘I feel pretty, oh so pretty,’” Coco sang softly as he looked in the mirror, aware of the dead woman in a black nightgown hanging by her neck from the chandelier behind him but much more focused on assessing the new outfit.

The tangerine linen skirt hugged his hips sublimely. The matching jockey coat was snug through the shoulders, but workable. The Dries van Noten high-heeled sling-backs were a bit toe-crunching. The Carolina Herrera silk taffeta blouse was simply remarkable. And the pearl earrings and choker? Just the right air of sophistication.

All he needed now was the right do.

Coco reached into the box and came up with a lush, shoulder-length, radiant amber wig. It was old, early 1970s, if he remembered correctly. His mother would have known the exact date, of course, but no matter. Once settled on the two-sided tape with the last strands of hair combed into place, the wig made Coco look like another person altogether.

Mysterious. Sexy. Alluring. Unreachable.

“I name you Tangerine Dream, Queen of the Garden Party,” Coco cooed to the woman staring back at him. “A vision of...”

He turned and looked at the petite dead woman dangling by a drapery cord from the chandelier. “Ruth? What would you say? I’m thinking a cross between Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights and Ginger on Gilligan’s Island — the haircut, anyway. Am I right, or am I just a foolish little girl?”

Coco giggled ever so softly before picking up the Prada shopping bag and other goodies pilfered from Ruth’s collection. He started to leave the master suite, then paused to listen. Though he knew that the staff had been given the day off and that Ruth’s husband, Dr. Stanley Abrams, aka “the Boob King of West Palm,” was in Zurich attending a medical symposium, it still paid to be careful.

Sure of himself now, Coco pushed on down a gallery rich with artwork, although the only piece he stopped to look at was an oil painting of the deceased. There you are, he thought, studying Ruth’s beauty. Caught at the moment of your ripeness, my dear, a gift to the universe.

Ruth and Stanley’s home was enormous and entirely too modern for Coco’s taste. But then again, what would you expect from the house that fake tits built? There was a great deal to be said for classic understatement, he believed.

As his mother liked to say: When it comes to your art, Coco, and fashion is art, take your motif to the limit and then back off several degrees.

Coco walked through a kitchen big enough to host an episode of Iron Chef and went down a hallway to a steel door. He checked the security system, got a white dust cloth from his bag, and covered his fingers with it before punching in the code. Five seconds later, he shut the garage door and waited for the electronic voice to tell him the system was armed.

The garage had four bays. The near one was empty. The second held Ruth’s Mercedes, and the third her husband’s Maserati. Coco’s beloved Aston Martin occupied the fourth bay. But before going to it, he reached into the Mercedes and removed the garage-door remote.

He backed the Aston out onto a colored concrete area, exited the car, pressed the remote, then wiped it down. When the garage door started to lower, he lobbed it inside, satisfied when it skittered to a halt a few feet from the Mercedes.

Someone intent on suicide would not bother to pick that up, would she? Coco was confident this was the case. He drove out through the security gates of Ruth and Stanley Abrams’s massive waterfront estate. Then he realized that the ladies of Palm Beach would already be gathering for cocktails. Maybe he’d go stroll by Oli’s Fashion Cuisine.

Would anyone recognize him at Oli’s? He was thrilled at his audacity, his taste for high-stakes games.

Let’s do it, girlfriend. Let’s really shake it up.

Ten minutes later, Coco parked the Aston Martin a few blocks away from his target zone. The vintage sports car was a risk, he knew. But he adored it, so it often caused him to act impulsively, demanding his attention when the Lexus would have done just fine.

Next time you’ll stay home, Coco thought and put on a pair of retro white-and-oval-framed sunglasses. He set off up the sidewalk, walking the way his mother had taught him, with his shoulders back, his head high, and his hips swaying like a pendulum.

The first man he encountered was a jogger in his fifties. Coco could feel his degenerate eyes looking over the Tangerine Dream. The second man, a Euro in yachting garb, dropped his sunglasses to gape openly.

That’s it, girl, Coco thought, putting just a little more sway in the booty for the Euro who’d no doubt turned to watch after the dream. Ahead, the yellow tables outside Oli’s were already filled with a stylish happy-hour crowd.

He took a breath, thought: Mysterious, now. Sexy. Alluring. Unobtainable.

That’s it, Coco. You’ve got it all.

Now flaunt it all.

He made his walk even more provocative, swaying his hips back and forth.

Coco raised his chin a degree as he passed the restaurant, ignoring the scene but aware of patrons twisting to look after him. He almost laughed to cause so much mistaken lust and envy.

Chapter 14

Starksville, North Carolina

Though everyone had heard the judge’s order loud and clear, it was well into the afternoon before two deputies brought my cousin, wearing leg shackles and handcuffs locked to a leather belt around his waist, into an interrogation room. Even through the bruises and swelling, I could see Stefan Tate took after our mothers’ side of the family. He was in his early thirties, tall and heavy-boned like me and like Damon. And we all had the same jawline.

I flashed on an image of him as a little boy, running around Nana Mama’s yard during one of Aunt Hattie’s infrequent trips to Washington. He’d had this infectious laugh, and it seemed like he thought everything was a mystery and an adventure.

“Alex,” Stefan said thickly as he sat down. “Glad you came.”

I nodded, said nothing.

“Leave his wrists cuffed, but release them from the belt,” Naomi said. “He may need to use his hands. And turn off all cameras and microphones.”

“Already done on the cameras and mikes,” an officer said. “But there is zero chance we’re letting him use his hands.”

Ignoring her protests, they chained Stefan’s legs and the belt to a stout eyebolt in the cement floor and left.

Leaning toward us, Stefan said quietly, “I’d sweep the room for bugs.”

I wondered if he was serious or just being melodramatic. But Naomi thought enough of the idea to pull out her iPhone and call up a white-noise app that she turned on high.

“That works,” Stefan said. “And thank you again, Alex, for coming. You don’t know what it means to have you believe that I did not do these things.”

“I don’t believe one way or the other,” I replied evenly, studying him for signs that he was capable of doing the things he’d been accused of.

“I’m being framed,” he said.

“Listen carefully,” I said. “I am your cousin, but I do not represent you. Ultimately I’m here representing Rashawn Turnbull. I find out anything that says you killed that boy, I will help the prosecution put you in the chair, or whatever they use here.”

“Lethal injection,” Stefan said. “I will not lie to you. I did not kill Rashawn.”

“Why’d you assault the guards?” Naomi asked.

“Other way around, Counselor. They assaulted me.”

“We’ll get back to that,” I said. “You’ve read the indictment?”

“More times than you can count. Look, I’m telling you. This case? These circumstances? They’re manufactured, Alex.”

“You didn’t do any of it?”

“Some of it,” he admitted. “But nothing illegal. They’ve twisted things, taken them totally out of context.”

“Convince me like you’ve convinced Naomi,” I said, crossing my arms. “Start at the beginning.”

“‘A very good place to start,’” Stefan sang, and he tried to smile.

According to the particulars of the indictment, two months earlier, Rashawn Turnbull had been found dead in an abandoned limestone quarry, a piece of land undergoing annexation by the city of Starksville. The teenager had been drugged and forcibly sodomized, and his neck had been slashed with a saw. Semen and other evidence found at the scene pegged Stefan Tate, Rashawn’s eighth-grade gym teacher, as the killer. DNA also linked Stefan to the drugging and rape of seventeen-year-old Sharon Lawrence, a student at Starksville High School, and she had agreed to testify against him.

So I didn’t smile when my cousin sang that line from “Do-Re-Mi.”

Instead, for the next hour and a half, I listened closely to his side of the terrible crimes described in the indictment, interrupting only to clarify verifiable facts, names, and times. Otherwise, I followed the adage that if you really want to learn about someone, you should just shut up and listen.

Chapter 15

“The day after Rashawn was found, they put the handcuffs on me, Alex,” my cousin said at the end of his version of events. “Ever since, I’ve been in here. No bail. Limited visitation, even with Patty and Naomi. I’m telling you, Alex, I’m being railroaded.”

I said nothing, still trying to absorb his story in light of the information given in the indictment.

He leaned forward. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“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.”

Chapter 16

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.”

Chapter 17

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.”

“Why would he do that?”

Patty said that toward the end of last year, there’d been a rash of incidents involving heroin and meth at the Starksville high school, including the two overdoses mentioned in the grand jury indictment.

“There was real pressure from the principal and school board to identify the source of the drugs,” she went on. “I don’t think any teacher took that more seriously than Stefan. He became obsessed with finding the source.”

“He says he was out looking for Rashawn the night he was killed.”

Patty nodded. “Rashawn’s mother, Cece, called us around eight, said he wasn’t home and asked if he was here.”

Naomi said, “Stefan said he was upset about many things that night, picked up a bottle for the first time in years, went down by the tracks, drank it, and passed out.”

My cousin’s fiancée nodded, said, “He said he was frustrated that he wasn’t finding the source of the drugs and shocked that Rashawn had told him earlier in the day that he didn’t want him as a friend anymore. So he got drunk.”

“Why didn’t Rashawn want to be Stefan’s friend anymore?” I asked.

“Rashawn wouldn’t say, and Stefan was—”

Somewhere out front I heard a door slam and then a male shout, “Killer-lovin’ bitch! Nigger-lovin’ bitch. I hope you rot in hell!”

Two shots from a high-powered rifle ripped through the night.

I was up and moving at the first shot, digging out the Glock in my holster. Three more quick shots blew out the living-room windows, showering me with glass.

As tires squealed, I yanked open the front door and went out in a crouch onto the front porch. The car lights were off, but I could tell it was old, a beater Impala, white, with horrible mufflers. A figure in a black hood, coat, and gloves hung out the window, aiming a scoped hunting rifle at me. He fired.

The sixth bullet hit the cedar-shake siding a few feet from me. I tried to get a bead on him, but the car was gone.

Breathing hard from the adrenaline, I began to straighten out of my crouch when I saw a blond figure in running clothes sprawled at the bottom of the porch stairs, blood pouring from a head wound. There was no use even going down to check for a pulse. There was no doubt in my mind that—

“Sydney!” Patty screamed behind me. “No! No!”

She began to collapse. I twisted and grabbed her in my arms.

“Why?” Patty sobbed into my chest. “Why Sydney?”

I didn’t have the heart right then to tell her that it looked to me like a case of mistaken identity.

Chapter 18

Within fifteen minutes, Dogwood Road was blocked off with traffic cones and the duplex was surrounded by yellow tape. Crime scene techs were photographing the body of Sydney Fox. A crowd had gathered. An unmarked cruiser pulled up at the perimeter, and Detectives Frost and Carmichael stepped out.

“Great,” Naomi muttered.

“You know them too?”

“Frost and Carmichael,” she said. “They led the city’s investigation into Rashawn Turnbull’s murder.”

“Good cops?” I said, putting aside my first impressions of them.

“Reasonably smart, adequately trained small-town detectives,” she said. “They say they’re by the book, but I suspect they cut corners, play fast and loose with the facts sometimes. And they tend to jump to conclusions.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, and I waited for them to study the corpse.

Frost scratched at his acne-scarred nose, nodded at Naomi. “Counselor.”

“Detective Frost,” Naomi said. “This is Alex Cross, my uncle.”

“We’ve met,” he said without enthusiasm. He turned to me. “This is my case.”

“I’m on vacation,” I said.

“I’m saying that you will have nothing to do with this murder except as a witness,” the detective insisted. “Are we good on that right from the get-go?”

“Your town, your ball game, Detective Frost.”

Carmichael said, “What happened?”

Naomi, Patty, and I gave our accounts of the evening, including the light going out on the porch and the racial slurs we’d all heard just before the gunfire.

Frost’s expression soured, and he asked, “Sydney having an interracial relationship too?”

Patty frowned, said, “Not that I know of.”

“Then they were trying to kill you and they shot Sydney by mistake,” Carmichael said, relieving me of the burden of telling her. “Both of you blondes and all.”

Stefan’s fiancée took the news hard and looked sick to her stomach. “Oh God. I wish I’d never come to this town.”

“In the morning we’ll need you at the station to give sworn statements,” Frost told us. “In the meantime, you need to leave the premises. We’ve got more members of the crime scene team on the way.”

Patty said, “Can’t I stay here? In my house?”

The older detective said, “You won’t get much sleep.”

I said, “Come over to my aunt Connie’s. She’s got two extra rooms.”

Stefan’s fiancée looked too tired to argue. “Let me get a few things.”

“You’ll put a watch on my aunt’s place?” I asked the detectives when Patty and Naomi had gone back inside.

Frost said, “I can ask, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get it.”

“Budget cuts,” Carmichael explained.

Which meant Bree and I would have to take shifts watching the cul-de-sac. When Patty had thrown some things in a small bag, we skirted around the body of Sydney Fox. A coroner had a bright light on her, and a tech was taking pictures. It was only then that I realized she’d been hit in the forehead twice, two wounds three inches apart.

I remembered the pace of the shots, how quick and crisp they—

A male voice called out, “Dr. Cross?”

I slowed near Naomi’s car and saw a big, athletic guy in jeans and a black hoodie climbing from a gray Dodge pickup. He wore a badge on a chain around his neck, and he jogged over to us.

“Detective Guy Pedelini,” he said, smiling and extending his hand. “Stark County Sheriff’s Office. An honor to meet you, sir.”

“You too, Detective Pedelini,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Kind of outside your jurisdiction, aren’t you, Guy?” asked Naomi coolly.

Pedelini sobered, said, “Just paying my respects to your famous uncle, Counselor. But now that I’m here, can you tell me what happened?”

“A highly skilled rifleman in an old white Impala killed the wrong woman,” I said, and then I described what we’d heard yelled just before the shots.

The sheriff’s detective had gone stern, his full attention focused on me.

“Why do you say he’s highly skilled?”

“He was using a bolt-action rifle, not a semi or a pump, and he managed to put two rounds into Ms. Fox’s forehead before she hit the ground,” I said.

“A hunter,” Pedelini said.

“Or military trained,” I said. “Know any racists that fit the bill and own a beater Impala?”

The detective thought about that before shaking his head. “There are a couple of avowed racists around who drive beat-up old white cars and a fair number of decent hunters and ex-military types, but no one who’s capable of that kind of shooting. I mean, he’d have to have sniper training, wouldn’t he?”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Why are you so interested in this, Guy?” Naomi said.

“Someone tries to kill a material witness in a heinous murder case that went down in my jurisdiction, I’m interested, Counselor,” Pedelini said.

“Why would you care if I was shot?” Patty Converse said. “I’m a witness for the defense. You think Stefan’s guilty.”

“I do,” Pedelini agreed. “I think he’s guilty as sin. But that doesn’t stop me from being concerned about the safety of everyone else. See, Ms. Converse, I don’t want there to be any doubt about this trial. I want the judge and jury to hear both sides fully and then deliberate and condemn your fiancé, put him in Central Prison over in Raleigh, and get him in line for a lethal injection.”

Chapter 19

It was past eleven when Naomi pulled up and parked in front of Aunt Connie’s bungalow. I climbed out, meaning to head for my old house and my family. But I saw that the lights were all out there. Bree opened the front door to my aunt’s place.

I’d called Bree within minutes of Sydney Fox’s death, but we’d agreed it was better that she stay where she was while I talked to the police.

Bree hugged me, kissed me, and said, “Your aunt figured you’d all be starving, so she’s been cooking and consoling.”

“Who’s she consoling?”

“Ethel Fox,” Bree said. “Sydney’s mother. She and Connie are friends.”

“How’s the mom taking it?”

“Disbelief. Devastation. Shock. Sydney was her only daughter. Her husband passed ten years ago, and her son lives out in California. I don’t know what she’d do if your aunts weren’t here.”

I put my arm around her shoulder, and we followed Naomi and Patty up into the house. Aunt Connie kept her home spotless, but it was by no means a cold or sterile place. The furniture was warm and cozy, and there were pictures of her and her friends and her children, Pinkie and Karen, everywhere. I couldn’t find one where my aunt wasn’t beaming or hugging someone.

Like I said, she never, ever met a stranger.

I could see Aunt Connie in the kitchen, wearing pink bunny slippers and a matching pink bathrobe and whisking eggs in a steel bowl. The air smelled of bacon, garlic, onions, and coffee. Suddenly I was ravenous and very tired. I wanted nothing more than to eat, then go next door and sleep.

Patty, Naomi, Bree, and I all went into the kitchen. Aunt Hattie was there too, sitting at the table and holding the hands of an older white woman with wispy gray hair. Dried streaks of tears showed on her cheeks, and she seemed to be staring off into nothingness, unaware of us.

“Sydney was the sweetest little thing, Connie,” Ethel Fox said in a weak voice. “So pleasing when she was a girl.”

“I remember,” Aunt Connie said, nodding to us.

“She was finding herself, I think, after the divorce,” the older woman went on. “So happy, and looking forward.”

“You know that’s true,” Aunt Hattie said. “She was doing good. A daughter to be proud of.”

Patty swallowed hard and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Fox. Sydney was such a fine, fine person, I...”

The dead woman’s mother seemed to break from her trance. She turned her head slowly to look at Stefan’s fiancée, who was fighting back tears.

“The police said she was shot ’cause of you,” Ethel Fox said in a flat, grieving tone.

Patty’s hands flew to her mouth and she choked out, “I wish it had been me. I swear to you, I never... I loved your daughter. She was my best friend here. My only friend.”

Ethel Fox got up slowly, staring hard at Patty, and for a second I thought she might strike her. Instead, she opened her arms and embraced Stefan’s fiancée, who wept on her shoulder.

“I know you loved her too,” Ethel Fox said, rubbing Patty’s back. “I know you loved her too.”

“You don’t blame me? And Stefan?”

The old woman pushed away from Patty and shook her head. “Sydney believed he was innocent as much as you do. We talked about it just the other day. She said Stefan didn’t have the kind of heart to do something that dark to anyone, much less to a boy he cared so much about.”

Aunt Hattie fought not to break down.

Aunt Connie wiped her own tears on her forearm, said, “Ethel, you hear me now. Our nephew Alex here is gonna find Sydney’s killer, just like he’s gonna find Rashawn’s. You mark my words, he’s gonna make them pay. Isn’t that right, Alex?”

Every eye in the room was on me. In the short space of time I’d been in Starksville, the town had revealed dimensions more ominous than I remembered. Deep inside, I wondered whether I was up to the task of figuring out who killed the Turnbull boy and, now, Sydney Fox. But they were all looking at me with such hope that I said, “I promise you, someone will pay.”

Aunt Connie broke into her toothy grin and then poured the beaten eggs into a black frying pan with a hiss. “Sit down now, I’ll finish up.”

“Sydney was right,” Aunt Hattie said. “Whoever killed that boy had a dark heart, and my Stefan does not.”

I realized she was directing the comment at me. Had Naomi told her what I’d said earlier in the day, about owing my allegiance to the victims?

Before I could respond delicately, Ethel Fox said, “You ask me, there’s only one heart black enough around here to kill a boy like that. You ask me, that Marvin Bell’s involved somehow.”

The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

My aunts evidently could, though.

Hattie got a stricken look and turned her head away.

Connie rapped hard on the edge of the skillet with the wooden spoon, glanced at me, saw my confusion, and then looked to Sydney’s mother and warned quietly, “Ethel, you know you don’t want to be accusing that Marvin Bell of nothing unless you got fifty God-fearing Christians behind you saying they saw it too, in broad daylight and with their own two eyes.”

“Who’s Marvin Bell?” Bree asked.

My aunts said nothing.

“He’s slippery, that one, always in the shadows, never showing hisself,” Ethel Fox said. Then she pointed a bony finger at me. “And you know why your aunts ain’t saying nothing to you ’bout him?”

My aunts wouldn’t look at me. I shook my head.

“Marvin Bell?” Ethel Fox said. “Once upon a time, before he went all proper, he owned your daddy. Your daddy was one of his niggers.”

Chapter 20

The word silenced the room, and Bree’s face turned hard. So did Patty’s and Naomi’s.

You heard the word used every day on the streets of DC, one person of color to another. But hearing it from the lips of an old white Southern woman in reference to my dead father, I felt like she’d slapped me across the face with something unspeakable.

Her daughter was dead. She was distraught. She didn’t mean it. Those were my immediate responses. Then I noticed that my aunts weren’t as shocked as the rest of us.

“Aunt Hattie?” I said.

Aunt Hattie wouldn’t look at me, but she said, “Ethel didn’t mean to shame your father’s name or yours, Alex. She’s just telling it like it was.”

Pained, Aunt Connie said, “Back then, your father was Marvin Bell’s slave. Bell owned him. Your mother too. They’d do anything he asked.”

“’Cause of the drugs,” Ethel Fox said.

I suddenly felt so hungry, I was light-headed.

“You don’t remember Bell coming to your house when you was a boy to bring your mama or papa something?” Aunt Connie asked, spooning the eggs onto a plate. “Tall white guy, sharp face, slippery, like Ethel said?”

Hattie added, “All nice one second, meaner than a crazy dog the next?”

Something blurry, troubling, and long ago flitted through my mind, but I said, “No, I don’t remember him.”

“What about—” Aunt Hattie began, and then stopped.

Aunt Connie had fetched plates of potato pancakes, crispy maple bacon, and a mound of toast from the warming oven, and she set them and the freshly made scrambled eggs on the table. Naomi and I attacked the food. Stefan’s fiancée pushed at her eggs and bacon and worried a piece of toast.

I stayed quiet as I ate. But Bree asked all sorts of questions about Marvin Bell, and by the time I set my fork on my plate, stuffed to the gills and feeling a lot less light-headed and achy, there was a thumbnail biography of him developing slowly in my mind, some of it fact, but most of it opinion, rumor, conjecture, and supposition.

Slippery described Bell perfectly.

No one at that table could peg exactly when Marvin Bell took control of my parents’ life. They said he’d slid into Starksville like a silent cancer when my mom turned twenty. He came bearing heroin and cocaine, and he gave out free samples. He got my mother and a dozen young women just like her strung out and desperate. He hooked my father too, but not just on the drugs.

“Your father needed money for you boys,” Aunt Connie said. “Selling and moving for Bell made him that money. And like Ethel was saying, Bell had his hooks into them so hard, they were just like his slaves.”

Ethel Fox said, “Once, Bell even ran your daddy out of your house, tied him with a rope to the back of his car, and dragged him down the street. No one moved to stop him.”

Flashing on that memory of the boys being dragged on a rope line the day before, I gaped at her, horrified.

“You don’t remember, Alex?” Aunt Hattie asked softly. “You were there.”

“No,” I said instantly and unequivocally. “I don’t remember that. I’d... remember that.”

The very idea of it made my head start to pound, and I just wanted to go somewhere in the darkness and sleep. Both my aunts and Sydney Fox’s mother looked at me in concern.

“What?” I said. “I just don’t remember it ever getting that bad.”

Aunt Connie said sadly, “Alex, it got so bad, the only way your mom and dad could escape was by dying.”

Hearing that after so long a day, I hung my head in sorrow.

Bree rubbed my back and neck, said, “Is Bell still a dealer?”

They argued about whether he was. Aunt Hattie said that soon after my father died, Bell took his profits and went twenty miles north, where he built a big house on Pleasant Lake. He bought up local businesses and gave every appearance of a guy who’d straightened out his life.

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Ethel Fox snapped. “You don’t change your spots just like that, not when there’s easy money to be made. You ask me, he runs the underworld of this town and the towns all around us. Maybe even over to Raleigh.”

I raised my head. “He’s never been investigated?”

“Oh, I’m sure someone has investigated him,” Connie said.

“But Marvin Bell’s never been arrested for anything, far as I know,” Hattie said. “You see him around Starksville from time to time, and it’s like he’s looking right through you.”

“What do you mean by that?” Bree asked.

Hattie shifted in her chair. “He makes you uncomfortable just by being near, like he’s an instant threat, even if he’s smiling at you.”

“So he knows who you are? What you’ve seen?” Bree asked.

“Oh, I expect he knows,” Connie said. “He just don’t care. In Bell’s kingdom, we’re nothing. Just like Alex’s parents were nothing to him.”

“Any evidence linking Bell to Rashawn Turnbull?” Bree said.

Naomi shook her head.

Patty Converse seemed lost in thought.

I asked her, “Stefan ever mention him?”

My cousin’s fiancée startled when she realized I was talking to her, said, “Honest to God, I’ve never heard of Marvin Bell.”

Chapter 21

I awoke the next morning to find my daughter, Jannie, at the side of my bed, shaking my shoulder. She had on her blue tracksuit and was carrying a workout bag.

“Six a.m.,” she whispered. “We have to go.”

I nodded blearily and eased out of bed, not wanting to wake Bree. I grabbed some shorts, running shoes, a Georgetown Hoyas T-shirt, and a Johns Hopkins hoodie, and went into the bathroom.

I splashed cold water on my face and then dressed, willing myself not to think about the day before and Marvin Bell and what my aunts said he’d done to my parents. Did Nana Mama know? I pushed that question and more aside. For a few hours, at least, I wanted to focus on my daughter and her dreams.

Nana Mama was already up. “Coffee with chicory,” she said, handing me a go cup and a small soft cooler. “Bananas, water, and her protein shakes are in there. There’s some of those poppy-seed muffins you like too.”

“Fattening me up?”

“Putting some meat on your bones,” she said, and she laughed.

I laughed too, said, “I remember that.”

When I was a teenager, about Jannie’s age, I’d gotten my height but weighed about one hundred and sixty dripping wet. I had dreams of playing college football and basketball. So for two years, Nana Mama cooked extra for me, putting some meat on my bones. When I graduated high school, I weighed close to two hundred.

“Dad!” Jannie whined.

“Tell Bree we should be back before ten,” I said, and I hurried out of the house with my daughter.

Jannie was quiet on the ride over to Starksville High School. It didn’t surprise me. She is incredibly competitive and intense when it comes to running. Sometimes she’s irritable before facing a challenge on the track. Other times, like that morning, she’s quiet, deep inside herself.

“This coach is supposed to be strong,” I said.

She nodded. “Duke assistant.”

I could see the wheels turning in her head. One of Duke University’s assistant track coaches ran the AAU team out of Raleigh during the summer. Some of her athletes would no doubt be on the track. Jannie was out to impress them all.

I pulled into a mostly empty parking lot next to the high school. At a quarter past six on a Saturday morning, there were only a handful of vehicles there, including two white passenger vans. Beyond them and a chain-link fence and bleachers, people were jogging, warming up.

“You’re here to train, right?” I said as Jannie unbuckled her seat belt.

She shook her head, smiled, and said, “No, Daddy, I’m here to run.”

We went through a gate, under the stands, and over to the track. There were fifteen, maybe twenty athletes there already, some stretching in the cool air, some just starting their warm-up laps.

“Jannie Cross?” A woman wearing shorts, running shoes, and a bright turquoise windbreaker jogged over to us. She carried a clipboard and grinned broadly when she stuck out her hand and said, “Melanie Greene.”

“Pleased to meet you, Coach Greene,” I said, shaking her hand and sensing her genuine enthusiasm.

“The pleasure is all mine, Dr. Cross,” the coach said.

Then she turned the charm on Jannie and said, “And you, young lady, are causing quite the stir.”

Jannie smiled and bowed her head. “You saw the tape of the invitational?”

“Along with every other Division One coach in the country,” she said. “And here you are, walking onto my track.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jannie said.

“Just for the record, you’ll only be a sophomore in the fall?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Coach Greene shook her head in disbelief and then handed me the clipboard and said, “I’m going to need you to sign a few forms here, saying we are not in any way, shape, or form considering this a recruitment meeting. This is summer work, and it’s all about training. And there’s an athletic release form from the Starksville school system at the bottom.”

I scanned the documents, started signing.

“Why don’t you take a lap and get warmed up,” Coach Greene said to Jannie, all business now. “We’ll be working two-hundreds this morning.”

“Yes, Coach,” Jannie said, looking serious as she put her bag on one of the low bleachers and ran out onto the track.

I signed the last of the documents and handed the clipboard back.

“You’re here how long?” Coach Greene asked.

“Unclear,” I said. “We’re down on a family issue.”

“Both sorry and glad to hear it,” she said, and she shook my hand again before jogging back to several women wearing AAU and Duke warm-up jackets.

There were other girls and boys coming in now, younger than the college bunch already out on the track, some roughly Jannie’s age. Three of them wore Starksville Track hoodies. I took a seat in the stands, sipped coffee, and ate poppy-seed muffins while Jannie went through her prep routine: a slow lap and then a series of ballistic stretches and drills, increasing in intensity and designed to get her quick-twitch muscles firing.

The entire time, the other athletes watched her, sizing her up, especially the high school — age girls, especially the ones from Starksville. If Jannie noticed, she wasn’t showing it. She had her game face on big-time.

Coach Greene called in the athletes and divided them into training groups. Jannie was put with the local girls. If she cared, she didn’t show it. This was all about the clock.

Chapter 22

Greene called for 60 percent effort, and the men went first, running the long left-hand turn of the two-hundred and then slowing into a trot back around. Greene sent the next groups in in waves. The seven college girls were serious athletes, strong and fleet. They seemed to dance down the track, barely touching the surface, their legs churning in a quick, powerful cadence.

Jannie watched them intently but showed nothing. When it came time for her group, the high school girls, to run, she went to the outside, letting the others have the favored lanes. Greene said something to her I didn’t catch. Jannie nodded and settled in.

They ran the staggers with no blocks, just taking off at Greene’s whistle. Some of the other girls, especially the three from Starksville, were surprisingly gutsy and kept abreast of Jannie through the slowdown. But you could see that they didn’t have her natural fluidness and stride.

The difference was more readily apparent two intervals later when Greene called for 80 percent effort. At the whistle, Jannie took off in a smooth, chopping motion that quickly gave way to the long, explosive lopes of a quarter-miler as she rounded the turn. She let up with ten yards to go and still beat the high school girls by three body lengths.

“Hey!” one of the local girls said angrily to Jannie, breathing hard. “Eighty percent!”

Jannie smiled and said, “That was seventy.”

Her tone was matter-of-fact, but the girl seemed to think Jannie was being condescending. Her face hardened; she turned and went over to her friends.

Coach Greene must have heard Jannie say she was giving only 70 percent, because she jogged over and said something to her. Jannie nodded and ran to catch up with the older girls.

“Drop to groups of four, ladies,” Greene shouted after them.

The college girls nodded to Jannie when she jogged up, but these were Division 1 athletes. After that moment of acknowledgment, they put on their game faces.

“Eighty-five to ninety now,” Greene called as the girls moved into the stagger.

At fifteen and a half, my daughter was as tall as or taller than most of the girls, but she didn’t have their strength or build. She looked slight next to them.

Jannie ran stride for stride with the two strongest girls until they were a hundred and fifty meters in. Then their conditioning and experience showed. They pulled away from her and crossed the slowdown mark a yard ahead.

“Ninety,” Greene called, and all the girls in that heat, including Jannie, nodded, their chests heaving.

They ran two more like that, and Jannie finished third both times. Then Greene called for warm-down and stretching. The two fastest college girls went over and talked to Jannie; the local girls tried to ignore her.

Coach Greene came to the fence, and I went down to talk to her.

“Has she run in the two-hundred in competition?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Quarter-mile only. Why?”

“Those two that beat her, Layla and Nichole, they’re pure sprinters. Two-hundred’s their race. Layla was runner-up at the Atlantic championships, twelfth at NCAA nationals.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I think she wants the four-hundred.”

“I know,” Greene said. “She’s raw, but very impressive, Dr. Cross.”

“Thank you, I think.”

The coach said, “It’s a deep compliment. I...” She paused. “Think you might be able to bring her over to Duke next Saturday morning?”

“For?”

“There’s a group from Chapel Hill, Duke, and Auburn, all four-hundred girls; they train there. And I’d like my boss in my other life to see Jannie run.”

“Thought this wasn’t about recruitment.”

“Just a friendly suggestion. I think Jannie will get bored running with the girls up here, and there are more suitable training partners an hour away.”

“We’ll talk about it,” I said. “And it will depend on my family situation.”

“Just know the door’s open for her,” the coach said, and she jogged off.

The three Starksville girls were coming across the track, and Greene high-fived them as she went by, told them, “Tuesday afternoon.”

The girls shot me hostile glances as they passed and then went on chattering about something. I watched Jannie kick into her rubber sandals and shoulder her bag. Every move she made was efficient and natural; even the way she ambled was fluid, her shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles in perfect, loose sync.

I realize I’m bragging on my own daughter here, but, proud papa aside, I knew enough about athletics to understand that you couldn’t teach what Jannie had. It was genetic, a blessing from God, a level of physical awareness so far beyond my comprehension that at that moment, I looked up to the sky and asked for guidance.

Jannie came up beside me, shaded her eyes, and scanned the sky too. “What’s up there?”

I put my arm around her and said, “Everything.”

Chapter 23

We got home at around twenty past eight. Ali was up but still in his pajamas, sitting on the couch and watching a deep-sea-fishing show on the Outdoor Channel, one of the few stations that came in well.

“This is cool, Dad,” Ali said. “They hook these huge marlin and they take like hours reeling them in so they can be tagged and tracked.”

“That is cool,” I said, peering at the turquoise waters. “Where is this?”

“The Canary Islands. Where’s that?”

“Off Africa, I think.”

Bree and Nana Mama were in the kitchen, making breakfast.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” Bree asked as I came in the room. “I wanted to go.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was trying to let you rest.”

“I’ll rest when I’m in Jamaica,” she said firmly.

I saluted her, said, “Detective Stone.”

“At ease,” Bree said, breaking into a soft smile. “After you eat, can we drive around? Like, all around?”

“So I can give you the lay of the land?” I said. “Sure, that makes sense.”

“Take me too,” Nana Mama said. “I’m going stir-crazy sitting in this house when all there is on the television is fishing and hunting shows. And I don’t care what Connie Lou says about how much Starksville’s changed. When I close my eyes, I see it as it was.”

Oddly, I didn’t. I realized that I hadn’t thought of the bungalow as my childhood home or as my parents’ home since that first night in town. The psychologist in me wondered why that was. And what about my aunts insisting I’d witnessed my father being dragged by a rope? Was I blocking it? If yes, why?

“You all right, Alex?” Bree asked, handing me a plate.

“Huh?”

“You’re brooding about something,” she said.

“Feels like a brooding day.” I shrugged, sat down at the table, and began to eat.

Naomi came in, said, “Isn’t this where we left off?”

“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.”

Chapter 24

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.

“That’s where Rashawn was found,” Naomi said. “I’ll show you the crime scene photographs later, but he was facedown on that top slab, jeans around his right ankle, left leg hanging off the side. I don’t think you can see the discoloration on the rock from here, but when Pedelini found him, it had been raining less than an hour, and there was a—”

“Wait,” I said, lowering the binoculars. “Pedelini? As in the sheriff’s detective?”

“Correct,” Naomi said. “Pedelini spotted the body from up here. He said that when he got to Rashawn, despite the rain, there was a pink halo of blood all around the body.”

“The indictment said the neck had been sawed,” I said.

Naomi nodded. “You can read the full autopsy report.”

“They have the weapon?” Bree asked.

My niece cleared her throat. “A foldable pruning saw found in the shared basement of the duplex where Stefan, Patty, and Sydney Fox lived.”

“Stefan’s foldable pruning saw?”

“Yes,” Naomi replied. “He said he’d bought it because he was taking up turkey hunting and another teacher at the school who turkey hunted told him it was a good thing to have along.”

“His prints on it?” Bree asked.

“And Rashawn’s DNA,” Naomi said.

Bree looked at us skeptically. “So how does he explain it?”

“He doesn’t,” Naomi said. “Stefan says he bought the saw, took it out of the packaging at home, and put it in the basement with the rest of the gear he’d bought to go hunting.”

“How many ways into that basement?” Bree asked.

“Three,” Naomi replied. “From Stefan’s place, from Sydney Fox’s place, and through a bulkhead door out back. No sign of forced entry there.”

I lifted the binoculars and aimed them into the old quarry again, at that spot on the rocks where a thirteen-year-old boy had suffered and died.

“I want to go down there,” I said. “See it up close.”

“They’ve got the old road across from the church chained off, and it’s a fair walk in,” Naomi said. “At least twenty minutes off the main road. You’ll want bug spray, long pants, and long sleeves because of the chiggers. There’s poison sumac too.”

“We can’t leave a ninety-year-old in a car that long in this heat,” Bree said. “We’ll take Nana Mama home, get what we need, and come back.”

For the second time that morning, I saluted my wife.

Chapter 25

We reached Loupe Street fifteen minutes later. Ali was still watching television, an adventure-hunting show featuring a big affable guy in a black cowboy hat.

“You ever heard of Jim Shockey?” Ali asked.

“Can’t say that I have.”

“He goes to all these, like, uncharted places and he hunts, like, ibex in Turkey and sheep in Outer Mongolia.”

“Outer Mongolia?” I said, looking closer at the screen and seeing a line of what I guessed were Mongolians with packs climbing some remote mountain with Shockey, the big guy in the black cowboy hat.

“Yeah, it’s dope,” Ali said, eyes fixed on the screen. “I didn’t know you could do things like this.”

“Outer Mongolia interest you?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“That’s right, why not?” I said, and I went upstairs to change. Naomi decided to stay behind and work on her opening statement. Nana Mama was making herself and Ali grilled cheese and green tomato sandwiches when Bree and I left.

We had the crime scene files and photographs with us as we approached the church again. The groundskeeper was finished and loading his mower onto a trailer. I looked for the chained-off and overgrown road that Naomi had shown us on the way out.

“Nana Mama’s right,” Bree said. “That is a beautiful cemetery.”

I looked up the rolling hill beyond the church, saw rows of tombstones and monuments. I remembered something my uncle Clifford had said two nights ago and something else my grandmother had said earlier this morning.

I pulled over, threw the Explorer in park, and said, “Wait here a second.”

I went to the groundskeeper, introduced myself, and asked him a few questions. His answers gave me chills up and down my spine.

Back in the car, I said, “Short detour before we go to the quarry.”

“Where are we going?”

“The cemetery,” I said, swallowing my emotions and putting the car in gear. “I think my parents are buried up there.”

Bree thought that over quietly for a few beats and then said, “You think?”

“The other night, Hattie’s husband said, ‘Christina’s next to Brock.’ Brock’s my mom’s brother, Aunt Connie’s late husband, and Nana Mama said he’s buried up there. My mom’s got to be buried beside her brother. And the groundskeeper said there’s also a Cross family plot up there.”

I drove through the gate and up the gently rolling hill, looking for the monuments that the groundskeeper had described.

“Alex,” Bree said softly. “You’ve never been to your parents’ graves?”

I shook my head. “People thought I was too young to go to my mother’s funeral, and we were sent to Nana Mama’s right after my father died. Given all that we’d been through, she wanted to spare us the pain of a funeral.”

Bree thought about that, said, “So your parents died close together?”

“Within a year of each other,” I said. “After my mother passed, my father was so heartbroken, he started drinking a lot more, using drugs.”

“That’s horrible, Alex,” she said, her brow knitting. “How come you’ve never told me that?”

I shrugged. “By the time I met you, my past was... my past.”

“And who took care of you and your brothers while all this was happening?”

I thought about that, driving slow, still scanning the hillside. “I don’t remember,” I said. “Probably Aunt Hattie. We always went to her house when things got—”

The monument was gray granite and far down a row of similar tombstones. The name cross was carved across the face of it.

I stopped the car, left it running for the air conditioner, and looked at my wife. Her features were full of pain and sympathy.

“You go see,” she said softly. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

I kissed her before climbing out into the heat and the clamor of insects coming from the woods. I went around the front of the Explorer and down the row of graves, my attention on the one that said Cross.

A general numbness settled in me when I reached the monument, which was barely tended. Grass grew up at the base. I had to crouch and spread it to find three small granite stones carved with initials. Left to right, they read:

I dug in the grass to the right of r.c. and found nothing but thatch and soil. There was no fourth stone. No J.C.

I stood and went around the back of the monument, finding more on the people buried there. The first name and the particulars startled me.

The second and third inscriptions read:

Puzzled, I climbed back into the car.

“What’s wrong?” Bree asked.

“My father’s not there. Nana Mama’s ex-husband, my grandfather, is, and his parents. I must have been named for my great-grandfather Alexander, who was a blacksmith.”

“You never knew that?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe there’s another Cross plot up here,” Bree said.

“Maybe,” I said, and I put the car in gear.

Nine rows up I spotted the pale white monument that said parks below a carved American flag. It was closer to the cemetery lane, four graves in, and well tended, with fresh flowers in a vase. Like the Cross plot lower on the hill, there were smaller stones, two of them, separated by a gap of several feet. They were inscribed B.W.P. and C.P.C.

Brock William Parks and Christina Parks Cross.

The grief swept over me like a chill fog thick with regret and loss. Tears began to dribble down my cheeks as I whispered, “I’m sorry I’ve never been here before, Mom. I’m sorry about... everything.”

I stood there trying to remember the last time I’d seen my mother, and I couldn’t. She’d been dying in the house. I was sure of that because my aunts were there a lot, caring for her. But I couldn’t conjure her up.

Disturbed by that, I wiped at my tears, walked around the back, and looked at the inscriptions.

I was flooded with emotions and images of my mother on her best days, when she was loving, caring, and so much fun to be around. I could have sworn I heard her singing then, and it took everything I had to make it back to the car.

Bree watched me with tear-filled eyes. “She’s there?”

I nodded, and then broke down sobbing. “She’s been there for all these years, Bree. And I’ve... never... been here. Not once. In all this time, I never even wondered where she was buried. I mean, my God, who does that? What kind of son am I?”

Chapter 26

Palm Beach, Florida

At noon that same Saturday, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office Detectives Peter Drummond and Richard S. Johnson were dispatched to a mansion on North Ocean Boulevard.

Detective Johnson was in his early thirties, a big athletic guy, ex-Marine, and a recent hire from Dade County. Detective Sergeant Drummond was in his sixties, a big, robust black man with a face almost devoid of expression due to nerve damage associated with a large burn scar that began beneath his right eye and spread over much of his cheek to his jaw.

Johnson knew he was lucky to have Drummond as his partner. The sergeant was a legend in the department, one of those men who had a knack for figuring out how criminals, especially murderers, thought.

Sergeant Drummond took a left off North Ocean Boulevard and pulled through open gates into an Italianate manor’s courtyard where two cruisers, a medical examiner’s van, and a midnight-blue Rolls-Royce were parked.

“Who the hell can afford to live like this?” Johnson asked.

“Around here,” Drummond said, “lots of folks. And definitely Dr. Stanley Abrams. He owns a big plastic-surgery clinic. They call him the Boob King.”

They climbed out of the unmarked cruiser into heat that was ungodly despite the proximity to the ocean.

“I thought most of the super-rich along Ocean Boulevard headed north for the summer,” the younger detective said.

“Most do,” the sergeant replied. “But guys like Abrams stay around no matter how hot it gets.”

One of the uniformed deputies showed them into the house — a castle, really, with so many hallways and rooms that Detective Johnson was soon lost. They climbed a grand staircase, passing an oil painting of a pretty woman in a ball gown, and heard the sound of a man crying.

They entered a bedroom suite and found a slight man in a hall off the bedroom sitting on a padded bench, head down.

“Dr. Abrams?” Drummond said.

The plastic surgeon looked up, revealing a smooth-featured face and a full head of hair that spoke to Johnson of multiple procedures, including hair plugs.

Drummond identified himself, told Abrams he was sorry for his loss.

“I don’t get it,” Abrams said, composing himself. “Ruth was the happiest person I know. Why would she do this to herself?”

“No inkling that she might have been thinking of suicide?” Drummond asked.

“None,” the doctor said.

“Nothing that had upset her lately?” Johnson asked.

The plastic surgeon started to shake his head, but then stopped. “Well, Lisa Martin’s death last week. They were close, ran in the same circles.”

Both detectives nodded. They’d caught that case too. But the death of Lisa Martin, another Ocean Boulevard resident, had been ruled accidental. She’d knocked a plugged-in Bose radio into the tub while she was taking a bath.

“So your wife was sad about Mrs. Martin’s death?” Drummond said.

“Yes, sad and upset,” Abrams said. “But not enough to... Ruth had everything to live for, and she loved life. My God, she’s the only person in this town, including me, who’s never been on antidepressants!”

“You found her, sir?” Johnson asked.

The surgeon’s eyes watered, and he nodded. “Ruth had given the staff the weekend off. I flew in overnight from Zurich.”

“We’re going to take a look,” Drummond said. “You touch anything?”

“I wanted to cut her down,” Abrams said, looking into his hands. “But I didn’t. I just... called you.”

He sounded lost and alone. Johnson said, “You got family, sir?”

Abrams nodded. “My daughters. Sara’s in London, and Judy’s in New York. They’re going to be...” He sighed and started to cry again.

Drummond went into the bedroom, Johnson trailing him. The detective sergeant stopped, studying the corpse in situ.

Ruth Abrams hung by a drapery cord that was suspended from a chandelier above the bed and cinched tight around her neck. She was a small-framed woman, no more than one hundred and ten pounds, and wore a black nightgown. Her face was swollen and mottled purple. Her legs and feet were a darker maroon because of the blood that had settled.

“You have a time of death?” Drummond asked the medical examiner, a young Asian woman who was making notes.

“Eighteen to twenty hours is the best I can do for now,” the ME said. “The air-conditioning throws things a bit, but it looks straightforward to me. She hung herself.”

Drummond nodded without comment, eyes on the body. He walked over to the bed and stopped about a foot away from it. Johnson did the same on the opposite side.

It looked straightforward to Johnson too. She’d apparently put an upside-down wastebasket on the bed to stand on while she got the noose around her neck and then she’d kicked it away. There it was, on the rug to the right of the bed. She’d hung herself. End of story.

But the sergeant had put on reading glasses and was studying the bedspread, which was bunched to the left side of the bed. He peered at the woman’s neck, livid and abraded from the cord, and then removed his glasses to study the knots that held the cord to the chandelier.

“Seal the house, Johnson,” Drummond said at last. “This was no suicide.”

“What?” the young detective said. “How can you tell that?”

The sergeant gestured to the bedspread and around the bed. “This looks like a struggle to me.”

“People struggle when they hang themselves.”

“True, but the sheets are all dragged to the left, meaning that the body was dragged up the right side, and the wastebasket was then placed on the right to suggest suicide,” Drummond said.

Johnson saw what the sergeant was talking about but wasn’t convinced. Drummond pointed to her hands.

“Broken and torn fingernails,” he said. “There’s a chip of the polish in the braids of the drapery cord. That and the vertical scratches above the neck suggests she was tearing at the cord during the initial struggle, which took place at ground level. And see how the livid lines are crisscrossed above and below the cord?”

Johnson frowned. “Yes.”

“They shouldn’t be there,” the sergeant said. “If she’d kicked the wastebasket, the cord would have caught all her weight almost immediately. There’d be one line behind and along the cord, and we might see some evidence of the cord abrading the skin as it slid into position.

“But these two clear lines suggest that the killer flipped the cord over Mrs. Abrams’s head from behind and throttled her. She fought, tore at her throat with her fingers, and maybe kicked at her killer. In any case, she created slack in the noose. The cord slipped, and the killer had to set it tight again, here. She was dead before she was hung up there. See the grooves along the cord where it’s tied to the chandelier? That’s from the killer hauling the body up.”

The young detective shook his head in admiration. Drummond’s legend was real, and the evidence was so clear once you heard him explain it.

“You want me to call in a full forensics team?” Johnson asked.

“I think that would be a very good idea.”

Chapter 27

Starksville, North Carolina

The woods across the street from the church were thick with mosquitoes and biting flies that swarmed around me and Bree as we made the hike into the old quarry. Though it was muggy and hot, we were glad we’d taken Naomi’s advice and put on long pants and long-sleeved shirts and doused ourselves with bug repellent.

We each carried a knapsack, and between the two we had several water bottles, a measuring tape, a camera, zip-lock bags, files with pictures of the crime scene, police diagrams, and copies of the notes Detectives Frost and Carmichael had taken when Rashawn Turnbull’s body was found.

The overgrown trail wound through stands of stinging nettles and brush choked with kudzu. There was no wind. The air was oppressively humid, and the whine of insects was enough to drive us crazy by the time we crossed the stream. The path followed the waterway through a shaded, man-made gap in the limestone wall, ten, maybe fifteen feet wide and forty feet high. The creek spilled over its banks passing through the gap, making a large section of the ground mossy and slippery, and we had to support each other until we were out the other side and into the sunbaked quarry.

Bree looked back through the gap. “The killer supposedly brought Rashawn through there, but I can’t see him dragging the boy in.”

I nodded. “He’d have fallen. They both would have fallen.”

“Any notes about that moss and slime in there being torn up?”

“Not that I saw. Then again, it rained late that night. Hard.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” Bree insisted. “I don’t think Rashawn was dragged in. He went along, which means he knew his killer.”

The police thought so too. It was in the indictment.

“I’ll buy it,” I said. “What else?”

Bree smiled. “I’ll let you know when I see it.”

We moved closer to the stack of rock slabs, stopped where we had perspective. I got out the crime scene photographs, glanced at the sky for strength, and then divorced myself from being a father, a husband, a human being. It’s the only way I can get beyond the things I have to witness and do my job.

But when I saw the first picture, a shudder went through me. The small, almost naked body lay facedown, straddling the top stone, wrists bound behind his back with a canvas belt. The arms appeared dislocated. His jeans were bunched around his right ankle, and jagged bone stuck out of the skin of the lower left leg. The head was so battered and swollen it was unrecognizable as a boy’s.

“God help me,” Bree said, and she looked away. “Who does something like this to a poor little guy like that?”

“Someone with a lot of pent-up rage,” I said, looking toward the stack of rocks.

“Which the prosecution says was Stefan’s reaction to Rashawn rejecting him,” Bree said.

“I don’t buy that,” I said. “This level of viciousness suggests pathological hatred or sadistic insanity, not a fit of revenge.”

We stood there forty feet from the stack and forced ourselves to go through the photographs. They ran the gamut from close-ups of various pieces of evidence in the order they were discovered to a dozen photos of Rashawn’s brutalized body, including his sawed neck.

In the pictures, the surface of the slab around Rashawn was pale pink, blood diluted by rain. It had spilled down over the other slabs and run out in fingers onto the stone floor. Seven feet from the stack, the blood disappeared into a debris field of baseball- to football-size chunks of limestone that ended at the creek forty-two feet away.

Rashawn’s sneakers, torn Duke Blue Devils T-shirt, and underwear were all found within a twenty-five-foot radius of the stack. So was the prosecution’s most damning piece of evidence. A photo showed a white card smeared with mud tilted down between chunks of limestone thirteen feet due east of the body; in the next photograph, the same item had been turned faceup, revealing a bloodied Starksville School District ID with a picture of my cousin Stefan Tate.

Chapter 28

In our conversation at the jail the day before, Stefan had told me that the last time he distinctly remembered having the ID was three days before the killing. He said that while coaching a tenth-grade gym class outside, he’d stuck it in the pocket of a windbreaker that he’d then placed on a bleacher. He forgot he’d put the ID in there until the next day. When he looked, he couldn’t find it.

His fiancée, Patty Converse, had been teaching a class at the same time in the same area, so as many as sixty kids had been in the vicinity of the windbreaker and the ID card. The only identifiable fingerprints on the ID, however, belonged to Stefan, who had failed to report the card missing.

My cousin’s fingerprints were also on a plastic sandwich bag found in the quarry seventeen feet east of the ID. The sandwich bag was rolled and sealed inside a larger zip-lock bag. That same sandwich bag contained drugs packaged for sale in cellophane wrappers: six grams of black-tar heroin, three grams of cocaine, and nine grams of crushed crystal methamphetamine.

My cousin had no explanation for the prints on the bag; he speculated that someone could have gone into his trash at school and retrieved a bag he’d discarded after lunch one day.

It was entirely possible but a flimsy defense. The preponderance of the evidence said Stefan was there that night.

“Let’s get closer and recheck everything,” I said. “Position of evidence, measurements, photographic angle, anything we can think of.”

“A lot can change in two months, Alex,” Bree said doubtfully as we walked up to the stack of rocks where Rashawn Turnbull had been tortured and killed. “There’s nothing here that looks remotely like blood. In fact, it’s almost like it’s been scrubbed.”

I could see what she was talking about. There were swirls and shallow gouges on the surface of the top slab and down the side, as if someone had scoured the area with an abrasive cleanser and a steel brush. Looking around, I wondered what else might have been sanitized after the police had gathered their evidence.

To further confuse things, the area was littered with broken beer and whiskey bottles, shotgun shells and.22 rifle casings, fast-food wrappers, broken plastic utensils, and several empty cans of Mountain Dew.

“All this stuff was tossed here after Rashawn’s death?” Bree asked.

I shrugged. “We’ll have to compare the photographs to what’s there now.”

“But they didn’t photograph every inch beyond the twenty-five-foot perimeter, did they?”

“Not from the looks of it,” I said. “We’ll have to do the best we can with what we’ve been given.”

I started checking measurements and comparing the pictures to the current situation. The crime scene diagrams showed the entrance gap as sixty-six and a half feet from the stack. I used a small laser range finder and noted it was closer to seventy. That was unimportant in itself, but it suggested that the rest of the forensics work might have been shoddy too.

I used the range finder again to tell me where the ID card and drugs had been found. Compared with the photographic evidence, those locations were also off by a foot or more. And many of the rocks had been overturned or moved slightly from the positions shown in the pictures.

Still, I noted the trend line created by the rock stack, the ID, and the drugs. The position of the three suggested someone leaving the stack and heading due east, toward the creek. This jibed with the police theory that the killer had escaped over the rocks, gone into the water, and then waded out of the quarry.

I continued along the trend line, noting by the pictures that no stone in the twenty-four feet between the drugs and the water had been left unturned. According to the file, police had found no more evidence along the route, but I went all the way to the creek anyway.

Rock-bottomed and algae-bloomed, the stream was no more than eight inches deep and sixteen inches wide. It ran lazily from my left to my right into and under the bramble of brush I’d seen from the lookout earlier that morning.

I got down into the water and walked in the stream, seeing how the willows overhung it. If things hadn’t changed considerably in the past months, a man would have had to crawl through there. A woman too.

Why do that? Why use the stream at all? It’s the dead of night. Why not just go out the way you came in?

I supposed someone could argue that Stefan would seek the water to keep his trail scent-free. But it had been raining when the killer left. And what had caused the fleeing murderer to drop the ID and the drugs? A pocket torn during the struggle?

I crouched to peer through the limbs and vines and saw where the creek broke free forty feet on, close by the gap in the quarry wall. On the banks, caught up in the roots, there was plenty of trash: beer cans, a plastic milk jug that looked like it had taken a shotgun blast, and a length of faded orange twine twisted through the roots like a game of cat’s cradle.

Toward the far end was what looked like a rusted bike handlebar, and—

Behind me, near Bree, a bullet ricocheted off stone a split second before I heard the distant muzzle blast of a high-powered rifle.

Chapter 29

I threw myself back and down into the stream, digging for my gun and screaming, “Bree!”

I heard the second round slap limestone before the report, and then she yelled, “I’m okay, Alex! Shooter on the northeast rim, left of the overlook!”

My backup pistol in hand, I raised my head, found the forested northeast rim, and caught something glinting in the trees a second before the third shot. This one was aimed at me.

The bullet blew up a small rock four feet in front of my position, throwing stone and grit in my face before I could duck.

Bree opened up with her nine-millimeter, three quick shots and then two more, all Hail Marys at better than two hundred yards. But the counterattack seemed to make the sniper think better of continuing to shoot at us.

For almost a minute, there was nothing. I put my face in the water, eyes open to wash them out. I raised my head and blinked before hearing the sound of an engine starting and rubber tires spitting gravel.

I stood, looked up blurrily, and saw a white flash as the shooter went past.

“Was that an Impala?” I yelled.

“Couldn’t tell!” Bree shouted back. “You okay?”

“Better than I might have been,” I said, blinking and wiping at my eyes until I could see reasonably well.

Bree was standing on the opposite side of the rock pile, scanning the rim in case there were others waiting to shoot.

“Where’d the first two rounds hit?” I asked when I reached her side.

“First shot, he had me exposed from the waist up and hit there,” she said, pointing to a fresh chip in the limestone four feet to her right. Then she pointed to a second chip on the surface of the top slab, eighteen inches in front of her. “I’d already dropped behind the stack when that one hit.”

I shaded my eyes with my hand, peered toward the spot where I’d seen the glint of the sun on a rifle scope. “Has to be better than two hundred and fifty yards,” I said. “But there’s no wind.”

“What are you saying?”

“The guy who shot Sydney Fox was an experienced rifleman at close range,” I said. “If this was the same guy, he’s military-trained or a practiced hunter, so with the right kind of rest, he should have hit us easily.”

Bree said, “Or maybe he’s a local hunter who’s good in thick cover around here, a quick shooter who falls to pieces at long distances.”

“Or the sight was off,” I said. “Or he intentionally missed us.”

“To scare us?”

“And let us know we’re being watched, and probably followed.”

Bree looked around, said, “I feel like a sitting duck out here.”

I did too, and I couldn’t shake the sensation. We decided to leave, call the sheriff’s office, and figure out where the shooter had been. But I went through the slippery gap in the wall feeling like there might be other things to be found in that quarry. I vowed to return the next day.

Once I had cell service, I called the only cop I’d met since arriving in Starksville who seemed more than merely competent. Detective Pedelini answered on the second ring. I told him what had happened. Pedelini said he was no more than twenty minutes away and would meet us at the lookout.

“Do not go into those woods without me,” Pedelini said.

We didn’t. He rolled up in an unmarked white Jeep Cherokee five minutes after we did. We walked him through it, pointing to the positions we’d been in when the shooting started and giving him our rough estimate of where the sniper had been.

Pedelini nodded, said, “Do not get ahead of me.”

The detective started hacking his way through kudzu with a machete he’d gotten from a box in the rear of the Cherokee. From our angle, the sniper had appeared to be very close to the rim, but we soon discovered that six or seven feet back from the edge, the ground turned too steep for anyone to walk on safely.

Pedelini stopped where the footing was treacherous, and we all had to hold on to trees for support.

“Here’s your shooter,” he said, pointing with the machete to scuff marks in the leaves. “There’s the legs of his bipod biting in.”

I stepped up, saw the two holes in the duff, and showed Bree where ferns had been matted down. “He was sitting, feet propped against those tree roots, and on a steady rest.”

Pedelini listened to our theories as to why a good shot on a steady rest would have missed us out there in the open, and he said all of them were reasonable but none conclusive. We searched the area and found no empty cartridges, meaning that the shooter had taken the time to clean up, which suggested he was smart and nothing more.

Pedelini led us out of the woods. We were all drenched in sweat, and we climbed into the detective’s air-conditioned car.

“What were y’all doing down there?” Pedelini asked.

“Due diligence,” I said. “I like to walk crime scenes if I can.”

“Find anything?”

“Some of the measurements on the diagrams are off,” I said.

The detective looked disgusted. “Measurements. That’s Frost and Carmichael’s work. Any other flaws?”

He said this with no defensiveness in his voice, as if he were merely looking for pointers from more experienced investigators.

Bree said, “Looks like someone’s been into that rock pile and scoured the slabs with a steel brush and an abrasive cleanser.”

Pedelini looked pained. “Cece Turnbull did that ’bout six weeks after Rashawn died. She’d heard that some of the local kids had been going out to see where her boy had been raped and killed. Like a fucking shrine. Can you imagine?”

Pedelini’s cheek twitched and his jaw drifted left of center before he said, “Anyway, Cece had gone back to drinking and drugging by then, and she flipped. She brought in a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and some meth and went at that slab with a barbecue brush and graffiti remover. I found the poor thing down there the next morning, stone drunk and weeping.”

Chapter 30

Pedelini had us follow him down to the sheriff’s office to make a statement. By the time we got there, it was past three that Saturday afternoon, and the uniformed officers were changing shifts.

The detective showed us into the detectives’ bullpen and pointed us to chairs near his desk, which featured a recent picture of him in a tricked-out bass boat, grinning and fishing with two darling little girls.

“Your daughters?” Bree asked.

The detective smiled, said, “Two of the joys of my life.”

“They’re beautiful,” I said. “When did your wife pass away?”

My wife frowned at me, but Pedelini cocked his head, said, “How did you know?”

“The way you were rubbing the ring finger of your left hand just then. I used to catch myself doing it after my first wife died.”

Pedelini looked down at his hand, said, “Remind me not to play poker with you, Dr. Cross. My Ellen died seven years ago this September. Childbirth.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Detective,” I said. “That’s rough.”

“I appreciate that,” Pedelini said. “I really do. But the girls and my job keep me going. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea? Coca-Cola? Mr. Pibb?”

“I’ll take a coffee,” Bree said. “Cream, no sugar.”

“A Mr. Pibb,” I said. “Haven’t had one of those in years.”

“I’m partial to them myself,” Pedelini said, and he disappeared down a hallway.

“I like him,” my wife said.

“I do too,” I said. “He’s solid.”

A female deputy came into the room carrying an armful of files and mail that she distributed to the various desks. When she got to Pedelini’s, she said, “Guy here?”

“Getting us something to drink,” Bree said.

She nodded, put several dusty old files on his desk, said, “Tell him these came over from the clerk. He’s been asking after them.”

“We’ll do that,” I promised, and the deputy moved on.

I had a crick in my lower back suddenly, and I stood to stretch. When I did, I happened to look down at the files; I saw the faded labels on the tabs, and felt my head retreat by several degrees.

The label of the file on top read Cross, Christina.

The one below it read Cross, Jason.

I picked up the file on my mother and was about to flip it open when Bree said in alarm, “Alex, you can’t just start going—”

“Oh, Jesus,” Pedelini said.

I looked up, saw the detective balancing a coffee mug and two cans of Mr. Pibb on a small tray. His skin had lost three shades of color.

“I am so sorry, Dr. Cross,” he said, chagrined. “I... I ran your name through our databases, and those files came up. So I... requested them.”

“My name?” I said. “What are these?”

Pedelini swallowed, set the tray down, and said, “Old investigative files.”

“On what?” Bree said, standing to look.

The detective hesitated, and then said, “Your mother’s murder, Dr. Cross.”

At first I thought I’d misheard him. I squinted and said, “You mean my mother’s death?”

“I don’t think so,” Pedelini replied. “They were filed under homicide.”

“My mother died of cancer,” I said.

The detective looked puzzled. “No, that’s not right. The database says murder by asphyxiation, case eventually closed due to the death of chief suspect, who was shot trying to escape the police and fell into the gorge.”

In total shock, I said, “Who was the chief suspect?”

“Your father, Dr. Cross. Didn’t you know?”