Cross Justice

Chapter 31

Three hours later, Bree drove us back through the streets of Birney. The pain of reading those files was still raw, still searing.

Bree put her hand on mine, said, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now, Alex. But I’m here for you, sugar. Any way you need me, I’m here for you.”

“Thank you. I... this just changes everything, you know?”

“I know, baby,” Bree said, and she pulled up in front of the bungalow where the files said my dad had smothered my mother with a pillow.

I got out of the car feeling like I’d just been released from the hospital after a life-threatening illness, weak and unsure of my balance. I started toward the front porch with my mind playing tricks on me, seeing flashes of shattered, disjointed memories: my boyhood self running down the train tracks in the rain; watching my father being dragged by a rope; and, finally, staring at my mother’s dead body in her bed, looking so frail, and small, and empty.

I don’t remember falling, only that I hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of me and set my world spinning.

“Alex?” Bree cried, rushing to my side.

“I’m okay.” I gasped. “Must have tripped or... Where’s Nana?”

“Probably inside,” Bree said.

“I need to talk to her,” I said.

“I know you do, but—”

“Dad!” Ali cried, pushing open the screen door and jumping off the stoop.

“I’m okay, son,” I said, getting to my feet. “Just haven’t eaten enough.”

The door slammed again. Naomi came out, looking concerned.

“He got a little dizzy,” Bree explained.

“Where’s Nana?” I asked.

“At Aunt Hattie’s,” she said. “They’re making dinner.”

“I think you need to go inside and lie down, Alex,” Bree said.

“Not now,” I said, and I fixed on my aunt’s house like it was a beacon in the night.

I took my tentative first steps still bewildered and seeking solace from my grandmother. But by the time I was on Hattie’s porch, I was moving fast, angry and seeking answers.

I stormed inside. Aunt Hattie, Aunt Connie, and Uncle Cliff were in the kitchen. My aunts were dipping tilapia fillets in flour, getting them ready to fry, when I walked in and said, “Where’s Nana?”

“Right here,” she said.

My grandmother was tucked into a chair on my left, reading a book.

I went to her, loomed over her, my hands balled into fists, and said, “Why’d you lie to me?”

Nana Mama said, “Take a step back there, young man. And what’d I lie to you about?”

“My mother!” I shouted. “My father! All of it!”

My grandmother shrank from me and raised her arm defensively, as if she thought I might hit her. The truth was I’d been on the verge of doing just that.

It rattled me. I stepped back, glanced around the room. My aunts were staring at me in fear, and Bree and Jannie and Ali and Naomi had come in and were looking at me like I had gone mad.

“None of that now,” Uncle Cliff roared, standing up with his walker and shaking his finger at me. “No mugging old ladies on my train. You sit your ass down, show me your ticket, or I will throw you off, next stop. You hear?”

Uncle Cliff trembled with force, and I was suddenly a kid again, weak and dizzy. I grabbed a chair and sat, put my head in my hands.

“Alex, what’s happened?” Nana Mama demanded.

“Just tell me why you all lied to me,” I said with a groan. “That’s all I want to know.”

Chapter 32

“I swear to you, I knew nothing about this!” Nana Mama cried after Bree told her what we’d read in the files. She looked to my aunts, said, “Is this true? Did you know?”

Aunt Hattie and Aunt Connie were holding on to each other in such a way that they didn’t have to say a word.

“Why?” Bree asked.

“Because,” Aunt Hattie said, her voice shaking. “Those terrible things that went on, they were so traumatic, so horrible, that you, Alex, blocked it all out. It was like you’d never seen what happened to your father. We figured it was nature’s way of helping you deal with it and that you’d be better off believing your mom died from the cancer and your dad from the drinking and the drugs.”

“But why lie to me?” my grandmother demanded, as shaken as I’d been.

“You’d been through so much already and gone so far in life, Regina,” Aunt Connie said, choking. “We didn’t want to make you suffer any more than you had to. Alcohol and drugs, you could understand. Jason had been headed for that early grave already. But his killing Christina, and then the way he died. We just couldn’t tell you. We thought it would break your heart when your heart needed to be strong for Alex and his brothers.”

Nana Mama gazed off into a distance, her lower lip quivering, then looked at me and started to weep.

I went to her, got down on my knees, and laid my head in her tiny lap, feeling her anguish as my own, feeling her tears splash on my face as I said, “I’m sorry I called you a liar.”

“I’m sorry ’bout everything, Alex,” she said, stroking my head the way she used to when I first went to live with her. “I’m sorry about every bit of it.”

There was a heaviness in the air when we finally got around to eating. No one said much the rest of the night. Or at least, I don’t remember anything specific until I went to my aunts after dessert and forgave them. They cried all over again when we hugged.

Aunt Connie said, “We didn’t mean all this to come out.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“You sure?” Aunt Hattie asked.

“You were trying to protect me,” I said. “I get that.”

Aunt Connie said, “But you still don’t remember anything?”

“I’ve been getting flashes,” I admitted. “But not much more than that.”

Aunt Hattie said, “Maybe that’s all God wants you to remember.”

I nodded, kissed them both, and went out the door after my family. Jannie was already heading up the porch stoop to our bungalow. Bree was walking along with Ali and Naomi. Ali saw me, turned, and ran back.

I put my arm around my boy’s shoulder, said, “See the lightning bugs?”

“Yeah,” Ali said, like he didn’t care.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

“Dad?” he said, not looking at me. “Can we go home?”

“What? No.”

“But I don’t like this place,” he said. “I don’t have any friends, and I don’t like how it hurts you to be here. And how it hurts Nana.”

I picked up my youngest and held him tight to me, saying, “I don’t like how it hurts either, son. But I promised I’d help Stefan. And in this life, a man is only as good as his word.”

Chapter 33

After mass that Sunday morning, Nana Mama and I dropped Bree and the kids back at the bungalow. I drove us close to the arched bridge and parked. My grandmother took my arm, and we walked slowly out onto the span above the gorge.

The Stark River was roaring down there, throwing up white haystacks, spinning into dark whirlpools, and surging against the walls as far as the eye could see downstream. I remembered my parents were always telling me and my brothers never to go near the bridge or the river.

“Dad used to say there was no worse way to die than drowning,” I told Nana Mama. “I honestly think he was scared of the gorge.”

“Because I taught him to be scared of it,” my grandmother said quietly. “My little brother, Wayne, died down there when he was six. They never found his body.”

She said nothing for a few long moments, just stared at the roiling water four stories below us like it held terrible secrets.

Then Nana Mama shook her head. “I can’t bear to think of how terrified your father must have been as he fell.”

“According to the report, he was probably dead before he hit the water.”

“And you don’t remember any of it?” she asked.

“I had a nightmare last night. It was raining and there was lightning, and I was running down the tracks and then toward the bridge. I saw flashing lights before I heard gunshots. And then there were men out on the bridge, looking over, just like we are now.”

“What a waste,” my grandmother said. “Just a wasted, tragic life.”

She started to cry again, and I hugged her until she calmed.

Wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, she said, “Do you think that’s all there is about what happened? That report?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s a couple of people I’d like to talk to about it.”

“You’ll let me know?”

“If I find something, you’ll know it,” I promised.

On the ride back to the bungalow, I drove through the east end of Birney so Nana Mama could see the house she’d been living in when Wayne died. I pulled over next to the ramshackle building. It was just two blocks from the river.

“I’ll never forget that day,” she said, gesturing at the house. “I was eight and there on that porch playing with one of my friends when my mama came out the house, asked where Wayne had gotten to. I said he’d gone off down the street to see his buddy Leon.

“She went down after him to Leon’s house, which was right there on the corner of South Street across from the gorge,” she went on. “Mama saw Wayne and Leon over on the rocks above the river. She saw him fall. You could hear her screaming all the way here. She never got over that. The fact that his body was never found just ate her up. Every spring she’d make my dad go downriver with her to where the gorge spills onto the flat so they could see if the floods had swept Wayne’s body out. They looked for twenty years.”

“I’m beginning to see why you wanted to leave this place,” I said.

“Oh, your grandfather saw to that,” she said.

“What was he like?” I asked. “Reggie.”

“Huh,” Nana Mama said, as if she didn’t want to talk about him, but then she did. “He was not like anyone I’d ever met before. A charmer, I’ll give him that. He could sweet-talk like it was his second language, and the way he told you about his adventures at sea made you want to listen forever. He swept me off my feet with those stories. And he was handsome, and a good dancer, and he made a lot of money, by Starksville standards.”

“But?”

Nana Mama sighed. “But he was away five, six months a year. I’m sure he caroused outside our marriage when he was in foreign ports because he wasn’t shy about doing it when he came home. Got to the point where all we did was fight. He didn’t mind drinking while we fought, and he didn’t mind using his fists either. I decided one day that, despite my marriage vows, that wasn’t the life I wanted, or deserved. So I divorced Reggie and got enough money out of it to go on up to Washington and start all over. All in all, it was the best move I’ve ever made.”

She fell silent then for a few moments. “You saw Reggie’s grave?”

“He’s with his parents,” I said.

“Always liked Alexander and Gloria. They treated me kind, and they loved your father, especially Alexander.”

“I was named after him,” I said.

“You were.”

“He was a blacksmith.”

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bree said, “We’re police detectives.”

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

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

“Then what are you doing here?”

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

“What for?”

“Because my cousin is Stefan Tate.”

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

The curtain fluttered shut.

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

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

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

There was no answer for several beats.

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

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

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

Chapter 35

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A very smart boy,” I said.

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

“Tell us about Stefan Tate,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rashawn told you that?” I asked.

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

“Which was like what?” Bree asked.

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

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

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

Rashawn’s mother yanked her arm away, turned her back on Bree, protecting the pipe, and sneered, “It’s the only thing that does.”

I said, “Are you planning to go to the courthouse tomorrow?”

Cece snatched up the small butane torch and backed away to the other side of the table, glaring at us.

“You not going to start in on that, are you?” she demanded. “I already heard an earful on that today.”

She lit the torch and stared greedily at the pipe bowl as she sucked and laid the flame. She took a whole lungful, held it, then rocked her head back and exhaled long and slow. I thought she was going to black out, but she just blinked stupidly at us a few times and then set the pipe down.

“Someone talked to you about being in court tomorrow?” I asked quietly.

The anger had left her, replaced by scorn.

“Harold and Virginia, dear Moms and Pops,” she said, plopping into a chair with a broken seat. She began doing imitations of a proper Southern belle and a deep-voiced man. “‘Straighten up for the trial, Cece. You wouldn’t want to be seen like this.’ ‘You’ve got to do it in honor of your dear Rashawn, Cynthia Claire.’”

She leaned over, grabbed the vodka bottle, took a belt, and went off on a tirade. “The fucking hypocrites. All caring and such, now that he’s dead. Alive, they were ashamed of his blood!”

Cece hugged her knees and shook her head violently. “They still don’t give a shit. Only things those two are concerned about is their money and their precious image in the community.”

Deepening her voice, she said, “‘Don’t want to have Cece do any more damage than has already been done. We must do everything we can to minimize our association with the little dead mulatto. With God’s blessing, none of our posh friends down on Hilton Head will hear a word of it.’”

She took another swig of vodka and stewed there as if she were alone for almost a minute before hanging her head and saying, “I don’t go to court tomorrow, it’s like I’m ashamed of him, ashamed to be his mother, isn’t it?”

Bree said, “If you don’t go, you’re saying you’ve given up on him, that he doesn’t matter to you anymore.”

“But he does matter.” Cece sobbed. “Rashawn was everything to me. The one good and decent thing I ever did in my whole life. And look what happened to him! My God, look what happened to him!”

Bree went over and put her arms around the woman’s heaving shoulders. “I know it seems impossible, but you’ve got to be strong now.”

“I don’t have that kind of strength.” Cece moaned. “I never have. It’s the story of my life.”

“Until today,” Bree said, rubbing her back. “The new story of your life is that you hit rock bottom today, Cece. You hit rock bottom, and from the depths of your despair, you asked for help. And when you did, Rashawn’s spirit reached out, took your hand, and gave you the strength to go into that courtroom tomorrow morning clear-eyed and sober, because only you can be his representative at the trial. Only his mother can stand there for him and make sure justice prevails.”

Head still down, straw hair still hanging, Cece tensed up as if to fight again. Then she shuddered long and slow. And as it died out, something seemed to fall away inside the dead boy’s mother. Cece sagged against Bree, and slept.

Bree glanced over, whispered, “I’ll stay with her. All night if I have to.”

Raw emotion welled in my throat.

“You okay with it?” she asked.

I smiled, said hoarsely, “More than okay.”

“Then why are you upset?”

“I’m not. What you did there with her was... just...”

“What?”

“I have never been more proud to call you my wife, Bree Stone.”

Chapter 36

Palm Beach, Florida

The Mansion had been modeled after a villa on the Amalfi Coast and it had once been a grand place. Now it was showing its age. The grounds weren’t as well tended as they had been. The front gate and door needed paint. Much of the brickwork required pointing. And who knew when the windows had last gotten a proper cleaning?

Coco knew all about the house’s many deficiencies and needs. He just had to look around the bedroom he was in to get upset. The silk wallpaper was separated at the seams in many places and curling back yellow. Scratches and dings showed on almost all the furniture. And the Oriental rugs were starting to look dingy.

Coco refused to dwell on any of it. He chose to ignore what had to be done to the house, just as he had chosen to ignore the Palm Beach Post ’s story on Ruth Abrams’s death.

Instead, he accessorized the three outfits laid out on a kingsize bed. He loved to accessorize. It calmed him as much as cross-dressing did.

For the past hour, ever since he’d read that the police were calling Ruth’s death a homicide, Coco had been adjusting the look of each ensemble using items from a large box of estate jewelry.

Wasn’t it fascinating, how the effect changed so radically with such small modifications? Mother always said image is in the detail, and she was right—

The house phone rang.

Coco ignored it. People were always calling, always hounding, wanting this and that, and he just needed a break from reality for a little while longer.

Is that too much to ask? No. Not at all.

Coco had narrowed the three outfits down to two when the doorbell rang.

They’re coming to my front door now?

He forced himself to swallow his outrage. Nothing was going to interrupt his interlude. Not today. Let them all wait. A party isn’t a party until the life of it arrives. Am I right, Mother?

Coco decided on an ensemble composed of a black taffeta skirt from Argentina, a lavender chiffon blouse with a daring neckline, sheer black hose, and black pumps. He went to a closet door, fished a key off the top of the jamb, and turned the dead bolt.

He pulled open the door. Several bathrobes and kimonos on hooks on the inner side of it fluttered and settled. The walk-in closet was huge and filled with all manner of women’s high fashion beneath clear plastic covers. Much of it went back decades, and he had to go well beyond the vanity and makeup mirror to find space for these new additions.

He hung the Tangerine Dream outfit first, and then the indigo Elie Saab dress. Both of them were definite repeats at some point down the road, he was sure. He placed the gladiator-strap stilettos and the orange sling-back heels on the floor beneath the ensembles and then retrieved the jewelry box.

Coco set it on a shelf beside the vanity and got to work. He taped his gender back, laid on Lancôme foundation, and glued his fake lashes into place. Feeling slightly breathless as he always did when the transformation was fully under way, he set his makeup aside for the moment.

He found a pair of naughty black thong panties left over from a trip to Paris a few years back and slipped them on. Then he put on the garter belt and hose, loving the thick black stripe up the back.

How pulpy!

Now Coco knew who he’d be for the evening, and he looked to a higher shelf filled with old wig boxes. His attention went to a blue one and he retrieved it. He wouldn’t tape the wig in place until he was almost fully clothed, but he couldn’t resist trying it on.

The hair was jet black and pulled back severely into a tight bun. Coco set it on his smooth head, adjusted it, and then eased into the black pumps.

He stepped in front of the mirror and pursed his lips in satisfaction.

Tonight you shall be the Black Dahlia, Coco thought. A sultry Latina with a hint of dominatrix and—

He heard a gasp. His wigged head whipped left.

A chunky, middle-aged black woman in jeans, a dark hoodie, and yellow rubber dishwashing gloves stood in the closet doorway, gaping at him.

“Oh, Jesus, no!” she whispered in a thick accent.

Then she turned and ran.

Chapter 37

Coco kicked off the pumps, tore off the wig, and bolted after her.

The woman wasn’t in shape or athletic, and he caught up to her before she reached the bedroom door. Coco grabbed her by the shoulder, spun the woman around, and pushed her up against the wall.

“What the hell are you doing in my house, Francie?” he demanded.

“I... I forget something important, Mr. Mize,” she said, terrified. “I no know you’re here.”

“Obviously,” Mize said. “What could be so important that you broke into my house wearing rubber gloves, Francie?”

She began to cry. “I was looking for... my bank card. The ATM.”

“You figured out you were missing your bank card three months after I fired you?”

Francie nodded wildly. “Yes. Just yesterday. I look everywhere. I say, this one must to be at the Jeffrey Mize’s house. So I come. I call you from outside. I ring doorbell.”

“To make sure I wasn’t home,” Mize said.

“No! You no answer. You no hear?”

“I was busy.”

His former maid’s gaze flickered down to his black panties, garter belt, and hose, and then back to the eyelashes and makeup.

“I so sorry,” she blubbered. “I see this now.”

“My secret life?” he said. “My closet?”

“I no mean to! I just looking for—”

“Something to steal, isn’t that right?”

“No, Mr. Mize,” the maid said, and she made the sign of the cross.

Mize’s mind turned to Coco’s unique perspective again, and he said, “I was wondering why I’d been missing some of mother’s lesser jewelry. Never suspected you, Francie, but that’s my naturally trusting personality.”

The maid got more frightened. “No, that’s not—”

“Sure it is,” Mize said. “You’re dirt-poor, Francie. So you steal. It’s what you do. It’s what I would do if I were you.”

She clamped her jaw shut and tried to struggle away, but he threw her back against the wall. “Please, Mr. Mize,” she whimpered. “Don’t call police. I do anything, but not that!”

Mize thought, said, “You can keep a secret, can’t you, Francie?”

She seemed not to understand for a moment, but then her head bobbled like a toy. “Of course, I no tell anyone you like dress lady-boy, Mr. Mize.”

He laughed. “Lady-boy? Is that what they’d call me in Haiti?”

Francie’s eyes darted around, but her head started bobbling again. “I sorry, Mr. Mize. Is a bad thing? Lady-boy?”

“You tell me.”

“No, Mr. Mize,” she babbled, “I no care your lady-boy secrets.”

“Then I don’t care you’re a thief, Francie.”

She didn’t know what to say, but she nodded in resignation. “Merci, Mr. Mize. Please, I so sorry.”

“How’d you get in?” Mize asked.

Francie looked down.

“If we’re going to share secrets, we better start by being honest, don’t you think?” Mize said in a more pleasant tone.

Tears dripping down her cheeks, Francie nodded. “I make key last year.”

“Show me?”

The maid pulled off one of her rubber gloves, dug in her back pocket, and came up with the key.

He took it, said, “The alarm code?”

Francie blinked. “You give it to me, Mr. Mize. You no remember?”

That was true. Stupid of me.

“I remember,” Mize said.

“What I do for you?” she ask. “Clean house again? It look like no clean for long time, Mr. Mize.”

“Maybe I’ll take you up on that.”

“Yes, yes,” Francie said. “Anything, Mr. Mize.”

“Who else knew you were coming here to steal?”

“No one! I swear to spirits.”

“Better to work that way, I suppose.”

She nodded again. “No one knows, is better, I think.”

“Makes sense,” Mize said. “What have you stolen from me before?”

Francie looked down again. “Something silver from dining room, and maybe bracelets and necklace in other room.”

“Thin gold bracelets? Little bangles?”

“I so sorry.”

“You were desperate,” he said. “I know what that’s like.”

Francie grabbed his hand and kissed it. “Bless you, Mr. Mize.”

Mize smiled. “Well, then, I know your secrets; would you like to see mine?”

The maid looked torn.

“C’mon, if we’re sharing secrets, we’re friends now,” he said. “Let me show you the closet and all its beauty.”

Francie licked her lips, and then shrugged. “Okay.”

“Real ladies first,” Mize said, and gestured with a flourish toward the open closet door.

Uncertain, she moved past him, crossed the room, and stopped in the closet doorway. She looked around and her eyes widened.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Mize asked.

Francie’s voice was filled with genuine wonder. “I never see such things before this now. Maybe in movies.”

“My mother started the collection,” Mize said, taking a white kimono off the door hook and slipping it over his shoulders. “She loved her clothes, and she taught me to love them too.”

The maid’s face tightened. “Is good. I think.”

“It bonded us,” he said. “See the jewelry box on the vanity? It was Mother’s. She was a spendthrift with exquisite taste in jewelry. Have a look. She’d want you to see.”

Francie glanced at him tying the robe. He stopped, smiling. “Go on.”

The maid went to the vanity. The lights around the mirror were glowing. She opened the lid. Her jaw dropped.

“Now, that’s what you were hoping you’d find, wasn’t it?” Mize asked.

He’d slid in behind Francie. In the mirror, she saw not Mize, but Coco, the smile gone cold, the eyes gone vacant.

Before the maid could reply or even change her expression, Coco flipped the robe’s sash over Francie’s head.

He cinched it nice, tight, and brutal around her neck.

Chapter 38

Starksville, North Carolina

Judging by the turnout for her wake that Sunday evening, Sydney Fox had been a well-liked person in Starksville. Nana Mama and I went to pay our respects while Naomi finished working on her opening statement and watched the kids, and Bree supported Cece Turnbull as she lurched toward a semblance of sobriety.

“A terrible thing,” Nana Mama said as she held tight to my forearm. “Woman like that, in her prime, gunned down on her own front porch. Bad as it was when I grew up here, there was never violence like that.”

“I’ll take your word for your era,” I said. “And, yes, it’s bad, part of a general badness about this town. Do you feel it?”

“Every day since we’ve been here,” Nana Mama said. “I’ll be happy to go home when the time comes.”

“I’m with you,” I said. “And we’ve only been here since Thursday.”

We followed a grief-stricken couple into the mortuary. There were very few dry eyes among the forty, maybe fifty people who had come to pay their respects. We waited in line to offer condolences to Ethel Fox, who wore an old but cared-for black dress she’d bought when her husband passed.

“I only figured to wear it again when I was dead and gone,” Ethel said. “And now, here I am, and there my baby girl is, all sealed up in a box.”

She hung her head and cried softly. “Just isn’t fair.”

Nana Mama patted her on the shoulder, said, “Anything you need, you call Hattie or Connie or me. And I’ll see you at the church tomorrow.”

Ethel wiped tears with a handkerchief, and nodded. “Ten a.m.”

I helped my grandmother into the chapel where Sydney Fox’s body lay in a closed simple casket. It was standing room only, with a crowd of genuine mourners, people who had been deeply touched by the deceased at some point, enough to appear in public and freely express their grief.

Nana Mama took a seat saved for her next to my aunts and Uncle Cliff, who clung to Aunt Hattie’s hand and looked vaguely frightened. Finding a spot just outside the doorway, I watched a few people go to the casket and pay their respects. Then I followed some others into a room where coffee and platters of Aunt Hattie’s cookies and brownies were offered.

Talking with several of the mourners, I learned more about Sydney Fox. How she’d grown up in town. How she’d married her high school sweetheart, who’d turned into a colossal asshole once he found out she couldn’t have kids. And how for years she’d endured his abuse while working as a beloved first- and second-grade teacher in the local elementary school. Many of the people I spoke to were parents of children who’d been blessed to have Sydney in their first years of school.

After a while I got angry. I’d shared just a few words with Sydney Fox, and now that seemed another crime, an armed robbery of my chance to know her.

I got a cup of coffee, ate more peanut butter — M&M cookies than I should have, and wandered back to see if Nana Mama was ready to leave. There were more people streaming in. I scanned their faces, looking for something familiar. Had I grown up with any of them? Would I recognize them after all these years?

The answer was no until I retrieved Nana Mama from the chapel and led her back for some cookies. Across the room, I spotted an imposing African American man in a dark suit, drinking coffee and munching on a brownie. He was familiar enough that I studied him.

Big dude like my best friend, John Sampson. Taller than me. Heavier than me. Ten, maybe fifteen years younger. The suit was expensive, but the body beneath it suggested hard labor. Then he changed one rough hand for another holding the coffee cup, and I knew him in a heartbeat.

I made sure my grandmother was good, walked over to him, and said, “How are you, Pinkie? Been a long time.”

Chapter 39

The face of my Aunt Connie’s only son, Brock “Pinkie” Parks Jr., clouded a bit at my use of his nickname, but then he realized who I was and broke into a grin.

“Alex,” he said, grabbing my hand and pumping it. “Last time I saw you, you gave me a piggyback on the sidewalk in front of Nana Mama’s place.”

I had a vague vision of that and said, “Long time ago. I think you’d break my back if I tried to do that now. I heard life’s been good for you.”

“Was until I heard Sydney died,” Pinkie said, his eyes watering. “Straight up? I loved Sydney. I loved her since I was like eight and she was ten. There was something about her, you know, like things went in orbit when she was around.”

“You ever tell her?” I asked.

“Nah, we were friends, and then not so much after she married Finn Davis,” he said. “He preferred it that way.”

“I heard Finn gave her a rough time,” I said.

“I set him straight once, but what was I gonna do? I got a good life working offshore and just couldn’t be around to protect her, especially when for a while there she didn’t want to protect herself.”

“She divorced him.”

“She told me,” he said, full of regret. “We’d been sending messages on Facebook and stuff, and I’d been meaning to come up to see her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” he said. “Any word on who did it?”

“Looked like a case of mistaken identity to me,” I said, then explained about Stefan’s fiancée being blond too.

Pinkie looked skeptical. “No one’s looked at Finn Davis?”

“We heard racial slurs before the shot,” I said. “They were yelling at Patty.”

“Maybe,” Pinkie said. “But Finn Davis is smart enough to use that as a cover. Then again, he was trained by the best.”

“And who would that be?”

“Old friend of your father,” Pinkie said grimly. “Marvin Bell.”

Before I could say anything to that, Aunt Hattie came in with Uncle Cliff, who was in a wheelchair today. She brightened when she saw us and came over. After greeting her nephew, she excused herself to go talk to Nana Mama and Aunt Connie.

Pinkie knelt down by our uncle, said, “How you doing, Uncle Cliff?”

“Vacation’s been good,” Uncle Cliff said. “Heading back to work next week. Got the City of New Orleans the whole next month. Gonna meet Jason in the Quarter next week, hear us some bad-ass blues and talk old times.”

I said, “My dad died, Cliff.”

My uncle frowned, but then looked at my cousin and got anxious. “That right, Pinkie? When Jason die? Why no one told me that?”

“He died a long time ago, Cliff,” I said. “When I was a boy. He got shot and fell off the bridge into the gorge.”

Clifford got even more anxious. “Pinkie, that ain’t right. Jason dead?”

My cousin licked his lips, glanced at me, and then patted Cliff’s arm and said, “Just like Alex said. You know that. We all know—”

Shouting erupted outside. It sounded like Ethel Fox.

Pinkie and I both left Uncle Cliff and went out on the front porch of the funeral home. Sydney Fox’s tiny mother stood toe to toe arguing with a man a solid foot taller than her. Rangy, with a chiseled, hard face, he was about Sydney’s age and dressed for the occasion in a dark gray suit.

“You’ll go in there over my dead body,” Ethel Fox said.

The man smiled. “She was my wife for years, Ethel. Least you can let me do is pay my respects.”

“You never respected her in life, Finn Davis!” Ethel Fox shouted. “Why should you in death?”

Davis leaned over his former mother-in-law, put his finger on her chest, and said in a low, threatening voice, “’Cause it’s the right thing to do, Ethel.”

Pinkie was off the porch in a shot with me right behind him.

“Back off, Finn,” Pinkie barked. “Back off, or I will bust you up fierce!”

All of a sudden, out from the shadows and between the cars, four men appeared. Every one of them had a tough, hard edge.

“Pinkie Parks,” Davis said slowly, taking a step back from Ethel Fox with an amused expression. “Figured you might be here, so I brought some friends along just in case. Who’s your sidekick?”

“My cousin,” Pinkie said. “He’s a big-time cop, works with the FBI.”

If Davis was impressed or intimidated, he didn’t show it. “Way I heard it, he’s down here trying to get your sick-fuck cousin Stefan off for killing that little boy. That the blood that runs through all you inbred cousins down there on Loupe Street? Sick-fuck blood?”

“Keep it up, and you’ll find out,” I said in a low, level voice.

Davis’s smile turned cold. “You keep it up, the whole lot of you gonna be driven from this town.”

“Leave,” Pinkie said. “You’ve got no legal right to be here, and you certainly have no moral right. So leave.”

Davis hesitated, and then took a step back, hands at his sides, palms exposed. “Have it your way, Ethel,” he said to his ex-mother-in-law. “You mourn dear Sydney. You bury dear Sydney. Next week I’ll go out to the cemetery, pay my respects, and piss on dear Sydney’s grave.”

Chapter 40

Stefan Tate’s trial began in earnest the following morning at eight o’clock sharp. The jury of eight women and four men had been empaneled the week before, and Judge Erasmus P. Varney lived up to his reputation for keeping his courtroom moving at a brisk pace.

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.”

Chapter 41

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.”

Eyes still, Bell smiled with precision. He altered the position of his cup on the saucer by a quarter turn.

“That statement is not true,” he said. “I have never sold drugs or been involved with them. Your mother and father, I actually tried to get them clean, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.”

“Never been involved with drugs?” I said.

“I am involved in business,” Bell said, sipping the coffee. “I have several enterprises, all successful. Why would I need to pursue something risky like drugs?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But every time your name comes up, people tell me that I should be looking at you.”

Bell seemed amused. “Looking at me in what way?”

“As some kind of criminal mastermind,” I said.

Bell laughed, reached for another sugar, said, “That’s a small town with a lot of poor folks for you.”

“What does poor have to do with it?”

“Everything,” Bell said. “Most poor people think that anyone who becomes successful couldn’t have done it legitimately, with initiative, with hard work. It’s just not part of the myth most poor people want to believe. So they sit around and invent bullshit stories to explain things when someone makes it in the world.”

“So there’s nothing to the charge?”

“Zero to the charge,” Bell said, holding my gaze. “How’d you come to be back in town, Detective Cross?”

I had the feeling he knew this, but I played along, said Stefan Tate was my cousin.

“Butcher,” Bell said, hardening. “Sorry that he’s your cousin, but based on what I’ve read, I hope that boy fries.”

“It’s a popular sentiment.”

“There you go.”

“You heard the defense’s position?”

“Can’t say that I have,” Bell said, reaching up to pick a coffee ground off the tip of his tongue.

“Stefan came to believe that there is a large and complex criminal organization operating in Starksville,” I said.

“If there is, I haven’t heard a thing about it,” Bell said.

“They run drugs,” I said. “Maybe more.”

“Maybe more?” Bell said. “Sounds like maybe more bullshit to me. Sounds like a fantasy designed to muddle the facts, which, as I understand them, are conclusive beyond a reasonable doubt. Your cousin murdered that poor boy, and he’s gonna pay for it. I had my way? Someone would rope him up and drag his ass through the streets on the way to the death chamber.”

“If you were running a criminal enterprise, I imagine you would,” I said.

Bell flicked the coffee ground away, leveled his green eyes at me, and said, “If I were you, Detective Cross, I would not be casting aspersions that are unfounded. It looks bad. It looks like you are desperate. If I were you, I’d face the facts about your cousin, pack your bags, and leave the sonofabitch to his fate.”

“That’s not happening,” I said, standing. “Sorry to have taken your time.”

“Anything for the son of an old friend,” Bell said. “But you tell your niece there that if she tries to bring my name up in this trial in any way, I will surely sue her ass from here to Raleigh and back.”

Chapter 42

I remembered Bell’s words as Judge Varney gaveled the court session to a close at five thirty that Monday after four hours of testimony that made my cousin sound like a monster.

Detective Guy Pedelini had gone on the stand first. He’d testified about discovering the body and identified evidence that the district attorney wanted admitted. Chief among them was the semen sample collected off Rashawn Turnbull’s body. It matched Stefan’s DNA. The prosecution also introduced blood matching Rashawn’s that was found on the pruning saw discovered in my cousin’s basement.

Naomi did her best to get the sheriff’s detective to say these things could have been planted, but he was skeptical in the extreme, and the jury took note.

Even more damaging to Stefan’s case was the testimony given by Sharon Lawrence, a teenager I recognized as one of the Starksville girls Jannie had trained with the prior Saturday. On the stand, she was pretty, articulate, and devastating.

Strong began her examination of Sharon Lawrence by getting her to admit that she was ashamed to be there but determined to tell the truth “for Rashawn’s sake.”

The jury reacted sympathetically. I reacted sympathetically.

Sharon Lawrence had been in one of Stefan’s twelfth-grade gym classes. She said there was something between herself and my cousin right from the start.

“Coach Tate was always looking at me,” she said.

“Did you like that?” Strong asked.

Lawrence looked in her lap and nodded.

“Coach Tate make advances toward you?”

The girl nodded again, flushing and kneading her hands. “I knew it was wrong, but he was... I don’t know.”

“Smart? Good-looking?”

“Yes,” she said. “And he seemed to care about everyone.”

Stefan glared at a legal pad during this entire exchange, scribbling with a pen and shaking his head.

“He seemed to care about everyone,” Strong repeated.

“Yes.”

“But especially you?”

Lawrence said, “I guess so. Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing for a while. It was just like flirting with each other.”

“And then?”

“It went further,” she said quietly.

“When was this?”

“Like, a few months after Billy Jameson and Tyler Marin overdosed and died, and a week before Stefan killed Rashawn.”

“Objection!” Naomi cried.

“Sustained,” Judge Varney said. “The jury will ignore that.”

“So tell us what happened,” Strong said.

You could see Sharon Lawrence wanted to be anywhere but in the courtroom as she mustered up her energy and said that after the two overdoses, my cousin became obsessed with finding out who the drug dealers were.

“He talked about it in class,” she said. “Asking anybody who knew anything to come forward.”

“Did they?”

“I don’t know. And it didn’t matter anyway, it was all a bunch of lies.”

“Objection,” Naomi said.

“Overruled,” Judge Varney said.

Strong said, “Can you tell us why you think they were lies?”

“Because Coach Tate was the one dealing the drugs,” Lawrence said.

“Objection!”

“Your Honor, with the court’s indulgence, Miss Lawrence will explain the basis of her contention.”

“Proceed, but you’re on a short leash, Counselor.”

“What makes you think Coach Tate was dealing drugs?”

“He told me,” Lawrence said. “He showed me.”

“Where were you when this happened?”

“At his place.”

“How did you come to be at his house?”

“At school that morning, he’d asked me to stop by,” Lawrence said. “He said Ms. Converse would be down in Raleigh at a doctor’s appointment.”

I glanced over at Patty Converse, who looked stricken.

Strong said, “And Coach Tate showed you drugs?”

“Yes.”

“Did you do drugs with Coach Tate?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of drugs?” Strong asked.

Lawrence bit her lower lip, which was trembling. “I don’t know all of it. Cocaine for sure. And, like, maybe some meth. He called it a speedball. But I think he put something in my soda too.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I woke up a couple of hours later in his bed,” she said, looking at her lap again. “I don’t remember how I got there. But I was naked and... sore.”

“Sore where?”

“You know,” she said, and she started crying.

Strong approached the box, gave her a tissue, said, “You’re doing fine.”

Lawrence nodded, but she wouldn’t look up.

“Was the accused there when you woke up?”

“He came into the room.”

“Did he acknowledge having sex with you?”

“Kind of.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“He said we shared a little secret now. He said if we didn’t keep the secret, I could end up like Billy and Tyler.”

“The kids who overdosed?”

Lawrence nodded and broke down again.

After Sharon had composed herself, Strong asked, “Was the sex consensual?”

“No,” she said forcefully.

“But you’d gone to Coach Tate’s house. You’d done drugs with him. You’d flirted with him. Certainly you must have thought sex might occur.”

“Maybe I did. But I was never given the chance to back out or say no.”

“He just drugged you.”

“Yes,” Lawrence said, her shoulders trembling.

“And he raped you?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you when this happened?”

“Seventeen.”

“You report it?”

She hung her head, said, “Not at first, no.”

“How long did you wait until you reported the rape?”

“Like, the day after they arrested Stefan?”

“Seven days,” Strong said.

“I wish I had come forward straightaway,” Sharon Lawrence said, oozing pain and sincerity. “If I had, maybe that boy would be alive, you know? But I’d seen what Coach Tate was really like, and I was scared for my own life.”

Chapter 43

That evening, dinner at our house was somber and subdued. We were all there except for Naomi, who was working on her cross-examination, and Patty Converse, who’d been so upset by the testimony that she’d gone home alone.

Aunt Hattie looked equally crushed. She sat quietly with Uncle Cliff and Ethel Fox, who was exhausted from a day spent planning her daughter’s funeral but who had insisted on coming over to give her friend moral support.

Aunt Hattie needed it. The Raleigh stations were reporting on Sharon Lawrence’s testimony against her son, focusing as much on her story as on her panties from the day of the alleged rape. Lawrence claimed she hadn’t washed them because she’d been debating whether or not to turn Stefan in.

Naomi had objected to having the panties introduced as evidence, calling them “tainted, at best,” but Varney overruled her after Strong informed the court that a state DNA analyst would testify that dried semen and vaginal fluids found on the underwear belonged to my cousin and Sharon Lawrence.

Things looked bleak for the home team.

“Dad?” Ali asked when I went in to tuck him in for bed. “Can we go fishing sometime while we’re here?”

“Fishing?” I said, flashing on vague recollections of fishing with my father and my uncle Cliff when I was very young.

Ali nodded. “I’ve been watching those shows on the Outdoor Channel. And I met a kid today named Tommy. He says he goes up to Stark Lake fishing with his father. He says it’s fun. Lots of fish.”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know a thing about fishing, but if that’s what you want to do, we’ll figure it out.”

Ali brightened. “Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow could be tough,” I admitted. “But let me find out what we’d need and where we’d go.”

“You could ask Tom’s father,” he said, yawning.

“If I see Tom’s father, I’ll do that,” I said, and I tucked the sheets up around his chin. “Love you, buddy. Have a good sleep.”

“Love you too, Dad,” he said. His eyes were already closed.

When I left the bedroom, Aunt Hattie looked at me and said, “Can you take Cliff over to the house? I’ll be right along.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “Ready, Uncle Cliff?”

My uncle said nothing, just stared off into space. Bree held the door open for me, and I wheeled him down the short ramp to the sidewalk.

“Need help?” Bree asked.

“I got it,” I said. “Be back soon.”

Bree blew me a kiss and went inside. I rolled him to the street, saying, “You still like to fish, Uncle Cliff?”

It was like a lightbulb going on. My uncle went from confused to lucid in two seconds flat. “Love to fish,” he said.

“I heard it’s good up to the lake,” I said.

“Early mornings,” Uncle Cliff said, nodding. “You want to be by the stream inlet on the west shore. Not far from my cabin. You know it?”

“I seem to remember it,” I said. “Where else is the fishing good besides the lake?”

“Those big pools below the gorge are always good for trout early and late.”

“What big pools?” I asked.

“You know. Where your father swam.”

I stopped and came around the front of the chair. “What do you mean? Where did my dad swim?”

My uncle looked at me in renewed confusion, said, “In those pools. All the time when we was kids. Where is he? Jason?”

Aunt Hattie and Pinkie caught up to us. My cousin was carrying the remnants of a pie, and Hattie had two bags of chicken legs.

“Jason’s dead, Clifford,” Hattie said.

My uncle’s expression twisted into shock. “When did he die?”

Hattie said, “Jason died a long time ago. In the gorge.”

Uncle Cliff started to cry. “He was like my brother, Hattie.”

“I know, Cliff,” Hattie said, patting him on the arm and then looking at me and Pinkie, who was upset by the whole thing. “I don’t know what it is. He just gets confused and upset sometimes. I’m so sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” I said.

She came around behind the wheelchair, said, “It’s probably better if I take him from here. Pinkie, can you bring the leftovers?”

My cousin nodded, and I stood there in the street looking after them until they’d gone inside and the lights flickered on.

Hoping to clear my head, get some perspective on the day, I texted Bree that I was going for a walk. Wandering down Loupe Street, I admitted that the evidence against Stefan felt overwhelming. My niece must have thought so too. She’d gone straight to confer with Stefan after adjournment. How was Naomi going to explain the semen? How was she going to cross-examine Sharon Lawrence?

Was Marvin Bell right? Was this a lost cause? Or were my aunts and Ethel Fox right? Were Bell and his adopted son, Finn Davis, involved? Had one of them killed Sydney Fox? Were they behind the criminal enterprise that Stefan suspected was ongoing in Starksville? How would I even go about answering any of those questions?

I still had no clear idea by the time I realized I’d walked all the way to the dark, arched bridge that spanned Stark River. Standing there, hearing the water roaring down in the gorge, I flashed on that dream I’d had of my younger self on the night my father died: running along the tracks through the rain, seeing the police cars with their lights flashing, and what I hadn’t told Nana Mama, what I hadn’t remembered until recently — my father out there on the bridge rail, the gunshot, and my dad falling.

I walked out onto the bridge to roughly where my father had been in my dream and looked down into the blackness, hearing the river at the bottom of the gorge but unable to see it.

A car pulled onto the bridge. The headlights swung over and past me. I ignored them, staring down into the void, and—

The car skidded to a halt right behind me. I pivoted in time to see three men jump out of an old white Impala.

They wore hoods and carried crowbars and a Louisville Slugger.

Chapter 44

I had no time to go for my backup pistol in the ankle holster. They were on me that fast.

The most important thing you can do in a situation like that is pay attention to the open space rather than to attackers or weapons. The more space you have or can create, the safer you are.

I had the bridge railing at my back and three men closing in on me trying to fan out, trying to limit my space. I moved hard to my right, along the rail and at an angle to one of the guys with a crowbar.

He grunted with laughter, raised his weapon, and made to club me down. I stepped forward off the curb with my right foot and spun my left foot back and behind me so the crowbar was no longer headed for my upper back but my face.

Before it could get there, I threw up my hands, reaching in and under the weapon’s arc to grab the guy by the wrist. With my left hand, I twisted the wrist and the crowbar away from me. With the heel of my right hand, I hammered up under the left side of his jaw.

He reeled.

I hit him again, this time with my fist, this time in the throat. There was a crunching noise and he dropped, gagging. I stripped him of the crowbar and took four steps backward, trying to create space again.

One of the other two, the one with the baseball bat, understood what I was trying to do. I looked over and saw there was another guy in the car, behind the wheel of the Impala. The driver threw the car in gear. Tires squealed at me at the same time the guy with the baseball bat jumped forward, the bat raised high over his head like it was an ax.

The Impala was going to mow me down. I jumped onto the oncoming car, rolled up on the hood. The driver hit the brakes. I slammed off the windshield and whipsawed back the other way.

The bat hit me hard in the midback and I was flung off the hood and onto the pavement. The wind was knocked out of me. The headlights blinded me.

But I still held the crowbar, and some deep instinct told me to look away from the headlights and down at the pavement.

“Fucker,” a man grunted. I caught a flash of shadow on the road a second before the boot caught me in the ribs.

I felt a cracking and gasped in pain.

“Cave his frickin’ skull in and be done with it,” snarled a second male voice behind the headlights.

I kept my head down, forcing myself beyond the pain, looking at the street surface. The second I caught a flicker in the shadows, I backhand-slashed out and up with the crowbar.

I felt it connect before I saw the knee buckling in silhouette. I felt the bat glance off the side of my head. It wasn’t a direct hit, but it was enough to make me dizzy and uncertain of what was up and what was down.

The guy I hit was yelling and clutching at his knee. He stumbled and fell against the hood of the car, screaming and clawing at his knee now.

Grunting in pain, still fighting for air, I thought: Two left. Other one with the crowbar. And the driver.

“Shoot him!”

I twisted my head, saw the driver climbing from the car, saw him holding a scoped hunting rifle. As he turned the gun my way, I flung the crowbar at him. It whipped sideways, end over end, and shattered the driver-side window, spraying the gunman with glass.

The rifle went off; the bullet ricocheted off bridge steel.

I heard tires squealing in the distance. Beneath the Impala, I saw headlights coming onto the bridge.

“We’re out of here!” the driver shouted, and he dove into the car.

Fearing he’d run me down as he escaped, I scrambled back toward the sidewalk. The one with the blown knee hopped around the car, jumped into the front seat. The guy with the other crowbar pulled the man I’d dropped into the backseat. I reached the sidewalk, swallowed the pain, and bent my body to get the Ruger from my ankle holster.

Doors slammed. Tires smoked. A pistol came out the window.

I drew mine and fired wildly at the Impala, spiderwebbing the rear passenger window as the car began to accelerate. The guy with the blown knee shot as they passed me. The bullet pinged off steel right by my head.

“Get the fuck out of our town, Cross!” one of them yelled as they sped away. “Or you’ll end up just like your cretin cousin.”

Chapter 45

A blue Dodge ram pickup with Florida plates skidded to a stop beside me.

“Alex!” Pinkie yelled as he jumped from the cab.

“Help me up,” I said, gasping. “Get me out of here.”

“There were shots!” he said.

“Which is why you need to get me out of here,” I said, fighting to get to my feet. “I do not want to talk to the Starksville police.”

Powerful hands caught me under the arms. I gritted my teeth at the pain in my ribs and hobbled to the passenger door. Pinkie lifted me into the truck and had us off the bridge before I heard the police sirens.

My cousin flipped off his headlights and turned down a road that paralleled the gorge. We were a quarter of a mile away before I saw distant blue lights go whizzing by, heading toward the bridge.

“Where to?” Pinkie asked.

“Somewhere we can wait them out for a little while,” I said. “Then we’ll circle back to Birney on the Eighth Street bridge.”

My cell phone rang. Bree.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“With Pinkie.”

“Did you hear those shots?”

“Yes,” I said, and I told her what happened.

“Don’t you think you should go to the hospital?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I want to stay under the radar on this.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain when I get home,” I said. “Give me forty-five minutes.”

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, and I love you.”

“I love you too, Alex.”

I hung up.

We’d left the east side of town and were heading down a long, gradual slope on a windy rural road when Pinkie finally turned his headlights back on.

“What the hell were you doing out on the bridge anyway?” he asked.

I started to tell him about my dream but stopped when I realized that wasn’t why I’d gone out there.

“It was something Cliff said about my dad.”

Pinkie shot me a quick glance. “What about your dad?”

“He said there were deep pools below the gorge, and when I said I didn’t know them, he told me my dad used to swim in them.”

“Okay...”

“I don’t know. The conversation just made me want to go to the bridge and look at the river, you know?”

Pinkie said, “I guess I can see that.”

We were almost to the bottom of the hill by then and traveling through deep forest.

“You know where those pools are?” I asked, looking out the side window.

A nearly full moon hung in the sky, throwing the woods into dark blue light.

Pinkie was quiet, but he slowed the truck and said, “Sure.”

A minute later, he stopped and gestured at a muddy lane that left the pavement. “That will take you in there.”

“Your truck make it?” I asked.

Pinkie hesitated, but then he turned us into a two-track that cut across a wooded pine flat. I could see by the ruts that the road was well used, but the forest pressed in from both sides, and thorny vines and branches scratched at the side of the truck.

Ten minutes later, we pulled into a turnaround. Pinkie stopped the truck, shut off the headlights. Here, where the trees opened up, the moon threw an even brighter light.

“Where are the pools?” I asked.

My cousin pointed at a gravel trail. “They’re not far. Lot of people go swimming here.”

“Got a flashlight?” I asked.

“What do you think you’re looking for, Alex?”

“I don’t know. I just want to see the pools.”

Pinkie paused before he asked, “You sure you’re up to it?”

“You give me a hand over anything rough, I think so.”

He sighed, said, “Suit yourself.”

My cousin came around to my side, opened the door, and helped me out. He fished in a toolbox in the bed of the truck and came up with a portable spotlight. He flicked it on. The shadows fled.

Moving slowly, guarding my ribs, I followed him down the gravel path to a grassy flat area by the banks of the Stark River. Moonlight bathed the place, which featured two large pools almost bisected by an outcropping of granite that looked like a chess bishop laid on its side.

Pinkie turned off the spotlight after we walked out on the ledge. Where the channel narrowed and flowed around the round knob of the outcropping, the current was swift. But in the pools, it was much stiller, and the moon reflected off them brightly. A quarter mile upriver you could make out the wall of the ridge and hear the roar of the water spilling out the mouth of the gorge.

“You ever hear of anyone falling into the gorge and surviving?” I asked.

Pinkie said nothing for several beats before replying, “They got kayakers in there all the time nowadays.”

“I meant a swimmer. Have you ever heard of someone swimming out of the gorge after falling from the arched bridge?”

Pinkie didn’t reply for several long moments. I turned and looked at him in the moonlight. He was staring at the water.

“Only one, Alex,” he said quietly. “Your dad.”

Chapter 46

With the pain in my ribs and the shot I’d taken to the head earlier in the night, I was sure I’d misheard him.

“Did you say my dad?”

Pinkie still wouldn’t look at me, but he nodded.

My stomach fluttered. I tasted bile. I saw dots glistening in front of my eyes and felt like I was going to pass out. Then an irrational anger seized control of me. I grabbed my cousin by his shirt collar.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry, Alex,” Pinkie said, sounding guilty. “Uncle Cliff swore me to secrecy about it years ago.”

I stared at my cousin in disbelief. “You’re saying my father didn’t die that night? He made it through the gorge?”

“Crawled out somewhere right around here,” Pinkie said. “Cliff found him passed out on this ledge long before dawn and long before the police came looking for his body. Your father was seriously busted up.

“Cliff got him out of here, took him to his fishing cabin up on the lake,” my cousin went on. “He nursed him back to health.”

“And told no one?” I asked incredulously.

“Just me,” Pinkie said.

“Why you?”

“Years later, we were up at his cabin. I was probably eighteen. Cliff was away from Aunt Hattie and drinking sour mash. A lot of it. He started getting all sad. And then he started crying, and then he started talking. Once he did, it was like a dam bursting. It all came out.”

Uncle Cliff told Pinkie about finding my dad and getting him to the cabin. He told him how my father had decided it was best if no one but Cliff ever knew he was alive. Nana Mama wasn’t to know. Me and my brothers weren’t to know.

“Why?” I asked, still bewildered and unsure of my emotions, which kept surging all over the place.

“I guess because he did kill your mother,” Pinkie said. “It was an act of mercy, but he killed her, suffocated her. No matter how you looked at it, though, in rural North Carolina, all those years ago, your father was facing a murder charge. Once he healed up, he decided to head south, disappear into a whole other life.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“Yes,” Pinkie replied.

My heart started to hammer in my chest. My father? Alive?

“Where did Uncle Cliff say he went?”

“Florida.”

“Where in Florida?”

“All Cliff knew was that he lived somewhere around Belle Glade, that he worked in agriculture, and that he belonged to a church for a while,” Pinkie said.

“So you’re saying he’s alive?” I asked.

Pinkie sighed and shook his head. “I’m not saying that at all. I’m sorry, Alex. From what I understand, he committed suicide two years after he left Starksville.”

That hit me harder than the kick I’d taken earlier in the evening. One second I was letting the fantasy of actually finding my father build a strange kind of hope in my heart, and the next second I was a grief-stricken boy all over again.

Suicide?

“Thirty-three years ago?” I said, aware of the bitterness in my voice.

Pinkie nodded. “Uncle Cliff said he got a call one night from a woman. She said she’d found Uncle Cliff’s phone number among the effects of a man named Paul Brown who’d committed suicide behind her church. Uncle Cliff said he asked her where she was and she said Belle Glade.”

“What was her name?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Pinkie said. “I don’t know if Uncle Cliff even knew. He was just torn up at your dad killing himself after everything he’d been through.”

I suddenly felt weak and reached out for Pinkie. He grabbed me under the arm, said, “You okay?”

“Not really.”

“Kind of a lot to absorb,” Pinkie said.

“It is,” I said.

“Let’s get you home, have a look at those ribs.”

“Probably a good idea.”

But as I followed him off the ledge, I kept pausing to look at the moon shining on the surface of the upstream pool, and I felt hollow and robbed of something I hadn’t even known I’d had.

Chapter 47

“Time for bath and bed, pumpkin,” he said, wiping chocolate frosting from the corners of the little girl’s mouth.

“Tell me a story, Grandfather?” she asked.

“A good one, Lizzie,” he promised. “You go to Grandma and take your bath. After you get in your jammies, Grandfather will tuck you in and tell you the best story you ever heard.”

“About magical princesses?” She beamed, clasping her hands. “And fairies?”

“What else?”

She kissed her grandfather on the cheek and scampered out of his office and down the hallway. Was there anything better than these moments? Could there be a stronger bond? He thought not. They were more father and daughter than grandfather and granddaughter. It was like they were emotionally welded together in a way that sometimes shocked him.

A phone rang in one of the drawers, broke into his thoughts.

He retrieved the phone, answered, said, “Wait.”

He went to the doorway and heard giggling voices and running water in the bathroom down the hall. Shutting the door, he said, “Talk.”

“They had Cross dead to rights, and they let him get away.”

Lizzie’s grandfather rubbed at his brow, wanted to break something.

“Idiots,” he said. “How difficult can it be?”

“He’s tough.”

“Cross is a goddamned threat to everything we’ve built.”

“Agreed.”

He thought several moments, said, “We need to go professional.”

“You got a player in mind?”

“Contact that woman we used last year. She’ll get it done right.”

“She’s expensive.”

“There’s a reason. Let me know.”

Lizzie’s grandfather broke the burn phone and threw it in the trash. Then he left the office and padded down the hall toward the bathroom. With every step, he turned his thoughts toward magical princesses and fairies.

Chapter 48

Belle Glade, Florida

Early the next morning, Detective Sergeant Pete Drummond drove an unmarked vehicle to the west side of the county, far from the megamansions and the deep blue sea.

Detective Richard S. Johnson looked out the window as they passed what used to be a hospital, and what used to be a grocery store, and a boarded-up shop that used to sell clothes. Some blocks, there were so many abandoned, windowless buildings pocked with bullet holes, it looked like parts of Afghanistan Johnson had seen serving in the Marine Corps.

They crossed a canal and took the Torry Island Road out into agricultural fields south of Pelican Bay on Lake Okeechobee, cane mostly, and corn, and celery. Johnson could see people out there picking in the infernal heat.

Drummond took a left onto a spur road. A sheriff’s cruiser was parked in the turnaround ahead, lights flashing. The county medical examiner’s van was parked beyond it. The sergeant climbed out of the rig, and Johnson followed him.

Deputy Gabrielle Holland got out of her cruiser, said, “Got her all taped off for you, Sarge. We’re just lucky a gator didn’t get to her before I did.”

“You identify her?” Drummond asked.

“Francie Letourneau. She’s from Belle Glade. Haitian immigrant. You know her?”

Drummond shook his head. “I don’t know the Glade like I used to.”

“Nice lady, for the most part. Worked over in Palm, cleaning castles.”

Johnson said, “You were professionally acquainted with the deceased?”

“We got Francie on drunk-and-disorderly a few times, but really, she was just blowing off steam.”

“You got an address for Ms. Francie here?” Drummond asked.

“I can get it,” Holland said.

“Please,” the sergeant said. “We’ll go down and take a look.”

“You might want your boots,” the deputy said as she climbed into the cruiser.

Drummond went to the rear of the unmarked and got out a pair of knee-high green rubber boots. The sergeant glanced at Johnson’s shiny black shoes, said, “You’re gonna need a pair of these for working the west side of the county.”

“Where do you get them?” Johnson asked.

“Best price is that Cabela’s catalog,” the sergeant said as he put them on. “But you can pick up something local at the Bass Pro Shops in Dania Beach.”

Drummond led the way around the cruiser, behind the coroner’s van, and over the bank of an irrigation ditch. Holland had taped off a muddy path that led down to the water.

“That’s the blackest mud I’ve ever seen,” Johnson said.

“Some of the richest soil in the world,” Drummond told him, skirting the tape through thigh-high swamp grass.

Johnson followed. Three steps in, he sank in the mud and lost his shoe.

“Cabela’s,” Drummond called over his shoulder.

The young detective cursed, dug out his shoe, and wiped it on the grass before joining the sergeant down by the ditch. Francie Letourneau’s body lay faceup in the muck, head at the water’s edge, feet oriented uphill. Her eyes were open and bulging. Her face looked particularly swollen. And her feet were bare and muddy.

“Cause of death? Time of death?” Drummond called to the assistant medical examiner, a young guy named Kraft who also wore green rubber boots and stood on a folded blue plastic tarp next to the body.

Kraft pushed back sunglasses, said, “She was strangled thirty-six to forty hours ago. Ligature is deep, and looks like there’s fibers in the wound.”

“She’s been here in this heat the whole time?” Johnson said.

“I don’t think so,” Kraft replied. “She was killed somewhere else and dropped here, probably last night. A fisherman found her at dawn.”

The sergeant nodded. “She got a phone on her?”

“No,” the medical examiner said.

Drummond looked around before crouching to study the body from six feet back. Then he walked up the bank along the tape and looked at the path and the marks in the mud and the footprints, most of which were filled with murky water.

The sergeant gestured to shallow grooves in the mud.

“Her heels made those marks,” he said. “He drags her downhill, holding her under the armpits. Right there, where the grooves get smaller, her shoes come off. Killer dumps the body and goes back for the shoes. So why doesn’t he push the body into the water?”

Johnson said, “Maybe he meant to but something spooked him. A car out on the main road. But why take her shoes? A fetish or something?”

“He didn’t take them,” Drummond said, gesturing across the ditch. “He tossed them. There’s one of them hanging on a branch over there.”

Johnson frowned, saw the shoe, and said, “How’d you see that?”

The sergeant said, “I looked, Detective. They taught you how to do that down in Dade, right?”

Chapter 49

An hour later, Drummond and Johnson were back in Belle Glade and parking in front of the Big O bar, which, according to Deputy Holland, was where Francie Letourneau liked to party.

The Big O was a dive fallen on hard times. The cement floor was cracked and irregular. The blue paint was peeling and chipped. Most of the chairs, barstools, and tables had been carved on. The only part of the place that looked remotely cared for was behind the bar. Hundreds of photographs of happy anglers holding up largemouth bass looked down on the four patrons dressed for fishing and the bartender.

“Cecil,” the sergeant said.

The bartender, an older man with a big potbelly, started laughing. “Drummond. You want a drink?”

“I think you enjoy being my temptation.”

“Hell, yeah,” Cecil said, coming over to shake the sergeant’s hand. “Everyone’s got a job, right?”

“Amen, brother,” Drummond said. “Cecil Jones, meet my partner, Detective Richard Johnson. Miami boy.”

The bartender shook Johnson’s hand, said, “You coming up in the world.”

The young detective smiled, said, “I like to think so.”

Jones looked to Drummond and said, “You gonna set him straight?”

“I’m trying,” the sergeant said.

“I heard they found a body out on the island,” the bartender said.

“Why I’m here,” Drummond said. “Francie Letourneau.”

Jones’s face fell. “Shit. That right? Shit.”

“She’s a regular, then?”

“Not a full-time subscriber, but often enough.”

“She been in recently?”

“Sunday, around noon,” he said, glancing up at the clock. “Had herself an eye-opener, Bloody Mary, double vodka, and then another for courage.”

“Courage?”

“She was heading over to Palm,” Jones said. “Said she had an interview for a new job that was gonna pay her four times what her old one did. I asked her what she needed a job for after hitting the Lotto twice in a month.”

“That right?” Drummond asked.

“Five grand on a scratcher, seven on her weekly play,” Jones said.

“Twelve K’s a lot of money,” Johnson said.

“It is,” the bartender said. “But she said she still needed the work. She’d lost two or three of her regular clients recently. No fault of her own. One got electrocuted in her bathtub.”

Drummond said, “Let me guess: another was murdered.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Jones said. “Wife of that plastic surgeon you see advertising on television all the time. You know, the Boob King.”

Twenty minutes later, they pulled up in front of Francie Letourneau’s small apartment with renewed purpose. The now-dead maid had worked for two now-dead wealthy women from Ocean Boulevard. Ruth Abrams’s death was clearly a murder by strangulation. Now Drummond and Johnson were questioning whether Lisa Martin really had accidentally dropped the Bose radio in her bathtub. Had she been killed too?

They got the landlord to open the maid’s apartment, stepped inside. Johnson gagged at the smell coming from a makeshift altar in the corner.

A rooster’s severed head had been placed upright in the dead center of a tin pie plate. Two inches of chicken blood congealed and rotted around the head. The bird’s feet were there too, set with their talons facing a doll made of bound reeds, stuffed burlap, and cornhusks.

A long thorn of some sort jutted out of the doll’s groin. There were two more thorns in the heart. A fourth one penetrated the top of the head.

“Santeria.” Drummond grunted. “She must not have left it behind in Port-au-Prince.”

“Who’s the doll supposed to be?” Johnson said.

“Let’s figure it out,” the sergeant said.

They searched for almost an hour.

In a manila envelope on a small desk, Johnson found receipts from the prior month for a new couch, television, and Cuisinart food processor. In the top drawer, he found the receipt for the Apple MacBook Pro that was still in the box on the floor, next to the filing cabinet. Everything had been bought with cash.

The lower filing cabinet drawer was partially open. One file had been shoved in hastily and it jutted above the rest. Johnson pulled it and saw that the day before Letourneau died, she’d bought a brand-new phone and upgraded her plan through Verizon.

Johnson called the number, heard it go straight to voice mail. He made a note to pull her phone records.

Drummond returned after searching the bedroom.

“Anything?” he asked.

“She spent a lot the past month,” Johnson said. “All cash. I figure close to four thousand. I looked at her bank accounts. There’s no eight grand, and no record of a safe-deposit box.”

“Well, she wasn’t keeping it under her mattress,” Drummond said. “I’ve been over every inch of this place, both bedrooms, kitchen, all of it, and—”

Johnson looked at the sergeant. He had stopped talking and was fixated on the altar and the doll.

“Maybe Ms. Francie was craftier than we thought,” Drummond said, walking over. “Maybe she left that chicken blood there knowing it would reek and the voodoo stuff knowing it would freak out anyone who might break into her house looking for cash.”

He lifted the maroon cloth, revealing the legs of a folding card table, the carpet, and nothing more.

“Good thought, though,” Johnson said.

Drummond got down on his knees, reached under the card table, and said, “You give up too easy, Miami.”

The sergeant worked his fingers into the carpet and ripped up a one-by-two-foot section that had been held in place with Velcro strips. He got out a jackknife and pried up an edge of the floor.

Drummond reached in, came up with a black leather purse, and eased out from under the voodoo altar. He stood up, brought the purse over to the desk, and opened it.

The sergeant whistled, shook his head, said, “Francie, Francie, what did you get yourself into?”

Johnson peered into the purse. “If those are real, Sarge, there’s a lot more than eight grand in there.”

Chapter 50

Starksville, North Carolina

Sharon Lawrence held up well under Naomi’s initial cross-examination. She stuck to her story about Stefan drugging and raping her and being so afraid of him she didn’t report it until after he was under arrest for Rashawn Turnbull’s murder.

“You have a lot of girlfriends, Sharon?” Naomi asked.

The girl nodded. “Enough.”

“Best friends forever?”

“A couple. Sure.”

“You tell any of them you were going to Coach Tate’s house that afternoon you say he raped you?”

“No. It was supposed to be a secret.”

“Anyone see you around his house?”

“I don’t think so,” Lawrence said. “He had me sneak in through the basement from the alley bulkhead door.”

Sitting behind Naomi with Bree holding my hand, I tried to stay focused on the testimony and listen for discrepancies, but my ribs hurt and my mind kept drifting to the evening before. Jannie and my grandmother had already gone to bed by the time Pinkie dropped me off.

Bree and I are tight. She knew in an instant that something was wrong with me beyond a couple of cracked ribs. I’d repeated Pinkie’s story, and she was as shocked as I was.

“Are you going to tell Nana Mama?” Bree asked.

That question had kept me up most of the night. It was still bothering me in court that next morning. So was the fact that Patty Converse had not shown up, and I think several of the jury members had noticed.

Then Naomi said, “Ms. Lawrence, did you see Rashawn Turnbull at Coach Tate’s house that afternoon?”

I forgot about the night before and Stefan’s fiancée, and focused. It was the first I’d heard about the victim being at the alleged rape scene. I glanced over at Cece, who was sitting beside a pretty blond woman in her late thirties. Two rows behind Cece sat her parents and a young woman I didn’t recognize. But they all seemed as interested as I was.

Lawrence said, “No, I did not see Rashawn there. Why?”

“Because Coach Tate says the only person at his home after school that day was Rashawn Turnbull.”

The high school senior looked doubtful. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“What time did you leave?”

Lawrence shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. Four? Maybe five? I was still kind of groggy.”

“Went out through the basement to the alley?”

“That’s right.”

“Strange,” Naomi said, looking at a couple of pieces of paper. “I have a sworn statement here from Sydney Fox that says she remembers Rashawn Turnbull knocking on Coach Tate’s door around four that afternoon. She remembers Rashawn going inside.”

Delilah Strong jumped up. “Objection, Your Honor. Sydney Fox is dead and cannot be questioned. I’d like to move that her statement be inadmissible.”

“This goes to the witness’s credibility, Judge,” Naomi said.

Varney thought about that for a moment and then said, “Overruled.”

“Your Honor!” Strong cried.

“I said overruled. Ms. Cross, can you rephrase as a question?”

Naomi nodded, said, “Are you sure you didn’t see Rashawn?”

Lawrence frowned, looked around, seemed to seek someone out in the courtroom, and said, “I don’t remember. I was groggy. Maybe he was there.”

“Or maybe you weren’t there at all,” Naomi said.

“That’s not true! Why would I lie about something like this?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” Naomi said. “Your parents here today, Sharon?”

Lawrence looked into the courtroom again, said, “My mom. My father’s not around anymore.”

The pretty blond woman sitting with Cece Turnbull craned her head to see better.

“And who is your mom?”

“Ann Lawrence.”

“What was her maiden name?”

“Objection,” Strong said. “Where’s the relevance?”

Naomi said, “I’m about to show relevance, Your Honor.”

Varney nodded, but I noticed that he had gone pale since he entered the courtroom.

“Your mother’s maiden name?”

“King,” she said. “Ann King.”

“She have a sister?”

Lawrence looked uncomfortable, said, “I don’t see...”

“Yes or no.”

“Yes, Louise was her sister. She’s dead.”

“And who was Louise married to at the time of her death?”

The girl’s jaw seemed to tense a bit before she said, “Marvin Bell.”

That got my attention, and I sat up straighter. So did Bree.

“So Marvin Bell is your uncle?” Naomi asked.

“Yes.”

“Has your uncle provided you and your mother with financial support since your father left?” Naomi asked.

“Objection!” the prosecutor cried. “What is the relevance here? Mr. Bell has no connection whatsoever to this case.”

“With the court’s indulgence, I’m trying to establish that connection,” Naomi said.

“You’re on a short leash, Counselor,” Varney said, sweating now despite the fact that it was quite cool in the courtroom.

Naomi said, “Marvin Bell has been giving your family money, correct?”

She lifted her chin, said, “Yes.”

“Be tough without that money, wouldn’t it?”

I noticed Sharon’s mother had gone very tense; she was sitting forward, holding on to the back of the bench in front of her.

“Yes,” Lawrence said quietly.

“Tough enough that you’d lie about a rape if he asked you?”

“No,” she said, and then she reached across herself with her left hand to scratch her shoulder, in effect shielding her heart.

“You realize you’re under oath,” Naomi said. “And you understand the penalty for perjury in a capital crimes case?”

“No... I mean, yes.”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Strong said. “The defense is badgering the witness.”

“Sustained,” Varney said, patting his brow with a handkerchief.

Naomi paused, and then said, “Did Coach Tate ever come to you asking about your uncle? Marvin Bell?”

Lawrence looked confused. “If he did, I don’t remember.”

“Funny,” Naomi said, returning to the defense table. “We talked to Lacey Dahl, a good friend of yours, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Ms. Dahl will testify that she heard Coach Tate ask you about Marvin Bell a few days before you claim the rape occurred,” Naomi said. “She heard it outside the women’s locker room at the high school. Do you remember now?”

Lawrence fidgeted. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What did he ask about?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did he ask whether your uncle was involved in the drug trade in Starksville?”

“What?” Lawrence said, offended. “No, that never—”

Before she could finish, Judge Varney let out a howl like he’d been stabbed. His contorted face turned beet red, and his entire body went rigid. Then he moaned like a wounded animal and pitched forward onto the bench.

Chapter 51

“Three days?” I said later that afternoon, standing outside the track stadium at Starksville High School with Bree. We were talking to Naomi with my cell phone on speaker.

“Maybe five,” my niece replied. “Judge Varney’s riddled with kidney stones and passing two. Strong says resuming trial Friday is the best we can hope for, but more likely Monday.”

“It’s probably a blessing,” Bree said.

“Why’s that?” Naomi asked.

I said, “Unless you and Stefan aren’t telling us something, Bree and I have both looked at the evidence, and other than Stefan’s suspicions about Marvin Bell, we don’t see anything that links him to drug trafficking.”

“There’s circumstantial evidence,” Naomi said.

“That’s not good enough,” Bree said. “We need to prove it.”

I said, “If we can peg Bell as a drug lord threatened with exposure, suddenly his niece Sharon’s story feels dubious, and we have a strong motive for his framing Stefan.”

“Still leaves the DNA evidence,” Bree said.

“I think I’ve got that covered,” Naomi said. “Stefan and Patty used condoms. I’ve got an expert witness willing to testify that it is entirely possible that the semen found on Rashawn and on those panties was stolen from the trash and then planted.”

“Put both those things together and there’s your reasonable doubt,” I said.

“But we don’t have Bell,” Bree said. “And Patty Converse a no-show in court today didn’t help.”

“I’m on my way to her apartment,” Naomi said. “She’s not answering her phone.”

“Let us know,” I said, and I hung up.

We went into the stadium and climbed into the stands. Many of the same athletes from the other day were there, including Sharon Lawrence, who shot Bree and me a glare as she jogged past with several of her friends.

Bree said, “The other night Cece Turnbull said Rashawn was very upset about something in the days before he died.”

“I remember that,” I said.

“Would seeing a rape be upsetting enough?” she asked quietly.

I looked over and saw she was serious.

“It would be upsetting enough,” I said.

Was Stefan’s version of events all lies? Had Rashawn seen him with Lawrence? Had my cousin assaulted the boy to shut him up?

Jannie was again running with the older girls. Coach Greene had them skipping in two-hundred-meter intervals. I couldn’t remember Jannie ever doing that in a training session, and I noticed she was having difficulty staying with the college athletes.

When it was over, Jannie went to her bag, threw on a hoodie, and then came over to the fence with an unhappy expression.

“I suck at skipping,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing it.”

“Did you ask?” I said.

Jannie shrugged, said, “It’s supposed to help with your explosiveness.”

“There you go,” Bree said.

“I’m plenty explosive when it counts,” Jannie said.

“Couldn’t hurt to get more,” I said, noticing that Coach Greene was crossing the track toward us, carrying Jannie’s gym bag and looking serious.

“Dr. Cross,” she said, not looking at Jannie. “We have a problem.”

“How’s that?” I said, standing.

She held out Jannie’s bag by the handles. It was open.

Jannie frowned, tried to see what the coach was talking about as I climbed down. But Greene held it away from her, said, “I want your father to see first.”

I stepped up and looked in the bag. There, nestled in a wrinkle of Jannie’s sweatpants, was a small glass vial filled with white powder.

Chapter 52

“That’s not mine!” Jannie protested the second she saw it. “Dad, there is no chance that’s mine. You know that, right?”

I nodded. “Someone put that in her bag.”

“Who would do that?” Coach Greene asked. “And why?”

I looked over at Sharon Lawrence, who was stretching and talking with her friends, seemingly oblivious to what was happening across the track.

“I can think of someone, but I’ll let the police deal with that,” I said.

“You want me to call the police?”

“You touch it?”

Greene shook her head.

“Then yes, call the police. It’s easily proved whether it’s my daughter’s or not,” I said. “Either her fingerprints are on it or they’re not.”

The coach looked at Jannie. “Are they?”

“No way,” Jannie said.

“Was the bag open?” I asked.

“The bag was open,” Jannie said. “I got my hoodie out and came over.”

“Was that how you saw it, Coach?” I asked.

“Eliza Foster, one of my athletes at Duke, noticed it and called me over.”

“So it was put in there either before practice or right after Jannie put on her hoodie and came over to talk to me,” I said.

“Eliza would have no reason to do anything like that,” Greene said.

“I want there to be concrete evidence that this was absolutely not my daughter’s. Jannie will even provide a blood sample that you can drug-test. Right?”

Jannie nodded. “Anything, Dad.”

I got out my wallet, dug out a business card, and handed it to the coach. “Call this guy. Sheriff’s Detective Guy Pedelini. He’ll handle the situation correctly.”

Greene hesitated, but then nodded. She walked away with Jannie’s bag, punching in the phone number on her cell phone.

Jannie looked about to cry when she sat down beside me and Bree.

“You’ll be fine,” I said, hugging her.

“Why would someone put that there?” she asked, looking torn up.

“To get at me and Bree through you,” I said. “But it won’t work.”

Detective Pedelini showed up ten minutes later. I let him speak with Greene first, waiting patiently with Jannie and Bree. He put on gloves and bagged the vial. He nodded to me and then went to talk with Eliza Foster.

When he was done, he came over and shook my hand in the twilight.

“Coach says you want it tested.”

“I do.”

He looked at Jannie. “You’re willing?”

“Yes,” Jannie said. “Definitely.”

“Any idea who might do this?” Pedelini asked.

“I’d start with Marvin Bell’s niece,” Bree said. “If Sharon Lawrence would lie about a rape for him, she’d plant drugs for him.”

The sheriff’s detective pursed his lips, said, “I’ll talk to her. Meantime, take Jannie to the office. I’ll call ahead for someone to take the prints and blood.”

Pedelini walked off toward the other girls, who were acting annoyed that they weren’t being allowed to leave.

“Dad?” Jannie said as we stood up and got ready to leave. “Can you make sure I can still go down to Duke to train for the four-hundred on Saturday?”

“Meet you at the car,” I said.

I went over to Coach Greene, asked her. She hesitated.

“She’s innocent until proven guilty, Coach.”

“You’re right and I’m sorry, Dr. Cross,” she said. “In all my years coaching, I’ve never had anything like this happen. Unless those tests say different, Jannie can come run with us on Saturday and any other day she wants.”

I turned to leave, started toward the tunnel beneath the stands.

But Marvin Bell and his adopted son, Finn Davis, blocked the way.

“For such a big-time cop, you don’t listen so well,” Marvin Bell said.

“Yeah?” I said. “What did I miss?”

“Your niece brought up my name in court today,” Bell said.

“Your niece was testifying in court today,” I said.

“That’s bullshit,” said Finn Davis.

“It’s bullshit that she was testifying or that she’s Mr. Bell’s niece?”

Bell smiled sourly. “I warned you about besmirching my name in court.”

“Besmirching?”

“Slandering, whatever you want to call it,” Bell said.

“It’s only slander or besmirching if it’s not true,” I said.

Davis said, “Listen, Detective Asshole. That poor girl was raped by that sick fuck Stefan Tate. It took guts for her to go on that stand and face her rapist.”

“No argument there,” I said.

“Then quit trying to tear her down,” Bell said. “You go on and think anything you want about me, but you leave Sharon out of it. She is a victim in all of this, and I won’t have her made into a punching bag.”

“And I won’t have someone try to frame my daughter in retaliation.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Someone just put a vial of white powder in her gym bag,” I said. “That’s a sheriff’s detective out there investigating. I figure Sharon for the job.”

“Horseshit,” Bell said.

I took a step, got right in their faces, said, “No, gentlemen, horseshit is you trying to kill me and strong-arm my family. You’re on notice. I am officially declaring war on the two of you.”

Chapter 53

Bree didn’t say much on the ride home after we’d taken Jannie to the sheriff’s office, where she’d provided blood and urine for analysis. I asked for and received samples from the same specimens, a precaution.

When we got home and went inside, I put the samples in a brown bag in the fridge. Jannie started telling Nana Mama about everything that had happened. Ali lay on the couch, watching another episode of Uncharted with Jim Shockey.

“Where is he now?” I asked. Shockey had traded his cowboy hat for a bandanna and was wading in murky water in a jungle.

“Like, the Congo?”

“That Jim Shockey gets around,” I said. “Bree come in?”

“I’m out here,” she called from the porch.

I went out, found her sitting in a rocker, looking out through the screen. She wasn’t happy.

“We okay?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said quietly.

“Why?”

“Did you have to say that to Bell and Davis? That you were declaring war on them?”

“I was speaking from the heart.”

“I get that, Alex. But now you’re more of a target than you were before.”

“Good,” I said. “We draw them out, and we shut them down.”

She looked up angrily. “Why do you always put yourself in harm’s way?”

My chin retreated. “Bree, you of all people should know that it’s part of—”

“The job?” she asked. “I don’t think so. I don’t put myself in harm’s way intentionally, and you do all the time. Did you ever stop for a second and think that it’s a pretty goddamn selfish habit?”

“Selfish?” I said, bewildered.

“Yes, selfish,” Bree said. “You have a family that needs you. You have a wife that needs you. And yet, at the drop of a hat, you’re ready to risk our happiness and well-being.”

I was speechless for several moments. I’d never heard Bree talk like this before. My late wife and Ali’s mother, yes. But Bree, no.

I hung my head and said, “What should I have done?”

“Defuse the situation,” she said. “Make them think you’re no threat until you’ve got damning evidence against them. But it’s too late, you escalated the threat, Alex, and—”

“Bree,” I said, holding up my hands. “I get it, and I’m sorry. In my own defense, because Jannie was being used, I got a little hot under the collar. It won’t happen again.”

“That’s good to hear,” she said, getting up from the rocker and going inside. “But you remain a target.”

I stood there a moment feeling a weight that hadn’t been there ten minutes before. She was right. I’d pushed when I should have been smarter and laid off.

In the kitchen, Jannie was finishing up a dinner of country-style ribs with Nana Mama.

My grandmother studied me, said, “You in hot water?”

“Trying to get out,” I said, heaping rice on my plate and then helping myself to the ribs, which were falling off the bone and smelled incredible.

“Thank you, Nana,” Jannie said, clearing her plate. “That was great.”

“Easy recipe,” she said, waving off the compliment. “Orange juice and barbecue sauce. Then slow cook them at two fifty for four hours.”

“Still great,” I said after taking a bite.

Sitting down, I ate and watched Jannie for any sign that she was anxious about the events of the past couple of hours. But she seemed confident when she left the kitchen.

“Jannie told me,” Nana Mama said.

“We took care of it,” I said.

“What was bothering you this morning?”

Part of me wanted to tell her what my cousin had said, that her son had survived the fall from the bridge and the trip through the gorge and went on to live two years on the run before committing suicide.

Instead, I said, “Just a rough night.”

“Uh-huh,” my grandmother said, unconvinced, and left me to my dinner, which was remarkably good even by Nana Mama’s high standards.

When I was done cleaning my plate, I went to our bedroom and found the door shut. I knocked, and Bree said, “It’s open.”

I went in, shut the door. Bree sat on the bed, studying her laptop.

In a low voice, I said, “I am sorry.”

She looked up and gave me a halfhearted smile. “I know you are.”

“There’s dinner waiting for you. Outstanding country ribs.”

“I’ll go eat in a minute,” she said.

“I can’t tell Nana Mama what Pinkie told me,” I said quietly. “Why not?” she asked.

“I don’t...” I began and then rubbed at my temples. “I guess I don’t want her to hear any of it unless I can prove it’s all true.”

“Your uncle Cliff is in no position to corroborate the story,” Bree said.

“I know,” I said, and then saw how to solve two problems at once. “So I’m getting up early, driving to Raleigh, and catching a plane to Palm Beach.”

“Okay,” she said, confused. “Why?”

“It’s the closest airport to where my father killed himself,” I explained. “And it gets me out of Starksville for a day or two, which eliminates me as a target.”

“But what about Stefan? Despite what I said at the track practice, he could have been framed. Maybe by Bell.”

“Or Finn Davis,” I said. “Which is why you’re going to be careful while I’m gone, hang to the outside, and learn everything you can from the public record about the two of them.”

Bree thought about that, and then nodded. “That I can do.”

Chapter 54

Palm Beach, Florida

Driven by a hot wind, the flames roared and belched black smoke into the late-morning sky. White egrets circled in the smoke, feasting on clouds of bugs fleeing the fire.

They were harvesting and burning sugarcane on both sides of Florida Route 441 as I headed west toward Lake Okeechobee, and twice I had to slow to a crawl, the smoke was so thick.

Finally I got upwind of the fire and the smoke was gone. I saw the sign welcoming me to Belle Glade. It was where my father had killed himself and as hard luck a place as I’d ever seen. I’d heard about the city, of course. Who in law enforcement hadn’t? As a municipality, Belle Glade used to have a murder rate the equivalent of a big metro area like DC or Chicago. After five minutes in Belle Glade, I could see some of the reasons why.

But I wasn’t there to diagnose and solve social ills, so I ignored the empty buildings and storefronts pocked with bullet holes and relied on Google Maps to lead me to the various churches around town. I wanted to find out how my father came to kill himself behind one of them.

There were a lot of churches in Belle Glade. At the first two, one for Baptists and another for Adventists, I got no helpful information. At St. Christopher’s Catholic Church, I talked with a priest painting the rectory door. Father Richard Lane was in his fifties and had only recently been transferred to Belle Glade.

“Thirty-three years ago?” he said, squinting at me. “I don’t know how you’re going to find someone just on a name.”

“I believe in miracles, Father,” I said.

“Well, I can check and see if a funeral Mass was said for Mr. Brown here, but if the old records are as poorly maintained as the newer ones are, I can’t offer you much hope, Detective Cross.”

I gave the priest my business card, told him to call if he found anything.

Over the next two hours, I knocked on the doors of every other place of worship in town. Someone answered at every church, but no one knew of a Paul Brown committing suicide there years before.

One evangelical minister recommended I try the churches in nearby towns to the north. Another advised me to do a county records search for death certificates. Both were good ideas, and as I left the second minister, I tried to figure out what to do next and how best to do it.

It was beastly hot and humid, and I was eager to climb into my rental car and cool off in the air-conditioning. But then I noticed a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office van parked up and across the street next to one of those shabby apartment complexes with two floors and exterior stairs.

I wandered over, looked into the complex, and saw a small crowd of people watching the upper floor where yellow crime tape had been strung up around the door of one of the apartments. A criminalist, a young guy, came down the stairs and started to walk past me.

I held up my badge and identified myself before asking where I’d need to go to get someone with the sheriff’s department to pull some documents for me as a professional courtesy.

“I honestly don’t know,” the tech said. “Sergeant Drummond might.”

“Where’s Sergeant Drummond?” I asked.

“That’s him,” the criminalist said, gesturing to two men dressed in suits exiting the apartment. “The one with the face scar.”

One of the men was big, African American, older, sixties. The other was in his thirties, dark good looks and, judging from his physique, a power lifter. My bet was on the lifter for the face scar, though I can’t tell you why. But when the older detective turned to climb down the stairs, I saw the large patch of ragged skin that began beneath his right eye, ran down seven inches, and then looped back above the jaw toward his ear.

“Sergeant Drummond,” I said, holding up my badge. “Detective Alex Cross, with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police, homicide division.”

Drummond’s face was flat as he examined my credentials. “Okay?”

The younger detective grinned and stuck out his hand. “Detective Richard S. Johnson. I know who you are, Dr. Cross. You used to be FBI, right? I saw one of your Quantico lectures on tape. Sergeant? Haven’t you heard of Alex Cross?”

Drummond handed me back my badge and said, “I hope it doesn’t crush your ego that I haven’t.”

“Unlikely, Sergeant,” I said, smiling. “I have a pretty bombproof ego.”

“So how can we help?” Detective Johnson said. “You down here tracking some serial killer or something?”

“No, nothing like that,” I said, and I explained that I was looking for a long-lost relative who’d supposedly died in Belle Glade years before.

“We can do a search for you back at the office,” Johnson offered.

“Can we, now?” Sergeant Drummond asked. “Or do we need to figure out who killed Francie Letourneau and two Palm Beach socialites?”

“I don’t want to mess up your investigation,” I said. “Just point me in the right direction. I’ll do the legwork.”

Drummond shrugged. “Follow us back to the office; we’ll see what we can do.”

“And maybe you’d want to take a look at our case?” Johnson said.

“Detective,” Drummond growled.

“What, Sarge?” his junior partner shot back. “This guy’s the expert’s expert. He trains FBI agents, for Christ’s sake.”

“Used to,” I said. “And I’d be glad to help. But if it would crush your ego...”

The sergeant actually smiled, said, “What the hell, Dr. Cross. Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks.”

Chapter 55

I followed them back to their offices in West Palm, a typical bullpen with cubicles surrounded by other cubicles that had windows and doors. Those were for the commanding officers, including Drummond.

“Johnson, help him find what he’s looking for,” Drummond said. “Sorry I can’t give you the royal treatment you seem to deserve, Cross, but duty calls. I’ve got to make some phone calls, and I’ll get those murder books for you.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” I said. He disappeared into his office and shut the door behind him.

While Johnson went to get us coffee, I sat there listening to the familiar sounds of a homicide unit, detectives on the phone, others in discussion. I hadn’t been gone a week and already I missed it.

Johnson returned with two cups of decent coffee. “I can’t believe Alex Cross is sitting at my desk.”

I stood up. “Sorry.”

“What? No, sit down. It’s an honor. Now, what or who are we looking for?”

“Male. African American. Died roughly thirty-three years ago.”

Johnson turned all business, got another chair, and retrieved his laptop computer. “Name?”

“Paul Brown. Supposedly killed himself behind a church in Belle Glade.”

“I’ll look at county death records and see if he had a sheet with us.”

“You have digital back that far?”

“For all of Florida,” Johnson said as he typed. “State paid for it. Prescient, you ask me.”

I liked the young detective. He was sharp and full of energy. I didn’t know exactly what to think of Drummond other than that he had a dry wit.

“So what’s with Drummond’s scar?” I asked.

Johnson looked up. “First Gulf War. An oil well he was securing blew. Killed two of his men. Shrapnel laid his cheek open like a flap, burned and chewed it all up. Extensive nerve damage. It’s why he hardly ever has any expression. His face just sort of hangs there, right?”

“You like him?”

Johnson smiled. “Like? I don’t know yet. But I admire him. Drummond’s the real deal in my book.”

“Good enough for me,” I said.

“Paul Brown?”

“Correct.”

“And thirty-three years ago,” Johnson said, studying his screen and typing. “We’ll go plus or minus a year just to be safe. We have a date of birth?”

I told him my father’s birthday.

Johnson hit Enter. Almost immediately, he shook his head. “No match.”

“Leave the birthday blank,” I said, figuring that my father must have been smart enough to leave everything about his old identity behind.

The detective played with it and hit Enter again. “There you go. Three of them.”

“Three?” I said, getting out of my chair to look at the screen.

Sure enough, three men named Paul Brown had died in Florida around thirty-three years ago.

“Can you pull up the death certificates?” I asked.

Just then, Sergeant Drummond exited his office carrying several large black binders. “Any luck?”

“We got three Paul Browns,” Johnson said. “Is there a way to access the death certificates from vital statistics, Sarge?”

“Miami, what are you, thirty years younger than me? You’re supposed to be the technologically advanced part of the team.”

The detective shook his head. “I don’t—”

“Try clicking on the name,” Drummond said.

“Oh,” Johnson said, and he clicked the first one.

The screen jumped to a PDF image of a death certificate for Paul L. Brown of Pensacola, age twenty-two. Cause of death: blunt-force trauma.

“Too young,” I said. “Try the next one.”

Johnson clicked on it. A new death certificate popped up for Paul Brown of Fort Lauderdale, age seventy-nine. Cause of death: stroke.

“Too old,” I said, now desperately wanting to find the answer behind door number three.

The third certificate fit the profile. Paul Brown, of Pahokee, Florida, age thirty-two, indigent. Cause of death: self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“That’s him,” I said, with a sinking feeling. “Where’s Pahokee?”

Drummond said, “Fifteen miles north of Belle Glade.”

“It’s got to be him, then,” I said, studying the certificate, oddly detached. “Which means the church is probably there. Says here the body was released to Belcher Brothers Funeral Home for interment.”

“Interment?” Johnson said. “Most indigents are cremated in Florida.”

“Not this time, apparently,” I said.

The sergeant said, “I know the guys who own that funeral home. The Belchers. They run an ambulance service there too. When I was on patrol in the west part of the county, they’d show up at all the fatalities. I’ll make a call.”

“I’d appreciate that, Sergeant Drummond.”

Drummond nodded, gestured to the books. “There’s the murders we’re working on. We’d appreciate the third eyeball if you have the time.”

The sergeant returned to his office. I started scanning the files on the deaths of the socialites Lisa Martin and Ruth Abrams and their maid Francie Letourneau. Two hours later, I was almost finished and flipping my way through the appendix of reports on the cleaning woman when Drummond returned.

“Took a bit to get in touch with him, but Ramon Belcher is working night duty and he said he’d go through the files for you,” the sergeant said.

“Thanks,” I said.

Johnson returned to the cubicle with more coffee. I waved it off, said, “Any more of that without something to eat and I’ll get an ulcer.”

Drummond said, “You find anything in there?”

“I saw a few things.”

“What do you like to eat?”

“Anything. Seafood.”

The sergeant nodded. “Got just the place down in Lake Worth. Johnson, are you in? We can talk about our case over dinner.”

“Absolutely,” Johnson said. “My wife’s pregnant. Let me just call her.”

“Pregnant?” Drummond said. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“Still early, Sarge,” Johnson said, digging out his phone and walking away. “End of the first trimester. Twins.”

The sergeant frowned, looked at me. “I would have liked to have learned that sooner.”

“It matter?” I asked.

“Course it matters,” Drummond grumbled. “As it stands now, I will do everything I can to keep Detective Johnson from screwing himself into harm’s way and depriving those babies of their father.”

“You’re a man of hidden virtues, Sergeant,” I said.

He looked at me with that slack, scarred face, said, “That’s not virtue, just common sense. It’s just me and my wife, and she’s got a good job that pays better than mine. But Johnson’s got three people depending on him now. Do the math. Tell me where my priorities should be when the shit hits the fan.”

Crusty as he was, Sergeant Drummond was beginning to grow on me.

Chapter 56

Pleasant Lake, North Carolina

Pinkie Parks gestured through the windshield to a gravel lane ahead that cut off the highway and dropped steeply to the lake. “There it is.”

Bree pulled the blue Ford Taurus she’d rented that morning over onto the shoulder and put it in park.

“Not much to see from here,” Pinkie said. “You’d want to be in the woods.”

Bree picked up a pair of binoculars and said, “Then let’s go into the woods.”

Once Pinkie learned that Alex had gone to Florida and that Bree was focusing on Marvin Bell and Finn Davis, he’d insisted on helping her. But now he raised his eyebrow, said, “You looking to kick a hornet’s nest?”

She frowned. “These woods are known for hornets?”

“These woods are known for Marvin Bell and Finn Davis, which is the same thing, way I see it.”

“Suit yourself,” Bree said, opening the door. “I’ll be back.”

Pinkie groaned but got out as well. It was hazy, hot, and humid. They waited until traffic died and then cut down the steep embankment and entered a thorny raspberry thicket. Pinkie led the way, clawing through it until they emerged into piney woods where crickets were sawing.

Below them and out several hundred yards, Bree could see the clean waters of Pleasant Lake. She heard outboard motors and kids laughing.

Pinkie went down a game path that led through the trees growing on the slope above the lake’s eastern shore. Bree followed, her brain going back to everything they’d learned that morning about Marvin Bell and Finn Davis.

After renting the car, she and Pinkie had gone to the Stark County Recorder’s Office and gotten online with the North Carolina secretary of state’s office, looking into the two men’s business interests. Together and individually, Bell and Davis owned five businesses in and around Starksville: a liquor store, a dry-cleaning shop, two automated car washes, and a pawn-and-loan operation.

Pinkie smartly noted that all five businesses would generate and bring in a lot of cash. Convenient if you’re also involved in some sort of illegal cash-intensive business.

But Bree had zero jurisdiction here. She couldn’t get to databases that might give her a look at the businesses’ bank accounts.

On a whim, Bree accessed public databases in Nevada and Delaware because both states had incorporation and tax laws that made them attractive for people interested in creating shell companies. Though there was nothing in Nevada, she was pleased to find that Marvin Bell and Finn Davis were listed as registered agents of six Delaware companies, three apiece. All six corporations had been organized for the purpose of “real estate acquisition and development.”

Which, in a roundabout way, led Bree to look up their real estate holdings in Stark County. To her and Pinkie’s surprise, neither man appeared to own any property in the area.

Pinkie said that simply wasn’t true, that Bell owned all sorts of property in Stark County, beginning with an estate on Pleasant Lake. When they looked up the lakefront property, they found it was owned by one of Marvin Bell’s Delaware companies and carried an assessed value of $3.1 million, which made Bree want to see the place.

Alex had told her to hang back, to stay to the outside, but Bree wasn’t planning to climb over the fence Marvin Bell had around his compound. She just wanted to look over it, get a sense of how the man lived.

Pinkie motioned to Bree to stop. She did, next to a young, fat pine tree that smelled of sap and blocked her view of the lake.

Looking over his shoulder, Pinkie whispered, “If you get low, slide around in front of me, and stay in the shadows, you should get a good look at it without being seen.”

Bree got down on her hands and knees. Pinkie pressed into the wall of pines there and let her pass. She twisted into a sitting position and used her feet to scoot herself sideways out into a shadowy slot in the trees.

A hundred vertical feet below Bree and one hundred yards closer to the lake was the gravel lane and the gate, which was tall, ten feet, anyway, and the chain-link fence was shrink-wrapped in green vinyl. Bree swept the binoculars along the top of the fence, making out coiled razor wire that had also been shrink-wrapped green.

Tiny cameras were mounted on posts to either side of the gate. There were other cameras on posts every forty yards or so before the fence was swallowed by dense vegetation. She assumed the cameras continued on around the six-acre perimeter and turned her attention to the compound.

Rhododendrons had been planted along the interior of the fence, no doubt to block the view from the gravel lane. But this high above the fence and the bushes, Bree had close to a bird’s-eye view of Marvin Bell’s domain, which featured a small lagoon at her left and a blunt point of flat land that jutted out into the main lake. Set back from the point on a knoll to the right of the lagoon and facing the lake stood the main house, a ten-thousand-square-foot log mansion with a red steel roof and matching shutters.

A beautiful stone terrace with gardens above the lagoon complemented the house. Three stone walkways flared out from a second terrace in front of the mansion, one going to the point, one to a boathouse to the left of the point, and one to a six-bay dock system to the right with lifts that held a fleet of Sea-Doos, motorboats, canoes, and sailboats. There was a bar and a huge barbecue built right into the dock along with lounge chairs and umbrellas.

Out on the point itself stood a miniature version of the main house from which, Bree imagined, the views must be incredible. She could see through several of the large and dramatic windows into the main building and could tell no expense had been spared on the interior. And there was art everywhere — paintings, sculptures, and mobiles.

The place looked like it was worth $3.1 million, no doubt, which raised her suspicions even further. In Bree’s mind, owning some small businesses in Starksville, North Carolina, did not get you a home worth upwards of three million dollars. She supposed Bell could have been successful in the stock market, or maybe one of those Delaware real estate investment companies had gone large.

But if so, why would Marvin Bell stay here? The property looked like a little piece of heaven, she admitted, but didn’t people who hit big money like to show it off in more trendy places?

Maybe Marvin Bell was just a homebody, like Warren Buffett. Or maybe he had a reason to stay here despite the wealth. Maybe he had crucial business to attend to.

Before she could weigh those options, Bree caught motion and swung the binoculars to see Finn Davis exiting the mansion. The rest of the estate was quiet and empty. The only sounds — kids laughing, a distant outboard motor — came from well down the shore.

Wearing dark sunglasses, a dirty ball cap, a green work shirt, jeans, and heavy boots, Finn Davis moved in an easy saunter around the circular driveway to a five-bay log garage. He pressed a remote control. A door raised, revealing an old orange-and-white Ford Bronco.

Where was he going in that heap? Looked totally out of place on...

Bree rolled out of her sitting position, scooted back behind the pines, and jumped up.

“We have to get back to the car,” she whispered to Pinkie. “Fast!”

Chapter 57

Lake Worth, Florida

Detective Sergeant Drummond parked outside the Kersmon Caribbean Restaurant, and the three of us went in. Althea, the owner and cook, saw Drummond and rushed out from behind a counter to hug him, laughing.

“You leave your old lady for me yet, Drummond?” Althea asked in a Jamaican accent.

“You know she’s one in a million,” the sergeant replied.

“I do,” Althea said. “Just checking to see if you’d lost your mind since I last saw you.”

Drummond introduced us, and she found us a seat in the small restaurant.

“Something to drink?” Althea asked. “Red Stripe?”

Johnson looked at Drummond, who said, “You’re off duty. Don’t mind me.”

“Red Stripe,” Johnson said.

“Make it two,” I said.

Drummond said, “Don’t bother with menus, Althea. Just bring us what you think we should be eating. Some of it should be fish.”

That seemed to make her happy, and she went off.

“You’ll be ruined for Jamaican food for life,” Drummond said. “I’m not kidding. Half the customers are from the Caribbean.”

“I won’t be able to tell my wife,” I said. “She loves Jamaica. Me too.”

“Yeah?” Drummond said. “I’m fond of it myself.”

I looked at Johnson, wanting to include him. “You ready to be a dad, Detective?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you?” Drummond asked me. “Ready?”

“No,” I said. “All I knew was I didn’t want to be like my father.”

“That work out?”

“Pretty much,” I said, and turned back to Johnson. “Don’t worry. You just sort of grow into the job, day by day.”

The beers came. So did small bowls of what Althea called fish tea, which was delicious, along with a basket of fresh zucchini bread, which was also delicious. No way I was telling Bree about this place.

“So, did you see anything we missed, Dr. Cross?” Johnson asked.

“Call me Alex,” I said. “And I don’t think you missed anything, but there are a few things I’m not clear on and a few things you might consider.”

“Okay...” Drummond said.

“Just to make sure we’re all on the same page,” I said. “You’ve got Lisa Martin and Ruth Abrams, wealthy socialites killed within a week of each other and made to look like suicides.”

“That’s right,” Johnson said.

“Friends?”

“Apparently so,” the sergeant said.

“Beyond that, they shared the same maid, Francie Letourneau, who stole jewelry from both women before being murdered herself.”

“Correct,” Johnson said. “We got confirmation from the husbands on pictures we showed them of several jewelry pieces found at Francie’s apartment.”

“Francie told the bar owner in Belle Glade—”

Althea returned with a tray. Fried plantains. Rice and black beans. Oxtail stew. And a whole steamed and spiced grouper. Definitely not telling Bree.

We dug in. The oxtail was simply incredible. So was the grouper. So were the second and third Red Stripes. I’d forgotten how easily they go down.

Once we were into second helpings, I said, “Francie told the bar owner in the Glade she was coming to Palm Beach for a job interview the day she died.”

“That’s right,” Drummond said. “Only we haven’t found a damn thing to say she ever made it to Palm. She just disappears.”

“No phone calls?”

“Her cell phone’s missing, but we found the account,” Johnson said. “I made a request yesterday for all calls in the last three months. We’ll probably hear tomorrow sometime.”

“Other thoughts?” Drummond asked.

“Yes. I think you should focus on the links and chains between the victims, and extrapolate from there.”

Johnson looked confused, so I said, “You want to isolate each thing that connects them. So, say, focus first on Francie as the common-denominator link in what we’ll call the socialites chain. Under this scenario, the maid could have killed them both to rip off their jewelry and then was killed herself by a third party who got wind of the jewels she was holding.”

“I could see that,” Drummond said, dishing a third helping of oxtail onto his plate.

“What’s the second link?” Johnson asked. “Or chain?”

“The socialite friendship,” I said. “Maybe Francie was working for a third socialite, was in the process of robbing her, and someone caught her, killed her, dumped her.”

Johnson shook his head. “From the files I went through at her apartment, Francie had been on hard times, lost all of her cleaning jobs.”

“Before she hit the Lotto?”

“Correct.”

“So maybe there was no Lotto hit,” I said. “Maybe the jewels were the explanation behind her newfound money. And maybe she wasn’t going to Palm Beach for an interview on the day she died; maybe she was going to kill someone and steal more jewels.”

Chapter 58

Sergeant Drummond thought about that, said, “We’ll call the Lotto.”

“I’d be calling past clients too,” I said. “See if any of them are missing jewelry. I mean, there were jewelry pieces the Abramses and Martins couldn’t identify in your photographs, right?”

“True,” Johnson said between mouthfuls.

Drummond’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out, looked at it, said, “Sorry, gentlemen, but I have to take this.”

He got up, leaving me with Johnson, who said, “There’s another possibility, you know.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Maybe Francie was the jewel thief, but she wasn’t the killer,” the young detective said. “Maybe she went to rob someone and surprised the killer.”

“You mean in the act of trying to murder a third socialite?”

“Why not?”

“Any reports of assaulted socialites?”

“Not that I know of,” Johnson said.

“Dessert?” Althea came over and said.

“I’m stuffed,” I said.

She frowned at me, said, “I make it from scratch.”

I held up my hands. “I’ll make room.”

“Sweet potato pudding,” she said, smiling. “Coffee? Tea?”

“I’ll take a coffee,” I said.

“I will too, Althea,” said Drummond, sliding back into his chair.

“I have to be going,” Johnson said. “Can we get the check?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Drummond said. “I’ve got you both covered.”

“Let me take my part of it,” I said.

“Visiting dignitary, I don’t think so,” the sergeant sniffed.

Johnson got up, said, “Again, it was great meeting you, Alex.”

“Likewise,” I said, getting to my feet and shaking his hand.

“See you in the morning, Sarge.”

“Bright and early,” Drummond grumbled.

Our coffee and pudding came. I didn’t know sweet potato pudding could be decadent, but it was.

The sergeant took a sip of coffee, said, “So all we’ve been doing is talking about our case. What is someone like you working on these days?”

I hesitated, then started telling him about my cousin Stefan, and Starksville, and all the strange twists the case had taken in the few days we’d been there. Through it all, Drummond listened intently and quietly, sipping his coffee and eating pudding.

It took me the better part of an hour to tell it all, and with the beers in me, I probably said more than I should have. But Drummond was a good listener, and it just seemed natural.

“And that’s where we are,” I said.

After several beats, the sergeant said, “You like this guy Marvin Bell for killing that kid, but I don’t hear anything that says you got him involved.”

“Because we don’t have him involved,” I said. “Like everyone in Starksville says, he’s a slippery guy.”

Drummond shifted his jaw left and nodded, lost in thought. Then he said, “I’ve known my share of slippery guys. Trick is to let them get so slippery they get overconfident and they—”

His cell phone rang. He looked at it, shook his head, said, “Sorry again.”

The sergeant got up and walked away, and I finished my coffee, thinking that I’d better find a place to stay the evening. Althea brought the check, which was incredibly reasonable considering the quality of the meal.

“I’ll handle the tip,” I said when Drummond returned.

The sergeant smiled. “I think you’re going to want to handle the whole bill once I tell you about those last two phone calls.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“The first call was from the Belchers’ funeral home,” he said. “They handled your Paul Brown’s embalming and delivered his body in a pauper’s casket to a church that isn’t in Pahokee anymore. Closed fifteen years back.”

I frowned. “And the second call?”

“From the minister who used to run that church,” Drummond said. “The Belchers called her. She evidently knew Paul Brown and says she’s willing to meet you out in Pahokee tomorrow around six p.m. to tell you about him.”

I grinned and snatched the check off the table.

Chapter 59

Starksville, North Carolina

Bree flipped off the headlights and coasted the Taurus to a stop diagonally across the town square from Bell Beverages. The Bronco was parked in front. Finn Davis had gone inside. She was beginning to doubt her instincts.

When she’d seen Finn Davis leave Marvin Bell’s place in the slouchy clothes driving the beater four-by-four, she figured it as some kind of disguise, or at least a way of moving under the radar. She and Pinkie had made it to the rental car two minutes before Finn drove out of the compound.

Finn Davis had never seen Bree, to her knowledge. While Pinkie slouched down, she faked a cell phone conversation until Davis had driven by her, heading south toward town. She’d U-turned once he’d rounded a curve and had been following him at a distance ever since.

“Just looks like a man tending business, probably collecting the daily take, which explains the workman’s getup,” Pinkie said. “He doesn’t want attention.”

It did look a lot like that. Finn had stopped at the pawnshop, the dry cleaners, and both car washes before heading to the liquor store. Maybe her instincts had been wrong.

Bree checked her watch. Eight thirty. She’d texted Alex to see how his day had gone almost an hour ago but heard nothing back so far. And she was starting to get hungry. Nana Mama said she’d hold dinner for—

“You think Alex will find what he’s looking for down there?” Pinkie asked.

Bree glanced at the big man, who seemed sincerely concerned.

“I hope so,” she said. “But to be honest, Pinkie, I don’t think Alex knows exactly what he’s looking for. Closure, I guess.”

“Does that happen?” Pinkie asked. “I mean, I never really knew my dad. Died when I was pretty young. Still, I think about him, and there’s nothing closed about it.”

Sydney Fox’s ex came out of the liquor store. Bree started the Taurus. She let Davis get ahead of her in light traffic, then pulled out and followed as he headed south out of Starksville. Two miles beyond the town boundary, the Bronco took a right onto a dirt road that wound up into the forest.

“Takes you up to Stark Lake,” Pinkie said. “There won’t be much traffic to hide in.”

“But there will be people up there?” she asked.

“Sure, summer vacationers and all. Campers at the state park.”

“Colored folk?”

“That too.”

“Then we’ll take our chances,” Bree said. She waited until Finn’s taillights disappeared into the trees before turning in after him.

Stark Lake did not resemble its name. The forest was lush all around it. Cabins dotted the shore; they were nothing like Marvin Bell’s place, but they were nice, well maintained. Bree drove along slowly, as if she were following directions, and peered down every driveway looking for the Bronco.

The road ahead cut hard right into a hairpin around a narrow cove.

“Stop,” Pinkie said. “Back up and turn around as if you’re lost.”

“You see him?” Bree said, braking the car to a stop.

“Turning into a cottage on the other side of that cove,” Pinkie said as she threw the car in reverse, U-turned, and drove away around a bend. “Pull in ahead there and kill your lights.”

Bree backed into the driveway of a dark cabin. They got out and ran to a stand of trees opposite that hairpin around the narrow cove. The water was no more than forty yards across and she had a good look at the cottage and the Bronco. No movement. No sound.

The cottage was nice, newer and more modern than the other places she’d seen on the lake so far. It wasn’t as nice as Marvin Bell’s, but it was still a trophy house by most people’s standards, certainly Bree’s.

A girl of nine, maybe ten, came out onto a wraparound porch that faced the water. Finn Davis came out on the porch after her. He was followed by a second man that Bree couldn’t see well. She raised her binoculars as the man turned to shake Davis’s hand, and she recognized him.

“Sonofabitch,” Bree whispered.

“What?” Pinkie said.

“Wait,” Bree said, staring through the binoculars to be sure it wasn’t a trick of the light on the porch.

No trick. That was Detective Guy Pedelini smiling and taking an envelope from Finn Davis. He tucked it nonchalantly in his pants pocket before putting his arm around the girl, whom Bree took to be one of Pedelini’s daughters. Davis headed for the Bronco.

Bree kept her attention on Detective Pedelini, saw his smile evaporate the second Finn Davis climbed into his vehicle. The detective and his daughter went back inside the cottage.

“Jesus,” Bree said, turning to run back to their car.

“What’s going on?” Pinkie demanded, huffing along beside her.

“That expensive cottage belongs to Guy Pedelini, the one man in Starksville that Alex and I thought was straight, and now it looks like he’s on the take from Finn Davis and probably Marvin Bell,” Bree said. “He’s also the cop who found Rashawn Turnbull and the detective investigating the drugs Marvin Bell’s niece planted on Jannie.”

“Fuck. Some things never change about Starksville.” Pinkie panted as headlights flashed back along the cove. “You can’t trust anyone but family.”

Davis’s headlights were coming closer. Bree and Pinkie skidded to a stop behind a big pine tree fifty feet from the rental. Finn Davis drove on by.

They ran to the Taurus, jumped in. Bree fired up the car, kept the headlights off, and drove out of the driveway and after Davis.

They lost the Bronco until it was almost back to the state highway. They spotted taillights down there on the flat, turning back toward town. Bree put on the headlights and sped up. There were more cars on the road. She hung back three cars from the Bronco as it passed the crumbling brick factory where Alex’s mother had sewn sheets and pillowcases. She stayed in that position almost to the old Piggly Wiggly store.

Right before the railroad crossing, Finn Davis turned hard left, along the tracks, and disappeared from view.

“Where’s that go?” she demanded.

“It’s a maintenance road, I think.”

Train tracks. Hadn’t Stefan Tate said there were strange goings-on along the train tracks that he’d been unable to figure out?

Bree made a split-second decision, pulled into the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, and jumped out of the car. She ran along the sidewalk toward the train tracks. The crossing lights began to flash. Bells rang. The gates lowered and she could hear the rumble of an oncoming train.

Bree scanned the area as the train horn blew. An abandoned building to her left. An empty lot with trees that lined the far side, separating the lot from the tracks. She dashed at an angle across the empty lot into the trees and found herself on a small bluff above the tracks. She pushed vines aside.

The headlights of the train and the Bronco lit up Finn Davis, who stood on the maintenance road a hundred yards away and not ten feet from the tracks. Bree got the binoculars on him. He didn’t seem at all concerned about the engine. He was looking at the cars behind it, which were rolling into view from around the bend.

Bree moved the binoculars to the boxcars and spotted the silhouettes of two men on top of one, two more four cars back, and another pair six cars beyond that. As they passed Davis, they raised their hands in some sort of salute that she couldn’t make out due to shadows.

But Marvin Bell’s adopted son was crisply visible when, in response to their salute, he raised his right hand and held three fingers high.

Chapter 60

West Palm Beach, Florida

An hour later, in my bed at the Hampton Inn, I came wide awake, sat up, and said into my cell phone: “Those guys riding the train on our way into Starksville that first day, they did that same salute.”

“Definitely,” Bree said, back in North Carolina.

I shook off the cobwebs in my mind. “How many did you see?”

“Six total.”

“Were they on specific cars or random?”

“They were all on freight cars, mixed in with tankers.”

“What did Davis do after the train had gone?”

“Got back in the Bronco, turned around, and headed north, probably back to Pleasant Lake,” Bree said. “I abandoned the surveillance at that point.”

“I’m still surprised about Guy Pedelini. I pegged him as a good guy.”

“I did too,” Bree said. “But I’m coming over to Pinkie’s point of view.”

“Which is?”

“Don’t trust anyone in Starksville who isn’t family.”

“Cynical, but probably a good idea for the time being.”

“Here I’ve been hogging the conversation. Any luck down there?”

“Nothing but luck,” I said and then filled her in on my day.

“Wow, that was fast,” Bree said when I was done. “Who’s this minister you’re going to see?”

“Her name’s Reverend Maya and supposedly she knew Paul Brown. The funeral guys remembered her.”

“Well, that’s good. You’ll be able to talk to someone who knew your dad.”

“I think so,” I said. “Then I can put this all behind me and come back and hold you, and together we’ll figure out that three-finger-salute thing.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“More like first thing the following morning.” There was a silence between us before I said, “You okay?”

“Just trying to figure out where to go next. Any advice?”

“Try to see Stefan if you can. Find out what specifically made him suspicious of the area around the train tracks. I don’t think he mentioned it.”

“I already talked to Naomi,” Bree said. “She’s seeing him in the morning. What are you doing tomorrow until you meet the minister?”

“I told Drummond and Johnson I was free to help them,” I said. “Least I could do, considering how much they’ve helped me.”

“I miss you, Alex,” she said softly.

“I miss you too,” I said. “And thanks.”

“For?”

“Sticking your neck out for family.”

“I’m Alex Cross’s wife,” she said teasingly. “What else would I do?”

“Very funny,” I said, grinning. “I love you, Bree.”

“I love you too, Alex,” she said. “Have a good night’s sleep.”

“You too,” I said, and clicked off.

It was nearly eleven by then and I’d been up since five. I should have been turning off the light, trying to get back to sleep. But I felt like I’d had a cup of espresso, jittery, wanting something to do. My focus finally fixed on that stack of three binders that held a copy of the murder book covering the investigations of the socialites and the maid.

Had I missed something on my first trip through them?

Figuring I’d be better off seeking the answer to that question instead of lying awake in the darkness wondering what this Reverend Maya might tell me about my father, I opened the first binder and started to read the records all over again.

Sometime after midnight, exhaustion overtook me, and I slipped off into darkness and dreams that were a mishmash of things I’d seen in Starksville and Palm Beach: Sydney Fox lying dead on her doorstep; the sugarcane burning, throwing smoke and bugs into the sky; Rashawn Turnbull’s body in the crime scene photos; and a dark-hooded and cloaked man standing with his back to me on a street in Belle Glade.

He raised his gloved right hand and held three fingers high.

Chapter 61

Starksville, North Carolina

Dear, sweet Lizzie, her grandfather thought as he dipped an oar into the calm water. Still dressed in her white nightgown and robe, his precious little girl knelt on the floor of the rowboat, forward of the bow seat, her arms flung over the gunnel, and her sleepy eyes trained on lily pads that glistened in the rising sun.

He pulled gently and rotated the oar handle with finesse, causing the flat-bottom skiff to spin in a slow circle across those lily pads. Lizzie held on tight to the sides of the boat and giggled before she let out a “Whee!”

“I told you it was fun,” he said.

“Is that really how you catch them, Grandfather? The fairies?” Lizzie asked as she pushed aside the ringlets of blond hair that fell across her innocent, ever-so-blue eyes.

The old man fell in love all over again and said, “I have it on the highest authority that a fine way to catch fairy princesses is to wait for a nice warm dawn when they will be out sunning on lily pads. You spin over them, confuse them, and then snatch them up.”

Lizzie turned wide-eyed. “But why?”

“Because if you catch a fairy princess, she must grant you three wishes.”

“Three?” the little girl said in wonder, gazing at the water and the lily pads drifting by. “What’s her name? What will I call her?”

“The princess?” He thought fast, said, “Guinevere.”

“Princess Guinevere,” she said, liking that. She lifted her head and looked back at him with a smile that broke away into fear and confusion.

“Who are they, Grandfather?” Lizzie asked.

He realized she was looking beyond him, back to shore. He looked over his shoulder and saw three men coming over the knoll from the house and down the lawn toward the water.

“Who are those men?” she asked again, agitated.

“Friends, Lizzie,” he replied as he turned the boat toward the dock. “Old friends. No one to worry about.”

“But what about Princess Guinevere?” she complained.

“She’ll be here tomorrow,” he said.

He pulled up to the dock and tossed a line to Starksville’s chief of police, Randy Sherman. Then he handed his granddaughter up to Stark County sheriff Nathan Bean and climbed onto the dock after her.

“Lizzie, run on up to the house, get you some breakfast,” he said.

Lizzie kissed her grandfather and ran barefoot up the lawn, adding in a few precious twirls to enchant him.

“Love that little girl,” he said, then he looked to the third man on the dock. “How’re the kidney stones treating you, Judge?”

“Shitty,” Erasmus Varney said with a pinched expression. “But I’ll survive.”

“Glad to hear that,” he said, “because survival is why I brought you all here this morning.”

Chief Sherman and Sheriff Bean studied the old man. Varney was trying, but the judge looked as if he wanted to pace against the pain.

“Been a good life for all of you, yes?” Lizzie’s grandfather asked.

The three men nodded without hesitation.

“Then it’s important to you that our good life goes on, yes?”

They nodded their heads vigorously.

“Good to hear,” he said, then sobered. “I have begun to fear that the survival of our good life is threatened.”

“By who?” Judge Varney asked.

“This Alex Cross and his family. All of them. His wife. His niece the attorney. His aunts and uncles and cousins too.”

“What do you want us to do?” Chief Sherman said.

“I have made arrangements through a third party to bring in a lace maker that can never be traced to any of us,” he said. “She is to be given every opportunity to succeed as she’s passing through Starksville.”

“She?” Sheriff Bean said. “Correct.”

“She been through town before?” Chief Sherman asked.

“Once.”

“When is her trip scheduled?” Sheriff Bean asked.

“She’s arriving today. Problems with any of that?”

Judge Varney said, “It has to be done delicately with someone like Cross. He has a reputation. Friends in high places.”

“We’re aware of that delicacy, Erasmus,” Lizzie’s grandfather said. “That’s why I’ve called in a lace maker. She’ll sew everything together so their deaths look like tragic twists of fate.”