Cross Justice

Chapter 62

Palm Beach, Florida

“Such a tragic way to die, Maggie,” Coco cooed. “But really, it’s acceptable now in our social strata, isn’t it? Or at least, it’s not the shame it once was.”

Dressed in a pair of Stéphanie Coudert white linen pants, a pale tan jersey, and ballet slippers, Jeffrey Mize sat wigless at the foot of the bed. He was lost in his alter ego, Coco, analyzing the fetal position of Maggie’s body, noting how the sheets were tucked perfectly under her chin, as if the poor dear had sought out a cozy spot in which to expire.

The spent bottle of Patrón on the night table helped the overdose tableau. So did the empty vials that had once held the deceased’s notoriously abused prescriptions for pain, anxiety, and sleep.

One cocktail was all it took, Coco thought with satisfaction as he got up off the bed. Maggie never knew what hit her. Not like Lisa Martin, who’d gone all Frankenstein’s bride, bug-eyed and shrieking when the radio hit the bathwater. And very unlike Ruth Abrams, who’d fought the noose with surprising strength.

Coco paused in front of Maggie’s mirror and admired the new clothes, the makeup, indeed the whole new look, before turning to the red box. He opened it, lifted out the wig. Copper-blond and shoulder-length, the hair fell easily about his shoulders.

A few adjustments and there was the effect he was going for: Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair, the casual look, not the one in the chess scenes with Steve McQueen where Faye was sheer elegance and glamour.

At least, that’s how Mother had always described this wig. Casual yet intriguing, sporty and strong. A woman who was a match for McQueen.

Coco laughed because he’d seen the movie and Mother was dead-on. Putting on tortoiseshell sunglasses to complete the Dunaway effect, he felt adventurous and naughty and very sexy when he pouted in the mirror. Coco left the mirror at last, took the canvas bag, and sauntered out of the bedroom and through the library. He paused where a portrait hung.

Maggie had been painted sitting barefoot on a sand dune at sunset. She wore jeans and a collared pink blouse, and she looked out to sea in three-quarter profile with windswept hair and an expression that suggested an awareness of her fading beauty. That’s how you’ll always be, he thought. Sitting on a coast of gold and thinking about loss.

Coco turned, leaving Maggie behind and yet forever with him in the memory of that painting. Beyond the kitchen, he checked the security system in a little room off the garage and was pleased to see it still down.

What had Maggie said? Something about a fifteen-minute reset?

Much more than I need, Coco thought, and flipped a switch that rebooted the system. Moving quicker, he went out into the garage and opened the door behind his beloved Aston Martin.

Coco got in, tied a blue scarf loosely over the wig, just as Faye had done in the famous dune-buggy scene in The Thomas Crown Affair with McQueen driving. He threw the Aston in gear and backed out into the first light of day.

The gate swung open. Coco drove out onto South Ocean Boulevard and headed north with the Aston’s top down. Salt spiced the air. The wind caused the scarf to flicker in his peripheral vision. The gathering day. The warming light.

It was like being in a movie, with Coco as the star, channeling Faye Dunaway as he drove past mansion after mansion bathed in the rising sun. He thought dreamily, You’ll all be mine someday. Mother always said so. You just have to dream it, Coco, and the whole world can be yours.

In town, he stopped for breakfast and played the Coco role to the hilt, feeding on the attention, enjoying how it made him and his audience glow. True glamour was always like that, Mother said. Beauty was a shared experience.

Getting back into the Aston Martin, Coco was confused for a moment, unsure where to go next. Then, like a homing pigeon, he relied on instincts to guide him. He drove for a while, parked the car, then walked to the door of Mize Fine Arts.

He’d spent a full night deep in the trance that was Coco, and it was only in front of the gallery that Mize realized who and where he was. Feeling suddenly weak, he fumbled with the lock before finally getting the shop door open.

Inside, he turned the dead bolt and shut down the alarm. He started through the gallery toward his office but felt so dizzy he had to stop and sit down on a stack of fine Oriental rugs in one of the alcoves. When was the last time he’d slept? A day? A day and a half? Had Coco taken all that time away?

Mize lay down, rolled slowly over onto his side, and passed out.

He had no idea how long he’d been there asleep when the sharp sound of knocking woke him. Mize looked around, dazed, then glanced in a mirror on the wall of the shop and saw the Dunaway look with nary a hair out of place.

More knocking.

Mize’s head began to pound, but he got up and walked around a corner to the front door, where a muscular guy in a white button-down shirt and a tie was peering in and pressing a police badge to the window.

Chapter 63

Palm Beach county sheriff’s office detective Richard S. Johnson saw the woman coming to the door of Mize Fine Arts and stepped back.

The lock was thrown. The door swung open, revealing a stunningly attractive woman with flawless hair that looked copper, strawberry, and blond.

She smiled, said in a soft Southern accent, “Can I help you?”

Detective Johnson had never backed down from a fight in his life. He had been in combat six times in Afghanistan and never flinched. But he had also never done well around women in this class of beauty.

“I’m, uh, Detective Johnson, uh, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.”

“Yes?” she asked, seeming to sense the effect she was having on him, sliding her hand up the doorjamb like some movie star.

“I’m looking for Jeffrey Mize,” Johnson said.

“He’s not here. He usually doesn’t come in for another hour or so.”

“Oh,” Johnson said. “I went by his house and he wasn’t there either.”

“He goes out for breakfast. Come back in an hour and I’m sure he’ll see you. Can I tell him what it’s about, Detective?”

“Routine, follow-up stuff on a case I’m working. And you are?”

“Coco,” she said. “I consult and appraise for Mr. Mize.”

“Can I come in and wait, Coco?”

Coco gave him an uncomfortable sigh. “Detective, I’m not an employee. I work for Mr. Mize on contract and I come in early so I can do my job when it’s quiet. Could you give me an hour? There’s a nice coffee shop down the street.”

“I’ll see you in an hour,” Johnson said.

“Unfortunately, I’ll be off by then,” Coco cooed. “But thanks, Detective.”

“You’re welcome, Coco,” he said, and walked down the sidewalk feeling like he’d been mildly hypnotized by the woman.

Johnson shook his head as he went to the coffee shop. He’d grown up in a tough part of Miami. He’d joined the Marines and done two tours in Afghanistan, and he still fell apart around certain women. He laughed when he thought of the first time he’d met his wife, Angela, how tongue-tied he’d been.

His phone rang. Detective Sergeant Drummond.

“Anything?” Drummond asked.

“I’m supposed to talk to Mize in an hour,” Johnson said. “You?”

“I chatted with Marie Purcell’s chief of staff,” the sergeant said. “She fired Francie four months ago. Suspicion of stealing rare coins.”

“Were we notified?”

“No,” Drummond said. “People like the Purcells don’t like to get police involved. They have their own security people and take care of things quietly.”

“Lot of that up here?” Johnson asked as he stood in line for coffee in a shop that had a nice vibe to it.

“I’d say so.”

“You hear from Cross?”

“On my way to pick him up,” Drummond said.

Johnson was kind of annoyed. He’d hoped to have more time with Dr. Alex Cross, pick his brain about things.

“Who’s next on your list?” the sergeant asked.

Johnson dug in his pocket for a piece of paper, studied the names, and said, “Crawford.”

“I’ll take Schultz.”

Johnson agreed and clicked off. He got an espresso shot and a mug of robust Kenyan coffee black and poured them together over ice. He read the Palm Beach Post cover to cover and made calls to the Crawford mansion and several others on the list but got nothing other than the opportunity to leave messages.

Johnson walked up to the gallery fifteen minutes early and rapped on the door. A man soon appeared. Tall, stoop-shouldered, and completely bald, he wore white slippers, baggy black trousers, a loose black shirt, and white cotton gloves.

“Detective Johnson?” he said in a deep voice. “Coco said you’d come by. Please, come in. Sorry I wasn’t here earlier, and sorry about the gloves, I’ve had a nasty allergic reaction to some lacquer remover I was experimenting with the other day.”

Johnson walked into the shop, gazed all around, said, “Lot of nice stuff in here. What is it you do, sir?”

“I buy and sell things of beauty,” Mize said. “Fine art, jewelry, rugs, and furniture. What can I do for you?”

“I’m here about Francie Letourneau.”

He frowned, and Johnson noticed he had no eyebrows. No hair of any kind. What did they call that condition?

“What about Francie?” Mize asked.

“She’s dead,” Johnson said.

Mize straightened, moved a white-gloved hand toward his slack mouth, said, “Dead?”

“Murdered,” Johnson said. “Her body was found out past Belle Glade.”

“My God, that’s awful,” Mize said. “I always liked her. Well, at least until I had to fire her.”

“Over?”

“She wasn’t showing up on time and she was doing a halfassed job,” Mize replied. “And though I could never prove it, I think she was stealing things.”

“You think?”

Mize gestured all around. “Keeping track of my inventory is more an art than a science. I can’t begin to remember every piece of jewelry, for example.”

“That what you think she stole?” Johnson said. “Jewelry?”

“Yes,” Mize said. “Several pieces that were my mother’s that just weren’t anywhere one day.”

“How’d you come to hire Francie?”

“Through a service,” he sniffed. “I was told she was highly recommended.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Saw? I don’t know, five months ago, but I heard from her a few days back. She left a message on my machine at home. Can you imagine the gall?”

“What was the message?”

“She said she was sorry about any misunderstanding we’d had and was looking for her job back.”

“You return her call?”

“Certainly not, and I erased the message.”

“What day was that?”

“Saturday? Sunday?”

“Where were you Sunday?”

Mize thought about that. “Worked here the whole afternoon. Had early sushi with Coco and her sister, went home around eight, watched old movies on Netflix for a bit. The Thomas Crown Affair, have you seen it?”

“No.”

“You should. It’s very good. The original, not the remake. But anyway, after drooling over Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen, I went to sleep around ten. I like to go to bed early and get up early. You?”

“Same,” Johnson said. “Do you know Ruth Abrams or Lisa Martin?”

“After I saw the stories in the paper, I racked my brain. I’m sure I’ve met them both at one social function or another. Terrible, though.”

“Francie Letourneau worked for both women.”

“Really? Do you think she was somehow involved in their deaths? And then, what, got killed herself?”

“It’s possible,” Johnson said, and he felt his cell phone buzz. It was Drummond again.

“Get your ass to the Crawford place,” the sergeant growled. “The missus is dead.”

Chapter 64

Detective Johnson was Climbing out of his car when Sergeant Drummond pulled us up beside him and parked on Ocean Boulevard between two patrol cars flashing their blue lights.

The heat had been stupefying when I joined Drummond in the parking lot of the Hampton Inn over in West Palm, but here, so close to the beach and water, there was a beautiful shore breeze. No wonder this had been the winter spot for the super-rich for, what, more than a century? Isn’t that what the sergeant had said last night?

Before I could make sure the three beers hadn’t addled my memory, Johnson started telling Drummond about his trip to Mize Fine Arts as they walked onto the grounds of the Crawford residence, a rambling white Mediterranean with a red-tile roof. The gardens inside the gate were stunning and gave way to a waterfall in a Zen-like setting.

The house was... well, I’d never been in one like it. Then again, I don’t get the chance to roam around in Palm Beach mansions a lot. Let’s just say that every room was designed for Architectural Digest.

The kitchen was over the top, with Swedish and Finnish appliances that gleamed like they’d been installed the day before and gorgeous Italian tile work. The library looked stolen from some abbey in southern France. And the bedroom where Maggie Crawford lay was as bright as a Florida day.

I scanned the room, saw the pills, the Patrón bottle, and the tumbler on the bed stand by the blowsy woman tucked under the covers. She must have been stunning once. She could have been sleeping there had her skin not been blue.

“Let’s not be touching anything,” Drummond said. “This will be a forensics case through and through.”

I couldn’t argue with him. There was no sign of struggle. It would be up to the lab people to tell us how she died.

A deputy appeared at the door, said, “The deceased’s personal assistant is downstairs. She called it in.”

We found Candace Layne in a miserable state in that beautiful library.

“This was what everyone feared would happen,” Layne said. “It’s why John, her soon-to-be ex, left. He couldn’t watch her self-destruct anymore.”

“Drug and alcohol problems?” I asked.

Layne nodded sadly. “Deep down, despite all the money, all the beauty and good fortune, she was an insecure, anxiety-ridden person.”

“When did you last see her?” Johnson asked.

“Yesterday around five thirty,” she said.

“Would you have been the last person to see her alive?”

“I would think so,” Layne said. “She had no plans for the evening. She was going to read and watch a movie.”

Drummond asked Layne if she knew the other three dead women, the two socialites and Francie Letourneau. When Layne responded by asking the sergeant if he thought Maggie Crawford had been murdered, he told her he was just covering all the bases. Layne said she’d fired Letourneau after Maggie caught her stealing silver. She’d e-mailed the personal assistants of Ruth Abrams and Lisa Martin but never met them.

“Did Mrs. Crawford run in their circle?” Drummond asked.

“Same fund-raisers, that kind of thing,” Layne said, nodding.

Even though we had no conclusive evidence that Maggie Crawford had been murdered, in my mind the four killings were linked. Three socialites, all using the same Haitian maid at some point. Three socialites and the maid now dead. This was no coincidence, which meant that there was a missing link, some factor that tied them all together.

“How long have you worked for her?” I asked.

“Five years next month,” Layne said sadly.

“Would you know if some of her things were missing?” Johnson said. “Like jewelry? Clothes?”

Layne nodded. “I think so. Do you want me to look?”

“We’ll wait until the forensics folks do their thing,” Drummond said. “Tell me about her.”

“Maggie?” Layne said, then thought. “Most of the time she was the kindest, funniest, most generous person you could ever meet, a real joy to work for. But sometimes, when her mind was altered, she was a tyrant, a little rich girl who wanted what she wanted right now. And even when she was sober, she often had this kind of... I don’t know... melancholy or wanting about her. There, you can see it in her expression in that painting over there.”

Layne gestured toward an oil painting of Maggie Crawford, barefoot, dressed in jeans and a pink blouse. She was sitting on a sand dune with sea grass around her, caught in three-quarter profile as she looked out toward the ocean. I walked over to study it, saw the expression the personal assistant had been talking about.

“That’s a big thing among the super-rich, right?” Johnson said behind me. “You know, getting your portrait painted?”

“I don’t know; I suppose so,” Layne said.

“Ruth Abrams and Lisa Martin had portraits done of them,” Drummond said, coming over to examine the painting. “Coco.”

“What?” Johnson said.

“Right here in the corner,” the sergeant said. “It’s signed Coco.”

“I have no idea who that is,” Layne said.

“Oh, I think I might,” Johnson said. “I met a Coco just this morning.”

Chapter 65

Starksville, North Carolina

Around four o’clock that afternoon, Bree walked along the railroad tracks where she’d seen Finn Davis give a three-finger salute to six young men riding freight cars on a train heading north.

“What are we looking for?” Naomi said.

“I don’t know,” Bree said. “And unfortunately, neither did your client.”

She and Naomi had come to the tracks in a long roundabout way from the jail, where they’d been able to talk with Stefan Tate for roughly thirty minutes. When she asked him about his suspicions regarding the trains, he said he’d overheard a couple of stoners at the high school talking about drugs and the track. He decided to follow one of them.

“Lester Michaels, a senior, one of those kids who lived to get high. I saw him jump a freight train. He didn’t come back to school for two days. When I asked him about the absence, he said he’d been sick, but I talked with his mother. She’d been ready to file a missing-person report on him.”

“You ever see any other people riding on the trains?” Bree had asked.

“No,” Stefan admitted. “I sat down there a few nights, watching, but trains come through Starksville twenty-four/seven.”

“I’ve been lucky, then,” Bree said. “I’ve seen guys on boxcars twice since I’ve been here, and both times they gave somebody on the ground a three-finger salute. You know anything about that?”

Stefan thought a moment, then nodded. “I’ve seen a few kids at the school use something like that, I think.”

“Names?” Naomi asked.

“I don’t know,” Stefan said. “I think they were Patty’s students. Where is she? She hasn’t come to see me or answered my calls.”

Bree said nothing.

Naomi said, “I’m sure she’s just under a lot of stress.”

“Or bailing on me,” Stefan said in a fretful tone.

Bree and Naomi had tried to assure him otherwise. But after they’d left the jail, they’d gone by Patty Converse’s place. Her car was gone, but from what they’d been able to see through the window, her stuff was still inside. Naomi had tried Patty’s phone number several times, but got voice mail.

So they’d come back to the railroad tracks around four that afternoon.

A train rumbled at them out of the south. Bree and Naomi walked well back from the tracks in order to see the tops of the freight cars. But they were all bare of riders, even the caboose. Another train came a few minutes later out of the north. It too was riderless.

“I’m thinking this is a little bit like the needle in the haystack,” Naomi said. “I mean, we can’t watch all day.”

Bree thought about that, looked around, and then back toward the thicket of trees between the tracks and the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. The trees overlooking the tracks triggered a memory of Ali watching some show on the Outdoor Channel the other day.

“Is there a store here that carries hunting and fishing gear?” Bree asked.

“There’s an army-surplus place that does, I think.”

They were soon back in the car, driving west of town to P and J’s Surplus. They went in and were greeted with several Confederate flags on the wall.

Bree ignored them and found the only salesperson, a heavyset white girl in her midteens named Sandrine. She looked at Bree suspiciously and at Naomi with mild interest.

“I seen you in the papers and on TV,” Sandrine said to her. “You’re defending that kid killer, right?”

“I’m Mr. Tate’s attorney,” Naomi said.

“You’re following the case?” Bree asked.

She shrugged. “Papa says I shouldn’t pay attention to any of it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Just niggers killing niggers, he says. No offense. I’m just quoting.”

Sandrine said this offhandedly. Bree swallowed her reaction by wondering how many people in and around Starksville thought about the case like that.

Naomi managed to stay composed as well, said, “We’re here looking for something to buy.”

“Yeah?” Sandrine said, perking up. “What’re you looking for?”

Bree told her, and the girl came waddling and smiling right out from behind her little counter. “We got it all at P and J’s! Got six of them in just the other day. How many you want?”

Bree thought and then said, “We’ll start with two.”

Chapter 66

West Palm Beach, Florida

Burning cane filled the air with smoke again as I drove toward Belle Glade, wanting to be there and in Palm Beach and in Starksville all at once.

It was five twenty in the evening. I’d spent the day with Drummond and Johnson, who’d quickly reached staff at both the Abrams and Martin residences and confirmed that Coco had painted the women’s portraits. None of the staff knew who Coco was, however, much less where she lived.

Maggie Crawford’s estranged husband, John, was fishing in Alaska. The Boob King had been in surgery all day and was unreachable. So was Elliot Martin, Lisa Martin’s billionaire husband, who was in Shanghai on business.

They’d left messages with all their aides. On the way to Mize Fine Arts on Worth Avenue, Johnson called up the Internet on his phone and ran a search for a Coco in Palm Beach and the surrounding areas. There was no such listing.

Then we’d found Mize Fine Arts closed during prime shopping hours, and no one answered our knocking.

“I’d like to go in there and look around,” Johnson said as we turned away.

“I’m sure you would,” Drummond said. “But I don’t think a name on three paintings gives us a search warrant. And that looks like a serious alarm system. You wouldn’t be able to explain yourself if you were somehow caught inside.”

When I looked at Drummond, he winked at me.

We went to Mize’s home. It must have been a grand place once, not huge like the megamansions out on Ocean Boulevard, but an impressive structure. The front yard and gardens were nicely maintained. But the manor itself needed painting. And up close, you could see the front door required varnishing, and the stucco siding was in minor disrepair.

Drummond rang the bell. There was no answer. He rang it again.

I wandered around the side and into the shadows between the house and a bamboo hedge that separated it from the place next door. The walkway was busted concrete overgrown with weeds. The backyard was worse, looked like it hadn’t been tended in months. A gutter downspout was disconnected halfway down from the roof. The lower part hung by a bracket.

“If he’s in there, he’s not answering,” Drummond said when I returned.

“I’d check the tax rolls on this guy,” I said.

“Why’s that?”

“He’s not taking care of his property, which means he’s under financial stress of some sort.”

Drummond called in a request for all information on Jeffrey Mize as we returned to the car.

“We’ll have to sit on the place,” Johnson said.

“And the art gallery,” I said. “Sooner or later, Mize or Coco will show up.”

Because Johnson was the only one who had seen Coco in person, he went to watch the shop. Drummond and I sat on the house until it was time for me to go learn what had become of my father.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” the sergeant said before I left.

Driving north out of Belle Glade an hour later, there was a bug hatch, and so many insects smashed into the windshield that it stayed smeared no matter how much wiper fluid I used. Near the Pahokee city limits, I stopped to fill up with gas and clean off the windshield, then I drove into town, seeing signs about the high school football team.

Drummond said the high school teams at Pahokee and Belle Glade always ranked among the top teams in the state and together had put almost sixty players in the NFL. Pretty impressive when you consider the economic devastation. There were fewer businesses in Pahokee than there’d been in Belle Glade.

But the Cozy Corner Café on Lake Street was still open. I parked in front. The humidity this close to Lake Okeechobee was stupefying. In the ten steps I took between the rental and the front door of the café, I was drenched, though maybe that also had to do with the sudden nervousness that swept through me. What had happened to my father all those years ago?

There were six customers in the café, though only one was female and alone. She smiled at me, waved me over. A pretty, plump older Latina woman with a beaming smile, she got up out of her booth, pushing back her long ponytail of black hair flecked with gray, and adjusted an attractive purple batik dress. A small, simple wooden cross hung on a chain about her neck.

“Dr. Cross?” she said, smiling as she took my hand in both of hers and peered kindly up at me through wire-rimmed glasses. “I’m Reverend Alicia Maya. I understand you’re interested in Paul Brown?”

Chapter 67

Over the course of an hour, an iced coffee, and a slice of pineapple pie, Reverend Maya told me what she knew about Paul Brown. She’d met him shortly after she had taken over the small Unitarian Universalist church in Pahokee as a first-time minister.

“I was twenty-five, right out of divinity school and sure I could change the world,” Reverend Maya said. “You wouldn’t believe it now, but back then, Pahokee was a thriving place. Everyone had jobs. People came here for jobs, including Paul Brown.”

Reverend Maya said Brown showed up at one of her evening services. He was weak and limped terribly.

“He stayed after the service,” she said. “He said he had no place to go and would be glad to clean the church if I let him sleep there. I was doubtful, but I could see he was a man in pain beyond the mere physical, and I said yes. He ended up living in the church for about eight months, working out in the picking fields in the day, cleaning the church at night.”

I held up my hands. “Before we go any further, can you answer a couple of quick questions?”

“I’ll try.”

“After Brown died, did you call someone named Clifford Tate in Starksville, North Carolina?”

The reverend cocked her head, looked off, and then said, “Yes. I believe the name and number were in a little book I found with Mr. Brown’s things.”

The loss of my father felt strangely final then, and it must have shown on my face because Reverend Maya said, “Sergeant Drummond said he was a relative of yours?”

“I believe he was my father,” I said.

She blinked, took a big breath, said, “Oh. I didn’t know that.”

Reverend Maya said Brown seemed to be a tortured man doing his best to atone for past sins, though he was evasive when it came to discussing their nature. He rarely spoke to her, but she often found him kneeling in prayer.

“I’d ask him what he was praying for,” the minister said. “All he would say was ‘Forgiveness.’”

“He never told you what had happened? What he did?”

The minister looked conflicted and I could tell it had something to do with confidentiality between a minister and a member of the flock, even a dead member of the flock. So I told her about Jason Cross.

Reverend Maya listened raptly as I described my parents’ descent into hell. I told her how my mother had died and about my disjointed memories of what I’d believed for three and a half decades was the night my father died.

“Mr. Brown confessed some of that to me, though there were never any names used. He said he’d killed his wife because she was suffering so.”

“I think that’s true. Did he ever mention us, the children? Or his mother?”

She nodded. “He did. He said his children were living with his mother somewhere up north, and that they were doing much better without him.”

Reverend Maya said that one evening several months after Brown had appeared at her church, she’d gone to check on him. Brown wasn’t there in the little room where he lived. Then she heard a shot and found him lying dead behind the church. He’d shot himself in the face with a shotgun.

“Can I see where it happened?”

She shook her head. “The church was a termite-ridden building that was torn down about five years after I left to take over a church in West Palm. But I’d be glad to show you his grave, if you’d like.”

“His grave. I’d like that very much.”

Chapter 68

“We’ll take my car,” Reverend Maya said. “Funner.”

To my surprise, she led me to an older-model, gleaming, two-door white Mazda Miata convertible roadster.

“Do all Unitarian Universalist ministers drive sports cars?” I asked.

She laughed. “This one does. It’s my single vice in life.”

The reverend was good at her vice; she drove the Miata on the rural roads beyond the decaying streets of Pahokee as if she’d had race training somewhere. I never got the chance to ask her if she had because she peppered me with questions about my life and my family.

I could tell by the end of the fifteen-minute drive that Reverend Maya was as good at probing for the soul of things as she was at driving.

“You’ve led an amazing life by any definition,” she said as she downshifted and turned through the narrow gate of a small cemetery out in the countryside. “I think Paul, uh, your father would have been very proud of you.”

I smiled, choked up, and said, “Thanks.”

Biting insects whirled around us the second she stopped the car. But then she reached into her glove compartment and pulled out two ThermaCell bug repellents. She clipped one to her purse. I put mine on my belt and was glad to see the thing worked.

We walked forward two lanes in the cemetery and took a left toward the chain-link fence and the dense vegetation beyond it. At the end of the row there was a simple reddish granite slab about the size of two bricks set side by side.

I felt my shoulders slump a bit reading those words and then the date of his death below. I thought back through the years, wondered where I’d been when my father killed himself.

I’d been, what, twelve? Thirteen? Did I ever once think of him back then?

I doubted it, and that admission let loose a trickle of raw emotion that had been building since I’d come upon the gravestone of my dad. My head swung slowly back and forth. My lungs fluttered for air.

He’d killed my mother and escaped prosecution only to be consumed by guilt and grief. The dam burst in me then, and I gave into it all, the tragedy, the loss of my father a second time. Burying my face in the crook of my arm, I broke down sobbing.

I felt Reverend Maya’s hand rubbing my back.

“Hard thing,” she said. “Hard, hard thing.”

It was almost a minute before I could control myself. I sniffed and looked away from her, said, “Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” she said in a soothing tone.

“I feel bad about all of it.”

“I think it would be natural. What are you most upset about?”

I thought about that and anger pooled in me. “I didn’t have a dad. That’s what I’m angriest about. A boy deserves a father.”

“He does, and I’m sorry,” she said, deep empathy in her expression.

“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” I said in a hoarse voice. “My father made his decision. I’m sure he thought it was the right thing to do.”

“But it’s still a hard thing.”

I nodded. “It was like a door slammed shut on him the night he died. And then, just in the past few days, that door was open, just for a second, and I caught a glimpse of a secret passageway, but it ended at another locked door. One that will stay that way forever.”

Reverend Maya seemed to feel my pain as if it were her own, and she didn’t speak for a moment. Finally she said, “Do you need more time alone?”

I gazed down at the gravestone feeling wrung out, and then I said to my father’s ghost, “I love you, Dad. I forgive you, Dad.”

Reverend Maya patted me on the back again as I walked away from the gravestone. We were quiet on the drive back to Pahokee.

“I hope I’ve helped to give you closure, Dr. Cross,” she said after I’d disentangled myself from the Miata.

“I wanted to know my father’s whole story, and now I do, and now I’ll have to learn to live with it, and so will my grandmother.”

Reverend Maya gazed at me for a long moment, and then said, “I have to go home and make dinner for my husband, who should be getting off work about now, but I wish you and your family all of Jesus’s blessings.”

“Thank you, Reverend,” I said, smiling weakly and nodding. “I wish the same for you and your husband. And drive safe.”

“Always,” she said. Then she put the Miata in gear and sped off into the gathering night.

Chapter 69

It began to rain as I drove across the bridge around eight thirty that evening. I was debating when to call Bree. A part of me wanted to pick up the phone right then, but I didn’t want to churn the emotions all over again while in public and behind the wheel. I’d call when I got back to my room at the Hampton Inn after checking in with Sergeant Drummond.

But neither Drummond nor Johnson answered the phone, and when I drove by Mize Fine Arts, I didn’t see any sign that the place was under surveillance. I drove on toward Mize’s house, knowing that I was doing what I often did in turbulent times. I was turning my mind to a mystery and an investigation as a way of escaping the rest of my life.

I should have gone somewhere to eat, then returned to my hotel and tried to get an earlier flight back to North Carolina. Instead, I was in front of Mize’s house, relieved to see Drummond’s vehicle right where I’d left it.

I drove around the corner, parked out of sight, and strolled down the sidewalk as nonchalantly as an African American male can in Palm Beach. Johnson saw me in the passenger-side mirror and unlocked the car.

I climbed in the backseat.

“Success?” Drummond asked, looking at me in the rearview.

“It was a great help. She was a great help.”

“Then we’re happy.”

“Yes, thank you, Sergeant.”

“Least we could do.”

“Given up watching the store?”

Drummond gestured through the windshield. “Those lights went on about an hour ago. Don’t know if it’s part of a security system or if Mize is in there.”

“How long are you going to sit on him?”

“I don’t know. Until I—”

“Sarge,” Johnson interrupted. “Garage door’s going up. Which car’s it gonna be? The Lexus or the...”

The rear end of a dark green convertible backed out of the garage into the turnaround. The top was up, and the car had to have been forty years old. It looked to me like something Sean Connery might have driven in his years as Bond.

“An Aston Martin DB Five convertible,” said Johnson appreciatively. “A very rare car. A very fast and nimble car. Roadster.”

“We’ll stay with it,” Drummond said, starting the car.

The roadster pulled out, revealing the silhouette of a tall figure behind the wheel. The car turned away from us, heading north at a rapid but legal clip toward Worth Avenue and Mize’s shop.

“You going to pull him over?” Johnson asked.

“I want to see where he goes at night after ignoring our phone calls and door knocks,” the sergeant said.

“Maybe he goes to Coco’s place,” Johnson said.

“You’re thinking they’re in this together?” Drummond asked.

“Why not? Coco could be turning Mize onto his targets. Or vice versa.”

Drummond frowned, glanced in the mirror at me. “A woman serial killer? Isn’t that rare?”

“You’ve got multiple killings here, but it doesn’t feel serial to me. In every case, effort was made to cast the deaths as suicides. Most serial killers delight in being blatant about their acts. So a woman could be our killer or an accomplice.”

“Motive?”

“Money.”

The Aston Martin was two cars and almost a block ahead of us as it rolled to the stop sign. Instead of taking a left toward Mize Fine Arts, the Aston Martin turned right and headed toward the ocean.

Drummond stayed well back now, unwilling to risk being noticed, while Johnson and I craned our necks to see the roadster take a left onto Ocean Boulevard just as the rain came on hard. When we turned after it, less than a minute later, we couldn’t see where Mize had gone.

Then Johnson saw brake lights in the shadows beyond a gate set in a wall that surrounded a two-story Mediterranean. The house was mostly shielded from the road by a riot of plants and towering palms. We circled the block to make sure Mize hadn’t gone somewhere else and returned feeling that he must have been allowed in by someone who lived or worked there. Edwin and Pauline Striker were listed as owners in the county records Johnson pulled up on his iPad.

“Is Pauline a candidate for Coco?” I said.

Johnson shook his head. “Both owners are in their late sixties. But maybe Coco’s a daughter or something.”

Drummond parked where we could see the gate and then drummed his fingers on the wheel. Even though his face remained expressionless, I was learning to read his other nonverbal cues. He was frustrated, and I sensed why.

The various links we’d established connecting the victims, Mize, and Coco were weak, at best, and some were unproven. We didn’t even know, for example, if the Coco who’d painted the portraits was the same woman who worked for Mize. And the only thing that tied Mize to any of it was the fact that he’d employed Francie Letourneau and had been called by the maid just before she’d been killed.

That certainly wasn’t enough to warrant us going into Mize’s home or even, for that matter, into the Strikers’ place. For all we knew, the Strikers were old and dear friends of the art dealer, and he was over for a late visit.

But what if—

Drummond said, “I’m sitting here wondering if Mize is in there alone with Pauline Striker.”

“Or with Coco and Pauline Striker.”

“Call the house,” I said. “Make it sound as if you’re checking in with people who used Francine Letourneau as a maid or a woman named Coco as a portrait painter. See if that flushes him out.”

Johnson looked up the number, called it, heard it ring into voice mail. He left a message identifying himself and asking that someone give him a call back on his cell phone regarding an ongoing investigation.

When he hung up, I doubted we’d get a call anytime soon and I yawned, glanced at my watch. It was nearly ten.

Then Johnson’s phone rang.

“The Strikers,” he said, and he put the phone on speaker and answered.

Chapter 70

In a hallway off the master suite upstairs, Jeffrey Mize became Coco. He got control of himself and affected a crotchety voice, saying, “This is Pauline Striker. I am looking for Detective Johnson.”

“You got him,” Johnson said. “Thanks for the quick callback.”

“What’s this about?” Coco said.

“An investigation I’m a part of,” Johnson said. “I’m trying to find out if you or your friends employed a Francine Letourneau as a maid in the past four or five years.”

“The answer for me is no,” Coco said. “We’ve been lucky and haven’t had a turnover in staff in ten years. Both our girls are part of the family. As far as the staff at other houses, I couldn’t say.”

“Right,” Johnson said.

“Is that all? My husband and I are entertaining.”

“Sorry to interrupt, but just one more question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you ever had a portrait of yourself done by an artist named Coco?”

For a moment, the cloud that was Coco lifted, and Mize felt panic surge through him. But in the next instant, Coco reasserted control and said, “The only formal portraits of me and my family are photographs. What’s this about? I have guests to entertain.”

“Just running down leads, ma’am,” Johnson said. “Again, I’m sorry for interrupting your evening.”

The line clicked dead.

Coco set the phone back in the cradle, feeling like an immediate danger had been averted. But he stood there several long beats also feeling like the police were closing in.

The Mize circuitry in his brain broke through: Johnson has met Coco and me. Johnson was pounding on the front door at the house this afternoon. He’ll go back to the shop in the morning. You should run now. Take all you can and run.

But these days, Coco was dominant. He pushed aside the thought of leaving just as easily as he’d pushed aside what his house looked like and hid every other thing that might mar his appearance to the outside world.

This was all that mattered. Appearance. This night. This moment.

One last time?

Dressed only in La Perla black panties and a gorgeous Chantal Thomass blush-and-black corset, Coco padded back into the master bedroom, where Pauline Striker, naked, was gagged and lashed to a chair, clearly terrified.

“What do you think?” Coco asked, running his fingers down the sides of the corset. “Slimming. And sensual. Why, Pauline, in my wildest moments I didn’t imagine you and Edwin as the merry-widow type, but I suppose what happens behind closed doors just happens and evolves. And then one day I’m here playing in your kinky side, and you’re... you’re there.”

Coco was transfixed by Pauline’s fear and didn’t move for several moments. Then he grabbed a pair of fine black silk hose, fresh from Paris, and sat in a chair at the vanity. He rolled them on over his toes and up his calves and thighs. Coco loved that sensation. It never got old.

“Have you ever had the sense there were two of you living inside your brain?” Coco asked Pauline, and then he gestured to the corset. “Finding this in your drawer tells me you have. So in case you were wondering, that’s what we’re doing here, exploring our personalities, acting out fantasies, you know?”

Pauline Striker’s eyes were glued on Coco.

As Coco went by her, he ran the fingernails of his left hand over her cheek softly, saying, “Tonight there’s someone else playing in your head, Pauline. Her name is Miranda. She’s a wild child, and I love her.”

Pauline’s brow was knit with confusion when Coco came around the other side of the chair and faced her.

“Miranda’s a wild child, and I love her,” he said again and felt himself harden. “But she’s also my mother, and I hate her.”

Coco slapped Pauline across the face so hard it left a palm print.

Over Pauline’s cries and whimpers of pain, Coco said coldly, “Gloves are off, Mummy. No more making things look like suicide for Jeffrey’s sake. There’s just nothing fulfilling in that anymore.”

Chapter 71

“I’m telling you, sarge, some of the time it sounded like Coco,” Johnson said. “She had this distinctive cadence when she talked, and so did that lady.”

“Cadence?” Drummond said, skeptical.

“Yeah, like where the word emphasis was,” Johnson said. “My wife’s a speech pathologist. She knows about this stuff, so I know about this stuff. Did you notice how the voice broke every so often? Old and then kind of younger?”

I’d never heard Coco’s voice, so I couldn’t say, but there had been something odd about the way Johnson’s questions had been answered.

“We can’t go in on the basis of you saying one woman sounded like another one on a cell phone,” Drummond said.

“But maybe I can,” I said.

“What?” the sergeant said, swiveling in his seat to look at me. “You’re on the job,” I said.

“You’re handcuffed by the law, but right here, right now, I have no jurisdiction. I am a private citizen with information that suggests a woman might be in danger in that house. Acting on that suspicion, I go into the compound. I look in a few windows. If there’s a party going on with Edwin, Pauline, Mize, and others, I slip out. If I see probable cause, I call you.”

“You could get shot,” Drummond said.

“If I do, you’ll be the first to know,” I said, getting out of the car.

“How’re you getting in?” asked Johnson.

“The straightforward way,” I said, and I shut the door.

It was pouring when I ran across the boulevard, which was lightly traveled at that hour. There was no one in the western lane at all when I accelerated at the gate and then jumped up like I was going for a rebound.

Both my hands found the top of the gate and hung on. I kicked and shimmied and pulled until I’d gotten my belly over it. I straddled the gate, pivoted, and then hung down off it and let go. I landed and moved fast into the shadows.

The driveway was done in some kind of mosaic tile and was slick and puddled everywhere as I moved past the vegetation that blocked the house from the road. There were lights on in the inner yard, revealing a lawn that looked like a putting green at Augusta; beds of blooming annuals ringed the house.

There were lights on at every corner. Tinier lights lit an arched trellis that framed the main entrance. But unless the Strikers were using blackout curtains, there were no lights on in the lower part of the house.

I could see at least three rooms on the second story that were lit up, however. And the drumming rain made hearing anything impossible. I wondered whether this had been another impetuous act, the kind of all-in move Bree had been concerned about.

But more often than not, I’ve found it pays to be all-in. I ran across the lawn to the walkway and up under the trellis to the door. For a moment I stood there, trying to hear inside. Figuring my scouting trip was likely about to be over, I nevertheless reached for the door handle, because, well, you never know.

The handle moved down, and the locking mechanism gave. The door swung open. You never know.

I was torn at that point, because even though the door had been left unlocked, I was still breaking and entering. I hesitated, and then decided to just step inside and listen. If I heard nothing of alarm, I’d be gone.

I stepped into a dark, air-conditioned foyer, eased the front door shut behind me, and strained to hear. The distant hum of a refrigerator compressor. The closer ticking of a clock. A drip, drip that I realized was me leaving puddles on the entryway floor.

Then I heard a woman’s muffled voice somewhere in the house above me. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but I caught the odd rhythm of her speech. Was that what Johnson had been talking about?

A smacking noise. A cry. A whimper.

I locked in on the sounds, not sure what to do. What if Mize or Coco was torturing her? But what if the Strikers and Mize and Coco were into bondage or something, and this was all between consenting adults?

The cop in me told me to get the hell out. But when I heard another smack and more crying, the mystery lover in me drove me toward a spiral staircase that rose off the foyer.

I climbed the stairs quietly, moving as fast as I dared. On the landing, I heard the woman’s voice again, clearer but still not intelligible. After kicking off my shoes, I drew the Ruger from my ankle holster and snuck down the hall, where I saw a wafer of light coming through a door at the far end; thankfully, no floorboards creaked or—

“What did you expect, Miranda?” a woman said cruelly. “You dress a little boy in silk and lace all the time, this is what you get.”

Smack. A moan.

A moan of pain? Or pleasure?

“You did teach me a classic sense of style, though, I’ll give you that,” the woman went on in that odd rhythmic voice. “But you denied yourself nothing.” There was a pause before she shouted, “Nothing!”

Smack.

“Anything you wanted, when you wanted it, Mother!”

Smack! Smack! Smack!

Each blow sounded louder and more furious than the previous one. If this was some kind of sex act, it was full-on S&M. Whatever it was, home invasion or not, I was going to see who was doing the hitting and who was being hit.

“How will it go for you this time, Miranda? Shall we stick with the tried? The true? The erotic? You know what asphyxia does to your orgasm.”

That stopped me right outside the door, and I didn’t know what to do. If I burst in and it was something consensual, I could kiss a lot of things good-bye.

The woman said, “Once it’s over, I’ll put a toy in you, complete your method, your scenario.”

Then the whimpering turned to whining amplified by what sounded to me like terror, and I didn’t care about anything but stopping it.

Gun up, I pushed the door inward, saw an older woman, naked, bound to a chair and gagged. There was some kind of wide sash or gold cord biting into her neck. Standing up behind her on the bed, straining to tighten the cord, was a very pale, very pretty bald woman wearing makeup and an outfit that would have made a trucker blush.

I panicked and was stepping backward when the naked older woman’s bulging eyes caught mine and she nodded wildly.

“Let go!” I yelled, moving deeper into the room, aiming right at the bald woman. “Let go or I will shoot you!”

Chapter 72

The bald woman started, stepped back, let go of the rope, and stared at me and the gun before raising her trembling hands and saying hoarsely, “What is this?”

I grabbed a robe off a chair, tossed it over the older woman I assumed was Pauline Striker, and came around behind her, still aiming at the bald woman.

“Get down on your knees, Coco, then facedown on the bed, hands behind your head,” I said.

She seemed even more frightened now that she realized I knew her name, and she started to lower herself to her knees while I worked the gag off Mrs. Striker. She spit it out, choked, and cried, “He—”

“Are you the police?” Coco asked from one knee.

“The next best thing,” I said, pulling out my cell phone. “Just need to know one thing, Mrs. Striker. Was that consensual? Or was your life in danger?”

Before the older woman could speak, Coco said in a deep male voice that startled me, “Of course it was consensual. Pauline, tell him. You can’t have our interlude coming out in the Palm Beach Post. Not with Edwin’s new thing just around the corner. It would be everywhere.”

I gaped for a second, realizing that Coco had to be Jeffrey Mize. But even though the person in front of me was bald, my brain was having trouble with the idea that she was a he. If not for the lack of hair, Mize could have been an aging supermodel.

“Mrs. Striker,” I said, feeling unsure now. “Please answer my question.”

The older woman seemed less upset than before, and she looked at me, then over at Mize, who was on all fours, gazing at her.

“Tell him, Pauline,” Mize said. “Whoever he is.”

Mrs. Striker swiveled her head to look at me, choked out, “Who are you?”

“A Good Samaritan,” I said. “I’m here to help and to contact the police if you need them.”

“Wait,” Mize said, pushing up into a kneeling position. “You’re not a cop?”

“How did you get in here?” Mrs. Striker asked, sounding angry.

“That’s not important; what’s important is whether this was consensual or not,” I said, feeling the situation slipping away from me.

“It was consensual,” she said emphatically. “But I most certainly did not consent to having you in my house holding me and my guest at gunpoint. Who are you and what are you after?”

“Who I am doesn’t matter,” I said, trying to figure out a way to exit gracefully and anonymously. “What matters is that Mr. Mize has been linked to the murders of three Palm Beach socialites.”

“That’s not true,” Mize snapped.

“He painted their portraits. Lisa Martin. Ruth Abrams. Maggie Crawford. Is there a portrait of you here in the house, Pauline? Were you about to become number four?”

Mrs. Striker looked bewildered for a moment and then said, “I don’t know anything about that.”

“See?” Mize said, smiling and straightening.

It was time to either cut and run or do something audacious. I chose audacious.

“Then I apologize and I’ll be going,” I said, lowering the gun. “But I’d rather see you free of your bonds before I go.”

“That’s not necessary,” Mize said.

“I insist,” I said.

Taking my eyes off Mize, I squeezed my phone, then crouched and set it on the carpet behind the ladder-back chair at the foot of the bed. With my left hand, I began working at the knots. My right thumb found the latch on the Ruger and I pressed it before I moved the gun to my left hand.

I made a sound of frustration, set the pistol on the bedspread, and set to work in earnest on the knots. I’d undone two and was stepping around Mrs. Striker when Mize dove on his belly, grabbed the Ruger, and aimed it at me, point-blank.

“I don’t know who you are, but I am going to enjoy killing you,” Mize said in Coco’s voice. “And don’t you move now, Pauline. We have unfinished business, you and I.”

“No, Jeffrey, I—”

Mize slammed the butt of the gun backward, hitting the side of Mrs. Striker’s head and opening up a rectangular cut that bled as she moaned.

“Why’d you do that?” I demanded.

“I needed her out of the way so you and I could have fun,” he said, coming off the bed, gun three feet from my chest. “Who are you?”

My mind was on overdrive, spinning through the little pieces of what I knew about Mize and the murders and what I’d heard coming up the stairs.

“Why kill me?” I asked. “I don’t fit your pattern. The mommy complex. Did you even have a father?”

“Shut up,” Mize said.

“It’s not difficult to understand you hating your mother and taking it out on these women,” I said. “Miranda, your mother, humiliated you right from the beginning, dressed you up like a girl until age... what?”

Mize glared at me, said nothing.

“I figure it had to be one of the few things that got you attention from her,” I said. “Women’s fashion and style were what you had in common. Maybe fashion was the only way you could tear Miranda away from all those men.”

“You don’t know anything about her,” Mize snarled.

“I know she spent a lot of money. I figure you barely inherited enough to keep up the house she left you. Or maybe, between your trust and the portrait commissions and your shop, you had enough money for a while. But recently the trust ran out, or the commissions stopped, or your shop began floundering. And it all got to be too much for you, didn’t it, Jeffrey?”

Mize seemed to be staring right through me now.

“So you went to the women who knew you, the women you’d painted before, the ones who reminded you of your mother, and you decided to let off a little steam.”

“Shut up, I said!” Mize shouted and he shook the gun at me.

“And maybe you stole money, jewels, and clothes from your victims, evened the score a little. All of them except Francie Letourneau; you took care of your maid because she was stealing from you, isn’t that right? Or, no, because she discovered your secret life as Coco, and—”

“Enough!” Mize screamed. He took a step closer and aimed the pistol at my face from less than a foot away. “Mother always said to get rid of pests fast!”

Chapter 73

I looked down the barrel of the Ruger, saw Mize’s slender feminine hand squeezing on the trigger.

“Freeze, Coco!” Detective Johnson yelled. “Drop the gun or I’ll shoot!”

“Don’t worry, Detective,” I said. “It’s not loaded.”

Mize’s flawless porcelain skin tightened over his exquisite cheekbones, and disbelief gave way to rage. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He tried again — nothing.

He pulled the gun back as if he meant to chop me with it. Before he could, I slapped him silly, dazed him, and knocked him to the ground. Johnson was putting cuffs on him when Sergeant Drummond appeared, gasping for breath.

“Tough trip over the gate?” I asked.

“You have no idea,” Drummond said, wheezing. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

“You heard everything?” I asked, going past Mrs. Striker, who was still bleeding and looking confused. I crouched down to the carpet and picked up my cell phone and the magazine from the Ruger.

“Loud and clear,” the sergeant said, waving his cell at me. “Enough probable cause in anyone’s book.”

“This is entrapment,” Mize said. “I want a lawyer. I’m being persecuted.”

“For what?” Johnson demanded as he hauled him to his feet.

“Cross-dressing,” he said. “Getting into a little weird sex. Right, Pauline?”

Mrs. Striker raised her bleeding head and glared at him. “He’d been a friend since he’d painted my portrait, and he just tried to kill me. He put on my lingerie, said I was his mother tonight, and tried to kill me. And I’ll testify to it in court, Edwin’s new deal be damned.”

“Can we call an ambulance for you?” I asked, smiling.

“Please,” she said. “And could you get me some clothes? I don’t want to be seen this way.”

“Tell me what you need,” I said as Johnson hauled Mize from the room.

She asked for the clothes Mize had stripped her of and held them and the robe against her when she stood unsteadily and walked to the bathroom. Before she closed the door completely, she peered out at me.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Drummond said, “That’s Alex Cross, don’t you know?”

he shook her head and shut the door.

“That was something,” the sergeant said as he scratched at his slack chin.

“We good?” I asked.

“Oh, you and me, we’re fine,” Drummond said. “Me and my boss and the DA? That may be another story.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the way I came in here gets some of it excluded in court. But so what? You know who killed the four now. Just have to rebuild the case based on what you know and prove it outside of here. And I’ll testify however I’m allowed.”

Drummond thought about that, nodded, said, “I suppose the most important thing was saving Mrs. Striker and getting a lunatic cross-dresser off the streets of Palm Beach.”

“Or out of the bedrooms, anyway.”

The sergeant seemed to chew on something, and then he said, “This how a lot of your cases go?”

“Actually, every single one of them is different.”

“After you make your statement, you’ll go back to North Carolina?”

“Tomorrow sometime, I hope.”

“Get that guy Melvin Bell?”

“Marvin Bell. He’s one of our suspects, but I haven’t excluded anyone.”

“Sounds to me like he’s your man.” Sirens wailed, coming closer.

“My gut says he is too, but we’ll see,” I said.

Drummond stuck his hand out, said, “A pleasure to meet you, and thank you for your help here.”

I shook it, said, “The feeling’s mutual, Sergeant. I hope we see each other again someday.”

He smiled that crooked smile of his, said, “I’d like that.”

The bathroom door opened. Mrs. Striker came out in a beautiful nightgown and a new robe. She held a washcloth to her head.

“Can you help me downstairs?” she asked weakly. “I don’t want to receive visitors in my bedroom.”

“Of course,” I said, coming over and giving her my elbow.

She held on to it. Drummond stepped aside. We walked slowly out into the hallway. At the far end, beyond the stairs, hung a portrait in oil.

I had to hand it to Mize. As Coco, he had captured Pauline Striker at what must have been the pinnacle of her beauty and charm.

Chapter 74

Starksville, North Carolina

In the remodeled kitchen of the house where I grew up, Nana Mama stared at me blankly and said quietly, “Your father lived another two years?”

I nodded and gave her the rest of it, including the suicide, including a description of her son’s small tombstone.

My grandmother held a trembling fist to her mouth. With her other hand, she plucked off her glasses and wiped at tears.

“Why’d he kill himself?” she asked.

“Guilt? Grief? The aloneness?” I said. “I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

“He must have been the one.”

“What one?”

“The caller,” Nana Mama said. “For the first year or two that you lived with me, always around a holiday or, come to think of it, one of you boys’ birthdays, I’d get a call with no one on the other end. At first I thought it was just a mistake, but I’d hear things in the background, a television or music playing. And then the line would click dead.”

“When did that stop?” I asked.

“Around two years after you came to DC?”

The timeline fit, but before I could say so, Jannie rapped on the frame of the kitchen entrance. “We have to go. I want a chance to warm up on my own.”

I checked my watch. We did have to go.

“You all right?” I asked Nana Mama as I stood up from the table.

She hesitated and then said, “I suppose I am. Better than before.”

“He was punished for his sins, and then he died,” I said.

My grandmother said, “There’s balance there. Should we go?”

“You’re up to the ride?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” she said, and she got to her feet. She put her hand on my arm. “Thank you, Alex.”

“For what?”

“Clearing things up.”

“Wish it had turned out some other way for him.”

“I do too. I always will.”

I helped Nana Mama out onto the porch, where Jannie, Bree, Ali, and Pinkie were waiting. We trooped out to the car and my cousin’s truck. Ali and Jannie wanted to ride with Pinkie. To my surprise, so did my little grandmother, who looked cute and ridiculous in the front seat of the one-ton pickup.

“I’ve never ridden in one of these,” she called out the window, and she waved with such enthusiasm that Bree and I had to grin.

“She’s one of a kind,” Bree said, climbing into the Explorer.

“Could you imagine if there were two?” I said, starting the car.

“I don’t think the world would be big enough.” Bree chuckled, leaned over, and kissed me. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re back.”

“Me too. And by the way, I loved the welcome-back celebration last night.”

She laughed contentedly, said, “Mmm. That was nice, wasn’t it?”

We held hands as we followed Pinkie through town. Nearing the railroad tracks, Bree said, “Think we have time to stop?”

“Probably, but I don’t know the way. Can we do it coming back?”

Bree looked longingly at the tree line beyond the tracks. “It’s funny how you want to check every couple of hours. It’s like gambling.”

“I can see that,” I said, and we drove on.

The road soon became steep and windy, and it dropped off the plateau in a series of lazy S turns. I noticed play in the Explorer’s wheel that hadn’t been there before. And the brakes were slightly sluggish.

“Remind me to check the fluid levels in Raleigh,” I said.

“Didn’t we do everything before our drive down here?” Bree asked.

“Yes, but something doesn’t feel quite—”

There was a slight clanking noise. The car shuddered.

“That can’t be good,” Bree said. “You better pull over, take a look.”

We were on a 10 percent, maybe 12 percent grade at that point, with low guardrails giving way to sheer banks and trees. Ahead, there was a scenic lookout. I put on my blinker, tapped the brakes. Nothing. I pumped the brakes. The car slowed only slightly, then gave another clank and shudder.

Then the vehicle seemed to break free of all restraint and we went into an accelerating, pell-mell, runaway descent.

Chapter 75

We hurtled down the road. Ahead of us, it veered sharply left, and all you could see beyond it was pale blue sky.

“Alex!” Bree screamed as I clawed at the wheel and stomped vainly on the brake pedal.

I grabbed the shifter, tried to slam it into low. The arm wouldn’t budge.

“Jesus, Alex, we’re—”

With my left foot, I stabbed at the emergency brake pedal but did not put it to the floor for fear we’d be thrown into a spin. There was a screeching noise as the tires caught, leaving smoke rising off the rubber-blackened road.

The Explorer lurched to one side and then another, but I managed to keep it from going sideways and then, just before that hard left turn, I slammed the shifter arm down, and the engine braked us some more.

I spun the wheel hard and got the front end around. The rear quarter panel of the car slammed into the guardrail, which tore off the bumper and flung it into the other lane and behind us.

The rest of the ride down the plateau was marred only by the smell of burning brake pads, the roar of a straining engine, and the sweat pouring off both our foreheads. When we reached flatter land, I threw the shifter in neutral and turned the car off. We coasted to a stop on the shoulder, and I put on the hazard lights, laid my head back.

“You should call Pinkie,” I said. “Tell him to make room in the truck.”

“Aren’t you going to see what happened?” Bree asked.

“I’m not a car guy,” I said. “We’re going to have to have it towed somewhere and looked at.”

“You’re going to have to file an accident report,” she said, digging out her phone and punching in Pinkie’s number.

“I’d miss Jannie,” I said. “I’ll leave a note with my name and number.”

“That’s called leaving the scene of—”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Just call him before he gets too far down the road.”

When they came back, we intentionally understated the situation, saying only that it seemed something was wrong with the brakes, but we were fine. I used my phone to find a towing company that agreed to get the car and take it to a dealership in Winston-Salem, and then I sat back, put my arm around Bree, and closed my eyes.

I fell into one of those strange, buzzing sleeps that follow stressful experiences. I didn’t remember a minute of the hour-and-a-half drive to Duke.

We blundered around before we found the track. Even with the close call, we were early enough that Jannie was able to start jogging before any of the other athletes arrived. They were all there by eleven, however, along with Coach Greene, who smiled as she came over to me.

“Glad you made it,” she said, shaking my and Bree’s hands.

“Jannie was so excited she was up before dawn,” I said.

“No way we weren’t making it,” Bree said.

The coach’s grin disappeared. “Just to follow up. Those blood and urine tests?”

“Haven’t heard yet,” I said. “But again, innocent until...”

“Of course,” she said, and then she handed me another waiver and apologized for my having to fill another one out. “This will be interesting, though.”

“How’s that?” Nana Mama asked.

The coach gestured to three women doing ballistic jumps and skips along the track to warm up. “Alice and Trisha are here at Duke. Dawn’s over at Chapel Hill. All three were second-team all-Americans this past season.”

“Jannie know that?” Bree asked.

“I kind of hope not,” Coach Greene said, and she trotted off. “What’s an all-American?” Ali asked.

“They’re among the best in the whole country,” I said.

“Is Jannie?”

“Course not,” Nana Mama said. “Your sister’s only fifteen, but it will be a good experience for her.”

As I’d seen her do twice before, Coach Greene led the girls through a series of exercises designed to get their quick-twitch muscles warmed up, loose, and firing. When they were ready, she broke them into squads of five and ran them through an Indian drill, where they ran at 40 percent unless they were at the rear of the pack. Then they had to sprint to the front.

They did this twice at four hundred meters. Jannie seemed to have no problem coming from behind in those long, fluid strides and then taking her place at the lead. After a five-minute break for water and more stretching, Greene made some switches, bringing my daughter over with the all-Americans in their early twenties and another girl who was at least four years older than Jannie.

They were watching my daughter out of the corners of their eyes. As I’d seen again and again since earlier that year, Jannie seemed unfazed by the age and experience differences.

“They gonna race now?” Ali asked, standing on the bleacher next to me.

“It’s just practice,” Bree said. “Not for Jannie,” I said.

“Let’s take it to seventy-five percent, ladies,” Greene said when they were lined up shoulder to shoulder. “Three, two, one, go.”

The older girls took off in short, choppy strides that soon opened into longer bounds and a less frenzied rhythm. Jannie seemed to come up to speed effortlessly but lagged a few feet behind the nineteen-year-old and was two yards behind the all-American trio entering the backstretch.

Jannie stayed right there until she’d rounded the near turn, picked up her pace slightly coming down the stretch, and finished just off the shoulder of the nineteen-year-old. She was four paces off the older girls, who were breathing hard. Two of them looked at Jannie and nodded.

No smile from my daughter, just a nod back.

The second quarter mile, at 85 percent, finished much the same way. Then Greene called for 90 percent effort.

Something about the way Jannie rolled her shoulders back and down let me know that it had become serious now, and even though there were fewer than fifteen people scattered across the bleachers watching, I couldn’t help but stand.

For the first time, Jannie adopted that same chopping fast gait off the line and stayed right with the elite bunch as they rounded the first turn. The older girls picked up the pace down the backstretch. Jannie stayed just off the shoulders of the all-Americans. The nineteen-year-old faded.

My daughter made her move coming into the second turn. She accelerated right by the three and was leading as they entered the stretch.

Even without binoculars, you could see the disbelief on the faces of the older girls, followed by the grit and determination that had gotten them close to the pinnacle of their sport. They poured it on, and two of them ran Jannie down and passed her before the finish. But my girl was a stride behind them and a stride ahead of one of the national-class athletes coming across the line.

Chapter 76

“That was a race!” Ali said.

“Jannie made it a race,” Pinkie said, smiling. “Oh my God, she’s good.”

“Dr. Cross?” a man said, coming across the grandstand toward us. Clad in unmarked gray sweats and a blue hoodie, he was in his fifties, a welterweight redhead with a rooster’s confident manner. “I’m Ted McDonald. To be honest, I came here to watch one of the other girls, but I’d very much like to talk to you about Jannie.”

“What about Jannie?” Nana Mama asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

McDonald glanced at the track where Greene and another, older woman in warm-ups were talking to the girls. “I’m a track coach, and a scout of sorts. I’d like to share something with you and Jannie, but let’s do it after Coach Greene and Coach Fall have had a chance to talk with you. Would that work out?”

“Before we leave Durham today, you mean?”

“I know a great place for a lunch that will help Jannie nutritionally recover from that workout,” McDonald said. “My treat?”

I glanced at Bree and Nana Mama, shrugged, said, “Sure. Why not.”

“Great, I’ll find you in the parking lot,” he said. He smiled and handed me a card that read Ted McDonald, Extreme Performance Systems. Austin, Toronto, Palo Alto.

McDonald shook my hand, went back up into the bleachers, and put his hood up. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I started to Google him and his company. Before I could get the names typed in on my phone, up came Coach Greene and the older woman in sweats, Duke’s head coach, Andrea Fall.

After introductions and handshakes, Coach Fall said, “I was skeptical after the invitational and more so after Coach Greene’s descriptions of Jannie’s running in the two-hundred, but now I’m a believer. How are her grades?”

“Outstanding,” Nana Mama said. “She’s a worker.”

“That makes things a lot easier,” Coach Fall said. “I’d like to formally offer your daughter a full-ride scholarship to Duke when she’s ready to attend.”

“What?” I said, dumbfounded.

“Jannie can’t officially answer my offer until February of her senior year, but I wanted it on the table as the first of what I assume will be many offers,” Coach Fall said.

“She’s that good?” Bree asked in wonder.

“I can count on one hand in thirty years of coaching the number of athletes I’ve seen who have Jannie’s potential,” she replied. “Barring injury, the sky is the limit.”

“This is just mind-boggling,” I said.

“I imagine so,” Coach Fall said. “So anytime you or Jannie are confused or want to talk about her training or how things are going, feel free to call me. Whatever she chooses to do and whatever college she chooses in the long run is beside the point. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and I shook her hand.

“Take care of her,” Coach Fall said. “She’s a thoroughbred.”

“What kind of bread is thor-oh?” Ali asked afterward.

“A thoroughbred is a racehorse,” Nana Mama said.

“Jannie’s a horse?”

“She runs like one,” Bree said, and she squeezed my hand.

I squeezed back, full of pride but also anxiety. I felt like I was in way over my head when it came to making decisions about Jannie’s future.

“You going to tell Jannie?” Nana Mama asked. “About the offer?”

“I have to,” I said. “But I’ll wait for somewhere quieter.”

When Jannie came up into the stands smiling, Ali said, “You got an offer.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said, and hugged her. “We’re very proud of you.”

She beamed, said, “Who knew?”

“God did,” Nana Mama said. “You’ve got something only God can give.”

We walked out into the parking lot and found Ted McDonald waiting. He shook Jannie’s hand, told her what he’d told me, and led us to a nearby café that offered organic sandwiches and the like.

We ordered, and he asked who would be making decisions about Jannie’s future training. I said I hadn’t even begun to think about that process.

McDonald said, “Then I’m very glad I happened to be here.”

He filled us in on his impressive background, including his PhD in exercise physiology from McGill University and his stints as a top coach with the Canadian and French national track federations. McDonald currently served as an independent training consultant to athletes at a number of U.S. universities, including Rice, Texas, Texas A&M, UCLA, USC, and Georgetown.

He said, “I’m also a scout for—”

Our lunch arrived. McDonald had ordered a salad for Jannie — vegetables, broiled chicken, and hard-boiled eggs — and a smoothie made from Brazilian acai berries that she said was delicious. I tried a sip and ordered my own.

While we ate, McDonald peppered Jannie with questions. How many pull-ups could she do without stopping? How many push-ups? What was her best standing broad jump? Her vertical leap? Flexibility? Endurance? Her mile time? Fastest recorded quarter?

Jannie didn’t know the exact answer to some questions, but others she knew right off the top of her head.

The questions went on. Had she ever long-jumped? High-jumped? Pole-vaulted? Hurdled?

Jannie shook her head.

“No matter,” he said. “Tell me what happens when you run. I mean, what’s the experience like for you?”

Jannie thought about that, said, “I sort of go off in my own world and everything gets kind of slow.”

“Nerves before you race?”

“Not really, no.”

“Not even today?”

“No. Why?”

“The girls you finished with in that last run were all-Americans.”

“Really?” Jannie said, surprised.

“Really.”

She grinned. “I think I could have beat them.”

“I bet you could have,” he said, then he grabbed a napkin, pulled out a pen, and scribbled for a minute or two.

He pushed the napkin across the table to me and Jannie. It read:

“What’s it mean?” I asked.

He told me, and it felt like everything in our lives changed.

Chapter 77

Later that afternoon, I was still struggling with what Ted McDonald had written on the napkin at lunch.

Was that possible? Should you even begin with that end in mind?

“He said we didn’t have to give him an answer right away,” Bree said from the driver’s seat of a rental car we’d picked up in Winston-Salem.

“I know,” I said. “But it’s just a lot to take in.”

“You don’t think she should try?”

“She’s only fifteen,” I said. “Is this when they start thinking like that?”

“Other kids in other sports sure do,” she said as we drove past the Welcome to Starksville sign.

I stared again at the napkin and wrestled with its meaning.

Was any of this possible? McDonald said it was. He said Jannie might win any of the titles he’d listed as a pure runner, but he’d seen such athleticism in my daughter that he thought she’d be better suited to the grueling multi-skill heptathlon event.

“The heptathlon decides the best female athlete in the world,” McDonald said. “You interested in being that athlete, Jannie? The one who can do anything? Superwoman?”

You could see it in my daughter’s face, how in the very instant he’d thrown out that spark, Jannie had caught fire.

“What would it take?” she asked.

“Your heart, your soul, and years of hard work,” he said. “You up to that?”

She’d glanced at me and then back at him, and nodded. I got chills.

McDonald said that if Jannie consented, he’d visit her regularly in Washington, DC, during the year to teach her the various events within the heptathlon. She’d compete as a runner until he was satisfied with her skills. If we were all happy after the first year, he’d arrange a scholarship at a private school in Austin, where she could work with him on a more consistent basis.

“The school’s excellent. They’ll challenge her academically so she’s ready for wherever she decides to go to college,” he said.

Bree said, “How much is this going to cost us?”

“Zero,” the coach said.

“What?” I said. “How’s that possible?”

McDonald said he was funded by several athletic-shoe and-apparel companies and charged with finding and nurturing track talent. If Jannie became the kind of athlete he thought she was, she’d be in line for endorsements that would make her life easier in the long run.

Free education. A career as a professional athlete. Olympic—

“They’re heading home, Alex,” Bree said, breaking into my thoughts.

Nana Mama, Ali, and Jannie were in Pinkie’s pickup in front of us. Pinkie reached his massive four-finger hand out the window crossing the railroad tracks and waved to us.

I waved back as Bree put on the blinker and pulled into the old Piggly Wiggly parking lot. I folded the napkin, put it in my shirt pocket.

“Think she can do it?” Bree asked as we headed toward that line of trees on that short bluff above the tracks.

“I’m beginning to think she’s like you,” I said. “Capable of anything and everything.”

She smiled, poked me in the ribs, said, “When’d you get so sweet?”

“Day I met you.”

“Good answer.”

“I have my moments.”

When we reached the trees, Bree led me to a big beech tree that overlooked the tracks. There were steel steps screwed into the tree. She said bow hunters used them, and she’d bought them at the local army-navy.

She climbed up around ten feet to another recent purchase. The Bushnell night-vision trail camera was designed to take pictures of whatever came by. Hunters used them to pattern deer. There seemed to be a commercial for them every eight minutes on the Outdoor Channel.

“Even Jim Shockey uses them,” Bree said. “So I thought, Why not? We’ll take pictures of every train that comes through Starksville.”

Bree had put up this camera and another one three hundred yards west. She’d checked the memory cards once after twenty-four hours and found pictures of riders heading north on the train late Thursday afternoon, just about the time we’d seen riders the previous Thursday as we drove into town.

Now she traded memory cards on both cameras and reactivated them. We took the cards back to the rental car and looked at them on her computer. It took us a while to scroll through them, but we saw pictures of more riders taken the night before at ten, roughly the same time Bree saw Finn Davis giving that three-finger salute on Wednesday night.

Davis was not in any of the new photographs, but Bree’s patterns had been established. Riders at ten o’clock every other night. Riders at five on alternate afternoons.

It was half past four by then. Someone should ride by within the hour. Despite the heat, we decided to return to the trees to see if the pattern would hold. As we sweated and waited, bugs whined all around us, and I had the creepy feeling there were ticks crawling up my legs.

My phone rang. Naomi.

“Stefan’s been beaten again,” she said. “Some jail inmates got to him.”

I sighed, said, “It’s like that in every prison with child killers and abusers.”

“Except Stefan didn’t do it, Uncle Alex,” Naomi said forcefully.

“Right. Where is he?”

“In Starksville Memorial under guard,” she said.

The train signal at the crossing to our right a hundred yards ahead started to ring.

“I’ll try to stop by to—” I began before noticing a train coming slowly out of the south. Twenty cars back, I could make out a lone rider. “Got to go, Naomi.”

“Just one rider,” Bree said as I pocketed the phone.

“Better than none,” I said.

“How do you want to handle this?” she asked as the train engine groaned by at less than fifteen miles an hour.

“Get the car and parallel me heading north,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

“Where are you going?”

“On that train,” I said as the lone rider, a young white guy wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a long black T-shirt, went past. He was sitting with his legs off the front of the freight car, looking straight ahead.

When I turned, Bree was already gone.

I waited until another fifteen cars had gone by before I left the trees, jumped off the bluff, and started to sprint.

Chapter 78

Cutting at an angle to the train, I timed it so a steel ladder welded into one of the boxcars was coming right by me before I sped up one last time, stabbed out my hand, and caught one of the rungs at head height. Before it could jerk me off my feet, I jumped and got my shoes on the lowest rung.

I hung there for six or seven breaths, then the dinging of the train-crossing bell reminded me I was about to be seen by all the cars waiting on my side of the tracks. I clambered up.

Car horns honked as my boxcar passed through the crossing. I didn’t look over my shoulder and didn’t go up on top until we were well beyond it and the train was starting to pick up speed.

I peeked over the edge of the container car to check on the rider, make sure he was still looking forward, before I crawled up onto the roof. I laid flat, holding on to one of the flanges until I had enough breath and strength to get up. James Bond makes it look easy, but standing on top of a slow-moving train is tough. Stalking forward on a jolting, swaying, accelerating train takes superhuman balance that I do not possess. I couldn’t stand up straight at all and settled for a wide-footed crouch, taking one tentative step after another.

Jumping to the next car made me nauseated, but I did it and kept on, staring at the rooftop right in front of me, then the rider, then the track far beyond with the irrational fear that I was going to miss an oncoming tunnel and be swatted off the train.

It took a solid fifteen minutes to go eighteen cars forward. I was trying to be ninja-like when I jumped to the nineteenth car, the one right behind the container car upon which the rider was perched.

I must have made some kind of sound, or maybe it was just time for him to look around. When I landed, he was staring right at me.

He swung his right arm from his chest, revealing a pistol equipped with a sound suppressor. I threw myself flat just before he shot. The round pinged off the steel rooftop about two feet to my right.

The rocking of the train had thrown off his aim. Or he was a lousy shot. Or maybe a combination of the two. In any case, I dug down, came up with my little Ruger nine-millimeter just before he pulled the trigger again.

His bullet clanged off a flange six inches from my head. I shot at him and missed. But it was enough to change the dynamics of things. He wasn’t holding ground anymore. He was getting out of Dodge, jumping to the next car as I struggled to my feet.

He was leaping to an oval-shaped tanker car when I jumped onto the container car behind him. I landed fine but I didn’t see the rider anymore. Then I realized he’d slipped when he’d landed on the tanker and done a face-plant.

He was slow to move, dazed by the hit, and I was able to close much of the gap between us. When he finally regained his feet, I saw he was no longer carrying the suppressed pistol. Had he dropped it?

“Stop!” I yelled. “I just want to talk to you.”

But he kept moving forward.

“Stop, or I’ll shoot!”

He didn’t slow.

I aimed to his left, sent a bullet by his ear. That caused him to cringe and turn toward me with his hands up.

That’s better, I thought. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Ahead, I could see we were approaching a train trestle. I cautiously jumped to the tanker and got another ten feet closer to the rider. We were less than twenty feet apart. He crouched, holding on to a wheel on top of the tanker.

“I just want to talk,” I said again.

“’Bout what, man?” he asked, trying to act tough but looking scared.

I held up my hand, showed him the three-finger salute, said, “I want to talk about this. And Finn Davis. And Marvin Bell. And you riding this train.”

He looked at me like I’d grown horns and shook his head. “No way, man.”

“We know you’re protecting something on this train. What is it?”

He looked away from me, shook his head again. “No way. Can’t.”

“We can protect you.”

“No, you can’t,” he said. “Ain’t no one can protect anyone from Grandfather and the company.”

“Grandfather and the company?” I said as the train started across the trestle high above a deep, narrow canyon thick with woods. “Who’s Grandfather? What’s the company?”

Looking at me with a stricken expression, he said, “Death of me.”

He let go of the wheel, launched out of the crouch, and dove off the tanker, off the trestle, screaming and waving his arms and trying to fly as he took the long fall to the treetops, crashed down through them, and vanished.

Chapter 79

I couldn’t believe it, and I twisted around, looking back and down into the canyon and the forest that had swallowed that young man whole. The only creatures I could see were crows circling lazily above the canopy, all of which disappeared from my view when the train rounded a curve.

The tunnel on the other side appeared so fast I had to throw myself down on top of the tanker and hold tight until we exited the other side into deep woods. I tried to call Bree but got no signal. There was no chance for me to get off the train for ten miles.

By the time it slowed and then stopped, night had fallen and the moon had risen. I’d come a long ways down in elevation. In the dim light I could see agricultural fields to either side of the tracks. I peered ahead, looking for a road crossing. Why were we stopped? I was about to climb off when—

“Let’s do this, man,” a male voice called from down the embankment.

I startled and then realized he was talking to me.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Shit, man, don’t be fucking around,” he said, nervous, and I made out the silhouette of him below me. “Gimme the order. I got the cash.”

“Sorry, I’m new,” I said, improvising. “How big’s that order again?”

“It’s on your sheet, man,” he said, irritated. “Just open the hatch, get it, and we do business.”

I looked around. The wheel the rider had held on to. It controlled a hatch.

I walked to it, knelt, and got hold of the wheel. Turning counterclockwise didn’t work. Neither did turning it clockwise. Then I considered that the hatch might be under spring tension. I put my weight on it, felt something depress, and twisted. The wheel turned clockwise.

When I heard a noise like unbuckling, I lifted. Up came the hatch lid, and the air was filled with a pleasant vanilla scent. I cupped the mini-Maglite I always carry, turned it on. Suspended beneath the hatch was an aluminum basket of sorts, about three feet deep and two feet in diameter. The flashlight beam shone through large holes in the walls of the basket, revealing dozens of yellow-paper packages each about the size of a large bar of soap. Some were banded together. Others were single.

“C’mon, man,” the guy said. “Train’s gonna leave ’fore—”

The train wheels squealed. The tanker lurched. I almost fell. I almost let go of the hatch lid, the basket, and whatever was in it.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Hey, shit, man!”

“Couldn’t be helped,” I called down. “Something wrong with the mechanism. I’ll put your order in for a ten-twenty delivery tomorrow night. You’ll get a discount.”

A pause. “How much?”

“Ten percent,” I yelled as we pulled away.

“Deal, man, that’ll work.”

I waited until he was far behind me, then sat with my legs spread against the walls of the hatch. I moved around the basket, inspecting it with the flashlight, and found a hinged door. I opened it, removed three of those yellow-paper packages. Each of them weighed about a pound.

My phone rang then. It was Bree.

“Where are you?” she asked anxiously. “I’ve been calling you.”

“We went off the plateau and there were tunnels, and I have no idea where I am.”

“You talk to the rider?”

I told her all that had happened.

“Jesus, he jumped?”

“I couldn’t believe it, like it was better to die than talk to me and face this Grandfather’s wrath.”

“You think Marvin Bell is Grandfather?”

“It seems likely.”

“So, drugs in the yellow packages?”

“I’m assuming so,” I said. “Ingenious, if you think about it. Using the trains.”

“It is. You going to stay on the train and see where it takes you?”

“No, I’m putting the basket back, sealing the hatch, and then getting off at the next stop. We’ll let Bell or whoever is behind this think their man bailed with some of their product.”

“Makes sense,” she said.

“I’ll call back soon, give you my location.”

Well down the track, I could see streetlights. I’d replaced the basket and hatch cover by the time the train stopped for the second time. On my right, from the brush by the track, I heard a sharp whistle.

Instead of answering it, I crept down a ladder on the opposite side of the tanker and slipped away as the whistle became louder and more insistent.

Chapter 80

The sweet little girl with sleepy eyes carried a piece of sheepskin about the size and shape of a face towel. Lizzie rubbed it against her porcelain cheek and sucked her thumb as she ambled across the room to her grandfather.

He had terrible things twisting and knotting his mind, but seeing her so precious, so innocent, they all unraveled. He scooped Lizzie up, said, “Time for bed, young lady?”

She nodded, snuggled into his arms, made him feel perfect. She was hardly a weight at all, not a burden, never a burden. Lizzie’s grandfather carried her from his office down the hall to her bedroom.

He got her safe and warm under her sheets and blanket. Her eyes fluttered toward sleep, but she said, “Tell me the story. What happens next to the fairy princess? To Guinevere?”

Her grandfather hesitated, and then said, “One day, a dragon came into Princess Guinevere’s kingdom.”

Lizzie became more alert. “Did the dragon hurt Guinevere?”

“He tried, but Guinevere’s grandfather, the fairy king, sent out his best warriors to slay the dragon. Guinevere’s older brother tried first but failed to kill the beast that threatened the fairy kingdom. A girl warrior went next.”

Lizzie was listening raptly now. She said, “Did she have a bow and arrow?”

He nodded, said, “She shot at the dragon as he flew by and missed him by an inch.”

A soft knock came behind him. Meeks stood there, dead serious.

“Someone downstairs needs to see you,” Meeks said.

He understood, nodded. “I’ll be a minute yet.”

“No, Grandfather,” Lizzie complained. “What about the dragon?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow night,” he said.

“Oooh,” she moaned. “I can’t wait. Does she get another shot at the dragon? The girl warrior? What’s her name?”

He thought, said, “Lace. And, yes, Lace gets another shot at the dragon, but I won’t tell you what happens until tomorrow.”

Lizzie yawned, said, “Lacey will get the dragon. She’ll save Princess Guinevere. I just know it.”

As her eyes started to flutter shut, he leaned over and kissed her cheek. He turned the light off but left the door to the hallway open a crack, just the way she liked it. He walked down the hall, thinking how many changes were under way and how many challenges they created.

Downstairs, he walked past oil paintings and sculptures into a library.

Finn Davis was standing there, looking unsure and uncomfortable.

“What is it?” Lizzie’s grandfather asked.

“We lost a company man,” Davis said. “His deliveries were never made.”

“Product?”

“All but three pounds intact.”

“Runner, then.”

“You want him tracked down?” Davis asked. “Dealt with?”

“Of course, but we have more pressing problems.”

“The Crosses?”

Lizzie’s grandfather nodded, said, “They survived the lace maker. She’ll try again. Meantime, I think you should take another stab at the big bad dragon.”

Chapter 81

At eight thirty on Monday morning, Pinkie drove me and Bree to the courthouse, where Stefan’s trial was about to resume. Nana Mama was coming later with Aunt Hattie and Aunt Connie. Jannie was taking care of Ali.

I felt raw and irritated. Bree and my cousin looked wrung out. We’d been at this for the past thirty-six hours with very little sleep. And the secrets of Starksville were as murky and shape-shifting as they’d ever been.

We’d cut open one of the yellow-paper packages and found heavy-gauge plastic vacuum-sealed around what looked like loose blocks of shattered topaz-colored glass. The taste and smell had been unremarkable, so I’d called in a few favors from friends at the FBI crime lab at Quantico. They’d be receiving the samples and analyzing them later in the afternoon.

We still had no idea who owned the tanker. The trail camera had taken a good picture of that tanker’s right side, revealing a code of fifteen letters and numbers stenciled in black. When we reviewed all the earlier pictures of riders, the majority were sitting one freight car back from similar tankers with similar codes. Pinkie had worked at the codes, trying to track them all Sunday afternoon and evening, but had gotten nowhere.

Bree and I had taken up position in those trees above the tracks in Starksville around nine the night before and stayed long past eleven. No riders passed us.

In short, we’d had no luck linking Marvin Bell or Finn Davis or anyone else to the so-called Grandfather and the company. We had even begun to speculate that the riders and the drug ring had nothing to do with Starksville, that the operation was organized elsewhere and the shipments just passed through.

“I’m wondering if that rider disappearing triggered some kind of shutdown in the delivery system,” Pinkie said, taking a left into the town square.

“Could be,” I agreed.

“I think there’s a way to see if the riders are from Starksville,” Bree said.

“Okay...” I said.

“More trail cameras,” she said. “We set them at crossings to the north and south. If the riders are from elsewhere, they’ll already be aboard.”

Pinkie nodded as he pulled into the courthouse parking lot. “And if they’re not, we know this is their origination point.”

“And no one around here manufactures vanilla, right?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” Pinkie said, parking.

When we reached the courthouse lobby, reporters, spectators, and witnesses streaming toward the trial venue were abuzz with news of Sheriff Nathan Bean’s fatal heart attack at a local breakfast café not an hour before. Sheriff Bean had had a history of heart problems, but it seemed a shock nonetheless.

In the courtroom I heard a reporter ask Starksville police chief Randy Sherman who the likely replacement was.

“Sheriff’s voted in,” Chief Sherman replied. “But I’d bet Guy Pedelini would be a strong candidate.”

I flashed on Bree’s description of Finn Davis standing on Pedelini’s back porch a few nights before, and for the first time, I felt as if there might really be a puppet master pulling the strings behind the scenes in Starksville. Grandfather? Even without concrete evidence against him, I could plainly see Marvin Bell in that role, hanging back in the shadows, looking legitimate, and using Finn Davis to do his bidding. We figured Bell and Davis were bribing Pedelini. How else did a detective afford a nice house on a lake like that?

A side door opened. A deputy led Stefan into the courtroom. I winced and heard my aunt Hattie cry out. My cousin’s left eye was bruised closed, and his jaw was wired shut.

Naomi rushed forward, looking furious as she helped him to his seat.

“Serves him right,” I heard a woman whisper, and I looked across the aisle at Ann Lawrence, who was talking to a sober Cece Turnbull. Rashawn’s mother didn’t reply, but Cece’s parents, who were sitting two rows behind, bobbed their heads in agreement.

District attorney Delilah Strong, however, seemed genuinely concerned about my cousin’s condition. So did her assistant Matthew Brady, who walked over to say something to Naomi.

She waved him off angrily. Patty Converse came in and sat in the row behind us. It was the first time we’d seen her in five days. She didn’t look at any of us, just stared blankly as the clerk and the court reporter took their positions.

The bailiff called out, “All rise. This court is now in session, Judge Erasmus P. Varney presiding.”

Chapter 82

Judge Varney was weaker and sallower than the last time I’d seen him, when he’d been flushed and contorting against the pain of kidney stones as EMTs rolled him from the courtroom. But the judge still had a commanding presence as he took the bench, picked up his gavel, and called his court to order.

“I apologize for my illness,” he said. “Ukrainian blood on my mother’s side. And I’d like to say how tragic it is that Sheriff Bean passed so suddenly this morning. He was a man of great integrity and honor.”

Varney’s eyes stayed locked ahead during his introductory remarks, as if he were not addressing the courtroom as a whole but someone in particular sitting in the gallery. Who, I couldn’t tell. But maybe it was just my imagination.

Varney picked up a piece of paper on the bench, read it, said, “Ms. Cross, the court has been notified that your cross-examination witness Sharon Lawrence will be unavailable today, as she has taken ill and is in the hospital. Is that correct?”

Ann Lawrence, her mother, stood and said, “Yes, Your Honor. She’s on IVs with a hundred and three fever.”

“Then I expect you’ll want to be at her side,” Varney said.

“Yes, Judge, thank you,” she said.

The mother of the girl who’d accused my cousin of rape and tried to frame Jannie glanced hurriedly at us and then left.

“She’s hiding something,” Bree whispered in my ear.

“Big-time,” I said, wanting to get up and follow her, ask her more than a few pointed questions.

But then Judge Varney said, “Counselor, when Ms. Lawrence is recovered, you’ll be given the opportunity to continue your cross. In the meantime, I’d like to move forward. Unless you have questions or concerns?”

“I have concerns, Your Honor,” Naomi said. “With all due respect to the memory of Sheriff Bean, there has been a fundamental breakdown in my client’s protection. Sheriff’s deputies allowed inmates to beat and kick my client until—”

“Objection!” the prosecutor cried. “There’s no evidence that any deputy ‘allowed’ the altercation.”

“Judge, Mr. Tate appears before you with multiple contusions, swelling, a broken jaw, and a probable concussion,” Naomi shot back. “At the very least, you can allow a competent neurologist to examine him before we continue with trial.”

Strong said, “Mr. Tate was treated by jail doctors, who tell me that he shows no sign of concussion.”

“Mr. Tate?” Judge Varney said. “Do you understand what’s going on around you? Where you are? What you’re doing here?”

Stefan nodded, spoke thickly through the wires on his teeth. “I do, Judge.”

Naomi looked exasperated.

The judge said, “Very well, then, the trial will continue, and I am ordering the sheriff’s office to double the guards with Mr. Tate at all times. Does that satisfy, Counselor?”

Naomi hesitated, then gave up and said, “It does, Judge.”

As far as the defense was concerned, that was the high point of the day. The district attorney called forensics experts who hammered home the damning evidence as it was introduced: Stefan’s semen on Rashawn’s body, Stefan’s semen in Sharon Lawrence’s panties, and Rashawn’s blood and body tissue on the foldable pruning saw found in my cousin’s basement.

Patty Converse turned ashen during this last testimony, especially when a fingerprint expert testified that the only clear prints on the saw were Stefan’s.

Naomi tried to damage the evidence of Stefan’s DNA in the teenage girl’s underwear, asking if, in the days between the time Lawrence claimed my cousin had raped her and Rashawn’s death, someone could have planted the semen. The people’s expert said it was possible but unlikely, given that Lawrence had thought to put the panties in a zip-lock bag.

“Unless Ms. Lawrence put the semen there herself,” Naomi said.

The expert said, “Correct, but we have no evidence of that.”

During the lunch recess, the service manager at the dealership where we’d left our Explorer called to tell me it looked like a rock had knocked an already loose hydraulic brake line free of its connection. The fluid ran out. We’d lost the brakes.

“You been driving many dirt roads?” he asked.

“A few, but I don’t remember something like a big rock hitting the undercarriage,” I said. “You’re not seeing signs of sabotage?”

“Like someone wanted your brakes to fail?” he said.

“Like that.”

“There’s easier ways to make brakes fail than banging a rock on the hydraulic line.”

“Unless you want it to look like an accident,” I said.

“I guess.”

I asked the manager to take pictures of the damage, and we agreed on a price to fix the car and a time for me to pick it up the following morning.

After lunch, the trial got even worse for Stefan and Naomi. Detective Carmichael took the stand and walked the jury through the evidence that had been logged in the old limestone quarry, including Stefan’s bloody school ID card.

Naomi tried to get Carmichael to admit the ID could have been planted, but the detective wouldn’t bite, said, “Your client was so hopped up on booze and drugs and so deep into his sadistic ways that he wasn’t thinking straight.”

Detective Frost testified about photographs taken at the scene. I’d seen them all before, but blown up like that, the brutality of what had been done to Rashawn’s body was magnified. There were audible gasps in the room, several from the jurors.

“Monster!” Cece Turnbull screamed as she leaped to her feet and stabbed her finger at Stefan. “You butchered him! You butchered him like there was nothing human and good there at all!”

For several beats, Judge Varney hammered his gavel and called for order, and then he instructed the bailiffs to escort Rashawn’s mother from the court yet again.

Cece was having none of it and screeched and spit at Stefan before the bailiffs could get hold of her and muscle her out. Cece’s mother wept while her father held his wife and stared in loathing at my cousin.

After the session, Naomi emerged from the courthouse and tried to put a positive spin on the day for the reporters gathered out front.

She left them finally and came over to Bree, Pinkie, and me in the parking lot. My aunts and Nana Mama had gone home at lunch.

Naomi said, “I know the judge instructed the jury to ignore Cece’s rant, but they’ll remember it.”

“They couldn’t help but remember it,” Bree said. “She left me shaking.”

Naomi looked away, wiped at her watering eyes. “Me too. I know it’s unprofessional of me, but I’m beginning to wonder whether Stefan did those things to Rashawn.”

“I am too,” said Patty Converse, who walked up to us. “I’m asking myself how I could have missed so much.”

“I’m considering whether or not to ask for a plea bargain,” Naomi said. “I know Matt Brady. He’ll be fair.”

“Don’t throw in the towel just yet,” I said.

“We’ve got nothing to refute Stefan’s being at the crime scene,” Naomi said. “They’ve got his DNA all over the place.”

Before I could respond to that, my phone rang, and I turned away. It was Coach Greene calling.

“You don’t know how much I hate to say this, Dr. Cross, but I just received a call from Detective Pedelini with the sheriff’s office. The blood and urine tests on your daughter both came back positive for cocaine and methamphetamine. I’m afraid Jannie can’t continue training with us, and Duke will be withdrawing its offer of a scholarship.”

Chapter 83

“This is bullshit, coach,” I said, struggling to control my fury. “Those samples had to have been tampered with. Probably by Detective Pedelini.”

“Well,” she said skeptically, “I don’t know how you’re—”

“Going to prove it? We have our own samples from that day in a brown paper bag in my refrigerator. I asked for them as a precaution. I’ll be sending those samples to an impartial lab. Will Duke take the FBI’s word?”

The line fell silent. Then Coach Greene said, “If the FBI says Jannie’s clean, then she’s clean.”

“Thank you, Coach,” I said curtly. “I’ll be in touch.”

I punched the disconnect button, wanting to hurl my cell phone through the windshield of my rental car. But I summoned every reserve of control I had left and told Bree and the others about the lab report.

“There is no way Jannie could have run like she did the other day if she was on coke and speed,” Bree said.

“Yeah,” Pinkie said. “Can’t they see that?”

“Evidently not, until we’ve got evidence that says otherwise,” I said and told them about Greene’s agreement to let the FBI’s lab be the final word.

“That works,” Pinkie said.

It did, and I started to calm down. Then something about the whole issue of drugs in the bloodstream and in the urine made me ask, “Naomi, has anyone run drug tests on the semen off Rashawn’s body and the Lawrence girl’s underwear?”

She thought about that, said, “Not that I know of.”

“Do you have access to those samples?”

“We received small subsamples that we are free to use to conduct our own tests,” she said. “They’re at the office.”

“Get them and bring them to our house,” I said, then I turned to Bree. “Get Jannie’s samples from our fridge and what Naomi brings you and pack it all up. Pinkie will take you to the Winston-Salem airport.”

“Okay...”

“Buy a round-trip ticket to National Airport,” I said. “I’ll call my friends at Quantico. Someone will meet you when your plane lands. You’ll go home, check on the house, fly back here in the morning.”

“You think this drug test might help Stefan?” Pinkie said.

“Depends on the results,” I said.

“And what are you going to do while I’m gone?” Bree asked.

“Pay Detective Pedelini a visit, and maybe Marvin Bell too.”

Chapter 84

By the time I reached Pedelini’s office, the detective had left for the day.

I drove to the lake, following the directions Bree had given me, and found the house where she’d watched Finn Davis deliver a payoff to Pedelini. It was a nice place, gorgeous lot, big house, well cared for, with a swing on the grass and a dock. It faced east, and I thought that the dawns must be special there.

I drove on, parked behind Detective Pedelini’s car, and went around and up onto the deck. Inside, the television was playing, a baseball announcer calling a game. Over that there was the louder sound of children giggling, and I smelled baking chicken. I knocked on the screen door.

“Daddy!” a girl called. “There’s someone at the door.”

I heard him say something that sounded like “I’m busy with the cat. Go see who it is.”

A second later, a pretty girl about ten came to the door, said, “Hello?”

“Hello to you,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Tessa Pedelini.”

“Tessa Pedelini, can you tell your father that Alex Cross is here to see him?”

She nodded and scampered away to relay the message.

There was a pause, and then I heard Pedelini say, “Here, you help her, then. Slow, right?”

“Right,” Tessa said.

The detective came to the screen door, hesitated, and then came out onto the porch. He extended his hand to shake mine. I didn’t take it.

“I was as surprised as you must have been to see those reports on your daughter,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets. “But they’re conclusive.”

Feeling cold and merciless, I said, “I had you wrong, you know?”

“How’s that?” he asked, frowning.

“I’ve known my share of dirty cops in my time, but you didn’t trip my alarms at all when I met you,” I said. “You came across as one of the good guys. Bree thought so too.”

“I am one of the good guys,” Pedelini said, looking me in the eye. “The best around here.”

“That’s not saying much, is it?”

His eyes narrowed. “If I’m out there doing my job, you can jaw all you want at me like that. But here on my own back porch, I won’t tolerate it. I’ll ask you to leave now before one of us does something stupid.”

Pedelini looked at me expectantly.

I stood my ground, said, “My wife saw you accept a payoff from Finn Davis the other night. Right here. And your daughter was there to witness it.”

He was rocked by that, took a step back, said, “Wasn’t like that.”

“What wasn’t like that?” I asked. “Payoff’s a payoff.”

Pedelini’s entire body tensed as if he were going to launch himself at me; he rose up on his toes, his fists curling and uncurling, before he said in a thin voice, “You have no idea of the pressures I’m under.”

I could see it everywhere about him, then. What I’d taken for a pre-attack pause was actually his body’s tensing under some heavy burden.

“Why don’t you tell me?” I said.

“Why would I?”

“I’m a shrink as well as a cop,” I said. “I’m offering you a twofer.”

Pedelini almost smiled. Then he gazed around as if looking for an escape route.

“Maybe I wasn’t wrong,” I said, wanting him to open up. “Maybe my initial read of you was the correct one. Maybe you are a good man and I just lack understanding.”

“Damn right you do,” he said.

“Tell me.”

He struggled, finally said, “Come with me.”

The detective turned and entered the house. I followed him into a short hallway off a country-style kitchen where a small-screen television was showing the baseball game. A younger girl, eight, maybe nine, was sitting at a round table eating pretzel sticks, transfixed by the game.

“Braves up by two, Daddy,” she said.

“There’s a God after all, Lassie,” Pedelini said.

“When’s dinner?” Lassie asked.

He glanced at a timer on the stove, said, “Thirty-two minutes.”

Pedelini left the kitchen. His daughter never glanced at me as I followed him into a family room with a large window that overlooked the lake.

“Beautiful place,” I said.

“If you think dirty money bought it, you’re wrong,” Pedelini said. “My late wife inherited it from her father.”

He turned into a doorway.

I stepped in after him and found myself in a hospital room.

Chapter 85

Medical equipment filled two stainless-steel racks of shelves. An elaborate wheelchair stood empty in the corner. Glowing monitors were mounted on wall brackets above and to the sides of a hospital bed with high railings.

“Cat?” Pedelini said to the girl sitting up in the bed, straining to open her mouth to get the spoonful of food Tessa was offering. “This is Dr. Cross. He wanted to meet you.”

The detective’s youngest took the spoonful, closed her mouth, and turned her eyes toward me. In a thick, garbled voice, she said, “Another one?”

Catrina Pedelini was her name, and she reminded me of a baby robin I’d seen once when I was walking with my mother to the linen factory. The newly hatched bird, sparse-feathered and bony and broken, had fallen from its nest. Cat Pedelini was all angles with a pigeon chest, a spine that arched to the left, and crippled hands and arms that curled back toward her torso so that she appeared to be holding something dear. Her face was at once disfigured and attractive.

“I’m not a medical doctor,” I said. “I’m here to see your father, but I’m very glad to meet you.”

“Dad needs a doctor?” she asked, looking to her father.

“He’s here about work, sweetheart,” Pedelini said, coming over to stroke the wispy silver-blond hair on her head. “You’re doing a good job.”

“I watch Criminal Minds after dinner?” she asked.

Tessa looked at me, said, “That’s Cat’s favorite show.”

“You eat everything on your plate, you can watch one episode before bath time,” Pedelini said.

She made a gurgling, pleased sound in her throat and then said, “But I use a bowl.”

“Bowl, then,” Pedelini said gently and kissed her on the head. “I’ll be in soon.”

The detective moved by me, back out into the hall, and I followed him to the kitchen, where his middle daughter said, “Braves up by one, Dad. When’s dinner?”

“There is a God after all,” Pedelini said as he passed. “And twenty-four minutes. Have a pretzel.”

“I’ve eaten almost the whole bag.”

“Another of life’s tragedies.”

He went down a short hall, out the screen door, and onto the deck.

“Tell me about Cat,” I said.

Pedelini shrugged, said, “She had a damaged gene to begin with, or so they tell me. But she was further damaged in the labor that took my Ellen. The official diagnosis is cerebral palsy.”

“She seems sharp,” I said.

“Very. She’s quite a girl. A fighter.”

The sheriff’s detective had tears in his eyes. He wiped at them.

“She why you take money from Finn Davis?” I asked.

“You have any idea what it’s taken to get her this far?”

“I can’t imagine,” I said.

“Every cell, every fiber of my being. I promised my wife when she knew she was dying and had already seen Cat. I promised her I would move heaven and earth for our baby. And I have.”

I had been right. Guy Pedelini was a man of conscience and inner goodness. I could almost feel it pulsing out of him at that moment.

“But care like that costs a lot of money,” I said, pressing the issue.

“Whole lot,” he agreed. He scuffed his shoes, looked at the deck.

“More than your insurance will pay.”

“That too,” he said, and sniffed.

“So, what, Marvin Bell’s money makes up the difference?”

He paused as if disgusted with himself, said, “Almost.”

“What’s he pay you to do?” I asked.

The detective took a deep breath, went to the railing, and looked out over the lake, where the reflection of the three-quarter moon shimmered on the water.

“To look the other way?” I asked, following him. “When the trains come through Starksville with guys who use a three-finger salute riding on top of freight cars carrying loads of drugs bound for dealers up and down the line? Is that what you do to help Lassie, Tessa, and Cat?”

Pedelini had his back to me. His shoulders trembled slightly, and he started to pivot toward me. We were less than sixteen inches apart. The sheriff’s detective had turned nearly ninety degrees to his left and was facing the narrow cove and the shore road beyond it when the rifle shot rang out. I caught the muzzle flash from across the cove a split second before I heard the blast.

Pedelini spun around, sagged on the railing, and then ragdolled to the deck.

Blood trickled from a head wound.

Chapter 86

I dove across the detective to shield him from a second shot, but it never came. All I heard was the screaming of Pedelini’s girls.

“Call 911!” I yelled at Tessa, who’d come to the screen door.

I didn’t wait to see if she complied, just turned to her father, whose eyes had rolled up in his head. He was breathing, though. And his pulse was strong.

I didn’t want to move him, but I turned his head slightly to look at the wound. The bullet had dug a nasty groove through the scalp and along the surface of his skull, like a wood-carving tool had worked it. But I couldn’t see anywhere the bullet had penetrated his cranium.

I heard a car start, wheels squealing. I stood, peered across the cove, and spotted the taillights of a car racing away on the shore road. The car swerved, and I saw an old couple dive out of the way.

The car lost control, hit something hard with a tremendous crash. The brake lights never came on.

I started to run. That was my shooter.

“Wait!” Tessa screamed after me.

“Your dad’s going to be all right!” I yelled, jumping off the porch and sprinting to the rental car.

I threw it in reverse, spit gravel onto the road, and jammed it in gear. I almost lost control going around the hairpin at the back of the cove and slowed at the curve near the spot from where the shooter must have fired. When my headlights came around, I could see an older couple standing, shaken, by the road. But there was no car beyond them.

I roared up to them and they looked frightened.

“I’m a police officer,” I said. “Where did that car go?”

The elderly man’s hand was trembling. “Up the road. A white Impala. Almost hit us.”

A white Impala. I drove away slow, trying not to spin up rocks that might hit the couple, my attention darting off the road to a stripped and gouged stump with bits of steel embedded in it. I figured he’d hit it hard head-on, which meant the radiator might have been damaged, or the front end.

In any case, I couldn’t see the car being able to maintain its pace down the winding mountain road from the lake back toward town. The moment I turned off the shore road onto the main route, I sped up again.

Halfway down the mountain, I spotted brake lights ahead of me, and then they were gone around a curve. I caught up on the next bend, my high beams finding the rear of the Impala. Judging from the silhouettes showing through the back window, there were only two inside.

The passenger twisted around as if to look back at me, raised a pistol. I mashed the pedal and rammed the rear bumper before he could shoot. The impact flung the Impala at a steep angle up the road and away from me. My headlights caught the driver clawing at the wheel.

Finn Davis managed to regain control of the car and picked up speed through the next turn. When I came around the curve, a guy was hanging out the passenger window and aiming a shotgun at me left-handed.

Chapter 87

He fired just as I hit the brakes.

Double-aught buckshot shattered the right side of the windshield. I hit the gas again when I saw the shooter awkwardly trying to work the pump action. He wasn’t a lefty.

I swung into the other lane where he couldn’t get an easy shot at me, then caught up and cut the wheel to ram the Impala a second time. My bumper hit the car at a quartering angle. The rear end of the Impala swung hard right. The guy with the shotgun was hurled from the car; he sailed through the air and disappeared into the night.

Finn Davis was in my headlights again, clawing at the wheel.

I didn’t give him a second chance, just sped up and rammed the Impala a third time, hitting it almost broadside. My car threatened to spin, and I had to slam the brakes. But Finn’s car reached a tipping point on the road shoulder.

It flipped off the embankment.

I skidded to a halt, heard sirens coming, dug out my pistol and flashlight, and ran back up the road. The Impala had turned over at least two times and was wedged at an angle against the trunk of an old pine. One of the headlights was still on, cutting deeper into the forest.

I shone my flashlight down into the gully, tried to find the driver-side door and Davis. He wasn’t there.

I flicked the light up to the car’s roofline and found him. He was bleeding, leaning out the passenger-side window, and leveling a scoped hunting rifle at me.

We fired at virtually the same time, me from the hip at fifty feet and Davis at that same distance from a dead rest. His scope had to have been off because, as it had with Pedelini, the bullet went left of me by no more than an inch or two.

I clicked off the light, threw myself flat on the shoulder, and listened for the sound of a rifle’s action over the hissing of the Impala’s radiator and the sirens coming up the mountain. I counted to twenty, stayed belly down, extended my hand to the edge of the gully, and rapidly clicked the light on and off.

Nothing.

I flicked it on again, slid to the side, and looked down into the gully. Finn Davis was rocked back against the tree trunk, blank eyes open and already dulling. A gout of blood showed in the wound at the center of his throat.

Chapter 88

“Are you arresting me?” I asked eight hours later.

“Just trying to get the story straight in our heads,” said Detective Frost, rubbing his belly in an interrogation room.

Wearily, I said, “I went to see Detective Pedelini about some lab tests, and someone shot at him while we were talking on his deck. I saw the bullet had hit him hard enough to knock him out, but nothing fatal. So I left, gave chase. Some folks out on the lake, an elderly couple, were almost run down by Davis making his escape. I tried to follow. His accomplice shot at my car. I took defensive action. Davis’s car went off the side of the road. He tried to kill me. I killed him in self-defense.”

“Why would Finn Davis try to kill Pedelini?” asked Carmichael.

Tired as I was, I decided I couldn’t trust the two men interviewing me. I withheld any and all theories spinning in my brain.

“I can’t give you a clear motive,” I said. “His adoptive father might be able to.”

“We put calls in to Marvin’s house and cell,” Carmichael said. “He isn’t answering.”

“Go to his place on Pleasant Lake.”

“A trooper did about an hour ago. No answer at the door, so he went inside. There were signs of a struggle. Know anything about that?”

“Nothing,” I said. “For all you know, Bell ordered Finn to kill Pedelini and is now running, making his house a mess so you’d think otherwise. But whatever. The fact remains that Finn shot at Pedelini and me. Test his rifle. I guarantee it will match the one that killed Sydney Fox.”

“You think Finn killed Sydney?” Frost said.

“I do,” I said.

“Why?”

“Spiteful ex-husband. Maybe more.”

They fell silent. Carmichael drank from a Diet Coke can. Frost sipped his coffee, said skeptically, “You make yourself out to be an innocent bystander.”

“With the attempt on Detective Pedelini’s life, most definitely. How is he, by the way?”

“In a medically induced coma,” Carmichael said. “Mild brain swelling.”

“Someone taking care of his daughters?”

“They’re covered,” Frost said.

I sat back in my chair confidently, said, “Then I’m not saying anything until Pedelini wakes up. You talk to him. He’ll back me up.”

The door opened, and Naomi entered, saying, “Not another word, Alex.”

“That’s already the plan,” I said.

“You charging him?” my niece snapped.

“Not at this time,” Frost admitted.

“Then I’d appreciate his release,” she said. “Dr. Cross is an integral part of my defense. He’s not leaving town. You’ll find him in Judge Varney’s court if you need him.”

Ten minutes later we slipped out the back door of the police station to avoid the television news crews and walked down the alley toward the courthouse in the dawn light. Part of me wanted to go home and get some sleep. Instead, I called Nana Mama, told her I was okay and would see her at the trial. I texted Bree to call me as we went to a café for breakfast with Pinkie.

I drank three cups of coffee, ate three eggs sunny-side up, bacon, and hash browns, and related everything that had happened to me during the night.

“Why would Finn Davis want to kill Guy Pedelini?” Naomi asked.

“Maybe Davis saw Pedelini as I do: an essentially good guy corrupted by circumstances,” I said. “Under duress, these kinds of people don’t hold secrets long before they break, confess, and implicate others.”

“So the sheriff, and then Pedelini?” Pinkie said. “You think someone’s trying to clean house?”

“If you add in the busted brake line of our car, it sure looks like it.”

“Someone’s under pressure,” Naomi said.

“Someone?” Pinkie said. “Try Marvin Bell.”

“Bell’s vanished,” I said.

“Which means we were getting close, right?” Pinkie said.

“Close to something. But it’s still like a jigsaw that won’t piece—”

My phone rang. A number I almost recognized but couldn’t place.

“Cross,” I said.

“Drummond.”

I smiled. “How are you, Sergeant?”

“Peachy,” he said. “Mize is copping to it all and pleading insanity.”

“He might be right.”

“Not my call,” Drummond said. “Your case? You get that guy Bell?”

“Close,” I said. “But he’s vanished.”

“Runner.”

“Looks like it.”

“Your nephew’s trial?”

“My cousin’s trial. And, to be honest, unless we can come up with some counterevidence fast, he’s looking at death row.”

Drummond didn’t reply for several beats, and then said, “You never know when something’s going to turn things around.”

“True,” I said. I heard a clicking, looked at the caller ID, saw it was Bree.

I told the sergeant I had to take another call but would keep him posted, and then I switched lines.

“Hey,” I said. “Where are you?”

“At National Airport, about to board a flight back to Winston-Salem,” Bree said. “I just got some preliminary results e-mailed to me from the FBI lab.”

“And?”

Chapter 89

Judge Varney gaveled the court to order at nine o’clock that Tuesday morning.

Before either of the attorneys could speak, the judge pointed his gavel toward the spectators, said, “Cece Turnbull? You in my court?”

Cece’s eyes were beet red and rheumy when she stood up and nodded.

“You gonna cause any more trouble?” he demanded.

“No, sir, Judge Varney,” she said in a tremulous voice. “I... I apologize. It’s just that—”

“Just nothing,” the judge said. “Long as you’re quiet, you can remain. But the first peep out of you and you’re gone for the duration. You understand?”

Cece nodded, sat down. Ann Lawrence leaned forward and patted her on the shoulder comfortingly. Sharon Lawrence sat next to her mother, pale, weak, and looking at her cell phone. Cece’s mother and father were behind the Lawrences. Mrs. Caine was staring into her lap while her husband sat ramrod straight in his business suit, arms crossed, focused completely on Judge Varney.

In those same moments, Police Chief Randy Sherman was sending hard glances at me and Nana Mama, who sat beside me, and at Pinkie, Aunt Connie, and Aunt Hattie, who were in the row behind us.

The bailiff led my cousin into the court. Stefan Tate’s facial swelling had gone down, but his skin was bruised a livid purple.

Patty Converse came in and took a seat next to Pinkie. I smiled. She nodded but wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“Where were we at adjournment?” Judge Varney asked his clerk.

“Detective Frost,” the clerk said. “Ms. Strong is still on direct.”

The older detective, who looked as tired as I was, took the stand.

Varney said, “I remind you you’re under oath.”

“Yes, Judge,” Frost said.

The district attorney let her assistant Matthew Brady take the lead in questioning the detective. Brady focused on other items gathered at the scene of Rashawn Turnbull’s rape and murder. Those pieces of evidence included a broken bottle of Stolichnaya vodka with Stefan Tate’s prints on it not ten feet from where the body was found.

During our first talk in the jail, my cousin said the bottle was probably his but that it must have been stolen from his apartment. The excuse was weak.

The weight of evidence against Stefan seemed overwhelming again. You could see it in the faces of many in the jury box. Stefan’s semen was at the scene of the crime. His prints were there. He killed that boy, deserved to fry.

“Detective,” Matthew Brady said. “You went to talk to the defendant the day Rashawn’s body was found.”

“That’s correct,” Frost said. “We found Mr. Tate at his house that morning.”

“How would you describe his condition?” Brady asked.

“Hung over. You could smell stale liquor on his breath.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That Rashawn’s body had been found,” Frost said. “And that we found his ID there covered with blood.”

“What was his reaction?”

“Went down on his knees and started sobbing.”

Frost said they took my cousin in for questioning and sealed the apartment until it could be searched by a forensics team. Before they interrogated Stefan they took his blood alcohol level, which registered as .065. Not legally drunk in North Carolina, but a solid indicator that he’d been drinking hard the night before.

Brady took the detective through the interrogation, in which Stefan steadfastly maintained his innocence. Yes, he’d been drinking the night before. He and his fiancée had had a fight. He’d stormed out, gone for a long walk, and picked up a bottle. He ended up passing out by the railroad tracks.

I glanced back at Patty Converse. She was staring at the floor.

“Did Mr. Tate say why he’d gone down by the tracks?” Brady asked.

“He said for no reason at all, and that made him hysterical,” Frost said.

“Did you believe him?”

“The hysteria? The anguish at what he’d done? Yes. That he went down by the tracks and passed out? No, I did not and do not. There was no evidence down there that put him anywhere near where he said he woke up.”

Frost went on to describe leaving Stefan in a cell under suicide watch while he and Carmichael searched the duplex where my cousin lived along with Sydney Fox and Patty Converse. The older detective found the pruning saw with Rashawn’s blood and flesh in the teeth on a shelf in the common basement along with some turkey-hunting equipment and a vial of methamphetamine.

“Was the saw or the meth vial hidden?” Brady asked.

“Yes. In a pack.”

“Odd that he would keep the weapon.”

“Mr. Tate’s blood alcohol level had to have been sky-high, and the brutality with which Rashawn was attacked suggests a berserk state,” Frost said. “Coming out of it, he probably wasn’t thinking too straight, dumped the saw where he found it.”

“Objection,” Naomi said. “The witness is speculating.”

“Sustained.”

Brady said, “Were Mr. Tate’s fingerprints on that saw?”

“Five fingerprints.”

“Anyone else’s?”

“No.”

Brady’s questioning went on for another hour. Around ten thirty, the assistant district attorney said, “No further questions.”

Judge Varney said, “Ms. Cross, you can choose to proceed with cross-examination of Detective Frost now or finish with Sharon Lawrence.”

Sharon Lawrence’s mother stabbed at her daughter’s thigh with her index finger. Sharon Lawrence jerked, looked up from her cell phone in disgust.

Naomi looked back at me. I nodded.

She said, “The defense will start with Detective Frost.”

Chapter 90

As Naomi came out from behind the defense table, she glanced at me again, and I shot her an encouraging smile.

“She got something?” Nana Mama whispered to me.

“Maybe,” I said, and gave her hand a squeeze.

“Detective Frost,” Naomi began. “At what time did you arrive at my client’s apartment the morning after the victim’s body was discovered?”

“Nine? Nine fifteen?”

“How was Mr. Tate dressed?”

“Gray sweatpants, blue hoodie.”

“His hair was wet?”

“Correct,” Frost said. “Mr. Tate stated that he’d just gotten out of the shower when we knocked.”

“Was the shower drain searched?” Naomi asked.

“It was.”

“Any of Rashawn Turnbull’s blood found in that drain?”

“No.”

“Any blood evidence found in that drain?”

“Mr. Tate’s.”

“Did Mr. Tate tell you that he has a history of nosebleeds? That they often occur when he’s exposed to hot water?”

Frost shifted, said, “He said that.”

Naomi returned to the defense table, picked up a document, said, “The defense would like to introduce our exhibit A: medical records dating back to Mr. Tate’s childhood that reflect this ongoing problem with nosebleeds.”

Judge Varney took the documents and nodded.

If the fact that my cousin suffered nosebleeds in any way contradicted the people’s case, neither Delilah Strong, Matt Brady, nor Detective Frost showed it.

“So you found Mr. Tate’s blood in the drain?” Naomi said.

“Correct.”

“But not Rashawn Turnbull’s?”

“Asked and answered, Counselor,” Judge Varney said.

“Don’t you find that odd?” my niece said to Frost. “I mean, the prosecution has spun this theory about my client entering a drunken, drug-fueled, berserk state to rape and kill Rashawn Turnbull, slashing at the boy’s neck with a pruning saw. And we’ve seen photos of the blood-spatter patterns at the crime scene. So why no blood in the drain? If your theory is to be believed, the boy’s blood should have been all over my client’s clothes and body.”

“We think Mr. Tate got rid of his clothes and washed off somewhere else.”

“But there’s no evidence to back that up.”

Frost said nothing.

“Do you have my client’s clothes with blood on them?”

“No.”

“Did you find the victim’s blood anywhere in that building other than on the pruning saw in the basement?”

Frost shifted uncomfortably, said, “No.”

“Did you find illegal drugs anywhere else in the house besides the vial of methamphetamine in the basement?”

“No.”

“In Mr. Tate’s office at the school?”

“No.”

“In his car?”

“No.”

“And yet you’d have us believe that Mr. Tate is not only a habitual user of meth but a dealer whose wares may have resulted in two overdoses at the high school.”

“Mr. Tate has a history of drug and alcohol abuse,” Frost said. “He got thrown out of—”

“Objection, Judge,” Naomi said.

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

But it had already been said. You couldn’t take something like that back and expect the jurors to actually eliminate the information from their brains. Stefan had past issues. That was all they would care about. Naomi looked frustrated but pushed on.

“Was there any sign of methamphetamine in my client’s blood the morning of his arrest?”

“Trace levels,” Detective Frost said.

“Trace levels? I thought he was in an alcohol-and-drug-fueled rage that night.”

“Large amounts of alcohol in the bloodstream can mask the presence of meth in certain tests.”

“Really?” Naomi said. “I hadn’t heard that. But again, you’re no expert.”

“Objection,” the district attorney said.

“Sustained,” Varney said before rapping his gavel. “We’ll take a lunch break and resume at one o’clock.”

Chapter 91

Pinkie slid into the same booth we’d used before at the Bench, the restaurant by the courthouse. I sat opposite him while Nana Mama and my aunts took a table next to us. I’d tried to invite Patty Converse, but she’d left the courtroom before Varney ended the morning session.

“I thought things went better for Stefan today,” Pinkie said.

“I did too,” I said. “For the first time since the trial began, I saw some of the jurors really thinking about the evidence against him.”

My cell phone buzzed. An e-mail alert. The waitress came over to take our orders. I asked for the patty melt with a salad instead of fries and another cup of coffee. I’d been up for so many hours at that point that I was feeling woozy again.

“If Stefan did it, he would have been covered in Rashawn’s blood,” Pinkie said.

“Unless Frost is right and he washed off somewhere else and buried his clothes,” I said.

“But why not the saw?”

“I know. It’s not logical. But sometimes murder and its aftermath are not logical events. It twists people into something unrecognizable.”

“You’re kind of raining on Naomi’s parade.”

“Not at all,” I replied, happy to see the waitress bringing my coffee. “I think she’s going to mount a vigorous defense on Stefan’s behalf.”

“I can hear a but coming.”

“But I’ve worked on enough of these cases to know that when the evidence to convict a child killer is formidable, the defense had better be able to do more than just poke holes in the prosecution’s narrative.”

“Like what?” Pinkie asked.

“Like find the real killer,” I said. “We do that, Stefan walks. If not, even with some of the lab results we got back, he risks conviction.”

“I swear on my dead daddy’s grave that Finn and Marvin were in on it,” Pinkie said.

I glanced over at the booth where I’d spoken with Bell the week before, said, “Well, unless the police find some evidence that links Bell and Davis to the killing, you’re swearing in vain.”

“Finn tried to kill Pedelini, who all but admitted to you before he was shot that he was looking the other way for payoffs.”

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean, maybe?”

“I’d have to see the test results on Davis’s rifle, but there is the possibility that Davis was shooting at me and hit Pedelini. We were fairly close and it was a long shot across that cove.”

The waitress returned with our orders, and we dug in. My head ached, and I had to force the food down.

After we’d finished, I was surprised that Nana Mama wanted to stay for the afternoon session. She’d been taking naps in the afternoon the past few months.

“I feel like something big is going to happen in that courtroom this afternoon,” she said, holding my elbow as we walked back to the courthouse. “And I don’t want to miss it.”

“You having premonitions now?” I asked, amused.

“I’m no swami or seer,” she snapped. “I just get feelings sometimes, and this is one of them.”

“Okay. This something big you’re feeling — is it good or bad for Stefan?”

My grandmother peered up at me with a confused expression on her face, said, “I can’t tell you one way or the other.”

We were outside the courthouse when my cell phone buzzed again, this time alerting me to a text. I sent Nana Mama in to claim our seats with Pinkie and my aunts, pulled out the cell to see a text from Bree:

Landed; in taxi on way to dealership to pick up car. Plan one stop, and then see you in court in two hours. How are things going?

I texted her back: Better. Naomi cross-examining Frost and scoring points. Drive safe and see you soon. Love you.

A moment later: Love you too.

I was about to stick my cell phone in my pocket when I remembered the e-mail that had come in during lunch. It was from one of my friends at Quantico, a report on the chemical compound that I’d taken from that basket in the tanker.

Chapter 92

I rushed into Judge Varney’s rapidly filling courtroom, went to the railing, and waved Naomi over. I said, “Do you have the state’s assay report on the meth found in the vial in Stefan’s basement?”

She thought about that, nodded, and went to dig through several large, legal-size boxes to retrieve it.

“What’s going on?” Naomi asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Just a hunch at this point.”

“You’ll let me know if it gets beyond a hunch?”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

I took my seat next to Nana Mama, kissed her on the cheek, and started reading through the state’s report, a chemical assay that identified the substance found in the vial in Stefan’s basement as a very pure designer methamphetamine. They described the chemical structure, but the science went over my head. There was, however, a graphic representation of that structure on the second page.

Then I called up the report I’d just received from my FBI friends and saw the graphs matched. I reread the note attached to the Bureau’s study, which stated the substance was “a designer drug created by a gifted chemist.”

All sorts of suppositions and assumptions I’d been playing with now became concrete fact. Someone called Grandfather, probably Marvin Bell, was running a designer-meth distribution operation via the freight-rail system.

Some of that signature meth was found in Stefan’s basement. Either my cousin had access to the drug and was holding out on us, or someone involved in the designer-meth distribution system had planted it there.

I got up and gave Naomi a summary of what I’d found before the bailiff called, “All rise.”

Judge Varney came in, said, “Carry on, Ms. Cross.”

My niece approached the witness box, said, “Just to recap where we were, Detective Frost. The prosecution believes that on the night in question, Mr. Tate went into an alcohol-and-drug-fueled rage and raped and murdered Rashawn Turnbull.”

“No doubt in my mind,” Frost said.

Naomi let that slide, said, “What’s Mr. Tate’s motive? Why take his rage out on a boy? A boy who supposedly idolized him?”

“You don’t know how many nights I’ve lain awake thinking about that,” Frost said, directing his reply to the jury. “At some level, you can’t get your head around the depravity of what was done to Rashawn. The pure hatred behind it.

“But Tate had gone off the wagon in a big way. He was feeding drugs to underage girls, raping them. Sydney Fox said she saw Rashawn going into Tate’s place the same day Sharon Lawrence says he drugged and attacked her. If so, I think Rashawn saw the rape. I think Rashawn said he was going to tell the police, and Tate just snapped.”

In the silence that followed, four or five jury members stared at Stefan as if he were already heading for death row. The others were watching my niece as if wondering why she hadn’t objected to Frost’s speculation.

Naomi went to the jury box, got the jury’s attention, said, “Detective, how do you explain the fact that Sydney Fox saw Rashawn go into that apartment but Sharon Lawrence testified that she never saw the victim the day she was allegedly attacked?”

I glanced over and saw Sharon Lawrence unglue herself from her cell phone.

Frost said, “She’d been drugged with a date-rape drug.”

“Any residue of a date-rape drug in Sharon Lawrence’s blood at the time of her reporting the alleged rape?”

Frost said, “She reported the attack a week after it happened.”

Naomi went to the defense table, retrieved a file. “The defense would like to introduce sworn testimony by several expert witnesses that all say date-rape drugs can linger in the bloodstream for up to fourteen days.”

Varney squinted, took the documents, scanned them, and then handed them to the clerk. He ran his hand back over his pompadour, looking kind of anxious. Another kidney stone coming on?

Naomi said, “So that part of Sharon Lawrence’s story is not correct, is it, Detective Frost? She wasn’t drugged, was she?”

“You said the drug can linger for up to fourteen days,” Frost said. “Up to means in some people, the drug is gone in a lot less than two weeks.”

Naomi paused, seemed to shift gears.

“The semen in her underwear. It was a direct match to my client?”

“DNA doesn’t lie,” Frost said.

“There’s no disputing the DNA test,” Naomi agreed. “When Ms. Lawrence came forward with her rape story, she had my client’s DNA in her panties.”

“Correct,” Frost said.

Naomi said, “Did you also find Ms. Lawrence’s DNA in the panties?”

“Yes,” Frost said.

Sharon Lawrence was looking at the ceiling above Judge Varney. Her mother held her hand tight.

“So you’ve got Mr. Tate’s semen and Ms. Lawrence’s body fluids, and you test them for DNA. What else did you test those substances for?”

The police detective frowned. “I’m not following you.”

“Did you have your lab do other tests on the semen and Ms. Lawrence’s body fluids? Say, drug tests?”

Frost blinked, said nothing.

“Detective?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so, no.”

“We’ve checked the record and you haven’t,” Naomi said. “So we had the FBI perform other tests on those samples.”

Chapter 93

Naomi held up a document, said, “The defense would like to introduce exhibit—”

“Objection!” Strong said, jumping to her feet. “The prosecution was not made aware of any such tests.”

“Because we ordered them last night and they came in this morning.”

“That’s impossible. The backlog of work at the FBI’s lab is—”

“Quantico did a rush job on the tests as a favor to my uncle.”

The district attorney looked to Judge Varney.

The judge rotated his head around to ease a cramp in his neck, glanced at me and the others in the cheap seats, said, “The court will admit the FBI’s tests.”

Naomi beamed. She handed copies to the clerk, the prosecution, and Detective Frost. Interested now, the jurors shifted in their seats, wondering just what the tests said. I tried not to smile, but I was proud of my niece. She had every person in the courtroom in the palm of her hand.

Naomi said, “You’ll see the necessary stamps, signatures, and so forth on pages one and two. Turn to page three. You’ll see that we submitted Ms. Lawrence’s body fluids at the time of the alleged rape for evidence of illicit drugs commonly used during date rapes, like Rohypnol.”

She walked over to the witness, said, “Can you read us the results, Detective?”

Frost said, “No drugs or alcohol present.”

“No drugs or alcohol present in Ms. Lawrence’s sample,” Naomi said.

Sharon Lawrence looked ready to be sick. She said something to her mother, who shook her head and held her hand tight.

Strong and Brady, meanwhile, were poring over the pages. So were the judge and the detective on the witness stand. The jurors were transfixed. Police Chief Sherman was leaning over the railing trying unsuccessfully to get the prosecutors’ attention.

Naomi said, “Detective Frost, on page four, what are the results of the test on my client’s semen at the time of the alleged rape?”

Frost’s voice cracked before he cleared his throat and said, “Negative for drugs and alcohol.”

“At the time of the alleged rape?”

“Correct.”

“No drugs or alcohol at all,” she said to the jury. “But that goes completely against the story to which Ms. Lawrence testified under oath. She said they were drinking, doing drugs, carrying on, and having a good old time before Mr. Tate slipped her a date-rape drug and had his way with her. Is that a fair summary of her story, Detective?”

“It is,” Frost said.

“Do you now believe my client raped Ms. Lawrence as she described?”

“Objection!” Strong said.

Sharon Lawrence was weeping silently. Her mother looked ready to crawl out of her skin.

Naomi said, “Judge, I’m asking a detective with two and a half decades of experience to evaluate the facts as he knows them now and form an opinion.”

Varney hesitated, said, “Overruled, Ms. Strong. Rephrase the question, Ms. Cross.”

“Does Ms. Lawrence’s story jibe with these FBI tests?”

“No, but she could have just embellished that part of the story,” Frost said.

“Or she embellished the entire story, in which case she can be prosecuted for perjury, along with her mother, and for planting false evidence,” Naomi said. “They’ll both do time.”

“No!” Ann Lawrence cried, getting to her feet. “She... we...”

Varney rapped his gavel, said, “Sit down, Mrs. Lawrence.”

She sat back down, looking wobbly, next to her daughter, who stared at the floor.

Naomi said, “The defense calls Sharon Lawrence to the stand.”

“Are you done with Detective Frost?” Judge Varney asked.

“For the moment, Judge,” Naomi said. “But I’d prefer he remain available.”

Varney instructed Frost to stay and, along with the rest of the crowded courtroom, watched him pass a pale, nervous Sharon Lawrence heading toward the witness stand.

Ann Lawrence’s face had gone flushed, and she sat small in her seat. Cece’s mother and father were staring at the woman as if she were some dark mystery.

“Ms. Lawrence,” Naomi said. “Did you hear Detective Frost’s testimony just now?”

“Yes.”

“And the results of the drug tests?”

Sharon Lawrence nodded feebly.

“Did Coach Stefan Tate drug and rape you?”

The girl said nothing for several long moments. Her lips trembled, and she looked out at her mother and then at Stefan Tate.

“No,” she whispered as tears poured down her face. “It was all a lie.”