Cross Justice (Alex Cross 23)

We passed the open gate to St. John’s Catholic Cemetery. Up the hill I could see the pull-off.

“It’s a beautiful spot,” Nana Mama said, and I glanced in the mirror a third time, catching my grandmother looking into the cemetery. “Your uncle Brock’s buried there. He could have been at Arlington, but Connie Lou wanted him here with family.”

“He died in the Gulf War, right?” Bree asked.

“Green Beret,” Naomi confirmed. “Posthumous Silver Star for valor at Fallujah. It’s on the shelf in the front room.”

“And Connie never remarried?” Bree asked.

“She never saw the need,” Nana Mama said. “Brock was her soul mate, and her men friends all paled in comparison.”

“Men friends?” I said.

“None of your business.”

I knew better than to pursue the subject. Instead, I drove up and into the pull-off. About three hundred yards ahead, the ground gave way to pale white and irregular cliffs. Hardwood trees, maple and hickory, grew above the cliffs on the far rim. But on the near side, the bigger trees had been cut for lumber, the remaining stumps all but swallowed by raspberry brambles and sapling thickets.

Bree, Naomi, and I got out, aware of the building heat and insect whine all around. My grandmother rolled down the window and stayed put. “I’ll wait here, thank you,” she said. “I’ve taught too many thirteen-year-old boys; I can’t listen to what you all have to say out there.”

“We won’t be long,” Naomi promised, and she said to me: “You might want binoculars if you’ve got them.”

“I do,” I said, and from a compartment in the rear of the Explorer I retrieved the Leupold binoculars I’d bought when I was still with the FBI.

Naomi led us forward to a tall guardrail. We looked over into a large, deep, and abandoned limestone quarry that immediately set my heart racing. I once more flashed on myself as a boy running in the rain at night. I didn’t know where or why. Or I couldn’t remember.

Or wouldn’t.

In any case, I forced myself to calm down and really study the quarry even before Naomi spoke. It was eighty, maybe ninety feet deep. In some places, the bottom was choked with brush, and in others it was solid stone. A creek cut through and disappeared through a gap in the wall to our left.

Gang graffiti marred the lower limestone walls. Above, the cliffs were irregular and staggered where miners had cut out huge slabs of stone. In several spots, there were gaping, jagged holes in the rock face—entrances to caves. Water trickled from the caves and ran down the walls into the creek.

Naomi pointed to the largest bare section of the quarry bottom, a pale and sunbaked rubble field that reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Greek ruins. There were chunks of limestone lying everywhere. The squarer pieces were stacked haphazardly, and the broken stuff was strewn all about.

“See the tallest pile?” my niece asked. “Far out, slightly right? Come left of it toward center, that low stack there closest to us.”

“I see it,” I said as I trained the binoculars on five door-size pieces of cracked stone. The area around that stack was mostly clear of debris. There was a path of sorts leading from it to the gap in the wall to our left.

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

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

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

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

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

“They have the weapon?” Bree asked.

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

“Stefan’s foldable pruning saw?”

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

“His prints on it?” Bree asked.

“And Rashawn’s DNA,” Naomi said.