Pinkie and I both left Uncle Cliff and went out on the front porch of the funeral home. Sydney Fox’s tiny mother stood toe to toe arguing with a man a solid foot taller than her. Rangy, with a chiseled, hard face, he was about Sydney’s age and dressed for the occasion in a dark gray suit.
“You’ll go in there over my dead body,” Ethel Fox said.
The man smiled. “She was my wife for years, Ethel. Least you can let me do is pay my respects.”
“You never respected her in life, Finn Davis!” Ethel Fox shouted. “Why should you in death?”
Davis leaned over his former mother-in-law, put his finger on her chest, and said in a low, threatening voice, “’Cause it’s the right thing to do, Ethel.”
Pinkie was off the porch in a shot with me right behind him.
“Back off, Finn,” Pinkie barked. “Back off, or I will bust you up fierce!”
All of a sudden, out from the shadows and between the cars, four men appeared. Every one of them had a tough, hard edge.
“Pinkie Parks,” Davis said slowly, taking a step back from Ethel Fox with an amused expression. “Figured you might be here, so I brought some friends along just in case. Who’s your sidekick?”
“My cousin,” Pinkie said. “He’s a big-time cop, works with the FBI.”
If Davis was impressed or intimidated, he didn’t show it. “Way I heard it, he’s down here trying to get your sick-fuck cousin Stefan off for killing that little boy. That the blood that runs through all you inbred cousins down there on Loupe Street? Sick-fuck blood?”
“Keep it up, and you’ll find out,” I said in a low, level voice.
Davis’s smile turned cold. “You keep it up, the whole lot of you gonna be driven from this town.”
“Leave,” Pinkie said. “You’ve got no legal right to be here, and you certainly have no moral right. So leave.”
Davis hesitated, and then took a step back, hands at his sides, palms exposed. “Have it your way, Ethel,” he said to his ex-mother-in-law. “You mourn dear Sydney. You bury dear Sydney. Next week I’ll go out to the cemetery, pay my respects, and piss on dear Sydney’s grave.”
Chapter
40
Stefan Tate’s trial began in earnest the following morning at eight o’clock sharp. The jury of eight women and four men had been empaneled the week before, and Judge Erasmus P. Varney lived up to his reputation for keeping his courtroom moving at a brisk pace.
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The place was packed for the opening arguments. Our family turned out in force. Pinkie was there with his mother. I sat with Aunt Hattie and Patty Converse, directly behind Naomi and Stefan, who came into court acting rattled.
He seemed particularly upset by the people sitting behind the prosecution. Cece Turnbull was there, drawn, weak, and holding on to Bree’s hand. Bree had spent the whole night with her and made sure she’d shown up sober.
Chief of police Randy Sherman sat on Cece’s other side and kept glancing at Bree, as if he were trying to figure out how she fit into the equation. Behind them were several reporters up from Raleigh and Winston-Salem, and another from the Associated Press.
Harry and Virginia Caine, the well-scrubbed couple I’d seen on Cece’s porch the prior day, were on hand in the third row. Her parents were dressed for business and seemed relieved to see their daughter’s sober condition.
Stark County Sheriff’s Office detective Guy Pedelini came in just as the opening arguments began and sat in the back near city homicide detectives Joe Frost and Lou Carmichael.
District attorney Delilah Strong gave the prosecution’s opening argument with Matt Brady as her cocounsel. Strong’s presentation of the case against my cousin was clear, concise, and damning.
She depicted Stefan Tate as a troubled individual thrown out of several schools and jobs because of substance abuse, then as a liar who hid his past on his application to teach in the Starksville school system, and then as a teacher who’d relapsed, dealt drugs to his students, and raped a student before sexually assaulting and butchering Rashawn Turnbull after the young boy rejected him.
When Strong was done, the jury members were taking lethal glances at my cousin. Cece Turnbull went berserk, screaming, “You’ll go to hell for what you did to my boy, Stefan Tate!”
It took Bree and a bailiff to get the victim’s mother out of the courtroom. When they brought Cece past her parents, she was bent over and weeping, and Harry and Virginia Caine looked tortured and lost.
Naomi asked Judge Varney for a recess and to instruct the jury to ignore Cece’s outburst. The judge gave the instructions but denied the recess and demanded she make her case.
My niece got uncertainly to her feet, saying, “The district attorney paints Stefan Tate as a drug-fueled homicidal maniac. Nothing could be further from the truth.”