Cross Justice (Alex Cross 23)

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 Carol

ina, 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?”