Cross Justice (Alex Cross 23)

For two seconds, the silence in that courtroom was so deep and complete you could have heard a mouse in the walls. I was tired, wrung out. It took me a full two seconds to figure out the killer, and then I twisted around, looking for Harold Caine.

Rashawn’s grandfather. Owner of a fertilizer company. Chemist, no doubt. Racist? Grandfather?

Caine’s expression seemed electrified by the charge. His body had gone rigid. His lips were peeled back. And he was clinging so hard to the bench in front of him that I thought his fingers might snap like Bell’s.

Caine’s wife stared at him like he was something unthinkable and cowered from his side.

Caine noticed, turned his head to her, said, “It’s not true, Virginia. He’s—”

“It is true!” Cece Turnbull screeched.

Caine’s daughter had twisted around and was looking past Ann and Sharon Lawrence to face her father two rows back. “You always hated Rashawn! You always hated that a nigger fucked your lily-white Southern daughter and left you with a living, breathing tarnish on the Caine family name!”

“No, that’s not true!”

Cece went over the back of her bench then, stepped up next to Ann Lawrence, and launched herself at her father. She crashed into him, slapping and scratching at his face.

“You treated my boy worse than dirt his entire life!” she screamed. “And you stole my Lizzie. Rashawn had as much of your precious blood as my Lizzie, and you cut it out of him with a pruning saw!”

Bree jumped up and went to Cece, who’d broken down sobbing as she feebly tried to continue her assault on her father. Bree pulled Cece off and held her while Caine slumped there, chest heaving, blood oozing from those scratches, looking around like a cornered animal at all the people in the courtroom watching him.

“None of it’s true,” Caine told them in a hoarse whisper. “None of it!”

“It’s all true!” Bell shouted from the witness stand. “You sick fuck. You deserve to burn in hell for what you did.”

The courtroom doors were flung open again. Two men and a woman, all wearing business suits, came in carrying pistols and badges.

The woman said, “My name is Carol Wolfe, FBI special agent in charge of the Winston-Salem office. Put the gun down, Sergeant Drummond.”

Drummond kept the shotgun to the back of Bell’s head, said, “I’m not quite done yet, Agent Wolfe. Mr. Bell here has one more thing to get off his chest.”

Chapter

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Marvin Bell seemed genuinely puzzled, said, “I told you everything.”

“Not all of it,” Drummond said. “You said you’ve never murdered anyone in your life.”

“That’s a fact,” Bell said.

“Never smothered anyone—a woman, maybe?” Drummond said. “Thirty-five years ago?”

“No.”

“You were her drug dealer,” the sergeant insisted. “She was dying of cancer, and no one was paying you for the heroin her husband was using to ease her pain.”

Bell shook his head.

“You got her husband damn-near-overdose high on smack,” Drummond said. “And then you smothered her with a pillow while he watched, so numb he couldn’t stop you.”

Drummond was breathing hard. He said, “Then, for almost a year, you made him work for you, and finally, when he was no use to you anymore, you tied that man to your car with a rope just like the one around your neck here, and you dragged that poor bastard through the streets, called him a wife killer, a mother killer.

“You alerted the police, said he’d murdered his wife, and gave him to the young men who were already in your pocket. Officer Randy Sherman and Deputy Nathan Bean. You paid them to make it look like he tried to escape. Judge Varney, a young assistant district attorney at the time, was there too. They pushed that man to the railing, and he didn’t understand why they went back to the cruisers and then turned and pulled th

eir guns. Then they shot him, and he fell off the bridge and into the gorge. Isn’t that the way it happened, Marvin?”

Drummond had dropped the hammer and was holding the shotgun against Bell’s head so hard his hands were shaking.