Haunted (Michael Bennett 10)

“What are my odds, Anita?” I said as the elevator doors shut.

“I don’t play that game,” she said crisply, adjusting the cuffs of her white blouse. “We’ll let the facts influence the jury, and let them decide.”

“But you’ve seen the prosecution’s evidence.”

“And I have a rough idea of their theory. I think our story’s more compelling, and I intend to tell it well.”

I believed her. In just the last six years, Marley had won eight high-profile murder cases. After I was charged with double homicide, I reached out to her, expecting to get a refusal or a “too busy.” Instead, she flew from Dallas to DC the next day and she’d been standing by me in legal proceedings ever since.

I liked Anita. There was no BS about her. She had a lightning-fast mind, and she was not above using her charm, good looks, and acting skills to help a client. I’d seen her use all of the above on the judge who oversaw pretrial motions, which, with a few disturbing exceptions, she’d won handily.

But mine was as complex a trial case as she’d ever seen, with threads that extended deep into my past.

About fifteen years ago, a psychopath named Gary Soneji went on a kidnapping and murder spree. I put him in prison, but he escaped several years later and turned his hand to bomb building.

Soneji detonated several, killing multiple people before we cornered him in a vast abandoned tunnel system below Manhattan. He almost killed me, but I was able to shoot him. He staggered away from me and was swallowed by the darkness before the bomb he wore went off.

Flash forward ten years. My partner at the Washington, DC, Metro Police Department, John Sampson, and I were working at a food kitchen. A dead ringer for Soneji broke in and shot two nuns in the chest and Sampson in the head.

Miraculously, Sampson and the nuns survived, but the manhunt for the Soneji look-alike continued.

It turned out there was a cult dedicated to Soneji that thrived on the dark web. The investigation into that cult led me, in a roundabout way, to an abando

ned factory in southeast Washington, DC, where three armed people wearing Soneji masks confronted me. I shot three, killing two.

But when police responded to my call for backup, they’d found no weapons on any of the victims, and I was charged with two counts of murder and one attempted.

The elevator doors opened on the third floor of the courthouse. We headed straight toward superior courtroom 9B, cut the line of people trying to get seats, and, ignoring the furious whispers behind us, went in.

The public gallery was almost full. The media occupied four rows on the far left of the gallery. The front row behind the prosecution desk, which was reserved for victims and victims’ families, was empty. So was the row reserved for my family on the right.

“Stay standing,” Marley uttered under her breath after we’d passed through the bar and reached the defense table. “I want everyone watching you. Seeing your confidence and your pride at being a cop.”

“I’m trying,” I whispered back.

“Here comes the prosecution,” Naomi said.

“Don’t look at them,” Marley said. “They’re mine.”

I didn’t look their way, but out of my peripheral vision I picked up the two assistant U.S. attorneys stowing their briefcases under the prosecution table. Nathan Wills, the lead prosecutor, looked like he’d never met a doughnut he didn’t eat. In his midthirties, pasty-faced, and ninety pounds overweight, Wills had a tendency to sweat. A lot.

But Anita and Naomi had cautioned me not to underestimate the man. He graduated first in his class from Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley and clerked at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals before joining the Justice Department.

His assistant, Athena Carlisle, had a no less formidable background.

A descendant of sharecroppers, Carlisle came from abject poverty in Mississippi. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school, winning a full scholarship to Morehouse College, where she graduated first in her class, and then she attended Georgetown, where she edited the law review.

According to profiles of both prosecutors that had appeared the week before in the Washington Post, both Wills and Carlisle were ambitious in the extreme and eager to prosecute the federal government’s case against me.

Why the U.S. government? Why the high-powered U.S. Attorney’s Office? That’s how it has worked in Washington, DC, since the 1970s. If you’re charged with a homicide in the nation’s capital, the nation is going to see you punished.

I heard shuffling and voices behind me. I turned and saw my family taking their seats. Bree smiled at me bravely and mouthed, “I love you.”

I started to say it back to her but then stopped, seeing a sullen teenage boy in khakis and a blue dress shirt with sleeves too short for his arms enter the courtroom. His name was Dylan Winslow. His father was Gary Soneji. His mother was one of the shooting victims. Dylan came up to the bar, not ten feet away, and pushed back his oily dark hair to glare at me.

“Frickin’ hell’s in session for you, Cross,” Winslow said, his smile smug and malicious. “Honestly, I can’t wait to see you go down in flames.”

Ali jumped up and said, “Like your dad did?”