Cross Justice (Alex Cross 23)

But the sergeant had put on reading glasses and was studying the bedspread, which was bunched to the left side of the bed. He peered at the woman’s neck, livid and abraded from the cord, and then removed his glasses to study the knots that held the cord to the chandelier.

“Seal the house, Johnson,” Drummond said at last. “This was no suicide.”

“What?” the young detective said. “How can you tell that?”

The sergeant gestured to the bedspread and around the bed. “This looks like a struggle to me.”

“People struggle when they hang themselves.”

“True, but the sheets are all dragged to the left, meaning that the body was dragged up the right side, and the wastebasket was then placed on the right to suggest suicide,” Drummond said.

Johnson saw what the sergeant was talking about but wasn’t convinced. Drummond pointed to her hands.

“Broken and torn fingernails,” he said. “There’s a chip of the polish in the braids of the drapery cord. That and the vertical scratches above the neck suggests she was tearing at the cord during the initial struggle, which took place at ground level. And see how the livid lines are crisscrossed above and below the cord?”

Johnson frowned. “Yes.”

“They shouldn’t be there,” the sergeant said. “If she’d kicked the wastebasket, the cord would have caught all her weight almost immediately. There’d be one line behind and along the cord, and we might see some evidence of the cord abrading the skin as it slid into position.

“But these two clear lines suggest that the killer flipped the cord over Mrs. Abrams’s head from behind and throttled her. She fought, tore at her throat with her fingers, and maybe kicked at her killer. In any case, she created slack in the noose. The cord slipped, and the killer had to set it tight again, here. She was dead before she was hung up there. See the grooves along the cord where it’s tied to the chandelier? That’s from the killer hauling the body up.”

The young detective shook his head in admiration. Drummond’s legend was real, and the evidence was so clear once you heard him explain it.

“You want me to call in a full forensics team?” Johnson asked.

“I think that would be a very good idea.”

Chapter

27

Starksville, North Carolina

The woods across the street from the church were thick with mosquitoes and biting flies that swarmed around me and Bree as we made the hike into the old quarry. Though it was muggy and hot, we were glad we’d taken Naomi’s advice and put on long pants and long-sleeved shirts and doused ourselves with bug repellent.

We each carried a knapsack, and between the two we had several water bottles, a measuring tape, a camera, zip-lock bags, files with pictures of the crime scene, police diagrams, and copies of the notes Detectives Frost and Carmichael had taken when Rashawn Turnbull’s body was found.

The overgrown trail wound through stands of stinging nettles and brush choked with kudzu. There was no wind. The air was oppressively humid, and the whine of insects was enough to drive us crazy by the time we crossed the stream. The path followed the waterway through a shaded, man-made gap in the limestone wall, ten, maybe fifteen feet wide and forty feet high. The creek spilled over its banks passing through the gap, making a large section of the ground mossy and slippery, and we had to support each other until we were out the other side and into the sunbaked quarry.

Bree looked back through the gap. “The killer supposedly brought Rashawn through there, but I can’t see him dragging the boy in.”

I nodded. “He’d have fallen. They both would have fallen.”

“Any notes about that moss and slime in there being torn up?”

“Not that I saw. Then again, it rained late that night. Hard.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” Bree insisted. “I don’t think Rashawn was dragged in. He went along, which means he knew his killer.”

The police thought so too. It was in the indictment.

“I’ll buy it,” I said. “What else?”

Bree smiled. “I’ll let you know when I see it.”

We moved closer to the stack of rock slabs, stopped where we had perspective. I got out the crime scene photographs, glanced at the sky for strength, and then divorced myself from being a father, a husband, a human being. It’s the only way I can get beyond the things I have to witness and do my job.

But when I saw the first picture, a shudder went through me. The small, almost naked body lay facedown, straddling the top stone, wrists bound behind his back with a canvas belt. The arms appeared dislocated. His jeans were bunched around his right ankle, and jagged bone stuck out of the skin of the lower left leg. The head was so battered and swollen it was unrecognizable as a boy’s.