CHAPTER

42

Four weeks later …

STRIKING HER GAVEL twice, Judge Priscilla Larch peered out through thick-lensed glasses and in a gravelly voice said, “The People versus Alex Cross. This court will come to order. Sergeant Holm, you may seat the jury.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” the bailiff said, and he went out.

“I’m praying we chose right,” my niece Naomi said.

Anita Marley nodded stiffly and looked to her opening arguments, not bothering to watch the five men and seven women who held my fate in their hands now filing into the courtroom and taking their places in the jury box. I understood why. Anita was still upset with me about jury selection.

During voir dire—the questioning of potential jurors by the prosecution and defense prior to jury selection—we’d disagreed over two picks: juror five and juror eleven. Five was a man in his seventies who had something wrong with his spine. His upper back was twisted and hunched. He walked slowly with a cane and had to turn his shoulders and rib cage to look up at you.

Juror five had also been sharp in his answers, especially when it came to describing his general skepticism about nearly everything in life. An electrical engineer before retiring, he said he took his time making decisions, tried to get to the truth before he acted, and was firm in his convictions.

Anita had wanted to dismiss juror five because he had a friend whose son had been shot by the Baltimore police. But he also said that he had “nothing against cops. They have a tough job. I can apply the law fairly, given that.”

I overruled Anita’s objection to juror five, telling her we wanted people skeptical enough to hear the facts and honest enough to deal with them fairly.

Juror eleven was a big, stylish, and beautiful woman in a gray Chanel suit. A brassy redhead, she had a beaming smile, an infectious laugh, and an accent as smooth as West Texas honey. She worked for a big PR firm in DC and was friends with several U.S. Capitol Police officers. Anita wanted her off the jury because a police officer had hit her brother with a baton during a riot at a music festival in Austin.

But juror eleven had also said that her brother “deserved to be hit because he was drunk, crazy, and took a swing at two cops.” I reminded Anita of that and overruled her.

The others we agreed on. On the whole, my jury seemed a cross-section of the capital. In addition to jurors five and eleven, there was a thin, hyper woman who worked as a U.S. Senate aide and was furious she hadn’t been excused from serving, a beefy guy who wrote a tax newsletter, a lobbyist for agribusiness, and a young mother from Adams Morgan who seemed delighted to serve, apparently seeing it as an extended break from her kids. There was also a male nurse who worked at GW Medical Center, a retired teacher, and a bartender at the Four Seasons Hotel. Two grandmothers and an ex–merchant mariner completed the dozen people who would decide whether I would go on with my life or take a very long detour into a federal penitentiary.

When they were seated, Judge Larch said, “The floor is yours, Mr. Wills.”

CHAPTER

43

“THANK YOU, JUDGE,” the assistant U.S. attorney said, and he got up. Wills tucked his shirt in over his big old belly, smiled sheepishly, ambled midway to the bench, and stopped.

The federal prosecutor took a breath, played the silence a moment, and then said, “Some police officers in America believe the judicial system is in ruins. They get so frustrated, they begin to see themselves as judge and jury, and then executioner. They do. I am with the U.S. Justice Department, and I’m telling you that in every major police force in this country, there is one or a pair or even a handful of cops who believe they are above the law.”

Wills paused and then directed his attention at me. “The defendant, Alex Cross, is a prime example of a police officer who thinks he is above the law, a cop who believes that he alone can identify evil and that he alone has the ability to stop it, even if it means his killing someone in the process.”

The prosecutor nodded to Athena Carlisle, his co-counsel, and she hit a button on her computer, bringing up two pictures, a man and a woman, on a screen opposite the jury.

Wells said, “Virginia Winslow was a mom, a welder, and a survivor of terrible abuse during her years married to Gary Soneji—”

“Virginia’s a martyr!” someone in the courtroom yelled.

I pivoted in my chair to see a bearded man with wild eyes standing in the aisle and pumping his fist. He shouted, “So’s Lenny Diggs!”

Judge Larch banged her gavel. “Bailiff, have this man removed from my court. I said I would not tolerate any outbursts and I meant it.”

“Both were persecuted!” the man shouted. “Both were killed by the chief persecutor, Alex Cross!”

Two U.S. marshals grabbed the guy, who offered no resistance and said nothing more as he was taken out. I guess he figured he’d made his point.

“The jury will ignore the outburst,” Judge Larch said. “Mr. Wills, make it snappy. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“Yes, Judge,” the prosecutor said, and he walked to the jury box. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is critical for you to know one thing about Virginia Winslow. She was sick and tired of being targeted by law enforcement simply because she’d unknowingly been married to a vicious criminal.

“Virginia changed her last name after divorcing Gary Soneji. The cops still came for her. She moved. They found her. She tried to hide her teenage son, Dylan, from his father’s legacy. But in this case, the defendant, Cross, acted to cruelly change that, seeking out and telling the boy in lurid detail what his father had done and making the young man feel as if he were also to blame.”

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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