“Violence ensued and someone died by Cross’s hand.”

Anita removed her glasses and cocked her head at him. “In those nine fatal incidents, Mr. Nixon, how many times did Alex Cross shoot first?”

He cleared his throat. “It’s more telling to look at escalation, Ms. Marley.”

“How many times did Dr. Cross shoot first?”

Nixon looked ready to argue but then said, “Zero.”

“Zero?” she said, looking at the jury. “And how many times did Alex Cross shoot first in any of the wounding incidents?”

“Zero.”

“Zero,” Anita said, looking right at jurors five and eleven. “Not once in Dr. Cross’s career has he fired his weapon in anything but self-defense. He deals with the worst of the worst. He tries to avoid conflict, but these people are violent, and he has the right to defend himself, isn’t that right, Mr. Nixon?”

“No,” Nixon said. “That’s not right. Cross seeks conflict. He charges in.”

“Sounds to me like a brave cop doing his job.”

“Objection,” Wills said.

“Sustained,” Judge Larch said. “The jury will ignore that.”

But of course they couldn’t. I could see in jurors five and eleven that Anita’s line of questioning had been effective and revealing. To those two, at least, maybe I wasn’t the out-of-control cop the prosecution described earlier.

“I have nothing further for this witness, Your Honor,” Anita said.

Wills stood and said, “The prosecution calls Kimiko Binx.”

CHAPTER

52

KIMIKO BINX RAISED her right arm and took the oath. A fit Asian American woman in her late twenties, Binx wore a chic gray pantsuit. Since I’d seen her last, she had grown out her hair and gotten it cut in a geometric style.

She perched in the witness chair and slowly swept her gaze around the courtroom, looking at everyone, it seemed, but me.

“You may proceed, Mr. Wills,” Judge Larch said, and she coughed.

The assistant U.S. attorney adjusted his pants, grinned sheepishly at the jury again, and then said, “Ms. Binx, what is it you do exactly?”

“Web design and coding,” she said.

“Good at it?”

“Very.”

“Well,” Wills said, and he smiled at the jury once more. “Do you remember the afternoon and early evening of March the twenty-ninth?”

“Like it was yesterday.”

The prosecutor led Binx through her version of events. She reported that she’d found me waiting for her outside her apartment door when she came in from a run, that I’d tracked her through a website dedicated to Gary Soneji that she’d designed, and that I asked her to take me to see her partner in the website, Claude Watkins.

“What’s your big interest in Gary Soneji?” Wills asked.

Binx shrugged. “It was a phase, like that woman who wrote the book where she visits all the graves of assassinated presidents? Kind of ghoulish, but interesting at the moment, you know?”

“So you’re not obsessed with Gary Soneji?”

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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