“God help them if you are, Nana,” Damon said, and we all laughed.
Feeling a little better, I checked my watch. Quarter to eight.
“Here we go,” I said, and went through the house.
I stopped at the front door, listening to my family lining up behind me.
Taking a deep breath, rolling my shoulders back like a marine at attention, I twisted the knob, swung open the door, and stepped out onto my front porch.
“It’s him!” a woman cried.
Klieg lights blazed to life as a roar of shouts erupted from the mob of media vultures and haters packing the sidewalks below our front porch and across Fifth Street in southeast Washington, DC.
There were fifteen, twenty of them, some carrying cameras and mikes, others carrying signs condemning me, all hurling questions and curses my way. It was such a madhouse I couldn’t hear what any of them was saying clearly. Then one guy with a baritone voice bellowed out loud enough to be heard over the din.
“Are you guilty, Dr. Cross?” he shouted. “Did you shoot those people down in cold blood?”
A black Suburban with tinted windows rolled up in front of my house.
“Stay close,” I said, ignoring the shouted questions and pointing to Damon. “Help Nana Mama, please.”
My oldest came to my grandmother’s side, and we all moved as one tight unit down the stairs onto the sidewalk.
A reporter shoved a microphone in my face and shouted, “Dr. Cross, how many times have you drawn your weapon in the course of duty?”
I had no idea, so I ignored him, but Nana Mama snapped, “How many times have you asked a stupid question in the pursuit of idiocy?”
After that, it took everything in me to tune it all out as we crossed the sidewalk to the Suburban. I helped the rest of my family inside the SUV, climbed up front, and shut the door.
Nana Mama let out a long breath.
“I hate them,” Jannie said as we pulled away.
“It’s like they’re feeding on Dad,” Ali said.
“Bloodsuckers,” the driver said.
All too soon we arrived in front of the DC District Court at 500 Indiana Avenue. It’s a two-wing, smooth-limestone structure with a steel-and-glass atrium over the lobby and a large plaza flanked by raised gardens out front. If there’d been twenty vultures at my house, there were sixty jackals there for my rendezvous with cold justice.
Anita Marley, my attorney, was also there, waiting at the curb.
Tall and athletically built, with auburn hair, freckled skin, and sharp emerald eyes, Marley once played volleyball for and studied acting at the University of Texas before graduating near the top of her law school class at Rice University. She was also classy, and brassy, and hilarious, as well as certifiably badass in the courtroom, which is why we hired her.
Marley opened my door.
“I do the talking from here on out, Alex,” she said in a commanding drawl before the roar of accusation and ridicule hit me from behind her, far worse than what I’d been subjected to at home.
I’d seen this kind of thing before from much different angles: a big-time trial mob, with local and national news broadcasters preparing to feed raw meat to the twenty-four-hour cable news monster. I’d just never been the raw meat before.
“Talk to us, Cross!” they shouted. “Are you the problem? Are you and your cowboy ways what the police have become in America? Above the law?”
I couldn’t take it and said, “No one is above the law.”
“Don’t talk,” Marley whispered loudly and took me by the elbow, moving me across the plaza toward the front doors of the courthouse.
The swarm went with us, still buzzing, still stinging.
From the crowd beyond the reporters, a man shouted in a terrified voice, “Don’t shoot me, Cross! Don’t shoot!”
Others started to chant with him in that same tone. “Don’t shoot me, Cross! Don’t shoot!”
Despite my best efforts, I could not help turning my head to look at them, seeing some carrying placards that featured a red X over my face. Beneath one it read: END POLICE VIOLENCE! Beneath another it said: GUILTY AS CHARGED!
In front of the bulletproof courthouse doors, Marley stopped to turn me toward the lights, microphones, and cameras. I threw my shoulders back and lifted my chin.
My attorney held up her hand and said in a loud and firm voice, “Dr. Cross is an innocent man and an innocent police officer. We are very happy that at long last he’ll have the opportunity to clear his good name.”
The police officers manning the security checkpoint watched me as I entered the courthouse, the media still boiling behind me.
Sergeant Doug Kenny, chief of court security and an old friend, said, “We’re with you, Alex. Good shoot from what I hear. Damn good shoot.”
The other three all nodded and smiled at me as I went through the metal detectors. Outside, the horde descended on my family as they fought toward the court entrance.
Nana Mama, Damon, and Jannie made it inside first, looking shaken. Ali and Bree entered a few moments later. As the door swung shut, Ali faced the reporters peering in. Then he raised his middle finger in the universal salute.
“Ali!” Nana Mama cried, grabbing him by the collar. “That is unacceptable behavior!”
But with the security team chuckling at him, and me smiling, Ali didn’t show a bit of remorse.
“Tough kid,” Anita said, steering me toward the elevators.
“Smart kid,” said a younger African American woman who appeared beside me. “Always has been.”
I put my arm around her shoulder, hugged her, and kissed her head.
“Thank you for being here, Naomi,” I said.
“You’ve always had my back, Uncle Alex,” she said.
Naomi Cross, my late brother Aaron’s daughter, is a respected criminal defense attorney in her own right, and she’d jumped at the chance to help me and to work with the renowned Anita Marley on my case.
“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?”
I thought Winslow was going to go ballistic then and attack my youngest son. Damon did too and stood up behind Ali.
Instead of taking a swing at Ali, the teen smiled with more malevolence.
“That’s right, kid,” he said coldly. “Exactly like my dad did.”
“All rise!” the bailiff cried. “Superior Court of the District of Columbia is in session. Judge Patricia Larch presiding.”
A tiny woman in her midfifties with thick glasses and a severe dyed-black hairdo, Judge Larch stood four foot ten—so short she almost looked comical climbing up behind the bench.
But I was in no way laughing. Larch had a richly deserved reputation for being a hanging judge.
Striking her gavel twice, Judge Larch peered out through those glasses and, in a smoker’s voice, growled, “The People vs. Alex Cross. This court will come to order.”
Michael Bennett faces his toughest case yet…
For an excerpt, turn the page.
At the end of the dark, crowded bar, a man in black twirled an e-cigarette through his fingers and over his thumb like a little baton, again and again as he watched and waited.
It was an aggravating, fidgety habit, he knew. But when he was anxious, it was harder to resist than smoking the damn thing.
The bar was in a hip industrial-chic hotel on 67th and Broadway called Index House, with a cutting-edge meets Roaring Twenties vibe. Charging stations blended into a décor of exposed brick and tufted chairs. With his downtown black silk suit and dark GQ looks, the man belonged there.
He deftly flipped the cigarette into his inside jacket pocket as the bartender finally approached with his drink. It was a zombie, four or five different rums and some cognac with a splash of pineapple and mango juice. One of the rums was 151-proof, and flammable. He’d seen drinks lit on fire many times over the last seven years, in many places, from Jamaica to Jakarta.
Too damn many, he thought.
“So are you a Walking Dead fanatic, or do you just like the demon rum?” the doe-eyed bartender asked, over the crowd murmur and slow jazz piano playing from the lobby.
There were two bartenders, a guy and a girl, but he had ordered from the guy.
“Entschuldigen Sie?” he said, staring at her like he’d just stepped off a flying saucer. It meant “Excuse me” in German. The one and only phrase he’d picked up in three useless months in Munich four years ago.
That did the trick. She went away with his two twenties, and quick. Lovely as she was, he didn’t need any distractions. Not now. He began rubbing his thighs nervously as he scanned the hotel lobby. He looked out at the dark of Broadway through the plate glass behind him, a clear moonless October evening in New York, bright lights twinkling.
At this critical juncture, he needed to stay on his damn toes.
Where the hell is this guy? he thought, taking out his phone to check his messages. It was 9:25. Almost a half hour late and still no call. Did this joker’s phone die? He just wasn’t coming? No way to know. Great. He’d just sit here on his ass some more.
He placed his phone on the zinc bar top and reached for the drink. Then he stopped himself and instead took out the e-cigarette again. Back and forth, and back and forth, over and through his fingers faster and faster, he twirled the metal cigarette until it was just a black blur across his knuckles.
In the crowded library off the hotel bar, Devine sat listening to the boss man on the phone.
“What’s Pretty Boy doing now?”
“Nothing,” Devine said. “Just sitting at the bar, playing with a pen or something. Got himself a tropical drink. He’s looking a little melancholy. And nervous.”
“That right?” the boss said.
Devine, who was from Tennessee, loved the boss’s hard-ass southern voice, the power in it. It reminded him of a backwoods Baptist minister, perpetually on the verge of going all fire-and-brimstone on his congregation.
“Well, he’s going to be singing the blues, all right. You just make sure you don’t join him for a few. He slips away again, it’s your ass.”
Devine winced. He didn’t take criticism well. Especially from one of the few people he respected.
“So, plan is still in place?” Devine said. “Hit him when he goes back to his room?”
“Yes, Devine. You remembered from five minutes ago. Bravo,” said the boss. “But if a chance comes up right there in the bar, if you can be discreet, you take it. That’s why I sent you in instead of Toporski. You know how to improvise.”
Devine shook his head as the boss hung up. He’d never heard the man so tense, so—dare he say it—nervous. Pretty Boy had him rattled. Had them all rattled.
That’s why they were up in New York now, all of them. There was a team a short block west in front of a gym on 67th and Amsterdam, and another outside the hotel.
They had Pretty Boy boxed in once and for all.
“El Jefe still got his boxers in a wad, eh?” said Therkelson.
“Yep,” Devine said as he glanced over at the blond, middle linebacker–size Therkelson. His big iron Swede thumbs were flying on his Galaxy, playing some game. “You know, Therk, you got a real funny way of conducting surveillance with your face in that phone.”
“Ah,” Therkelson said, not even glancing up. “You got it covered. I’m the muscle here in our little partnership, Timmy. Be wrong not to let you do anything. I want to make sure a little guy like you feels like you’re contributing.”
Devine munched a handful of complimentary jalapeño peanuts as he kept his eyes trained on the target.
He didn’t know how they’d tracked Pretty Boy down. A few of the guys were saying the boss man had an old friend in the NSA, which seemed valid. With access to phone and credit card tracking, you could pinpoint any old Tom, Dick, or Harry in the civilized part of the planet in half an hour.
And what Pretty Boy was doing, they didn’t know that, either. All they knew was that it wasn’t part of the playbook. He’d bugged out for a little R & R for the long weekend like the rest of them, but then come Tuesday, he didn’t show up. No word.
That was a week ago. Now they’d finally run him down, here in New York in this fancy Pajama Boy gin mill, of all places.
Devine watched as the hot bartender tossed Pretty Boy another interested glance. Had a woman, even an ugly one, ever looked at him like that? he thought. No. Not even when he gave them the money first. The bitter inequities of the world.
Yeah, Devine thought, nodding as he looked at Pretty Boy. He was going to enjoy this little piece of work.
It was about three minutes later when Pretty Boy put down his empty glass and stood up. He was heading toward the can. Devine had been monitoring it. There was no one in there.
Welcome to an evening at the improv, Devine thought as he suddenly slapped the phone into Therkelson’s lap.