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  She hung her head and cried softly. “Just isn’t fair.”

  Nana Mama patted her on the shoulder, said, “Anything you need, you call Hattie or Connie or me. And I’ll see you at the church tomorrow.”

  Ethel wiped tears with a handkerchief, and nodded. “Ten a.m.”

  I helped my grandmother into the chapel where Sydney Fox’s body lay in a closed simple casket. It was standing room only, with a crowd of genuine mourners, people who had been deeply touched by the deceased at some point, enough to appear in public and freely express their grief.

  Nana Mama took a seat saved for her next to my aunts and Uncle Cliff, who clung to Aunt Hattie’s hand and looked vaguely frightened. Finding a spot just outside the doorway, I watched a few people go to the casket and pay their respects. Then I followed some others into a room where coffee and platters of Aunt Hattie’s cookies and brownies were offered.

  Talking with several of the mourners, I learned more about Sydney Fox. How she’d grown up in town. How she’d married her high school sweetheart, who’d turned into a colossal asshole once he found out she couldn’t have kids. And how for years she’d endured his abuse while working as a beloved first- and second-grade teacher in the local elementary school. Many of the people I spoke to were parents of children who’d been blessed to have Sydney in their first years of school.

  After a while I got angry. I’d shared just a few words with Sydney Fox, and now that seemed another crime, an armed robbery of my chance to know her.

  I got a cup of coffee, ate more peanut butter–M&M cookies than I should have, and wandered back to see if Nana Mama was ready to leave. There were more people streaming in. I scanned their faces, looking for something familiar. Had I grown up with any of them? Would I recognize them after all these years?

  The answer was no until I retrieved Nana Mama from the chapel and led her back for some cookies. Across the room, I spotted an imposing African American man in a dark suit, drinking coffee and munching on a brownie. He was familiar enough that I studied him.

  Big dude like my best friend, John Sampson. Taller than me. Heavier than me. Ten, maybe fifteen years younger. The suit was expensive, but the body beneath it suggested hard labor. Then he changed one rough hand for another holding the coffee cup, and I knew him in a heartbeat.

  I made sure my grandmother was good, walked over to him, and said, “How are you, Pinkie? Been a long time.”

  Chapter

  39

  The face of my Aunt Connie’s only son, Brock “Pinkie” Parks Jr., clouded a bit at my use of his nickname, but then he realized who I was and broke into a grin.

  “Alex,” he said, grabbing my hand and pumping it. “Last time I saw you, you gave me a piggyback on the sidewalk in front of Nana Mama’s place.”

  I had a vague vision of that and said, “Long time ago. I think you’d break my back if I tried to do that now. I heard life’s been good for you.”

  “Was until I heard Sydney died,” Pinkie said, his eyes watering. “Straight up? I loved Sydney. I loved her since I was like eight and she was ten. There was something about her, you know, like things went in orbit when she was around.”

  “You ever tell her?” I asked.

  “Nah, we were friends, and then not so much after she married Finn Davis,” he said. “He preferred it that way.”

  “I heard Finn gave her a rough time,” I said.

  “I set him straight once, but what was I gonna do? I got a good life working offshore and just couldn’t be around to protect her, especially when for a while there she didn’t want to protect herself.”

  “She divorced him.”

  “She told me,” he said, full of regret. “We’d been sending messages on Facebook and stuff, and I’d been meaning to come up to see her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” he said. “Any word on who did it?”

  “Looked like a case of mistaken identity to me,” I said, then explained about Stefan’s fiancée being blond too.

  Pinkie looked skeptical. “No one’s looked at Finn Davis?”

  “We heard racial slurs before the shot,” I said. “They were yelling at Patty.”

  “Maybe,” Pinkie said. “But Finn Davis is smart enough to use that as a cover. Then again, he was trained by the best.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Old friend of your father,” Pinkie said grimly. “Marvin Bell.”

  Before I could say anything to that, Aunt Hattie came in with Uncle Cliff, who was in a wheelchair today. She brightened when she saw us and came over. After greeting her nephew, she excused herself to go talk to Nana Mama and Aunt Connie.

  Pinkie knelt down by our uncle, said, “How you doing, Uncle Cliff?”

  “Vacation’s been good,” Uncle Cliff said. “Heading back to work next week. Got the City of New Orleans the whole next month. Gonna meet Jason in the Quarter next week, hear us some bad-ass blues and talk old times.”

  I said, “My dad died, Cliff.”

  My uncle frowned, but then looked at my cousin and got anxious. “That right, Pinkie? When Jason die? Why no one told me that?”

  “He died a long time ago, Cliff,” I said. “When I was a boy. He got shot and fell off the bridge into the gorge.”

  Clifford got even more anxious. “Pinkie, that ain’t right. Jason dead?”

  My cousin licked his lips, glanced at me, and then patted Cliff’s arm and said, “Just like Alex said. You know that. We all know—”

  Shouting erupted outside. It sounded like Ethel Fox.

  Pinkie and I both left Uncle Cliff and went out on the front porch of the funeral home. Sydney Fox’s tiny mother stood toe to toe arguing with a man a solid foot taller than her. Rangy, with a chiseled, hard face, he was about Sydney’s age and dressed for the occasion in a dark gray suit.

  “You’ll go in there over my dead body,” Ethel Fox said.

  The man smiled. “She was my wife for years, Ethel. Least you can let me do is pay my respects.”

  “You never respected her in life, Finn Davis!” Ethel Fox shouted. “Why should you in death?”

  Davis leaned over his former mother-in-law, put his finger on her chest, and said in a low, threatening voice, “’Cause it’s the right thing to do, Ethel.”

  Pinkie was off the porch in a shot with me right behind him.

  “Back off, Finn,” Pinkie barked. “Back off, or I will bust you up fierce!”

  All of a sudden, out from the shadows and between the cars, four men appeared. Every one of them had a tough, hard edge.

  “Pinkie Parks,” Davis said slowly, taking a step back from Ethel Fox with an amused expression. “Figured you might be here, so I brought some friends along just in case. Who’s your sidekick?”

  “My cousin,” Pinkie said. “He’s a big-time cop, works with the FBI.”

  If Davis was impressed or intimidated, he didn’t show it. “Way I heard it, he’s down here trying to get your sick-fuck cousin Stefan off for killing that little boy. That the blood that runs through all you inbred cousins down there on Loupe Street? Sick-fuck blood?”

  “Keep it up, and you’ll find out,” I said in a low, level voice.

  Davis’s smile turned cold. “You keep it up, the whole lot of you gonna be driven from this town.”

  “Leave,” Pinkie said. “You’ve got no legal right to be here, and you certainly have no moral right. So leave.”

  Davis hesitated, and then took a step back, hands at his sides, palms exposed. “Have it your way, Ethel,” he said to his ex-mother-in-law. “You mourn dear Sydney. You bury dear Sydney. Next week I’ll go out to the cemetery, pay my respects, and piss on dear Sydney’s grave.”

  Chapter

  40

  Stefan Tate’s trial began in earnest the following morning at eight o’clock sharp. The jury of eight women and four men had been empaneled the week before, and Judge Erasmus P. Varney lived up to his reputation for keeping his courtroom moving at a brisk pace. />
  The place was packed for the opening arguments. Our family turned out in force. Pinkie was there with his mother. I sat with Aunt Hattie and Patty Converse, directly behind Naomi and Stefan, who came into court acting rattled.

  He seemed particularly upset by the people sitting behind the prosecution. Cece Turnbull was there, drawn, weak, and holding on to Bree’s hand. Bree had spent the whole night with her and made sure she’d shown up sober.

  Chief of police Randy Sherman sat on Cece’s other side and kept glancing at Bree, as if he were trying to figure out how she fit into the equation. Behind them were several reporters up from Raleigh and Winston-Salem, and another from the Associated Press.

  Harry and Virginia Caine, the well-scrubbed couple I’d seen on Cece’s porch the prior day, were on hand in the third row. Her parents were dressed for business and seemed relieved to see their daughter’s sober condition.

  Stark County Sheriff’s Office detective Guy Pedelini came in just as the opening arguments began and sat in the back near city homicide detectives Joe Frost and Lou Carmichael.

  District attorney Delilah Strong gave the prosecution’s opening argument with Matt Brady as her cocounsel. Strong’s presentation of the case against my cousin was clear, concise, and damning.

  She depicted Stefan Tate as a troubled individual thrown out of several schools and jobs because of substance abuse, then as a liar who hid his past on his application to teach in the Starksville school system, and then as a teacher who’d relapsed, dealt drugs to his students, and raped a student before sexually assaulting and butchering Rashawn Turnbull after the young boy rejected him.

  When Strong was done, the jury members were taking lethal glances at my cousin. Cece Turnbull went berserk, screaming, “You’ll go to hell for what you did to my boy, Stefan Tate!”

  It took Bree and a bailiff to get the victim’s mother out of the courtroom. When they brought Cece past her parents, she was bent over and weeping, and Harry and Virginia Caine looked tortured and lost.

  Naomi asked Judge Varney for a recess and to instruct the jury to ignore Cece’s outburst. The judge gave the instructions but denied the recess and demanded she make her case.

  My niece got uncertainly to her feet, saying, “The district attorney paints Stefan Tate as a drug-fueled homicidal maniac. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

  Gaining confidence, Naomi depicted my young cousin as a man who’d gotten off track, fought demons, and kept the circumstances of his addictions private on his school application because it was his right under the law. He’d come home to Starksville and found his passion as a teacher, and he cared deeply about his students. She described the drug overdoses at the school and Stefan’s efforts to fight and expose the drug dealers.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is the defense’s contention that Stefan Tate was getting very close to uncovering the presence of a major drug ring operating in and around Starksville,” Naomi went on. “For that, my client was framed, as a drug dealer himself, as a rapist, and as the brutal murderer of a boy he loved like a son.

  “When you’ve heard the hard evidence, when you see how manufactured it all looks on close examination, you’ll realize without a doubt that Stefan Tate is no drug dealer, no rapist, and most certainly no murderer.”

  Chapter

  41

  Judge Varney called for a recess at noon.

  My poor aunts and Nana Mama were exhausted. Patty Converse drove them home. After taking Cece Turnbull home, Bree joined Pinkie and me for lunch at the Bench, a barbecue joint that catered to the courthouse crowd.

  “You thought any more about Finn Davis?” Pinkie asked after we took a booth and ordered.

  “A little,” I admitted.

  “What about Finn Davis?” Bree asked.

  As he had with me the evening before, Pinkie filled Bree in on Sydney Fox’s ex. Born and raised in Starksville, Finn Davis had been orphaned when his parents died in a car crash. Marvin Bell, the man who’d hooked my parents on drugs, took Finn Davis in, treated the boy like his son.

  “Marvin spoiled Finn, trained Finn, probably abused Finn,” Pinkie said. “You ask me, Finn turned out just like his adoptive dad. They can both turn on the charisma, make you forget what they are deep down.”

  “And what’s that?” Bree asked.

  Pinkie started to speak, but then stopped and stared over my shoulder. He muttered, “The devil himself just walked in.”

  A thin, angular man, Marvin Bell put me in mind of the actor Bruce Dern as he walked up to our booth. Longish steel-gray hair. Gaunt, narrow face. Sharp nose. And opaque green eyes that, as Bree said, roamed all over you.

  Marvin Bell ran those weird opaque eyes over me and then Bree, showing no reaction. Then he leveled his gaze at Pinkie.

  “My two cents, Parks?” he said. “At funerals, all grudges are off. My boy had every right to grieve for Sydney and pay his respects.”

  “Unless your boy shot her,” my cousin said. “Which, in my mind, goes along with his threat to piss on her grave.”

  The muscles in Bell’s cheeks flickered with tension, but his voice remained calm when he said, “Finn signed the divorce papers. He’d moved on. There is no reason he’d do something like that to his ex-wife.”

  “Oh, I think a case could be made for obsession,” Pinkie said. “But I’m thinking spite. You and your boy have never liked to lose face.”

  Bell stood there a moment, looking as if it was taking all his control not to smash my cousin in the face. “Finn’s no murderer.”

  Then he walked across the room to another booth.

  “Think I’ll go introduce myself,” I said.

  Bree said, “That a good idea?”

  “Sometimes, you shake something, it rattles,” I said, getting up.

  The waitress set a cup of coffee in front of Bell and walked away. I slid in across from him. If I unnerved him at all, he didn’t show it. If he’d been shaken by Pinkie’s accusations, he didn’t show it.

  “Didn’t know I’d invited you to sit down, stranger,” Bell said, tearing open a sugar packet and tapping it into the coffee.

  “We’ve met, Mr. Bell,” I said. “A long time ago.”

  “That right?” he said, stirring the coffee and turning his weird green eyes on me. “I don’t recall you.”

  “Alex Cross,” I said. “Jason Cross was my father.”

  Bell cocked his head in reappraisal, tapped the spoon on the side of the cup, and smiled softly. “There now, I see the resemblance.”

  “I’m a homicide detective in Washington, DC.”

  “Long way from home, Detective Cross,” he replied, setting the spoon down. “And funny, I don’t recollect ever meeting you.”

  “I was young,” I said. “It was about a year after my mother died.”

  “You mean after she was murdered, don’t you?” he said in a straight tone delivered with an expression that revealed nothing.

  “I remember that night,” I said. “You tied my father to your car with a rope, dragged him through the streets.”

  Bell sipped his coffee, never taking his eyes off me. “It was another time. It was what you did to a man who’d kill his own wife in cold blood and call it good.”

  I hadn’t expected that and said nothing while Bell talked on.

  “I gave your father some of the punishment he deserved. And then I did the right thing and immediately turned him over to the police. Sad what happened next, but probably for the good of all. Even you. Even your brothers.”

  I hadn’t expected that either, and it took a few beats before I could reply.

  “You sold my mom and dad drugs,” I said. “Got them hooked.”

  Eyes still, Bell smiled with precision. He altered the position of his cup on the saucer by a quarter turn.

  “That statement is not true,” he said. “I have never sold drugs or been involved with them. Your mother and father, I actually tried to get them clean, and anyone who says otherwise is
lying.”

  “Never been involved with drugs?” I said.

  “I am involved in business,” Bell said, sipping the coffee. “I have several enterprises, all successful. Why would I need to pursue something risky like drugs?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But every time your name comes up, people tell me that I should be looking at you.”

  Bell seemed amused. “Looking at me in what way?”

  “As some kind of criminal mastermind,” I said.

  Bell laughed, reached for another sugar, said, “That’s a small town with a lot of poor folks for you.”

  “What does poor have to do with it?”

  “Everything,” Bell said. “Most poor people think that anyone who becomes successful couldn’t have done it legitimately, with initiative, with hard work. It’s just not part of the myth most poor people want to believe. So they sit around and invent bullshit stories to explain things when someone makes it in the world.”

  “So there’s nothing to the charge?”

  “Zero to the charge,” Bell said, holding my gaze. “How’d you come to be back in town, Detective Cross?”

  I had the feeling he knew this, but I played along, said Stefan Tate was my cousin.

  “Butcher,” Bell said, hardening. “Sorry that he’s your cousin, but based on what I’ve read, I hope that boy fries.”

  “It’s a popular sentiment.”

  “There you go.”

  “You heard the defense’s position?”

  “Can’t say that I have,” Bell said, reaching up to pick a coffee ground off the tip of his tongue.

  “Stefan came to believe that there is a large and complex criminal organization operating in Starksville,” I said.

  “If there is, I haven’t heard a thing about it,” Bell said.

  “They run drugs,” I said. “Maybe more.”

  “Maybe more?” Bell said. “Sounds like maybe more bullshit to me. Sounds like a fantasy designed to muddle the facts, which, as I understand them, are conclusive beyond a reasonable doubt. Your cousin murdered that poor boy, and he’s gonna pay for it. I had my way? Someone would rope him up and drag his ass through the streets on the way to the death chamber.”