The People vs. Alex Cross (16 page)

“So you’re saying that in each of these cases, Alex Cross was investigated and found to have taken prudent action in accord with police and FBI protocol?”

“I don’t know about prudent when you end up with a dead suspect.”

“Objection,” Anita said.

“Sustained,” Judge Larch said. “But rephrase, Ms. Marley.”

Anita seemed taken aback for a moment. Then she said,
“Was Dr. Cross found to be in compliance with police and FBI protocols in each of those nine shootings?”

Nixon acted like he had something stuck in his teeth but eventually said, “He was.”

“All nine?”

“All nine.”

“And in the cases of wounding?”

“Yes, but—”

“A simple yes will do, Mr. Nixon. Since you have had a chance to look at Dr. Cross’s record in such detail, would it be fair to say that the criminals involved were dangerous people? Violent people?”

“Doesn’t mean they had to die by a police bullet,” Nixon said.

“It’s a yes-or-no question.”

“Yes, they were dangerous.”

“Killers?”

“Often.”

“Bombers?”

“Their crimes are not the issue here.”

“They most certainly are the issue,” Anita said. “Dr. Cross has a reputation for going after the worst criminals, taking on the biggest cases, isn’t that so?”

“He’s well regarded as an investigator.”

“Did Dr. Cross put himself in personal danger to solve the cases you looked at?”

“Every cop in America is in danger every day.”

“Point taken,” Anita said. “But in light of the
kinds
of cases Dr. Cross worked for the FBI and DC Metro, wasn’t he bound to come into contact with more violent suspects than the average cop?”

Nixon paused and then said, “Probably a higher incidence of contact with that sort of criminal, but I can’t tell you what that is statistically.”

“A higher incidence of contact will do,” Anita said, and she smiled at the jury as she went back to the defense table. She put on reading glasses and scanned her notes for a moment.

When she was done, she pivoted and looked at the witness. “Just to summarize, Mr. Nixon, in each of the nine fatal cases you looked at, Dr. Cross, because of his job, came into close contact with a hardened criminal, correct?”

He thought about that and then said, “Correct.”

“And violence ensued,” she said.

“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.”

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?”

“Not anymore. Seeing friends of mine killed for their intellectual interests soured me on it.”

“Objection!” Anita said.

“Sustained,” Judge Larch said. “The jury will ignore the last statement.”

Wills bowed his head, crossed to the jury box. “So you led Dr. Cross to an abandoned factory to see Mr. Watkins, isn’t that correct?”

Binx nodded and said that Claude Watkins and some of his friends had been using the old factory as an art studio and living space.

“Did you coerce Dr. Cross in any way to go find Watkins?”

She leaned forward to the mike. “I didn’t have to. He wanted to go.”

“But you wanted him there as well, correct?”

“Well, Claude did, that’s right.”

“Why’s that?”

“Claude’s an artist—visual and performance. He thought it
would be interesting and telling to see what Cross would do if he were confronted with one Soneji after another.”

Under further questioning, Binx continued her tale in mostly accurate fashion until she had us moving deeper into the factory and reaching a large rectangular room. At that point, she began to lie through her teeth.

Wills said, “When you went inside, was Claude Watkins at the far end of that long room wearing the Soneji disguise?”

“Yes,” Binx said.

“Was Mr. Watkins armed?”

“No.”

“No nickel-plated revolver in his hand?”

“No. Claude had his hands open, and he turned his palms to show Cross.”

I LEANED OVER
to Naomi, whispered, “That is categorically false.”

My niece patted me on the arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll get our chance.”

Wills said, “What happened next?”

“Cross aimed his gun at Claude and told him to drop the gun and get down on the floor.”

“Did he?”

“He didn’t have a gun, but Cross didn’t seem to care. I knew he was going to shoot Claude, so I hit Cross’s gun hand. Claude took off and tried to hide.”

“What was Dr. Cross’s state before you hit him?”

“He was acting weird, creepy.”

“In what way?”

“Sweating, looking like he was loving the fact he was aiming down on Claude, you know, like he dug it.”

Wills crossed to a blown-up diagram of the factory floor and
pointed at the far left end of the rectangle. “Watkins was here before he ran?”

“Yes, in front of that alcove.”

“What happened then?”

For the first time, Binx looked over at me. “Cross went crazy.”

“Objection!” Anita cried.

“Overruled,” Judge Larch said. “Continue.”

Binx testified that Virginia Winslow stepped out of the shadows of an alcove in the middle of the far long side of the factory room and that I then shot Soneji’s widow without provocation.

“Was Mrs. Winslow armed?” Wills asked.

“No way,” Binx said. “She hated guns.”

“Tell us why she was part of this performance in the first place.”

“Virginia told me that she couldn’t get away from Soneji’s legacy, so she’d decided to try to make art out of it, a bitter commentary, you know?”

“And Dr. Cross shot her?”

“Right in the chest. I couldn’t believe it. I started screaming, but he didn’t care. He just kept shooting, Claude, and then Lenny Diggs.”

“All of them unarmed?”

“Yes. And after he shot Lenny, he was swinging his pistol around and yelling for more.”

“What exactly was Dr. Cross yelling?”

“Like ‘Who’s next? C’mon, you bastards! I’ll kill every single Soneji before I’m done.’”

Wills looked at the jury. “‘I’ll kill every single Soneji before I’m done.’”

Juror five was shaking his head. Juror eleven was shaking hers.

Wills rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them and said, “Thank you, Ms. Binx, that must have been difficult. Your witness, Ms. Marley.”

ANITA HAD BEEN
scribbling notes on her legal pad. She looked up and said, “Your Honor, the defense asks the Court’s leave to delay our cross-examination of Ms. Binx pending an ongoing line of inquiry we are following.”

“An ongoing line of inquiry?” Wills asked.

“Right,” Anita said.

Judge Larch didn’t like that. “How much of a delay are you asking for?”

“I would think tomorrow afternoon would work, Your Honor.”

Larch got a sour look on her face, but then seemed to think of something that brightened her mood. She said, “Ms. Binx, you are excused for the day. Ten minutes’ recess before Mr. Wills calls his next witness.”

The judge banged her gavel, got up fast, and hurried for the door, no doubt dreaming of that first puff.

Larch came back in a much better mood exactly ten minutes
later. She returned to the bench, popped a mint, and said, “Mr. Wills?”

“The prosecution calls Claude Watkins to the stand.”

I heard a creak as the double doors to the courtroom swung open. I turned to see a man in a wheelchair being pushed by Gary Soneji’s son, Dylan. Claude Watkins was in his late forties with salt-and-pepper hair, a stubble beard, and a buff upper body. A blanket hid his withered legs.

Dylan left him at the bar, and Claude Watkins rolled the chair over in front of the witness stand.

The prosecutor looked at Judge Larch and said, “I’d like to treat the witness as hostile. He has been highly uncooperative.”

Larch glanced at the man in the wheelchair, who looked fuming mad.

“You going to answer questions under oath?” she asked.

“Depends on what’s asked,” Watkins said, not looking at her.

She ordered the bailiff to administer the oath, which he did without enthusiasm.

“How are you, Mr. Watkins?” Wills asked.

Watkins sneered at him. “About as good as you can be when you’re confined to a wheelchair and have to use a catheter to take a piss.”

“How did you wind up in that chair?”

Watkins’s face bunched up in loathing before he pointed at me and said, “He put me in it. Cross. Shot me for no good reason.”

“Objection,” Anita said.

“Overruled,” Judge Larch said. She popped another mint into her mouth.

Wills said, “Can you take us through the events of March twenty-ninth?”

Watkins grudgingly said he’d gotten interested in Soneji and then me by accident. But the more he read about me, the more he was convinced I was “borderline out of control” when it came to the mass murderer.

He testified that he decided to entice me into a situation that could result in an “interesting and revealing piece of performance art.” He would lure me to an abandoned factory where he’d confront me with one Soneji after another.

“So
you
could see his reaction?” Wills asked.

“Oh, hell no. I wanted
everyone
in the world to see Cross’s reaction.”

Beside me, Anita cocked her head to one side.

Wills squinted as if he’d heard something new from the witness and said, “How were you going to do that?”

“By filming it, of course,” Watkins said.

“What?” Wills said.

“What?” Naomi whispered.

Anita said, “What the hell is—”

“You had to have found them,” Watkins said. “I mean, you had to have searched the factory and found the smartphones with the add-on lenses, right?”

Anita and the prosecutor’s assistant both shot to their feet.

Anita said, “Judge, there has been no mention of any such cameras or phones in discovery.”

“Because we found no cameras or phones,” Wills said.

Watkins looked like he wanted to spit in disgust. “I put them there myself. What is this? A cover-up? I was wondering why you weren’t badgering me about them from the get-go. I’m telling you, we got the whole thing from three different angles!”

THE COURTROOM ERUPTED
. Judge Larch banged her gavel, demanding order. She told the jury to ignore Mr. Watkins’s testimony for the time being and ordered both prosecution and defense into chambers along with the U.S. marshals who worked in her courtroom.

“Judge, the government asks that it be given time to find the phones Mr. Watkins claims are in that factory,” Wills said when they were all in chambers.

“Judge, there is no way to know if these phones, if there are any, have been put there after the fact as a ploy by Mr. Watkins,” Anita said. “Whatever is on them should be excluded.”

“That factory has been sealed for months,” Wills said.

“But not guarded.”

“We don’t even know if the phones exist, Ms. Marley,” Judge Larch said. She looked at one of her marshals. “Collins, you and Avery, please go talk to Mr. Watkins. Find out where he
says he hid these phones, call a forensics team, and go look. If you find them, establish a perfect chain of custody and bring them here.”