The People vs. Alex Cross (26 page)

“What?” Dylan Winslow yelled angrily, jumping to his feet. “He shot my mom in cold blood!”

“Not guilty!” Ali shouted at him, standing up. “Not guilty!”

Judge Larch pounded her gavel and then shook it at Ali and Soneji’s kid. “One more outburst out of either of you, and you’ll be banned from my court. Clear?”

Dylan was fuming and red-faced, but he slammed his butt back down on the bench beside Binx. Ali grinned with satisfaction and sat more slowly.

Turning back to the jury, Judge Larch said, “On count two, in the death of Leonard Diggs, the charge is murder in the first degree. How do you find?”

“We find the defendant not guilty, Your Honor.”

“This is bullshit!” Binx shouted. “I saw it with my own two eyes!”

“One more word and it’ll be contempt of court, Ms. Binx,” Larch said, standing and glaring at her.

Binx shook her head in a rage, but she said nothing else.

“On count three of the indictment,” the judge said, “attempted murder of Claude Watkins, how do you find?”

“There was reasonable doubt. Not guilty, Your Honor.”

The courtroom erupted. I let out my breath long and slow and hung my head in deep gratitude, thanking God for my deliverance, before spinning around and reaching across the bar to kiss Bree, who was grinning through tears.

“Welcome back from the edge, baby,” she said.

“This is a travesty of justice!” Claude Watkins shouted. “I’ve got a piss bag and he’s frickin’ not guilty? He guns down three and he’s not guilty?”

Larch banged her gavel, said, “That’s enough, Mr. Watkins.”

“I reject this!” Watkins roared, and he spun his wheelchair around and headed out. “I do not recognize this jury or this court!”

“Neither do I!” shouted Binx, and she stormed after him.

The judge called to the officer at the door to the hallway, “Fuller, arrest them both. I want them held on suspicion of conspiracy, murder, and perjury.”

Binx whirled around and shouted, “You can’t be serious! This is insanity!”

“It’s government persecution, that’s what it is,” Watkins said.
“They cooked up that whole pack of lies to bury us. It’s what the police state does! Shoots you down, then makes up a goddamn excuse for shooting you down!”

As Binx struggled against the zip cuffs around her wrists and a second officer restrained Watkins in his wheelchair, my gaze snagged on Soneji’s son. Dylan Winslow was on his feet, looking back at Binx and Watkins as they were taken from the courtroom. The fingers of the troubled teen’s left hand trembled as he tried to grip the bench in front of him.

He was part of it,
I thought.
He’s got something to hide
.

The prosecutor was on his feet and furious as well.

“Your Honor,” Wills said. “The verdict is the verdict, but I echo Ms. Binx and Mr. Watkins. This
is
a travesty of justice, one you can undo by vacating this verdict and demanding a retrial.”

“What? And undo double jeopardy?” Anita cried. “On what constitutional grounds, Counselor?”

Larch held up her hand to stop further argument. Then she tugged her glasses down the bridge of her nose and gave the prosecutor a withering stare.

“Mr. Wills,” she said. “As far as the Court is concerned, this entire trial has been a travesty of justice. Because of the naked ambitions of yourself and Ms. Carlisle, as well as the government’s need for a scapegoat for the country’s rash of police-involved shootings, the two of you and your bosses not only bought into a sophisticated framing of the defendant, but fully participated in a rush to justice. I anticipate someone investigating both of you very soon.”

For once, the federal prosecutors were speechless.

“Dr. Cross?” Larch said.

“Your Honor.”

“I am sorry this happened to you.”

“Thank you, Judge Larch. I am too.”

“Go and enjoy your freedom. Take care of that son of yours.” She banged her gavel. “The jury is released. Case closed.”

I threw my hands up and whirled around to see Bree, Jannie, Damon, Nana Mama, and my dad cheering behind me.

Tears welled in my eyes as I kissed Anita and Naomi. Then I went around, picked up Ali, and hugged my boy like he was life itself.

TO BE HONEST
, despite the verdict, I was feeling mixed emotions sitting in a chair outside Chief Michaels’s office the following Monday.

My arrest, the trial, and even the verdict had forced me to do a lot of reevaluating about my priorities and my purpose in life.

I had always seen homicide investigation as a way to represent the slain and help the friends and family of the victims find not only closure, but justice. I think of it as an honorable profession, one that, until I was arrested, gave me a great degree of fulfillment.

But turning back to clinical psychology and counseling, my first loves, had reminded me why I enjoyed that work so much. Ultimately, my job was to help people trying to understand and improve themselves and their lives. Being a psychotherapist was as noble a calling as being a homicide detective, and fulfilling in an entirely different way. And yet here I was, ready to put an end to the counselor part of me again.

“Dr. Cross?” Michaels’s secretary said. “He’ll see you now.”

I went into the chief ’s office. Crossing the room to his desk, I watched Metro’s leader closely, trying to read his body language. The chief had played it political during the months I’d spent on suspension pending trial. In private, he’d expressed support. In public, he’d covered his ass.

So it was a bittersweet experience when Michaels summoned his politician’s smile, reached out his hand, and said, “I knew you’d be back, Alex. What would Metro do without you?”

I swallowed whatever uncomfortable feelings I’d had and thanked him for reinstating me on the Major Case Unit. In the squad room, Bree ended Sampson’s suffering by reassigning Detective Ainsley Fox to another partner and putting the two of us back together. That was good, really good, maybe even better than the verdict. No bittersweet feelings at all.

I spent the rest of that first day filling out forms that sought back pay in light of the verdict and doing a pile of other administrative nonsense. But on Tuesday, Sampson and I were back on the job, with the missing blondes the first order of business. We started early, leaving DC long before dawn and driving north.

Four and a half hours later, we left Interstate 180 for State Route 220 toward Muncy Valley, Sonestown, and Laporte, Pennsylvania. It was timber country. The road was narrow, winding, and flanked on both sides by state game lands and big leafless forest tracts.

We got coffee in Laporte before stopping in at the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office to talk with Detective Everett Morse, who was working with the Pennsylvania State Police on the murder of twelve-year-old Timmy Walker Jr. and the disappearance of Ginny Krauss and Alison Dane.

Morse was collegial enough and showed us the murder book, but it had been months since Ginny and Alison had disappeared and Timmy’s body had been found. The trail had gone cold. Morse told us not to bother trying to talk to the girls’ parents. They’d barely spoken with Morse or the state police.

When we stopped at the Pennsylvania State Police barracks on the north side of Laporte, Investigator Nina Ford largely confirmed Morse’s take on the case. She allowed us to look through her files as well, and, like Morse, discouraged us from trying to talk to the missing girls’ parents.

“What about Timmy’s parents?” Sampson asked.

“Big T’s out of the picture,” Detective Ford said. “Lenore’s at the house. You could stop at Worlds End State Park, where Timmy’s body was found. By the time you have a look around and get to Hillsgrove, Lenore should be up and almost coherent.”

From GPS coordinates Ford gave us, we were able to pinpoint the exact location where Timmy Walker’s corpse had been discovered—roughly a mile east of the parking lot at Worlds End State Park and several miles from where the missing girls’ car was found.

But for an older model white Chevy pickup truck with a toolbox in the back and decals on the window from the National Wild Turkey Federation, the park’s lot was deserted when we pulled in twenty minutes later.

A cold, raw wind blew while we hiked the trail and followed the GPS navigator to the rugged ground where a hiker had come across Timmy’s arm sticking out from under a pile of branches and leaves.

“That’s a workout, getting up here,” Sampson said, chest heaving. “Trail was steep.”

I nodded, my heart still hammering. “Timmy weighed ninety-two pounds, so it was someone very strong.”

“And someone who knew how to get to this particular stretch of nowhere,” Sampson said about two seconds before the shooting started.

BOOM! CA-CHING. BOOM!

Sampson and I whipped around and dived for cover behind a downed log.

Boom!

“Where the hell is he?” Sampson hissed.

Hearing popping noises, clucking, and branches snapping, I peeked up over the log and saw a flock of wild turkeys racing through the woods. Up the hill, I spotted movement. I grabbed my binoculars, focused them, and saw a teenage girl in camouflage scrambling down the steep hillside, a man carrying two shotguns right behind her.

“I got him, Dad!” I heard her yell and she threw her hands up in the air. “We both did!”

We stood and waved at the hunters as they got busy with the two dead turkeys. It wasn’t until we were close that they noticed us.

The father stood, glanced at the shotguns propped up
against a tree. I guess it wasn’t often he saw two men wearing coats and ties in the turkey woods.

We both showed our badges. He got stiffer. “This was a clean hunt.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “We’re here looking into the death of Timmy Walker.”

He softened. “That’s a tragedy. My Ellie here went to school with him. I’m Howard Young, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Young,” I said. I shook his hand and then looked at his daughter. “Tell us about Timmy.”

Ellie played with a camouflage scarf around her neck and her expression soured. “TW-Two was nice growing up, but then he kind of became a creep.”

“More like a little pervert,” her father said.

“How’s that?” Sampson said.

Ellie looked around and then said, “I don’t know if it’s true, but he supposedly put a hole in the wall at school so he could look into the girls’ locker room. The rumor was he took pictures and showed them to his friends.”

Sampson grimaced.

I said, “Was that investigated?”

“The principal said so,” Ellie said. “The school even had police look at Timmy’s phone, but there was nothing on it.”

Her father said, “Doesn’t mean there wasn’t another phone or a camera. I wanted that boy thrown out of school, but they didn’t do a thing. And then he died, so we’ll never know, will we?”

“We’re hoping to help figure out why he died,” Sampson said.

Young nodded uncertainly. “Well, we’ve got birds to clean, and Ellie’s got classes this afternoon.”

We thanked them for their time and hiked back down the steep hillside to the parking lot. Had Timmy been killed for taking pictures he shouldn’t have? Had the killer brought Timmy up that trail in the dark? His mother had reported him missing well after sunset, so there was a good chance. That meant the killer had a headlamp or a helper. Did that matter?

I set that thinking aside and went back to the iPad, looking at an aerial view of the area with pins that marked the locations of the girls’ abandoned car, Timmy’s botched burial site, and his home. The car and the house looked about a mile apart, but the killer had dumped his body miles away.

Why? To try to separate the two cases in the minds of police?

I supposed that was likely, though any detective worth his or her salt would have known the two cases were related. Same day. Same general time frame. The proximity of Timmy’s home to where the girls’ car was found.

So what happened? Did Timmy see the kidnapping, blunder into it somehow, and get killed for it?

That was our working theory when we pulled into the driveway of Timmy Walker’s house, a restored Colonial with fresh paint and a new, seamless metal roof. It was by far the nicest home in this small mountain hamlet where most of the structures looked like hunting camps. Brown leaves covered the modest front yard. A tricycle lay tipped over by the birdbath.

Sampson knocked on the door. No answer.

He knocked harder, and the door opened. A young girl, six or maybe seven, stood there in food-stained pajamas. She had a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket around her shoulders and studied us with red eyes.

“Hi there, young lady,” I said. “We’re police officers. We’d like to talk to your mom.”

“She’s sleeping,” the girl said.

“Can you wake—”

“I’m up!” a woman said, pounding down the stairs.

Mom was in a blue terry-cloth robe and barefoot. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were puffy, rheumy, and wild when she said, “You get him? Timmy’s killer?”

“Mrs. Walker?” I said.

She came up behind the girl, hugged her. “I’m his mom, Lenore. This is his sister, Kate.”

We identified ourselves, said we’d like to talk to her.

“So you didn’t get him?” she asked, bewildered.

“Not yet, ma’am.”

The dead boy’s mom swallowed thickly and looked off in despair. “No one tells me what’s going on. Months Deuce has been gone and no word from anyone in weeks, not the sheriff, not the state police, not the FBI … not even my coward of an ex-husband.” She broke down weeping.

Her daughter scowled at us and then turned around to hug her mother.

“It’s okay, Mommy,” the little girl said. “It’s going to be okay.”

WHEN WE GOT
Lenore Walker calmed down enough to talk, she invited us in, and we learned that she had, by her own description, led a fairly charmed life until the night Timmy disappeared. She’d grown up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and met Tim Walker her junior year at Pennsylvania State.