THE CARPETED STAIRS made no noise as I climbed to a narrow landing. I turned right and went around the banister to Tess Aaliyah’s bedroom door. Before I could knock, I heard her in there talking.
“Rats,” Tess said in a soft voice that sounded bewildered. “I saw rats. Here? Believe it. I saw … I heard … them scratching in the walls … and her screaming. Mom screaming. Mom’s always screaming.” Tess cried quietly. “Always screaming.”
She sounded so close, I squatted down and saw a shadow that suggested she was sitting on the floor with her back to the door.
I got up, took a deep breath, knocked, and said softly, “Tess?”
“Go ’way,” she said in a whisper that I had to strain to hear.
“It’s Alex Cross,” I said, a little louder. “I wanted to see if we could talk.”
“Quiet!” she snarled. “I know my … my rights. I’m not seeing another shrink. No more rats chattering in my closets, no way.”
Before I could reply, Tess said, “Alex, you’re the big rat. One chitchat, and you start all this drama … put nasty thoughts in my dad’s head. ‘Poor Tess. She’s crazy enough now. Stick her in a hole.’”
“I’m not here to stick you in a hole.”
Tess sniggered. “Course you are.”
“I’m not. I just want to talk things over.”
For several seconds, there was no reply. The door creaked as she leaned against it. I heard her shift position on the floor.
I glanced over at her father, who stood at the head of the stairs looking like he was listening to someone drown.
“Tess?” I said. “Can I just talk, then? Would that be okay?”
“Whatever you want,” she said, returning to that bewildered voice. “Just do it nice and quiet. I hear you fine.”
I paused, trying to think ahead, trying to figure out the best way to get her to come out and turn over the—
Saa-chunk.
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41
THE SOUND FROZE my thoughts. I’d heard it a thousand times in my life, maybe more, the particular noise a double-action revolver makes when a thumb cocks the hammer into firing position.
“Tess,” I said, stepping quietly to the side of the door and out of the potential line of fire. “Do you have a gun in there?”
In that off voice, she said, “Hate rats in my closets.”
I glanced at her father, motioned for him to be patient, and said, “A lot of people care about you, Tess. They’d like to help you. I’d like to come in and help you. Your dad would too.”
“No need,” Tess said wearily, sounding as if she might be falling asleep. “Ask my dad. Tessie’s an impatient girl, can’t wait for pest control to do its thing.”
“Will you do me a favor? Will you put the gun down beside you, at least?”
“No, Alex,” she whispered. “What would be the point of that?”
I decided to shake her a bit. “I asked you before if you were self-medicating. You said no. But your dad just showed me twelve different meds in your kitchen.”
After a pause, she said, “Legitimate prescriptions from licensed docs.”
“Except I don’t think the other doctors knew everything you’d been prescribed, Tess,” I said. “There are several drugs down there—antidepressants and antipsychotics—that pose a significant risk when combined. You could have a very serious drug interaction, one that could stop your heart, trigger a stroke, potentially damage your brain, wipe out your long-term memory.”
In a slow, modulated whisper, Tess said, “Hasn’t. Worked. Yet.”
The gun barked.
It startled me so badly I jumped back before feeling the horror and disbelief well in me. Tess had shot herself. She was dead, right there on the other side of that door. My knees went to rubber and I grabbed at the banister, feeling like I was going to be sick. Bernie Aaliyah roared in panic and despair, “No!”
He limped fast to her door and pounded on it. “Tess! Answer me! Tess, you answer me right now!”
In the short silence that followed, I said, “Bernie?”
Tess’s father twisted his head to look at me, enraged. “Shut up, you. I never should have called you, Cross. You’ve killed her, that’s what you’ve done!”
Part Three
THE PROSECUTION OF ALEX CROSS
CHAPTER
42
Four weeks later …
STRIKING HER GAVEL twice, Judge Priscilla Larch peered out through thick-lensed glasses and in a gravelly voice said, “The People versus Alex Cross. This court will come to order. Sergeant Holm, you may seat the jury.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” the bailiff said, and he went out.
“I’m praying we chose right,” my niece Naomi said.
Anita Marley nodded stiffly and looked to her opening arguments, not bothering to watch the five men and seven women who held my fate in their hands now filing into the courtroom and taking their places in the jury box. I understood why. Anita was still upset with me about jury selection.
During voir dire—the questioning of potential jurors by the prosecution and defense prior to jury selection—we’d disagreed over two picks: juror five and juror eleven. Five was a man in his seventies who had something wrong with his spine. His upper back was twisted and hunched. He walked slowly with a cane and had to turn his shoulders and rib cage to look up at you.
Juror five had also been sharp in his answers, especially when it came to describing his general skepticism about nearly everything in life. An electrical engineer before retiring, he said he took his time making decisions, tried to get to the truth before he acted, and was firm in his convictions.
Anita had wanted to dismiss juror five because he had a friend whose son had been shot by the Baltimore police. But he also said that he had “nothing against cops. They have a tough job. I can apply the law fairly, given that.”
I overruled Anita’s objection to juror five, telling her we wanted people skeptical enough to hear the facts and honest enough to deal with them fairly.
Juror eleven was a big, stylish, and beautiful woman in a gray Chanel suit. A brassy redhead, she had a beaming smile, an infectious laugh, and an accent as smooth as West Texas honey. She worked for a big PR firm in DC and was friends with several U.S. Capitol Police officers. Anita wanted her off the jury because a police officer had hit her brother with a baton during a riot at a music festival in Austin.
But juror eleven had also said that her brother “deserved to be hit because he was drunk, crazy, and took a swing at two cops.” I reminded Anita of that and overruled her.
The others we agreed on. On the whole, my jury seemed a cross-section of the capital. In addition to jurors five and eleven, there was a thin, hyper woman who worked as a U.S. Senate aide and was furious she hadn’t been excused from serving, a beefy guy who wrote a tax newsletter, a lobbyist for agribusiness, and a young mother from Adams Morgan who seemed delighted to serve, apparently seeing it as an extended break from her kids. There was also a male nurse who worked at GW Medical Center, a retired teacher, and a bartender at the Four Seasons Hotel. Two grandmothers and an ex–merchant mariner completed the dozen people who would decide whether I would go on with my life or take a very long detour into a federal penitentiary.
When they were seated, Judge Larch said, “The floor is yours, Mr. Wills.”
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43
“THANK YOU, JUDGE,” the assistant U.S. attorney said, and he got up. Wills tucked his shirt in over his big old belly, smiled sheepishly, ambled midway to the bench, and stopped.
The federal prosecutor took a breath, played the silence a moment, and then said, “Some police officers in America believe the judicial system is in ruins. They get so frustrated, they begin to see themselves as judge and jury, and then executioner. They do. I am with the U.S. Justice Department, and I’m telling you that in every major police force in this country, there is one or a pair or even a handful of cops who believe they are above the law.”