“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.”
CHAPTER
52
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.”
CHAPTER
53
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.”
CHAPTER
54
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.