The People vs. Alex Cross (18 page)

I felt my expression harden as I said, “I’ve never really wanted to play that card, but it sure makes you think, doesn’t it?”

It went on for another twenty minutes before King finished. When the cameras were off, I stood and let the tech remove the microphone while King spoke with her producer.

She came over afterward, shook my hand a second time, and said, “I apologize for some of the tougher questions. Like you said, it’s the job.”

“I don’t mind tough questions as long as they’re unbiased.”

“How’d I do?”

“I thought you were fair. How’d I do?”

King held my gaze before saying, “You’re either a pathological liar and a killer or you’re being framed by real smart folks.”

“That how you’re going to spin it?”

“No spin, Dr. Cross,” King said. “We’ll lay out both sides as we go and let the viewers decide.”

BREE, ANITA, AND
Naomi were convinced I’d done myself a great deal of good with the interview. And Nana Mama was still buzzing with the excitement of meeting Oprah’s best friend forever, which I thought was kind of sweet and funny.

But as the hours ticked by I grew more anxious. What if Anita’s analysts weren’t good enough? What if we couldn’t prove the video had been doctored?

Around nine that evening, I was feeling claustrophobic. Ali found me pacing around in the kitchen.

“Dad?” he asked. “Can I see those videos everyone’s talking about?”

“Why would you want to see things like that?”

He shrugged. “Your attorney Ms. Marley thinks something’s wrong with them. I wanted to see if I could see it.”

I thought about that for several moments and then said, “I don’t think I’d be the best father if I let a nine-year-old see a recording of people dying needlessly.”

“Oh,” my son said, sounding taken aback. “I just wanted to help.”

“I know you did, bud,” I said, and I hugged him.

Ali left me looking disappointed, which made me feel even more claustrophobic. I went upstairs and got changed into sweatpants, an old FBI hoodie, and running shoes. I found Bree in the front room watching
The Voice
and said I was going out for a jog.

“You want company?”

“Not this time,” I said. “I need to get some things straight or I won’t sleep.”

Bree gave me an even gaze. “Just for the record, Alex, I think it sucks you’re going through this. It guts me.”

“It does suck,” I said. “But like Nana Mama said, the truth will out.”

“I don’t want you spending a day in prison before that happens.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“Don’t forget Jannie’s racing in the morning.”

“I won’t be longer than I have to be,” I said, then kissed her and went out the door. I ran down the block well out of sight before slowing and hailing a cab.

I got in the back and gave the driver an address. Twenty minutes later I was climbing out into a crowded parking lot in a light industrial area off I-95 not far from Dumfries, Virginia. I’d probably driven by the steel building there several thousand times while I was based at Quantico and never noticed it.

Then again, ten years before there had been no big glittering sign on the side facing the road that said
GODDESS
!

Throbbing electronic music pulsed from the building. For a moment I thought the two shaved-head bouncers weren’t
going to let me in because of what I was wearing, but the manager happened by and said, “The FBI is always welcome. More and more of you brave ones every day.”

I paid the twenty-five-dollar cover fee and went inside the club, an homage to 1970s disco, with black walls, lots of mirrors, and flashing balls spinning and flickering above the dance floor, which was packed with gyrating gay men in all manner of dress, from tuxes to leather bondage outfits.

As I moved around, I turned down two offers to dance myself before spotting the man I’d come to see. Krazy Kat Rawlins was right in the middle of the mob of sweating dancers, shaking his booty, tossing his red Mohawk around, and waving his tattooed arms overhead as if he were at a revival for some of that old-time religion.

When the song changed, Rawlins came off the dance floor sweating, gasping, grinning, and flirting with several pals before he spotted me. Suddenly, the FBI’s top digital analyst wasn’t so exhilarated anymore.

“Unless you drive on my side of the highway, what are you doing here?”

“You haven’t been returning my calls.”

Rawlins patted his Mohawk, gauging its stiffness, before saying, “I don’t believe you deserve to talk to me or to Batra anymore.”

“Excuse me?”

He squared off, crossing his arms. “I’ve looked at the videos, Dr. Cross. Metadata’s all there and I don’t see any evidence that the sections that show the victims’ hands have been altered in any way.”

The words took a moment to sink in, and then I felt detached from my body. I looked around the dance club as if it were part of some weird dream.

“I saw guns, pistols,” I said.

“The data doesn’t lie,” Rawlins said.

“No, that’s not right. I’m telling you, Krazy Kat, that—”

“I can’t help you.”

I put my hands to my head. “I feel like I’m in some alternate universe, like I’m losing my mind.”

He knit his brow. “Then you should go talk to someone, like a therapist, someone who can help you understand what you’ve done.”

“But I didn’t—”

“The videos say you did,” Rawlins said. “The videos say Winslow and Diggs were unarmed. You killed them in cold blood, not self-defense.”

“I saw guns!”

“Then your brain invented the guns so you could deal with what you’d done. You’d gotten off before. You’d do it again.”

The FBI tech guru walked away and disappeared into the mass of writhing bodies on the dance floor with me staring dumbly after him.

I HAVE NEVER
been a quitter in my entire life, never tried to do anything but face my responsibilities and duties head-on. But sitting in another cab twenty minutes after Rawlins vanished back onto the dance floor at the club, I felt like telling the driver to take me to National Airport or Union Station instead of home.

I wanted to flee, get a new identity, and hide out on a South Sea island, do anything except go home to tell Bree, Nana Mama, and the kids what Rawlins had said. There’d been no guns. I’d been deluded at best, downright evil at worst. In either case, I was going to federal prison, probably for life.

I shut my eyes, trying to remember the entire incident, clearly seeing the gun in Watkins’s hand, and in Virginia Winslow’s, and Leonard Diggs’s. It made me sick to my stomach when I thought of the videos, clearly showing no guns before I shot.

How in God’s name was that possible?

I thought back again, trying to remember every instant, and recalled that I’d felt odd, light-headed when Kimiko Binx and I arrived at the factory. Inside the factory, I’d felt … giddy? Why would I have been giddy? There were people with guns trying to kill me and I’d been … elated?

Maybe Rawlins was right. Maybe I did need to see a shrink, or at least someone who might understand what I was going through, someone like …

“Driver,” I said. “Change of plans. Take me downtown.”

He dropped me on a corner not far from the courthouse. I walked north several blocks to a familiar street with lights blazing in some of the town houses and big dumpsters out in front of the ones that were dark.

There were a few lights on in one of the duplexes, which did and didn’t surprise me. Bernie Aaliyah had been fixing up the place.

As I climbed the stairs to the porch and the front door, my mind fled back to the last time I’d been here. I remembered being outside Tess Aaliyah’s bedroom door, hearing the gunshot, and jumping back in shock and despair. And poor Bernie Aaliyah pounding on the door, begging the silence for an answer, some hope.

I shook off the memory, hesitated, and then knocked. A few moments later, the dead bolts were thrown and the door opened.

“Dr. Cross?”

“I wonder if I could talk to you.”

“I’m doing good since we last spoke,” Tess said, and she smiled. “We have another meeting set, don’t we?”

“This time it’s not about you,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and frowned. “Well, then, of course, please come in.”

I FOLLOWED HER
inside, remarking to myself how good she looked after only a month off the various interacting drugs that had helped put her behind a locked door with her backup pistol talking about rats, and her father and I outside thinking suicide.

It turned out that the construction projects up and down the street had disturbed the neighborhood’s urban rat population and caused a migration. Tess had seen rats twice in her closet upstairs earlier that day. After her fight with her dad, and in a semidelusional state due to the drugs, she decided she’d clean out the closet, put crackers and birdseed in a pile, and then sit back and wait for a shot. It was why she’d insisted on talking quietly. She’d been hunting.

After Tess shot the rat, the ringing in her ears was so loud that for several long, agonizing moments, she didn’t hear her father pounding on the door. Then she’d opened the door and looked at us with bloodshot, drug-puzzled eyes, as if she couldn’t imagine what we were so upset about.

It had taken several hours to convince Tess to enter a psychiatric facility in Virginia so she could be properly evaluated. But she eventually agreed and spent a week there getting clean and undergoing tests. She’d gone into the psych ward taking a multi-pill cocktail and left on a single drug for depression. The doctors said that in her effort to forget, she was lucky she hadn’t done permanent brain damage.

“You want a beer?” Tess said. “Dad left some.”

“Water if you’ve got it,” I said.

“Coming up,” she said and got me some chilled from the fridge.

I sat in Bernie Aaliyah’s favorite chair. Tess gave me my water, curled her feet under her on the couch, and said, “Thank you again for helping me, Alex. You were the only one who saw I was a danger to myself.”

“I’m glad you agreed to get help,” I said. “Which is why I came to see you.”

“Okay?”

“Have you been following my trial?”

She shook her head. “My therapist advised me to go on a no-media diet for a few months.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” I said, but then I brought her up to speed on the latest trial developments, including the video and Rawlins’s contention that it had not been doctored.

“But you saw those pistols?”

“Every time I close my eyes, I see them,” I said.

“Any chance you imagined them?”

I started to tell her absolutely not but then said, “Part of me doesn’t know anymore, Tess, and it’s got me scared that I did something heinous and that my mind has somehow erased it and put something else in its place to justify my actions. Does that make sense? Has that ever happened to you?”

Pain flickered on her cheeks before she shook her head. “I remember every detail, the first shots, me returning fire, and then hearing the Phelps’s nanny wailing beyond that apartment door. I can’t forget a second of it.”

“That’s how the other part of me feels.”

“Then those pistols were there and removed from the videos. You just have to prove it.”

My cell phone dinged, alerting me to a text. I pulled it out, saw it was from Bree:
Where are you, Alex? I’m worried
.

I texted back,
Talking to an old friend. On my way
.

I looked at Tess and said, “I have to go. Thanks for talking.”

“One good deed deserves another.”

We both stood and headed toward the door. I opened it and looked back at her before leaving.

“I forgot to ask. How are you keeping busy?”

Tess smiled wistfully and said, “Running twice a day, reading, and trying to learn how to forgive myself without a bunch of drugs in my brain.”

AT TEN THE
following morning, I was in the stands inside the Johns Hopkins University field house with Damon, a sophomore now. We were watching Jannie take her last warm-ups. She’d been quiet on the ride up for the meet, so quiet that I had finally asked her what was going on.

Jannie didn’t want to talk at first, but she eventually admitted that she was upset because someone had uploaded the shooting videos to YouTube. Social media was incensed. Terrible comments had been directed at her and at the boys.

That only made the day worse. When I’d told Bree the night before that Rawlins said the videos had not been doctored, I’d seen something in her eyes that I swore I’d never see there. Doubt. Not open suspicion, not a lack of faith, but doubt about the facts of the shootings as I’d described them.

“How are
you
doing, Dad?” Damon asked.

“Let’s focus on Jannie,” I said. “I’m sick of thinking about everything else.”

“How’s our girl looking?” Ted McDonald asked, breaking into my thoughts.

I was surprised to see him. “Thought you couldn’t make it, Coach.”

“My plans changed last night.”

“Does Jannie know?” Damon asked.

“She will after the race.”

“You mean after you see if she executes your race plan,” I said.

“That too,” McDonald said. “The field’s pretty much the same as last time, including Claire Mason, so we can kind of hit reset today.”

“Same tactics you recommended before?”

“A few tweaks based on her recent practice times,” he said, and he dug in his pocket for a stopwatch.

Jannie had pulled the inside third lane. Claire Mason, the Maryland state champion and future Stanford athlete, was two wide in the fifth slot.

Whatever frustration and hurt Jannie might have been feeling on the ride to Baltimore appeared to be bottled and corked when the race starter called the young women to their marks. Our girl went to the blocks bouncing, shaking her arms, and rolling her head, all the while staring into the middle distance.