She’d gone to a far-off place in her mind then, where there was no hurt, no feelings at all, as if she’d already found death. That feeling of passing, of being already gone from her body, had stayed with her even after they were done, even after they’d thrown her back in her plywood box, even after days without eating.
Someone threw the door’s dead bolts.
Gretchen cringed and tried to keep staring at the plywood wall.
“You don’t eat, you don’t deserve to play the game,” the strange electronic voice said. “You don’t eat, drink, keep your strength up, you don’t deserve to live.”
“I don’t want to live like this.”
“We kind of thought that.”
She looked at the big guy in black wearing the GoPro camera and the paintball visor and saw something that cut through her feelings of nothingness, made her retreat.
He wasn’t carrying that knife he’d brought the first four times they’d played the game.
This time he carried a coil of rope tied at one end into a hangman’s noose.
Chapter 51
Judge Larch gaveled the court to order at precisely eight a.m. She took care of several administrative issues before reminding Norman Nixon he was still under oath when he returned to the witness stand.
“Ms. Marley,” Larch said. “Your cross-examination, please.”
Anita patted me on the thigh, got up, and said, “Mr. Nixon, of the nine fatal shooting incidents you looked at involving my client, how many were judged wrongful police conduct?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “None. It’s a—”
“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.”
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.