Coco giggled ever so softly before picking up the Prada shopping bag and other goodies pilfered from Ruth’s collection. He started to leave the master suite, then paused to listen. Though he knew that the staff had been given the day off and that Ruth’s husband, Dr. Stanley Abrams, aka “the Boob King of West Palm,” was in Zurich attending a medical symposium, it still paid to be careful.
Sure of himself now, Coco pushed on down a gallery rich with artwork, although the only piece he stopped to look at was an oil painting of the deceased. There you are, he thought, studying Ruth’s beauty. Caught at the moment of your ripeness, my dear, a gift to the universe.
Ruth and Stanley’s home was enormous and entirely too modern for Coco’s taste. But then again, what would you expect from the house that fake tits built? There was a great deal to be said for classic understatement, he believed.
As his mother liked to say: When it comes to your art, Coco, and fashion is art, take your motif to the limit and then back off several degrees.
Coco walked through a kitchen big enough to host an episode of Iron Chef and went down a hallway to a steel door. He checked the security system, got a white dust cloth from his bag, and covered his fingers with it before punching in the code. Five seconds later, he shut the garage door and waited for the electronic voice to tell him the system was armed.
The garage had four bays. The near one was empty. The second held Ruth’s Mercedes, and the third her husband’s Maserati. Coco’s beloved Aston Martin occupied the fourth bay. But before going to it, he reached into the Mercedes and removed the garage-door remote.
He backed the Aston out onto a colored concrete area, exited the car, pressed the remote, then wiped it down. When the garage door started to lower, he lobbed it inside, satisfied when it skittered to a halt a few feet from the Mercedes.
Someone intent on suicide would not bother to pick that up, would she? Coco was confident this was the case. He drove out through the security gates of Ruth and Stanley Abrams’s massive waterfront estate. Then he realized that the ladies of Palm Beach would already be gathering for cocktails. Maybe he’d go stroll by Oli’s Fashion Cuisine.
Would anyone recognize him at Oli’s? He was thrilled at his audacity, his taste for high-stakes games.
Let’s do it, girlfriend. Let’s really shake it up.
Ten minutes later, Coco parked the Aston Martin a few blocks away from his target zone. The vintage sports car was a risk, he knew. But he adored it, so it often caused him to act impulsively, demanding his attention when the Lexus would have done just fine.
Next time you’ll stay home, Coco thought and put on a pair of retro white-and-oval-framed sunglasses. He set off up the sidewalk, walking the way his mother had taught him, with his shoulders back, his head high, and his hips swaying like a pendulum.
The first man he encountered was a jogger in his fifties. Coco could feel his degenerate eyes looking over the Tangerine Dream. The second man, a Euro in yachting garb, dropped his sunglasses to gape openly.
That’s it, girl, Coco thought, putting just a little more sway in the booty for the Euro who’d no doubt turned to watch after the dream. Ahead, the yellow tables outside Oli’s were already filled with a stylish happy-hour crowd.
He took a breath, thought: Mysterious, now. Sexy. Alluring. Unobtainable.
That’s it, Coco. You’ve got it all.
Now flaunt it all.
He made his walk even more provocative, swaying his hips back and forth.
Coco raised his chin a degree as he passed the restaurant, ignoring the scene but aware of patrons twisting to look after him. He almost laughed to cause so much mistaken lust and envy.
Chapter
14
Starksville, North Carolina
Though everyone had heard the judge’s order loud and clear, it was well into the afternoon before two deputies brought my cousin, wearing leg shackles and handcuffs locked to a leather belt around his waist, into an interrogation room. Even through the bruises and swelling, I could see Stefan Tate took after our mothers’ side of the family. He was in his early thirties, tall and heavy-boned like me and like Damon. And we all had the same jawline.
I flashed on an image of him as a little boy, running around Nana Mama’s yard during one of Aunt Hattie’s infrequent trips to Washington. He’d had this infectious laugh, and it seemed like he thought everything was a mystery and an adventure.
“Alex,” Stefan said thickly as he sat down. “Glad you came.”
I nodded, said nothing.
“Leave his wrists cuffed, but release them from the belt,” Naomi said. “He may need to use his hands. And turn off all cameras and microphones.”
“Already done on the cameras and mikes,” an officer said. “But there is zero chance we’re letting him use his hands.”
Ignoring her protests, they chained Stefan’s legs and the belt to a stout eyebolt in the cement floor and left.
Leaning toward us, Stefan said quietly, “I’d sweep the room for bugs.”
I wondered if he was serious or just being melodramatic. But Naomi thought enough of the idea to pull out her iPhone and call up a white-noise app that she turned on high.
“That works,” Stefan said. “And thank you again, Alex, for coming. You don’t know what it means to have you believe that I did not do these things.”
“I don’t believe one way or the other,” I replied evenly, studying him for signs that he was capable of doing the things he’d been accused of.
“I’m being framed,” he said.
“Listen carefully,” I said. “I am your cousin, but I do not represent you. Ultimately I’m here representing Rashawn Turnbull. I find out anything that says you killed that boy, I will help the prosecution put you in the chair, or whatever they use here.”
“Lethal injection,” Stefan said. “I will not lie to you. I did not kill Rashawn.”
“Why’d you assault the guards?” Naomi asked.
“Other way around, Counselor. They assaulted me.”
“We’ll get back to that,” I said. “You’ve read the indictment?”
“More times than you can count. Look, I’m telling you. This case? These circumstances? They’re manufactured, Alex.”
“You didn’t do any of it?”
“Some of it,” he admitted. “But nothing illegal. They’ve twisted things, taken them totally out of context.”
“Convince me like you’ve convinced Naomi,” I said, crossing my arms. “Start at the beginning.”
“‘A very good place to start,’” Stefan sang, and he tried to smile.
According to the particulars of the indictment, two months earlier, Rashawn Turnbull had been found dead in an abandoned limestone quarry, a piece of land undergoing annexation by the city of Starksville. The teenager had been drugged and forcibly sodomized, and his neck had been slashed with a saw. Semen and other evidence found at the scene pegged Stefan Tate, Rashawn’s eighth-grade gym teacher, as the killer. DNA also linked Stefan to the drugging and rape of seventeen-year-old Sharon Lawrence, a student at Starksville High School, and she had agreed to testify against him.
So I didn’t smile when my cousin sang that line from “Do-Re-Mi.”
Instead, for the next hour and a half, I listened closely to his side of the terrible crimes described in the indictment, interrupting only to clarify verifiable facts, names, and times. Otherwise, I followed the adage that if you really want to learn about someone, you should just shut up and listen.
Chapter
15
“The day after Rashawn was found, they put the handcuffs on me, Alex,” my cousin said at the end of his version of events. “Ever since, I’ve been in here. No bail. Limited visitation, even with Patty and Naomi. I’m telling you, Alex, I’m being railroaded.”
I said nothing, still trying to absorb his story in light of the information given in the indictment.
He leaned forward. “You believe me, don’t you?”
�
�A lot of it has to check out.”
“I promise you on my mother’s Bible, it will.”
“So let’s say your version of events is true. Who’s behind it?”
Stefan hesitated, and then said, “I don’t know. I’m hoping you’ll figure it out.”
“But you’ve got suspicions?”
“I do, but I’d rather not put them out there.”
“Stefan, your life is on the line here,” Naomi said. “We need it all.”
“What you don’t need is conjecture,” Stefan said. “That’s the word, right?”
“It is, but—”
He gestured at me with his manacled hands. “I’d rather have Alex go into this with no preconceived notions. Let the facts I’ve given him take him where they take him. That way, when he says he believes me, I’ll know he’s telling the truth.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and I checked my watch. It was past six.
Naomi went to the door, knocked twice. The guards came to get Stefan.
He said, “Tell Patty, my mom, and my dad that I love them and that I’m innocent.”
“Of course,” Naomi said.
“When will I see you again?” he asked us as the guards stood him up and unlocked his chains from the eyebolt on the floor.
“Tomorrow,” my niece replied.
“When I’ve got something to talk to you about,” I said.
“Fair enough,” my cousin said, and they led him out.
Naomi waited until we were outside the jail and moving toward her car before asking, “What don’t you believe?”
“I believe all of it until proven otherwise,” I said.
“But you seemed skeptical in there.”
“I’m skeptical of everything when the rape, torture, and murder of an innocent kid is involved,” I said matter-of-factly.
That seemed to upset her.
“Am I wrong to think this way?” I asked.
“No, it’s just that Stefan needs people in his corner,” Naomi said. “I need people in Stefan’s corner.”
“I know, but as I said, I am ultimately in Rashawn Turnbull’s corner. It’s the only way I work.”
Chapter
16
It was twilight when we parked on Dogwood Road in Birney, only three streets east of Loupe. We walked down the block to a two-story duplex in need of attention, paint certainly, but with a lawn that was freshly mowed. The smell of grass was everywhere.
One of the porch lights was blinking when a middle-aged bleached-blond Caucasian woman wearing running shorts and a Charlotte Bobcats T-shirt exited the right door. She gave us the once-over as we came up onto the porch, said, “Friend or foe?”
“Friends,” Naomi said. “I’m Stefan’s lawyer.”
“Sydney Fox,” she said, shaking Naomi’s hand. “Neighbor and landlord.”
I introduced myself and explained the family connection to Stefan.
“Jesus, isn’t it awful,” Sydney said softly, her face saddening. “I love that guy. I really do. Stefan’s got soul and passion, you know? I just pray what they’re saying isn’t true. Break my heart if it was, and I don’t want to think what it would do to Patty. But I’d best be going to take my run. I like it when it’s cool like this. Nice meeting you, and anything I can do to help, you just call Sydney. Patty’s got the number.”
The blinking porch light went dead, casting her side in shadows.
“Shit,” Sydney said, and she had to fumble to get her key in the lock before going inside. “I guess my run will have to wait a couple of minutes.”
My niece rang the other bell. The curtain drew back a few moments later.
“It’s me and my uncle, Patty,” Naomi said.
The door opened. We slipped inside into a simple, tidy living area with a futon for a couch, a trunk for a coffee table, and a flat-screen on the wall. The door shut, revealing a fit, attractive blond white woman in her late twenties. She looked exhausted.
She studied me a beat before sticking out her hand. “Patty Converse. I’ve heard a lot about you, Dr. Cross.”
Eyeing the small diamond engagement ring, I said, “And I’ve heard very little about you other than what Stefan has told me.”
Her eyebrows shot up, and her voice turned yearning. “You saw Stefan? They haven’t let me see him in days. How is he?”
“Puffy and bruised but okay,” Naomi said. “He was attacked—unprovoked—first by inmates and then by guards.”
Her concern turned to anger. “There should be security cameras, tapes.”
“I’ll be going after those,” Naomi promised.
I made a note to myself to find out if the fact that Patty and Stefan were a mixed-race couple had anything to do with the case. Patty offered us coffee, which Naomi declined and I accepted. We followed her into a galley kitchen, and she made the coffee in a French press while answering a few of my questions.
“Stefan says you met the first day of school,” I said. “New teacher just like him.”
“That’s right,” she said, scooping coffee from a tin.
“Love at first sight?”
Patty blushed. “Well, it was for me. You’d have to ask Stefan.”
“It was for him too,” Naomi said.
Patty got teary, and her hand trembled as she covered her lips. “He didn’t do this. He loved Rashawn. We both did.”
“I know,” my niece said.
I asked, “How’d you come to take a job in Starksville?”
Patty said she’d been raised in a small town in Kansas and played softball on scholarship at Oklahoma State. She’d majored in exercise science and minored in education. When she graduated, she decided to move to the Raleigh area, where her older sister had settled, and look for a job.
“Closest openings were here,” she said. “They needed two gym teachers to cover high school and middle school.”
I said, “Seems fated that you and Stefan would take the jobs.”
Patty’s eyes welled up again, and she whimpered, “I love to think so.”
Chapter
17
I waited until she’d calmed down and then said, “Tell me about Rashawn Turnbull and Stefan.”
“They were connected, right from the start,” she said as she poured me coffee. “And I admit that it bothered me because our relationship was just blossoming and Stefan seemed to give as much time to Rashawn and the other students he took an interest in as he did to me.”
On the third or fourth day of the school year, Patty said, Stefan found Rashawn sitting in the locker room, refusing to change for gym class. The boy was small for his age, and withdrawn. Both the black boys and the whites picked on him because his mother was white and a recovering addict while his father was African American and a crook.
“Rashawn felt alone, like he didn’t fit in anywhere,” she said. “Stefan said he’d felt similarly when he was young, you know?”
“Sure,” I said. “Stefan ever use drugs in your presence?”
“Never. He knew I wouldn’t stand for it.”
“But you knew about his past?”
She nodded. “He would never deal drugs. He hates what drugs stole from him and feared what it could steal from kids.”
“Did you ever find drugs in the house?”
“Never.”
“Did Stefan ever just disappear for hours at a time without telling you where he was going?”
She looked at something in her lap, said, “We love each other, but we’re not attached at the hip.”
“That doesn’t answer the question,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said, agitated. “Yes. Sometimes he’d go off, said he had things to do.”
“When Stefan came back, where did he tell you he’d gone?”
She thought about that. “Usually for hikes or runs. There’s a path that parallels the train tracks that he likes. Too noisy for me. Other times he was staking out places in town where kids gathered.”
“Why would he do that?”
Patty said that toward the end of last year, there’d been a rash of incidents involving heroin and meth at the Starksville high school, including the two overdoses mentioned in the grand jury indictment.
“There was real pressure from the principal and school board to identify the source of the drugs,” she went on. “I don’t think any teacher took that more seriously than Stefan. He became obsessed with finding the source.”
“He says he was out looking for Rashawn the night he was killed.”
Patty nodded. “Rashawn’s mother, Cece, called us around eight, said he wasn’t home and asked if he was here.”
Naomi said, “Stefan said he was upset about many things that night, picked up a bottle for the first time in years, went down by the tracks, drank it, and passed out.”
My cousin’s fiancée nodded, said, “He said he was frustrated that he wasn’t finding the source of the drugs and shocked that Rashawn had told him earlier in the day that he didn’t want him as a friend anymore. So he got drunk.”
“Why didn’t Rashawn want to be Stefan’s friend anymore?” I asked.
“Rashawn wouldn’t say, and Stefan was—”
Somewhere out front I heard a door slam and then a male shout, “Killer-lovin’ bitch! Nigger-lovin’ bitch. I hope you rot in hell!”
Two shots from a high-powered rifle ripped through the night.
I was up and moving at the first shot, digging out the Glock in my holster. Three more quick shots blew out the living-room windows, showering me with glass.
As tires squealed, I yanked open the front door and went out in a crouch onto the front porch. The car lights were off, but I could tell it was old, a beater Impala, white, with horrible mufflers. A figure in a black hood, coat, and gloves hung out the window, aiming a scoped hunting rifle at me. He fired.
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