“Why would Finn Davis try to kill Pedelini?” asked Carmichael.
Tired as I was, I decided I couldn’t trust the two men interviewing me. I withheld any and all theories spinning in my brain.
“I can’t give you a clear motive,” I said. “His adoptive father might be able to.”
“We put calls in to Marvin’s house and cell,” Carmichael said. “He isn’t answering.”
“Go to his place on Pleasant Lake.”
“A trooper did about an hour ago. No answer at the door, so he went inside. There were signs of a struggle. Know anything about that?”
“Nothing,” I said. “For all you know, Bell ordered Finn to kill Pedelini and is now running, making his house a mess so you’d think otherwise. But whatever. The fact remains that Finn shot at Pedelini and me. Test his rifle. I guarantee it will match the one that killed Sydney Fox.”
“You think Finn killed Sydney?” Frost said.
“I do,” I said.
“Why?”
“Spiteful ex-husband. Maybe more.”
They fell silent. Carmichael drank from a Diet Coke can. Frost sipped his coffee, said skeptically, “You make yourself out to be an innocent bystander.”
“With the attempt on Detective Pedelini’s life, most definitely. How is he, by the way?”
“In a medically induced coma,” Carmichael said. “Mild brain swelling.”
“Someone taking care of his daughters?”
“They’re covered,” Frost said.
I sat back in my chair confidently, said, “Then I’m not saying anything until Pedelini wakes up. You talk to him. He’ll back me up.”
The door opened, and Naomi entered, saying, “Not another word, Alex.”
“That’s already the plan,” I said.
“You charging him?” my niece snapped.
“Not at this time,” Frost admitted.
“Then I’d appreciate his release,” she said. “Dr. Cross is an integral part of my defense. He’s not leaving town. You’ll find him in Judge Varney’s court if you need him.”
Ten minutes later we slipped out the back door of the police station to avoid the television news crews and walked down the alley toward the courthouse in the dawn light. Part of me wanted to go home and get some sleep. Instead, I called Nana Mama, told her I was okay and would see her at the trial. I texted Bree to call me as we went to a café for breakfast with Pinkie.
I drank three cups of coffee, ate three eggs sunny-side up, bacon, and hash browns, and related everything that had happened to me during the night.
“Why would Finn Davis want to kill Guy Pedelini?” Naomi asked.
“Maybe Davis saw Pedelini as I do: an essentially good guy corrupted by circumstances,” I said. “Under duress, these kinds of people don’t hold secrets long before they break, confess, and implicate others.”
“So the sheriff, and then Pedelini?” Pinkie said. “You think someone’s trying to clean house?”
“If you add in the busted brake line of our car, it sure looks like it.”
“Someone’s under pressure,” Naomi said.
“Someone?” Pinkie said. “Try Marvin Bell.”
“Bell’s vanished,” I said.
“Which means we were getting close, right?” Pinkie said.
“Close to something. But it’s still like a jigsaw that won’t piece—”
My phone rang. A number I almost recognized but couldn’t place.
“Cross,” I said.
“Drummond.”
I smiled. “How are you, Sergeant?”
“Peachy,” he said. “Mize is copping to it all and pleading insanity.”
“He might be right.”
“Not my call,” Drummond said. “Your case? You get that guy Bell?”
“Close,” I said. “But he’s vanished.”
“Runner.”
“Looks like it.”
“Your nephew’s trial?”
“My cousin’s trial. And, to be honest, unless we can come up with some counterevidence fast, he’s looking at death row.”
Drummond didn’t reply for several beats, and then said, “You never know when something’s going to turn things around.”
“True,” I said. I heard a clicking, looked at the caller ID, saw it was Bree.
I told the sergeant I had to take another call but would keep him posted, and then I switched lines.
“Hey,” I said. “Where are you?”
“At National Airport, about to board a flight back to Winston-Salem,” Bree said. “I just got some preliminary results e-mailed to me from the FBI lab.”
“And?”
Chapter
89
Judge Varney gaveled the court to order at nine o’clock that Tuesday morning.
Before either of the attorneys could speak, the judge pointed his gavel toward the spectators, said, “Cece Turnbull? You in my court?”
Cece’s eyes were beet red and rheumy when she stood up and nodded.
“You gonna cause any more trouble?” he demanded.
“No, sir, Judge Varney,” she said in a tremulous voice. “I…I apologize. It’s just that—”
“Just nothing,” the judge said. “Long as you’re quiet, you can remain. But the first peep out of you and you’re gone for the duration. You understand?”
Cece nodded, sat down. Ann Lawrence leaned forward and patted her on the shoulder comfortingly. Sharon Lawrence sat next to her mother, pale, weak, and looking at her cell phone. Cece’s mother and father were behind the Lawrences. Mrs. Caine was staring into her lap while her husband sat ramrod straight in his business suit, arms crossed, focused completely on Judge Varney.
In those same moments, Police Chief Randy Sherman was sending hard glances at me and Nana Mama, who sat beside me, and at Pinkie, Aunt Connie, and Aunt Hattie, who were in the row behind us.
The bailiff led my cousin into the court. Stefan Tate’s facial swelling had gone down, but his skin was bruised a livid purple.
Patty Converse came in and took a seat next to Pinkie. I smiled. She nodded but wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“Where were we at adjournment?” Judge Varney asked his clerk.
“Detective Frost,” the clerk said. “Ms. Strong is still on direct.”
The older detective, who looked as tired as I was, took the stand.
Varney said, “I remind you you’re under oath.”
“Yes, Judge,” Frost said.
The district attorney let her assistant Matthew Brady take the lead in questioning the detective. Brady focused on other items gathered at the scene of Rashawn Turnbull’s rape and murder. Those pieces of evidence included a broken bottle of Stolichnaya vodka with Stefan Tate’s prints on it not ten feet from where the body was found.
During our first talk in the jail, my cousin said the bottle was probably his but that it must have been stolen from his apartment. The excuse was weak.
The weight of evidence against Stefan seemed overwhelming again. You could see it in the faces of many in the jury box. Stefan’s semen was at the scene of the crime. His prints were there. He killed that boy, deserved to fry.
“Detective,” Matthew Brady said. “You went to talk to the defendant the day Rashawn’s body was found.”
“That’s correct,” Frost said. “We found Mr. Tate at his house that morning.”
“How would you describe his condition?” Brady asked.
“Hung over. You could smell stale liquor on his breath.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That Rashawn’s body had been found,” Frost said. “And that we found his ID there covered with blood.”
“What was his reaction?”
“Went down on his knees and started sobbing.”
Frost said they took my cousin in for questioning and sealed the apartment until it could be searched by a forensics team. Before they interrogated Stefan they took his blood alcohol level, which registered as .065. Not legally drunk in North Carol
ina, but a solid indicator that he’d been drinking hard the night before.
Brady took the detective through the interrogation, in which Stefan steadfastly maintained his innocence. Yes, he’d been drinking the night before. He and his fiancée had had a fight. He’d stormed out, gone for a long walk, and picked up a bottle. He ended up passing out by the railroad tracks.
I glanced back at Patty Converse. She was staring at the floor.
“Did Mr. Tate say why he’d gone down by the tracks?” Brady asked.
“He said for no reason at all, and that made him hysterical,” Frost said.
“Did you believe him?”
“The hysteria? The anguish at what he’d done? Yes. That he went down by the tracks and passed out? No, I did not and do not. There was no evidence down there that put him anywhere near where he said he woke up.”
Frost went on to describe leaving Stefan in a cell under suicide watch while he and Carmichael searched the duplex where my cousin lived along with Sydney Fox and Patty Converse. The older detective found the pruning saw with Rashawn’s blood and flesh in the teeth on a shelf in the common basement along with some turkey-hunting equipment and a vial of methamphetamine.
“Was the saw or the meth vial hidden?” Brady asked.
“Yes. In a pack.”
“Odd that he would keep the weapon.”
“Mr. Tate’s blood alcohol level had to have been sky-high, and the brutality with which Rashawn was attacked suggests a berserk state,” Frost said. “Coming out of it, he probably wasn’t thinking too straight, dumped the saw where he found it.”
“Objection,” Naomi said. “The witness is speculating.”
“Sustained.”
Brady said, “Were Mr. Tate’s fingerprints on that saw?”
“Five fingerprints.”
“Anyone else’s?”
“No.”
Brady’s questioning went on for another hour. Around ten thirty, the assistant district attorney said, “No further questions.”
Judge Varney said, “Ms. Cross, you can choose to proceed with cross-examination of Detective Frost now or finish with Sharon Lawrence.”
Sharon Lawrence’s mother stabbed at her daughter’s thigh with her index finger. Sharon Lawrence jerked, looked up from her cell phone in disgust.
Naomi looked back at me. I nodded.
She said, “The defense will start with Detective Frost.”
Chapter
90
As Naomi came out from behind the defense table, she glanced at me again, and I shot her an encouraging smile.
“She got something?” Nana Mama whispered to me.
“Maybe,” I said, and gave her hand a squeeze.
“Detective Frost,” Naomi began. “At what time did you arrive at my client’s apartment the morning after the victim’s body was discovered?”
“Nine? Nine fifteen?”
“How was Mr. Tate dressed?”
“Gray sweatpants, blue hoodie.”
“His hair was wet?”
“Correct,” Frost said. “Mr. Tate stated that he’d just gotten out of the shower when we knocked.”
“Was the shower drain searched?” Naomi asked.
“It was.”
“Any of Rashawn Turnbull’s blood found in that drain?”
“No.”
“Any blood evidence found in that drain?”
“Mr. Tate’s.”
“Did Mr. Tate tell you that he has a history of nosebleeds? That they often occur when he’s exposed to hot water?”
Frost shifted, said, “He said that.”
Naomi returned to the defense table, picked up a document, said, “The defense would like to introduce our exhibit A: medical records dating back to Mr. Tate’s childhood that reflect this ongoing problem with nosebleeds.”
Judge Varney took the documents and nodded.
If the fact that my cousin suffered nosebleeds in any way contradicted the people’s case, neither Delilah Strong, Matt Brady, nor Detective Frost showed it.
“So you found Mr. Tate’s blood in the drain?” Naomi said.
“Correct.”
“But not Rashawn Turnbull’s?”
“Asked and answered, Counselor,” Judge Varney said.
“Don’t you find that odd?” my niece said to Frost. “I mean, the prosecution has spun this theory about my client entering a drunken, drug-fueled, berserk state to rape and kill Rashawn Turnbull, slashing at the boy’s neck with a pruning saw. And we’ve seen photos of the blood-spatter patterns at the crime scene. So why no blood in the drain? If your theory is to be believed, the boy’s blood should have been all over my client’s clothes and body.”
“We think Mr. Tate got rid of his clothes and washed off somewhere else.”
“But there’s no evidence to back that up.”
Frost said nothing.
“Do you have my client’s clothes with blood on them?”
“No.”
“Did you find the victim’s blood anywhere in that building other than on the pruning saw in the basement?”
Frost shifted uncomfortably, said, “No.”
“Did you find illegal drugs anywhere else in the house besides the vial of methamphetamine in the basement?”
“No.”
“In Mr. Tate’s office at the school?”
“No.”
“In his car?”
“No.”
“And yet you’d have us believe that Mr. Tate is not only a habitual user of meth but a dealer whose wares may have resulted in two overdoses at the high school.”
“Mr. Tate has a history of drug and alcohol abuse,” Frost said. “He got thrown out of—”
“Objection, Judge,” Naomi said.
“Sustained,” Varney said. “The jury will ignore that.”
But it had already been said. You couldn’t take something like that back and expect the jurors to actually eliminate the information from their brains. Stefan had past issues. That was all they would care about. Naomi looked frustrated but pushed on.
“Was there any sign of methamphetamine in my client’s blood the morning of his arrest?”
“Trace levels,” Detective Frost said.
“Trace levels? I thought he was in an alcohol-and-drug-fueled rage that night.”
“Large amounts of alcohol in the bloodstream can mask the presence of meth in certain tests.”
“Really?” Naomi said. “I hadn’t heard that. But again, you’re no expert.”
“Objection,” the district attorney said.
“Sustained,” Varney said before rapping his gavel. “We’ll take a lunch break and resume at one o’clock.”
Chapter
91
Pinkie slid into the same booth we’d used before at the Bench, the restaurant by the courthouse. I sat opposite him while Nana Mama and my aunts took a table next to us. I’d tried to invite Patty Converse, but she’d left the courtroom before Varney ended the morning session.
“I thought things went better for Stefan today,” Pinkie said.
“I did too,” I said. “For the first time since the trial began, I saw some of the jurors really thinking about the evidence against him.”
My cell phone buzzed. An e-mail alert. The waitress came over to take our orders. I asked for the patty melt with a salad instead of fries and another cup of coffee. I’d been up for so many hours at that point that I was feeling woozy again.
“If Stefan did it, he would have been covered in Rashawn’s blood,” Pinkie said.
“Unless Frost is right and he washed off somewhere else and buried his clothes,” I said.
“But why not the saw?”
“I know. It’s not logical. But sometimes murder and its aftermath are not logical events. It twists people into something unrecognizable.”
“You’re kind of raining on Naomi’s parade.”
“Not at all,” I replied, happy to see the waitress bringing my coffee. “I think she’s going to mount a vi
gorous defense on Stefan’s behalf.”
“I can hear a but coming.”
“But I’ve worked on enough of these cases to know that when the evidence to convict a child killer is formidable, the defense had better be able to do more than just poke holes in the prosecution’s narrative.”
“Like what?” Pinkie asked.
“Like find the real killer,” I said. “We do that, Stefan walks. If not, even with some of the lab results we got back, he risks conviction.”
“I swear on my dead daddy’s grave that Finn and Marvin were in on it,” Pinkie said.
I glanced over at the booth where I’d spoken with Bell the week before, said, “Well, unless the police find some evidence that links Bell and Davis to the killing, you’re swearing in vain.”
“Finn tried to kill Pedelini, who all but admitted to you before he was shot that he was looking the other way for payoffs.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe?”
“I’d have to see the test results on Davis’s rifle, but there is the possibility that Davis was shooting at me and hit Pedelini. We were fairly close and it was a long shot across that cove.”
The waitress returned with our orders, and we dug in. My head ached, and I had to force the food down.
After we’d finished, I was surprised that Nana Mama wanted to stay for the afternoon session. She’d been taking naps in the afternoon the past few months.
“I feel like something big is going to happen in that courtroom this afternoon,” she said, holding my elbow as we walked back to the courthouse. “And I don’t want to miss it.”
“You having premonitions now?” I asked, amused.
“I’m no swami or seer,” she snapped. “I just get feelings sometimes, and this is one of them.”
“Okay. This something big you’re feeling—is it good or bad for Stefan?”
My grandmother peered up at me with a confused expression on her face, said, “I can’t tell you one way or the other.”
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