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.”
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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.”
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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.
Wills said, “Can you take us through the events of March twenty-ninth?”
Watkins grudgingly said he’d gotten interested in Soneji and then me by accident. But the more he read a
bout me, the more he was convinced I was “borderline out of control” when it came to the mass murderer.
He testified that he decided to entice me into a situation that could result in an “interesting and revealing piece of performance art.” He would lure me to an abandoned factory where he’d confront me with one Soneji after another.
“So you could see his reaction?” Wills asked.
“Oh, hell no. I wanted everyone in the world to see Cross’s reaction.”
Beside me, Anita cocked her head to one side.
Wills squinted as if he’d heard something new from the witness and said, “How were you going to do that?”
“By filming it, of course,” Watkins said.
“What?” Wills said.
“What?” Naomi whispered.
Anita said, “What the hell is—”
“You had to have found them,” Watkins said. “I mean, you had to have searched the factory and found the smartphones with the add-on lenses, right?”
Anita and the prosecutor’s assistant both shot to their feet.
Anita said, “Judge, there has been no mention of any such cameras or phones in discovery.”
“Because we found no cameras or phones,” Wills said.
Watkins looked like he wanted to spit in disgust. “I put them there myself. What is this? A cover-up? I was wondering why you weren’t badgering me about them from the get-go. I’m telling you, we got the whole thing from three different angles!”
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THE COURTROOM ERUPTED. Judge Larch banged her gavel, demanding order. She told the jury to ignore Mr. Watkins’s testimony for the time being and ordered both prosecution and defense into chambers along with the U.S. marshals who worked in her courtroom.
“Judge, the government asks that it be given time to find the phones Mr. Watkins claims are in that factory,” Wills said when they were all in chambers.
“Judge, there is no way to know if these phones, if there are any, have been put there after the fact as a ploy by Mr. Watkins,” Anita said. “Whatever is on them should be excluded.”
“That factory has been sealed for months,” Wills said.
“But not guarded.”
“We don’t even know if the phones exist, Ms. Marley,” Judge Larch said. She looked at one of her marshals. “Collins, you and Avery, please go talk to Mr. Watkins. Find out where he says he hid these phones, call a forensics team, and go look. If you find them, establish a perfect chain of custody and bring them here.”
“Judge, that’s the rightful role of the government,” Wills said.
“We’re seeking swift truth and justice here, Mr. Wills,” Larch said. “If the cameras are there and they do show what happened that day, we’ll all see it together. At the same time. Here. In my chambers.”
The marshals left. The judge ordered that the jury be sequestered and given lunch. We ate down the hall, all of us wondering how the cameras could have been missed, and me worrying about the confidence with which Watkins had revealed them. What would they show?
An hour later, word came that three smartphones with extender lenses had been discovered where Watkins said they’d be: in recesses cut into the factory’s support beams, hidden with thin pieces of sheet metal.
An hour after that, Larch’s marshal entered her chambers with three evidence bags, each holding an iPhone 6s. They were dusty and their batteries were dead. Between the group of us, we had enough cords to recharge the devices.
One by one, they blinked on. Claude Watkins was asked to provide the security codes for the phones, which he did. They all used his birthday.
U.S. Marshal Avery, a thin woman with an intense bearing, wore gloves to enter the codes. Then she attached the first phone to a laptop computer, and the laptop to a screen on the wall of Judge Larch’s chambers.
Fifteen minutes later, as the last of the three videos played, there was dead silence in Judge Larch’s chambers. I felt steam-rolled and had no doubt I was heading to a federal pen for a long, long time.
“Compelling, Judge,” Wills said, triumphantly. “The government wishes to introduce these into evidence immediately.”
Anita said, “Your Honor, you cannot allow these videos to be introduced until we’ve had time to analyze them.”
“I’d say the videos speak for themselves,” Wills said. “The important parts, anyway. To ignore them would be a travesty of justice, Your Honor.”
“Allowing them into evidence without giving us the chance to examine them would be a gross miscarriage of justice, Your Honor,” Naomi said.
Judge Larch sat back in her chair, closed her eyes, and puffed on an electronic cigarette.
“Your Honor?” Wills said.
“I’m thinking,” Larch said. “You’ve heard of that, right, Counselor?”
The prosecutor was taken aback but said, “Of course, Your Honor. I’ve been known to think myself every once in a while.”
The judge opened one eye and fixed it on Wills. “I’ll allow the videos to be introduced.”
“What?” Anita cried. “Judge—”
“Ms. Marley,” Larch said curtly. “The prosecution wants the videos introduced. If you can impeach their value and credibility, you’ll be free to do so at the appropriate time.”
“With all due respect, Your Honor,” Anita began, “these will bias the—”
“For a few days, perhaps,” Larch said, putting her e-cig on her desk. “If they’re fake, you’ll know soon enough, won’t you? And maybe you’ll make Mr. Wills look like a fool for being so impetuous.”
“Your Honor?” the prosecutor said, looking as if he’d sniffed something unpleasant.
“I’ve given you lots of rope, Mr. Wills,” she said. “Try not to hang yourself with it.”
Wills blinked and said, “Yes, Your Honor.”
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NANA MAMA SAW the devastated look on my face when we returned to the courtroom. She came to the rail.
“You okay, son?”
“It’s bad, Nana.”
“The truth will out. Just stay fixed on that.”
I nodded but felt like the weight of the world was on me when Judge Larch gaveled the court back into session and announced to the jury that she was admitting the videos. She also cautioned them that the government had decided not to analyze the videos before they were shown to the jury.
“In that light, keep an open and skeptical mind,” she said. “The defense will have its say about these videos, I’m sure.”
As Marshal Avery called up the videos on a screen facing the jury, Nathan Wills was so pleased he jigged a little as he crossed to the witness box. Claude Watkins was again sitting there in his wheelchair.
“Mr. Watkins,” Wills said. “Have you seen this footage?”
“No.”
“They’re all black-and-white, three or four minutes long. We’ll watch them simultaneously. You’ll see the scene from three angles at once.”
The deputy marshal hit a key on her computer. The screen, divided into three frozen feeds, lit up.
On the left, there was an elevated, look-down perspective on the dimly lit rear of the factory where the shooting had occurred. It was a long and largely empty assembly-line space with dark storage alcoves off it on all four sides.
From the perspective, I figured the smartphone had been placed atop an alcove in the middle of the long south wall of the room. On the opposite wall, a mural was lit by soft spotlights.
The middle of the screen showed the feed from a smartphone camera that had been hidden almost directly across the room, above the opposite northern alcove, and aimed back at the floor area, though you could see the bottoms of the three spotlights.
On the far right of the screen, we were afforded a view from above the west alcoves. That angle showed the full length of the factory floor and the spotlight beams bisecting it right to left.
The deputy hit Play and all three feeds started. The people in the c
ourtroom saw me enter the space at the east end of the factory floor, carrying my service weapon and leading Binx along by her handcuffs. Exactly the way I remembered it.
At the west end of the room, Claude Watkins stepped out. He was dressed as Gary Soneji, and in a cracking, hoarse voice he said, “Dr. Cross. I thought you’d never catch up.”
“Freeze them,” Wills said. “Show feed three only.”
A moment later, the screen was filled with Watkins in disguise standing there, palms turned out.
“No gun,” Wills said. “Absolutely no gun.”
It was the second time I’d seen the image and the second time I got furious thinking that, if I wasn’t guilty, I was being railroaded by pros.
“That’s fake,” I whispered to Naomi. “I don’t know how they did it, but that is wrong.”
Before my niece could answer, the screen unfroze. The three videos showed me raising my service pistol, aiming at Soneji, and moving toward him, shouting, “Drop your weapon now or I’ll shoot!”
Watkins’s right hand moved, but there was nothing there, and nothing like the clatter of a gun dropping that I remembered.
“Facedown on the floor!” I shouted. “Hands behind your back!”
Soneji started to follow my orders but then Binx came up from behind and hit my gun hand with both her fists. The blow knocked me off balance, and my gun discharged before a fourth spotlight went on, blinding me.
Then the lights died. I threw myself to the factory floor. I stayed there several moments, peering around, before I lurched to my feet. Gun up, I ran hard to the nearest alcove on the north wall.
I shouted, “I’ve got backup, Gary. They’re surrounding the place!”
Leaving the alcove, I moved west along the north wall of the factory to the next anteroom, the one directly beneath the mural. The camera on the opposite roof caught me from behind and gave the viewer a decent look inside the north alcove, where large rolls of canvas were stacked on tables made of plywood and sawhorses.
From deep in that alcove, Virginia Winslow, disguised as her late husband, stumbled out of the darkness. Stooped and far forward on the balls of her feet, she took two sharp, halting steps before straightening up. The camera zoomed in on us. Her right hand started to rise.
The People vs. Alex Cross: (Alex Cross 25) Page 13