Deadly Cross

by Patterson, James

  Bree took the phone, looked at it, and nodded. “So you got here at what time?”

  “Twenty to one?” he said. “The back door was unlocked. I went inside, expecting the place to be lit by candles and some music going. But there’d been one hell of a fight. She was in the kitchen, on her side, bleeding. I called 911 and held her while I waited for the EMTs.”

  “She say anything?”

  “Like I said, she was in and out. Made perfect sense and then no sense. But she knew me one time. Said my name and seemed like she wanted to tell me something, but she couldn’t get it out. Just kept saying, like, ‘Ahh-sigh. Ahh-sigh.’ ”

  Bree wrote that down, said, “I know you said the place is trashed. Did you notice anything obviously missing that had been there on your previous visits?”

  He frowned. “I don’t think so.”

  “What about her computers?”

  “Oh, I’m sure those are still there,” he said. “She keeps her laptops and backups in her safe at night, said there were all sorts of people who’d love to have a look at them, and even if they managed to get them, they wouldn’t find anything.”

  “Encrypted?”

  “Yeah, she used this privacy system called Thor or something.”

  “Tor,” I said.

  “That’s it. She said Tor was the only safe way for her to do business without getting … without getting killed.” He started to cry again. “Jesus, she looked awful. I just want to go home.”

  “Not until you’ve been processed,” Bree said. “We need your clothes. We need you photographed.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can prove you weren’t part of it,” I said.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You were the only one who knew the rear door was going to be unlocked.”

  “But I’m not the only one who knew about the rear door.

  Everyone who’s ever bought or sold dirt with Kelli had to come in from the alley. Discreet.”

  “Duly noted,” Bree said. “I have a forensics crew on its way. It shouldn’t take too long, Mr. Sparkman.”

  He started to argue, but then surrendered.

  Bree looked at me. “Go inside?”

  “I think I’ll leave that to you, Chief,” I said. “Your last official act. I’m going to the hospital.”

  CHAPTER 53

  I REACHED THE EMERGENCY ROOM at Georgetown Medical Center at three thirty and learned that doctors were still trying to stabilize Kelli Ann Higgins and determine the extent of her injuries.

  I waited outside the trauma room until a doctor exited talking to a med student. “That woman is lucky to be alive,” the doctor said. “Skull fracture. Broken jaw. Several busted ribs. Probably a ruptured spleen.”

  “Blunt-force wounds?” the med student asked.

  “Yes, all of them.”

  I stepped up and identified myself. “She conscious?”

  “For a few minutes at a time.”

  “Did she say anything about the attack?”

  “Yes. She said, ‘Hit me.’ ”

  The door to the trauma room opened and Higgins was wheeled out on a gurney. Her face was badly swollen on the right side, and she was being given a blood transfusion.

  “Where’m I?” Higgins said, the words slurred.

  “Georgetown Medical Center, Kelli Ann,” one of the nurses said.

  “She headed to surgery?” I asked the doctor.

  “CT first,” she said. “The neurosurgeon’s on her way.”

  “Mind if I tag along with her to CT?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I hurried down the hallway following Higgins’s gurney. I showed the nurses my badge, said, “FBI.”

  “B? I?” Higgins said, blinking.

  They stopped outside the radiology department.

  I got down low to where I thought Higgins could see me. “That’s right. FBI. You remember me?”

  She looked like she was having trouble focusing, but then she said, “Craw.”

  “That’s right, Cross,” I said.

  The nurses started wheeling the gurney again, and I had to wait until they’d gotten her inside the CT room.

  One nurse said, “You’ve got two minutes while the techs set up, and then you’re going to have to leave the area, Dr. Cross.”

  I went around to where Higgins could see me again.

  “Hit me,” she said.

  “Who hit you?”

  She swallowed. “Craw … bar.”

  “They hit you with a crowbar. Did you know your attacker?”

  She blinked. “Claw … bar.”

  “Why did this person attack you?”

  Higgins looked puzzled, squinted at me. “Claw? Craw?”

  “Yes. I’m Dr. Cross. Why do you think you were attacked?”

  Her eyelids drifted shut.

  “Kelli Ann?” I said and touched her lightly. “Stay with me.”

  “Uh?” she said, opening her eyes.

  “Do you know why you were attacked?”

  “Na.”

  “Were you selling or buying something that could get you attacked?”

  Higgins didn’t move, and I thought she hadn’t heard. Then she licked her lips and croaked out, “Why cuh-ay?”

  Why cuh-ay? My heart started slamming against my chest. “Why Kay? Why Kay Willingham?”

  Higgins relaxed and nodded.

  “What about Kay?” I said.

  “Why Kay kill.”

  I stared at her. Why Kay kill. “You were beaten because of why Kay was killed?”

  Her jaw slackened, her eyes closed, and she nodded slightly.

  “You know why she was killed?” I said, knowing the techs were coming.

  She nodded slightly again. “Ahh-sigh.”

  “Ahh-sigh?” I said.

  She made a humming noise in her throat.

  “I don’t understand. Ahh-sigh?”

  The radiology tech came over. “We need her now.”

  “Lum,” Higgins said. “Lum.” She saw I didn’t understand and got agitated. “Ahh-sigh. Lum.”

  “You can tell him afterward, dear,” the nurse said, rolling her away from me. “We just need you to be still while the machine tells us exactly where you’re hurt.”

  I stared after Higgins and suddenly understood what she had been trying to say: asylum.

  She had been beaten for knowing that Kay was killed because of the asylum.

  What asylum? That psychiatric facility Kay went to in Alabama?

  Was that what she was trying to tell me?

  CHAPTER 54

  Alabama

  Two days later

  NED MAHONEY WAS AT THE wheel as we drove north of Montgomery in stifling heat and humidity that would have made a DC summer day feel fall-like by comparison. It was August. The crops were tall. The foliage between the fields was a dark gray-green, pines, oaks, and creeping vines alike.

  “You think Bree’s changing her mind?” Mahoney asked.

  I shrugged. After the Higgins attack, Chief Michaels showed up at our house and convinced her to take two weeks to cool off and see if quitting was really in her long-term best interests. Evidently, the idea for him to come had been Commissioner Dennison’s.

  “Dennison was a man about it,” I said. “He admitted he was wrong and said he recognized her clear value once it was no longer there, that he wished to apologize and move on. He also apologized to me for sharing the information about Kay.”

  “Odds of her going back?”

  I shrugged again. “Fifty-fifty?”

  “That’s about what I’m giving this trip of yours not being a wild-goose chase. I mean, we have Elaine Paulson dead to rights.”

  This was ground we’d covered before, but I replied, “But we don’t know the truth. Do I wish Higgins had said more before she died on the operating table? Of course. But we have a dying statement from a known peddler of scandal who told me she was beaten and Kay and Christopher were shot to death because of Kay’s time in the as
ylum. We have to chase this.”

  My phone buzzed with a text. I read it, then told Ned, “Rawlins says Higgins’s computers have one of the most sophisticated encryption systems he’s ever seen. He’s days from being inside them.”

  “Kay’s asylum it is, then,” Mahoney said, surrendering. “And again, I wish I could have justified bringing Sampson down with us.”

  “He figured out he needed to be with his family,” I said.

  “I love that guy.”

  “Me too.”

  We got off the highway and drove six miles on a county road to the entrance of West Briar, the private psychiatric facility where Kay had stayed on several different occasions over the years. A winding drive climbed up through thick woods, and then the trees thinned and ended, revealing an open, campus-like setting dominated by a large white, rambling structure — more like a country inn than an asylum — with well-kept lawns and gardens.

  Arriving unannounced can often result in an initial strike-out for investigators, but sometimes when people are shown FBI credentials with no warning, there’s a valuable window of candor before their guards go up and they start posturing and lying to you. The more hardened the criminal or the smarter the sociopath, the narrower the window of candor. The opposite is also true; the more honest the person, the wider the window.

  We got out of the car and were met by a temperature of over one hundred degrees and air that was thick with moisture.

  “I’m going to need a shower by the time we get inside,” Mahoney grumbled.

  “Two showers,” I said, wiping at the sweat rolling off my forehead.

  Inside the building, the air was so cold, we shivered. The receptionist, an older woman with half-glasses, gave us such a frigid stare that I shivered again as Mahoney and I showed her our credentials.

  “FBI?” she said. “What’s this about?”

  “Please notify the administrator that we wish to speak to him or her as part of a federal investigation,” Mahoney said, ignoring her stare. “We also want to speak to whoever was medically in charge of the late Kay Willingham during her most recent stay.”

  The receptionist’s eyes widened. She placed a murmured call.

  Five minutes later, we were sent to see the psychiatrist who ran West Briar. He stood up behind his spotless desk as we entered his office. He was surrounded by dozens of leather books that looked like they had never been read, generic sailing photographs, and framed degrees from Rice and Baylor. He smiled unhappily as we approached. I couldn’t help suspecting we were about to see the smallest possible window of candor.

  “I am Dr. Nathan Tolliver,” he said, reaching out to shake our hands limply. “To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from the FBI?”

  “We’d like to see any and all files regarding the late Kay Willingham’s stays here,” Mahoney said. “And we want to talk with everyone who interacted with her, especially her primary doctor, during her most recent stay.”

  “That would be me,” said a woman entering behind us. “I’m Dr. Jeanne Hicks, and I’m sure we would both like to be of help, but our hands are tied under Alabama law. Kay opted, in writing, to keep her psychiatric files secret.”

  “This is a federal murder investigation,” I said. “A federal murder investigation into Kay’s death.”

  “We understand and we support what you are doing,” Dr. Tolliver said. “Kay was a special person. But legally there’s nothing we can do. To have access to those files, you’ll need a court order or the signature of the executor of Ms. Willingham’s estate.”

  “Who is in Montgomery, where we just came from,” Mahoney said.

  “Unfortunately, that is correct,” Dr. Hicks said.

  CHAPTER 55

  THE LAW OFFICES OF Carson and Knight were housed in a venerable Southern mansion on a side street not far from the Alabama state capitol. For the second time that day, we showed up unannounced. We presented our credentials to Reggie, the young man at the front desk of the busy legal enterprise.

  The lobby was paneled in Alabama black oak and up high on one wall were two large paintings of the firm’s founders, Robert Carson and Claude Knight. Below them in rows were photographs of the various attorneys who’d been made partner since the firm’s inception nearly fifty years before.

  While we waited, I studied the pictures and was surprised to see a photograph of a younger Claudette Barnes, the vice president’s chief of staff; her late husband, Kevin, who’d died in a biking accident; and, higher up on the wall, a picture of J. Walter Willingham himself.

  “Willingham and Barnes both worked here?” I said to Mahoney.

  “The VP for about six months after he left the prosecutor’s office,” boomed a man in a gray linen suit, a white shirt, and a bow tie coming down the staircase. “A great man, and his picture helps the firm’s image.”

  He grinned and stuck out his hand to shake ours. “Robert Carson Jr. People call me Bobby. I understand you have a question about Kay Willingham’s estate.”

  “Are you the executor, Mr. Carson?”

  “I am not,” he said. “I am the son of one of the founders. I manage the firm and oversee the executor of her estate, Nina Larch, who is unfortunately away for the day taking a deposition in Valdosta. However, I am also Kay’s second cousin and am familiar with her estate, so I am hoping I can help. Let’s go into this conference room, gentlemen. It’s not in use, Reggie?”

  The man at the front desk said, “No, Bobby.”

  “Do not disturb, then,” he said and gestured us inside.

  When the door shut, Mahoney said, “To avoid having to get a federal court order, we need the executor to sign a release allowing us to review Kay Willingham’s medical files from her time at West Briar psychiatric.”

  The hail-fellow-well-met expression melted from Carson’s face. “I am afraid I cannot help you there,” he said. “I know for a fact that Kay feared being ripped apart and dissected after her death. She stipulated that — ”

  “Hold on,” Mahoney said. “‘Ripped apart and dissected’? How do you know that?”

  “She told me so herself,” he said. “She worried about what the media might do with her mental illness and got a judge to agree to seal her medical and probate files.” Mahoney said, “Local judge?”

  “State level.”

  “We’ll have to see a federal judge, then,” I said.

  We started to go, but Carson said, sounding pained, “Kay’s not going to get her wish, is she? Since it’s a murder case, once the files become part of the chain of evidence, they’re fair game, I suppose.”

  “We’re not out to destroy Kay’s reputation if that’s what you mean,” I said.

  “No, no,” he said. “My poor sweet cousin did a lot of that on her own, long before she inherited her grandma’s money and land.”

  Before we could reply to that, there was a knock at the door, and Reggie gingerly put his head in. “Your four-thirty is waiting, Bobby.”

  Carson looked at us. “Can’t put this one off, gentlemen. Can you let me know what the judge decides? I feel very protective of Kay and just want to make sure her wishes are taken into consideration.”

  “Of course,” Mahoney said.

  He shook our hands and we went out into the inferno of an Alabama August day. The rental car felt like the inside of a blast furnace until the AC kicked in.

  “I’m not going to bother with the local judges,” Mahoney said, picking up his phone. “I’m going straight to the U.S. Attorney General’s office to get them to file for it in federal court here in Montgomery.”

  He spent several minutes on the phone with an assistant U.S. attorney, and when he hung up, he said, “She says we’ll probably get it in the morning. Hotel? Shower?”

  “Tempting, but we’ve got daylight left,” I said. “Let’s go find that plantation. Kay was always conflicted when she talked about her grandmother’s place. She’d light up about its beauty and then express remorse at the history of it. I think she told me sh
e was giving the property to the state for a park when she died. I’d like to see it.”

  “It’s also where she’s buried, isn’t it?”

  “That too.”

  CHAPTER 56

  THE ROAD GOING OUT TO the Sutter family’s plantation was badly in need of repair after a spring of flooding. After the car bottomed out several times, we finally found the entrance to the property some seven miles east of the highway on the south side of the road. Crumbling brick pillars supported an iron gate with peeling paint.

  The Sutter name was still discernible in the rusted ironwork, as was a faded No Trespassing sign on one pillar. The gate was chained and padlocked. Beyond it, a gravel road disappeared into the woods.

  “Feel like a walk?” I said.

  “In this heat?”

  “I think we can lose the coats, ties, and starched white shirts this once, don’t you, Agent Mahoney?” He gave me a glum gaze for several seconds, then sighed. “J. Edgar will be rolling over in his grave.”

  “I think that’s already happened a few times for a lot of different reasons.”

  We both stripped down to our undershirts, suit pants, and shoes before getting out. It was past six and the heat had ebbed a little, but it was still ungodly hot and humid as we went to the gate. I was about to start climbing when Mahoney gave the padlock a shake.

  It opened.

  “See?” he said. “We don’t need to bother J. Edgar.”

  We pushed open the gate. Mahoney drove through and I shut it, wrapped the chain and lock the way we’d found it.

  “I hope no one decides to close that lock,” Mahoney said as I got in the rental. “We don’t have bolt cutters.”

  We drove down the gravel road, raising dust, then crossed a low spot that had flooded during the rain. There was mud splashed out on both sides.

  “Other trucks have been in here recently,” I said.

  “More than the burial detail?”

  I stuck my head out the window, saw water glistening on tire tracks. “More recent.”

  We drove through the woods into fields that must once have been full of cotton plants but were now overgrown with bramble and thistle. It was a deeply disturbing feeling to imagine the backbreaking hours that enslaved people had spent in those fields.