“If you were running a criminal enterprise, I imagine you would,” I said.
Bell flicked the coffee ground away, leveled his green eyes at me, and said, “If I were you, Detective Cross, I would not be casting aspersions that are unfounded. It looks bad. It looks like you are desperate. If I were you, I’d face the facts about your cousin, pack your bags, and leave the sonofabitch to his fate.”
“That’s not happening,” I said, standing. “Sorry to have taken your time.”
“Anything for the son of an old friend,” Bell said. “But you tell your niece there that if she tries to bring my name up in this trial in any way, I will surely sue her ass from here to Raleigh and back.”
Chapter
42
I remembered Bell’s words as Judge Varney gaveled the court session to a close at five thirty that Monday after four hours of testimony that made my cousin sound like a monster.
Detective Guy Pedelini had gone on the stand first. He’d testified about discovering the body and identified evidence that the district attorney wanted admitted. Chief among them was the semen sample collected off Rashawn Turnbull’s body. It matched Stefan’s DNA. The prosecution also introduced blood matching Rashawn’s that was found on the pruning saw discovered in my cousin’s basement.
Naomi did her best to get the sheriff’s detective to say these things could have been planted, but he was skeptical in the extreme, and the jury took note.
Even more damaging to Stefan’s case was the testimony given by Sharon Lawrence, a teenager I recognized as one of the Starksville girls Jannie had trained with the prior Saturday. On the stand, she was pretty, articulate, and devastating.
Strong began her examination of Sharon Lawrence by getting her to admit that she was ashamed to be there but determined to tell the truth “for Rashawn’s sake.”
The jury reacted sympathetically. I reacted sympathetically.
Sharon Lawrence had been in one of Stefan’s twelfth-grade gym classes. She said there was something between herself and my cousin right from the start.
“Coach Tate was always looking at me,” she said.
“Did you like that?” Strong asked.
Lawrence looked in her lap and nodded.
“Coach Tate make advances toward you?”
The girl nodded again, flushing and kneading her hands. “I knew it was wrong, but he was…I don’t know.”
“Smart? Good-looking?”
“Yes,” she said. “And he seemed to care about everyone.”
Stefan glared at a legal pad during this entire exchange, scribbling with a pen and shaking his head.
“He seemed to care about everyone,” Strong repeated.
“Yes.”
“But especially you?”
Lawrence said, “I guess so. Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing for a while. It was just like flirting with each other.”
“And then?”
“It went further,” she said quietly.
“When was this?”
“Like, a few months after Billy Jameson and Tyler Marin overdosed and died, and a week before Stefan killed Rashawn.”
“Objection!” Naomi cried.
“Sustained,” Judge Varney said. “The jury will ignore that.”
“So tell us what happened,” Strong said.
You could see Sharon Lawrence wanted to be anywhere but in the courtroom as she mustered up her energy and said that after the two overdoses, my cousin became obsessed with finding out who the drug dealers were.
“He talked about it in class,” she said. “Asking anybody who knew anything to come forward.”
“Did they?”
“I don’t know. And it didn’t matter anyway, it was all a bunch of lies.”
“Objection,” Naomi said.
“Overruled,” Judge Varney said.
Strong said, “Can you tell us why you think they were lies?”
“Because Coach Tate was the one dealing the drugs,” Lawrence said.
“Objection!”
“Your Honor, with the court’s indulgence, Miss Lawrence will explain the basis of her contention.”
“Proceed, but you’re on a short leash, Counselor.”
“What makes you think Coach Tate was dealing drugs?”
“He told me,” Lawrence said. “He showed me.”
“Where were you when this happened?”
“At his place.”
“How did you come to be at his house?”
“At school that morning, he’d asked me to stop by,” Lawrence said. “He said Ms. Converse would be down in Raleigh at a doctor’s appointment.”
I glanced over at Patty Converse, who looked stricken.
Strong said, “And Coach Tate showed you drugs?”
“Yes.”
“Did you do drugs with Coach Tate?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of drugs?” Strong asked.
Lawrence bit her lower lip, which was trembling. “I don’t know all of it. Cocaine for sure. And, like, maybe some meth. He called it a speedball. But I think he put something in my soda too.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I woke up a couple of hours later in his bed,” she said, looking at her lap again. “I don’t remember how I got there. But I was naked and…sore.”
“Sore where?”
“You know,” she said, and she started crying.
Strong approached the box, gave her a tissue, said, “You’re doing fine.”
Lawrence nodded, but she wouldn’t look up.
“Was the accused there when you woke up?”
“He came into the room.”
“Did he acknowledge having sex with you?”
“Kind of.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“He said we shared a little secret now. He said if we didn’t keep the secret, I could end up like Billy and Tyler.”
“The kids who overdosed?”
Lawrence nodded and broke down again.
After Sharon had composed herself, Strong asked, “Was the sex consensual?”
“No,” she said forcefully.
“But you’d gone to Coach Tate’s house. You’d done drugs with him. You’d flirted with him. Certainly you must have thought sex might occur.”
“Maybe I did. But I was never given the chance to back out or say no.”
“He just drugged you.”
“Yes,” Lawrence said, her shoulders trembling.
“And he raped you?”
“Yes.”
“How old were you when this happened?”
“Seventeen.”
“You report it?”
She hung her head, said, “Not at first, no.”
“How long did you wait until you reported the rape?”
“Like, the day after they arrested Stefan?”
“Seven days,” Strong said.
“I wish I had come forward straightaway,” Sharon Lawrence said, oozing pain and sincerity. “If I had, maybe that boy would be alive, you know? But I’d seen what Coach Tate was really like, and I was scared for my own life.”
Chapter
43
That evening, dinner at our house was somber and subdued. We were all there except for Naomi, who was working on her cross-examination, and Patty Converse, who’d been so upset by the testimony that she’d gone home alone.
Aunt Hattie looked equally crushed. She sat quietly with Uncle Cliff and Ethel Fox, who was exhausted from a day spent planning her daughter’s funeral but who had insisted on coming over to give her friend moral support.
Aunt Hattie needed it. The Raleigh stations were reporting on Sharon Lawrence’s testimony against her son, focusing as much on her story as on her panties from the day of the alleged rape. Lawrence claimed she hadn’t washed them because she’d been debating whether or not to turn Stefan in.
Naomi had objected to having the panties introduced as evidence, calling them “tai
nted, at best,” but Varney overruled her after Strong informed the court that a state DNA analyst would testify that dried semen and vaginal fluids found on the underwear belonged to my cousin and Sharon Lawrence.
Things looked bleak for the home team.
“Dad?” Ali asked when I went in to tuck him in for bed. “Can we go fishing sometime while we’re here?”
“Fishing?” I said, flashing on vague recollections of fishing with my father and my uncle Cliff when I was very young.
Ali nodded. “I’ve been watching those shows on the Outdoor Channel. And I met a kid today named Tommy. He says he goes up to Stark Lake fishing with his father. He says it’s fun. Lots of fish.”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t know a thing about fishing, but if that’s what you want to do, we’ll figure it out.”
Ali brightened. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow could be tough,” I admitted. “But let me find out what we’d need and where we’d go.”
“You could ask Tom’s father,” he said, yawning.
“If I see Tom’s father, I’ll do that,” I said, and I tucked the sheets up around his chin. “Love you, buddy. Have a good sleep.”
“Love you too, Dad,” he said. His eyes were already closed.
When I left the bedroom, Aunt Hattie looked at me and said, “Can you take Cliff over to the house? I’ll be right along.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Ready, Uncle Cliff?”
My uncle said nothing, just stared off into space. Bree held the door open for me, and I wheeled him down the short ramp to the sidewalk.
“Need help?” Bree asked.
“I got it,” I said. “Be back soon.”
Bree blew me a kiss and went inside. I rolled him to the street, saying, “You still like to fish, Uncle Cliff?”
It was like a lightbulb going on. My uncle went from confused to lucid in two seconds flat. “Love to fish,” he said.
“I heard it’s good up to the lake,” I said.
“Early mornings,” Uncle Cliff said, nodding. “You want to be by the stream inlet on the west shore. Not far from my cabin. You know it?”
“I seem to remember it,” I said. “Where else is the fishing good besides the lake?”
“Those big pools below the gorge are always good for trout early and late.”
“What big pools?” I asked.
“You know. Where your father swam.”
I stopped and came around the front of the chair. “What do you mean? Where did my dad swim?”
My uncle looked at me in renewed confusion, said, “In those pools. All the time when we was kids. Where is he? Jason?”
Aunt Hattie and Pinkie caught up to us. My cousin was carrying the remnants of a pie, and Hattie had two bags of chicken legs.
“Jason’s dead, Clifford,” Hattie said.
My uncle’s expression twisted into shock. “When did he die?”
Hattie said, “Jason died a long time ago. In the gorge.”
Uncle Cliff started to cry. “He was like my brother, Hattie.”
“I know, Cliff,” Hattie said, patting him on the arm and then looking at me and Pinkie, who was upset by the whole thing. “I don’t know what it is. He just gets confused and upset sometimes. I’m so sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I said.
She came around behind the wheelchair, said, “It’s probably better if I take him from here. Pinkie, can you bring the leftovers?”
My cousin nodded, and I stood there in the street looking after them until they’d gone inside and the lights flickered on.
Hoping to clear my head, get some perspective on the day, I texted Bree that I was going for a walk. Wandering down Loupe Street, I admitted that the evidence against Stefan felt overwhelming. My niece must have thought so too. She’d gone straight to confer with Stefan after adjournment. How was Naomi going to explain the semen? How was she going to cross-examine Sharon Lawrence?
Was Marvin Bell right? Was this a lost cause? Or were my aunts and Ethel Fox right? Were Bell and his adopted son, Finn Davis, involved? Had one of them killed Sydney Fox? Were they behind the criminal enterprise that Stefan suspected was ongoing in Starksville? How would I even go about answering any of those questions?
I still had no clear idea by the time I realized I’d walked all the way to the dark, arched bridge that spanned Stark River. Standing there, hearing the water roaring down in the gorge, I flashed on that dream I’d had of my younger self on the night my father died: running along the tracks through the rain, seeing the police cars with their lights flashing, and what I hadn’t told Nana Mama, what I hadn’t remembered until recently—my father out there on the bridge rail, the gunshot, and my dad falling.
I walked out onto the bridge to roughly where my father had been in my dream and looked down into the blackness, hearing the river at the bottom of the gorge but unable to see it.
A car pulled onto the bridge. The headlights swung over and past me. I ignored them, staring down into the void, and—
The car skidded to a halt right behind me. I pivoted in time to see three men jump out of an old white Impala.
They wore hoods and carried crowbars and a Louisville Slugger.
Chapter
44
I had no time to go for my backup pistol in the ankle holster. They were on me that fast.
The most important thing you can do in a situation like that is pay attention to the open space rather than to attackers or weapons. The more space you have or can create, the safer you are.
I had the bridge railing at my back and three men closing in on me trying to fan out, trying to limit my space. I moved hard to my right, along the rail and at an angle to one of the guys with a crowbar.
He grunted with laughter, raised his weapon, and made to club me down. I stepped forward off the curb with my right foot and spun my left foot back and behind me so the crowbar was no longer headed for my upper back but my face.
Before it could get there, I threw up my hands, reaching in and under the weapon’s arc to grab the guy by the wrist. With my left hand, I twisted the wrist and the crowbar away from me. With the heel of my right hand, I hammered up under the left side of his jaw.
He reeled.
I hit him again, this time with my fist, this time in the throat. There was a crunching noise and he dropped, gagging. I stripped him of the crowbar and took four steps backward, trying to create space again.
One of the other two, the one with the baseball bat, understood what I was trying to do. I looked over and saw there was another guy in the car, behind the wheel of the Impala. The driver threw the car in gear. Tires squealed at me at the same time the guy with the baseball bat jumped forward, the bat raised high over his head like it was an ax.
The Impala was going to mow me down. I jumped onto the oncoming car, rolled up on the hood. The driver hit the brakes. I slammed off the windshield and whipsawed back the other way.
The bat hit me hard in the midback and I was flung off the hood and onto the pavement. The wind was knocked out of me. The headlights blinded me.
But I still held the crowbar, and some deep instinct told me to look away from the headlights and down at the pavement.
“Fucker,” a man grunted. I caught a flash of shadow on the road a second before the boot caught me in the ribs.
I felt a cracking and gasped in pain.
“Cave his frickin’ skull in and be done with it,” snarled a second male voice behind the headlights.
I kept my head down, forcing myself beyond the pain, looking at the street surface. The second I caught a flicker in the shadows, I backhand-slashed out and up with the crowbar.
I felt it connect before I saw the knee buckling in silhouette. I felt the bat glance off the side of my head. It wasn’t a direct hit, but it was enough to make me dizzy and uncertain of what was up and what was down.
The guy I hit was yelling and clutching at his knee. He stumbled and fell against the hood of the car, screamin
g and clawing at his knee now.
Grunting in pain, still fighting for air, I thought: Two left. Other one with the crowbar. And the driver.
“Shoot him!”
I twisted my head, saw the driver climbing from the car, saw him holding a scoped hunting rifle. As he turned the gun my way, I flung the crowbar at him. It whipped sideways, end over end, and shattered the driver-side window, spraying the gunman with glass.
The rifle went off; the bullet ricocheted off bridge steel.
I heard tires squealing in the distance. Beneath the Impala, I saw headlights coming onto the bridge.
“We’re out of here!” the driver shouted, and he dove into the car.
Fearing he’d run me down as he escaped, I scrambled back toward the sidewalk. The one with the blown knee hopped around the car, jumped into the front seat. The guy with the other crowbar pulled the man I’d dropped into the backseat. I reached the sidewalk, swallowed the pain, and bent my body to get the Ruger from my ankle holster.
Doors slammed. Tires smoked. A pistol came out the window.
I drew mine and fired wildly at the Impala, spiderwebbing the rear passenger window as the car began to accelerate. The guy with the blown knee shot as they passed me. The bullet pinged off steel right by my head.
“Get the fuck out of our town, Cross!” one of them yelled as they sped away. “Or you’ll end up just like your cretin cousin.”
Chapter
45
A blue Dodge Ram pickup with Florida plates skidded to a stop beside me.
“Alex!” Pinkie yelled as he jumped from the cab.
“Help me up,” I said, gasping. “Get me out of here.”
“There were shots!” he said.
“Which is why you need to get me out of here,” I said, fighting to get to my feet. “I do not want to talk to the Starksville police.”