The sixth bullet hit the cedar-shake siding a few feet from me. I tried to get a bead on him, but the car was gone.
Breathing hard from the adrenaline, I began to straighten out of my crouch when I saw a blond figure in running clothes sprawled at the bottom of the porch stairs, blood pouring from a head wound. There was no use even going down to check for a pulse. There was no doubt in my mind that—
“Sydney!” Patty screamed behind me. “No! No!”
She began to collapse. I twisted and grabbed her in my arms.
“Why?” Patty sobbed into my chest. “Why Sydney?”
I didn’t have the heart right then to tell her that it looked to me like a case of mistaken identity.
Chapter
18
Within fifteen minutes, Dogwood Road was blocked off with traffic cones and the duplex was surrounded by yellow tape. Crime scene techs were photographing the body of Sydney Fox. A crowd had gathered. An unmarked cruiser pulled up at the perimeter, and Detectives Frost and Carmichael stepped out.
“Great,” Naomi muttered.
“You know them too?”
“Frost and Carmichael,” she said. “They led the city’s investigation into Rashawn Turnbull’s murder.”
“Good cops?” I said, putting aside my first impressions of them.
“Reasonably smart, adequately trained small-town detectives,” she said. “They say they’re by the book, but I suspect they cut corners, play fast and loose with the facts sometimes. And they tend to jump to conclusions.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, and I waited for them to study the corpse.
Frost scratched at his acne-scarred nose, nodded at Naomi. “Counselor.”
“Detective Frost,” Naomi said. “This is Alex Cross, my uncle.”
“We’ve met,” he said without enthusiasm. He turned to me. “This is my case.”
“I’m on vacation,” I said.
“I’m saying that you will have nothing to do with this murder except as a witness,” the detective insisted. “Are we good on that right from the get-go?”
“Your town, your ball game, Detective Frost.”
Carmichael said, “What happened?”
Naomi, Patty, and I gave our accounts of the evening, including the light going out on the porch and the racial slurs we’d all heard just before the gunfire.
Frost’s expression soured, and he asked, “Sydney having an interracial relationship too?”
Patty frowned, said, “Not that I know of.”
“Then they were trying to kill you and they shot Sydney by mistake,” Carmichael said, relieving me of the burden of telling her. “Both of you blondes and all.”
Stefan’s fiancée took the news hard and looked sick to her stomach. “Oh God. I wish I’d never come to this town.”
“In the morning we’ll need you at the station to give sworn statements,” Frost told us. “In the meantime, you need to leave the premises. We’ve got more members of the crime scene team on the way.”
Patty said, “Can’t I stay here? In my house?”
The older detective said, “You won’t get much sleep.”
I said, “Come over to my aunt Connie’s. She’s got two extra rooms.”
Stefan’s fiancée looked too tired to argue. “Let me get a few things.”
“You’ll put a watch on my aunt’s place?” I asked the detectives when Patty and Naomi had gone back inside.
Frost said, “I can ask, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get it.”
“Budget cuts,” Carmichael explained.
Which meant Bree and I would have to take shifts watching the cul-de-sac. When Patty had thrown some things in a small bag, we skirted around the body of Sydney Fox. A coroner had a bright light on her, and a tech was taking pictures. It was only then that I realized she’d been hit in the forehead twice, two wounds three inches apart.
I remembered the pace of the shots, how quick and crisp they—
A male voice called out, “Dr. Cross?”
I slowed near Naomi’s car and saw a big, athletic guy in jeans and a black hoodie climbing from a gray Dodge pickup. He wore a badge on a chain around his neck, and he jogged over to us.
“Detective Guy Pedelini,” he said, smiling and extending his hand. “Stark County Sheriff’s Office. An honor to meet you, sir.”
“You too, Detective Pedelini,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Kind of outside your jurisdiction, aren’t you, Guy?” asked Naomi coolly.
Pedelini sobered, said, “Just paying my respects to your famous uncle, Counselor. But now that I’m here, can you tell me what happened?”
“A highly skilled rifleman in an old white Impala killed the wrong woman,” I said, and then I described what we’d heard yelled just before the shots.
The sheriff’s detective had gone stern, his full attention focused on me.
“Why do you say he’s highly skilled?”
“He was using a bolt-action rifle, not a semi or a pump, and he managed to put two rounds into Ms. Fox’s forehead before she hit the ground,” I said.
“A hunter,” Pedelini said.
“Or military trained,” I said. “Know any racists that fit the bill and own a beater Impala?”
The detective thought about that before shaking his head. “There are a couple of avowed racists around who drive beat-up old white cars and a fair number of decent hunters and ex-military types, but no one who’s capable of that kind of shooting. I mean, he’d have to have sniper training, wouldn’t he?”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“Why are you so interested in this, Guy?” Naomi said.
“Someone tries to kill a material witness in a heinous murder case that went down in my jurisdiction, I’m interested, Counselor,” Pedelini said.
“Why would you care if I was shot?” Patty Converse said. “I’m a witness for the defense. You think Stefan’s guilty.”
“I do,” Pedelini agreed. “I think he’s guilty as sin. But that doesn’t stop me from being concerned about the safety of everyone else. See, Ms. Converse, I don’t want there to be any doubt about this trial. I want the judge and jury to hear both sides fully and then deliberate and condemn your fiancé, put him in Central Prison over in Raleigh, and get him in line for a lethal injection.”
Chapter
19
It was past eleven when Naomi pulled up and parked in front of Aunt Connie’s bungalow. I climbed out, meaning to head for my old house and my family. But I saw that the lights were all out there. Bree opened the front door to my aunt’s place.
I’d called Bree within minutes of Sydney Fox’s death, but we’d agreed it was better that she stay where she was while I talked to the police.
Bree hugged me, kissed me, and said, “Your aunt figured you’d all be starving, so she’s been cooking and consoling.”
“Who’s she consoling?”
“Ethel Fox,” Bree said. “Sydney’s mother. She and Connie are friends.”
“How’s the mom taking it?”
“Disbelief. Devastation. Shock. Sydney was her only daughter. Her husband passed ten years ago, and her son lives out in California. I don’t know what she’d do if your aunts weren’t here.”
I put my arm around her shoulder, and we followed Naomi and Patty up into the house. Aunt Connie kept her home spotless, but it was by no means a cold or sterile place. The furniture was warm and cozy, and there were pictures of her and her friends and her children, Pinkie and Karen, everywhere. I couldn’t find one where my aunt wasn’t beaming or hugging someone.
Like I said, she never, ever met a stranger.
I could see Aunt Connie in the kitchen, wearing pink bunny slippers and a matching pink bathrobe and whisking eggs in a steel bowl. The air smelled of bacon, garlic, onions, and coffee. Suddenly I was ravenous and very tired. I wanted nothing more than to eat, then go next door and sleep.
Patty, Naomi, Bree, and I all went into the kitchen. Aunt Hattie was th
ere too, sitting at the table and holding the hands of an older white woman with wispy gray hair. Dried streaks of tears showed on her cheeks, and she seemed to be staring off into nothingness, unaware of us.
“Sydney was the sweetest little thing, Connie,” Ethel Fox said in a weak voice. “So pleasing when she was a girl.”
“I remember,” Aunt Connie said, nodding to us.
“She was finding herself, I think, after the divorce,” the older woman went on. “So happy, and looking forward.”
“You know that’s true,” Aunt Hattie said. “She was doing good. A daughter to be proud of.”
Patty swallowed hard and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Fox. Sydney was such a fine, fine person, I…”
The dead woman’s mother seemed to break from her trance. She turned her head slowly to look at Stefan’s fiancée, who was fighting back tears.
“The police said she was shot ’cause of you,” Ethel Fox said in a flat, grieving tone.
Patty’s hands flew to her mouth and she choked out, “I wish it had been me. I swear to you, I never…I loved your daughter. She was my best friend here. My only friend.”
Ethel Fox got up slowly, staring hard at Patty, and for a second I thought she might strike her. Instead, she opened her arms and embraced Stefan’s fiancée, who wept on her shoulder.
“I know you loved her too,” Ethel Fox said, rubbing Patty’s back. “I know you loved her too.”
“You don’t blame me? And Stefan?”
The old woman pushed away from Patty and shook her head. “Sydney believed he was innocent as much as you do. We talked about it just the other day. She said Stefan didn’t have the kind of heart to do something that dark to anyone, much less to a boy he cared so much about.”
Aunt Hattie fought not to break down.
Aunt Connie wiped her own tears on her forearm, said, “Ethel, you hear me now. Our nephew Alex here is gonna find Sydney’s killer, just like he’s gonna find Rashawn’s. You mark my words, he’s gonna make them pay. Isn’t that right, Alex?”
Every eye in the room was on me. In the short space of time I’d been in Starksville, the town had revealed dimensions more ominous than I remembered. Deep inside, I wondered whether I was up to the task of figuring out who killed the Turnbull boy and, now, Sydney Fox. But they were all looking at me with such hope that I said, “I promise you, someone will pay.”
Aunt Connie broke into her toothy grin and then poured the beaten eggs into a black frying pan with a hiss. “Sit down now, I’ll finish up.”
“Sydney was right,” Aunt Hattie said. “Whoever killed that boy had a dark heart, and my Stefan does not.”
I realized she was directing the comment at me. Had Naomi told her what I’d said earlier in the day, about owing my allegiance to the victims?
Before I could respond delicately, Ethel Fox said, “You ask me, there’s only one heart black enough around here to kill a boy like that. You ask me, that Marvin Bell’s involved somehow.”
The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
My aunts evidently could, though.
Hattie got a stricken look and turned her head away.
Connie rapped hard on the edge of the skillet with the wooden spoon, glanced at me, saw my confusion, and then looked to Sydney’s mother and warned quietly, “Ethel, you know you don’t want to be accusing that Marvin Bell of nothing unless you got fifty God-fearing Christians behind you saying they saw it too, in broad daylight and with their own two eyes.”
“Who’s Marvin Bell?” Bree asked.
My aunts said nothing.
“He’s slippery, that one, always in the shadows, never showing hisself,” Ethel Fox said. Then she pointed a bony finger at me. “And you know why your aunts ain’t saying nothing to you ’bout him?”
My aunts wouldn’t look at me. I shook my head.
“Marvin Bell?” Ethel Fox said. “Once upon a time, before he went all proper, he owned your daddy. Your daddy was one of his niggers.”
Chapter
20
The word silenced the room, and Bree’s face turned hard. So did Patty’s and Naomi’s.
You heard the word used every day on the streets of DC, one person of color to another. But hearing it from the lips of an old white Southern woman in reference to my dead father, I felt like she’d slapped me across the face with something unspeakable.
Her daughter was dead. She was distraught. She didn’t mean it. Those were my immediate responses. Then I noticed that my aunts weren’t as shocked as the rest of us.
“Aunt Hattie?” I said.
Aunt Hattie wouldn’t look at me, but she said, “Ethel didn’t mean to shame your father’s name or yours, Alex. She’s just telling it like it was.”
Pained, Aunt Connie said, “Back then, your father was Marvin Bell’s slave. Bell owned him. Your mother too. They’d do anything he asked.”
“’Cause of the drugs,” Ethel Fox said.
I suddenly felt so hungry, I was light-headed.
“You don’t remember Bell coming to your house when you was a boy to bring your mama or papa something?” Aunt Connie asked, spooning the eggs onto a plate. “Tall white guy, sharp face, slippery, like Ethel said?”
Hattie added, “All nice one second, meaner than a crazy dog the next?”
Something blurry, troubling, and long ago flitted through my mind, but I said, “No, I don’t remember him.”
“What about—” Aunt Hattie began, and then stopped.
Aunt Connie had fetched plates of potato pancakes, crispy maple bacon, and a mound of toast from the warming oven, and she set them and the freshly made scrambled eggs on the table. Naomi and I attacked the food. Stefan’s fiancée pushed at her eggs and bacon and worried a piece of toast.
I stayed quiet as I ate. But Bree asked all sorts of questions about Marvin Bell, and by the time I set my fork on my plate, stuffed to the gills and feeling a lot less light-headed and achy, there was a thumbnail biography of him developing slowly in my mind, some of it fact, but most of it opinion, rumor, conjecture, and supposition.
Slippery described Bell perfectly.
No one at that table could peg exactly when Marvin Bell took control of my parents’ life. They said he’d slid into Starksville like a silent cancer when my mom turned twenty. He came bearing heroin and cocaine, and he gave out free samples. He got my mother and a dozen young women just like her strung out and desperate. He hooked my father too, but not just on the drugs.
“Your father needed money for you boys,” Aunt Connie said. “Selling and moving for Bell made him that money. And like Ethel was saying, Bell had his hooks into them so hard, they were just like his slaves.”
Ethel Fox said, “Once, Bell even ran your daddy out of your house, tied him with a rope to the back of his car, and dragged him down the street. No one moved to stop him.”
Flashing on that memory of the boys being dragged on a rope line the day before, I gaped at her, horrified.
“You don’t remember, Alex?” Aunt Hattie asked softly. “You were there.”
“No,” I said instantly and unequivocally. “I don’t remember that. I’d…remember that.”
The very idea of it made my head start to pound, and I just wanted to go somewhere in the darkness and sleep. Both my aunts and Sydney Fox’s mother looked at me in concern.
“What?” I said. “I just don’t remember it ever getting that bad.”
Aunt Connie said sadly, “Alex, it got so bad, the only way your mom and dad could escape was by dying.”
Hearing that after so long a day, I hung my head in sorrow.
Bree rubbed my back and neck, said, “Is Bell still a dealer?”
They argued about whether he was. Aunt Hattie said that soon after my father died, Bell took his profits and went twenty miles north, where he built a big house on Pleasant Lake. He bought up local businesses and gave every appearance of a guy who’d straightened out his life.
“I don’
t believe that for a second,” Ethel Fox snapped. “You don’t change your spots just like that, not when there’s easy money to be made. You ask me, he runs the underworld of this town and the towns all around us. Maybe even over to Raleigh.”
I raised my head. “He’s never been investigated?”
“Oh, I’m sure someone has investigated him,” Connie said.
“But Marvin Bell’s never been arrested for anything, far as I know,” Hattie said. “You see him around Starksville from time to time, and it’s like he’s looking right through you.”
“What do you mean by that?” Bree asked.
Hattie shifted in her chair. “He makes you uncomfortable just by being near, like he’s an instant threat, even if he’s smiling at you.”
“So he knows who you are? What you’ve seen?” Bree asked.
“Oh, I expect he knows,” Connie said. “He just don’t care. In Bell’s kingdom, we’re nothing. Just like Alex’s parents were nothing to him.”
“Any evidence linking Bell to Rashawn Turnbull?” Bree said.
Naomi shook her head.
Patty Converse seemed lost in thought.
I asked her, “Stefan ever mention him?”
My cousin’s fiancée startled when she realized I was talking to her, said, “Honest to God, I’ve never heard of Marvin Bell.”
Chapter
21
I awoke the next morning to find my daughter, Jannie, at the side of my bed, shaking my shoulder. She had on her blue tracksuit and was carrying a workout bag.
“Six a.m.,” she whispered. “We have to go.”
I nodded blearily and eased out of bed, not wanting to wake Bree. I grabbed some shorts, running shoes, a Georgetown Hoyas T-shirt, and a Johns Hopkins hoodie, and went into the bathroom.
I splashed cold water on my face and then dressed, willing myself not to think about the day before and Marvin Bell and what my aunts said he’d done to my parents. Did Nana Mama know? I pushed that question and more aside. For a few hours, at least, I wanted to focus on my daughter and her dreams.