Cross Justice (4 page)

Dubious, I said, “Nobody lives here now?”

“My Karen and her family, but they’re down to the Gulf Coast least through the rest of the summer, caring for Pete’s mother, who’s in an awful poor way. I’ve talked to them. They want you to stay if you feel comfortable.”

I glanced at Bree, who I could tell was weighing weeks of hotel costs against a free place to stay, and said, “I’m comfortable with it.”

Aunt Connie smiled and hugged me. “Good; we’ll get you moved in soon as we get you fed. Who’s hungry?”

“I am,” Ali said.

“Hattie’s laying out a spread over to her house,” Connie Lou said. “Let’s get you somewhere you can wash up and we’ll have us a grand time and catch up proper-like.”

My aunt was such a force of nature that Ali, Jannie, and Naomi fell right in behind her when she rumbled off. Bree held out her hand to help Nana Mama and looked at me expectantly.

“I’ll be right along,” I said. “I think I need to go in there alone the first time.”

I could tell my wife didn’t quite understand. Of course, I’d told her very little about my boyhood, because, really, my life began the day Nana Mama took me and my brothers in.

“You do what you have to do,” Bree said.

My grandmother gazed at me evenly, said, “You did nothing to cause any of it. You hear? That was out of your control, Alex Cross.”

Nana Mama used to talk to me like this all the time in the first few years after I went to live with her, teaching me to divorce myself from the self-destruction of others, showing me there could be a better way forward.

“I know, Nana,” I said, and I pushed open the gate.

Walking up to the screened porch, however, I felt as strange and disconnected as I had ever been in my entire life. It was as if I were two people: a man who was a capable detective, a loving husband, and a devoted father who was heading toward a quiet little house in the South, and an unsure and fearful boy of eight trudging toward a home that might be filled with music, love, and joy or, just as easily, screaming, turmoil, and madness.

AUNT CONNIE WAS
right. I didn’t recognize the place.

At some point in the past decades, it had been gutted and the configuration of the bungalow totally changed. The porch was the only part I completely recognized. The entryway where we’d leave our shoes was gone. So was a half wall that used to divide the kitchen from the living area, where me and my brothers, Charlie, Blake, and Aaron, used to play and watch television on those occasions when we had one that actually worked.

The new furniture was nice and the flat-screen television large. The kitchen had new cabinets and a new stove, fridge, and dishwasher. There were more windows in there too, and the dim place where we’d eaten our meals at a dreary Formicatop table was now a bright and cheery spot with a built-in breakfast nook.

Standing there, I could almost see my mother on one of her better mornings, dressed in her threadbare robe but glowing like a beauty queen, smoking a filtered Kent cigarette, making
us waffles with sunny-side-up eggs on them, and singing along to Sam Cooke on WAAA 980 AM out of Winston-Salem.

… been a long time coming, but I know a change gonna come …

It was her favorite song, and she had an amazing raspy gospel voice developed in her father’s Baptist church. Hearing my mom sing in my head while I stood in the kitchen where she used to sing to us, I choked and then broke down crying.

I never expected it.

I suppose I’d put my mother away for so long in one of those boxes I keep locked in my mind that I thought I was long over the tragedy of her life. But obviously I wasn’t. She’d been smart, sensitive, and very funny. She’d been gifted with words and music. She could make up songs right off the top of her head, and on those rare occasions when I witnessed her singing in church, I swear to you, it was as if an angel possessed her.

But there were other times, too many times, when demons took her. She saw her own father commit suicide in front of her when she was twelve and she was emotionally crippled by it her entire short life. She found relief in vodka and heroin, and in the last few years of her life, I rarely remember her stone-cold sober.

I said that demons took her, but really, it was the memories festering in her drug-and-booze-addled mind that created the monster that she sometimes was late at night. From our beds, we’d hear her crying for her dead father, or screaming at him. On those nights, she’d get violent, break things, and curse God and all of us too.

All the children in an addict’s family play different roles and have different ways of coping. My brothers retreated into themselves when my mother was using and a danger to us. My job was to stop her from hurting herself and, later, to pick her
up off the floor and put her to bed. In the language of recovery, I played the roles of hero and caregiver.

Standing there, recalling all those times I’d tried to forget, I suddenly saw plainly that my mother had created me in more ways than the physical. From an early age, I’d dealt with chaos and chaotic people, and to survive, I’d had to swallow my fears and force myself to understand and deal with sick minds. Those hard-won skills had inevitably led to my calling in life, to Johns Hopkins for my doctorate in psychology, and then to police work. And for those reasons and others, I realized that despite all the craziness and the loss, I was grateful to my mother and blessed to be her son.

Wiping my tears away, I left the kitchen and went into the hallway that led to the bedrooms. When I was a boy, there were just two in the house, and we had a single sorry excuse for a bathroom. Recently, another bath had been added. The large room where my brothers and I slept had been split in two. There were bunk beds in both of them now.

Staring into my distant past, oblivious to any noises in the house around me, I remembered my father on one of his better evenings, sober and funny, telling me and my brothers about some trip he was going to take us on to hear jazz on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

Gotta have dreams, boys,
he’d always say before he turned out the lights.
Gotta have dreams and you’ve got to—

“Freeze!” a man shouted. “Hands up high where we can see them!”

I startled but raised my hands, looking over my shoulder and back down the hall into the kitchen. Two men in civilian clothes with police badges on lanyards around their necks were aiming pistols at me.

“ON YOUR KNEES,”
barked the taller and younger of the two, a lean, ropy African American in his early thirties.

The other plainclothes cop was Caucasian, fifties, a pasty, pock-faced man with a hank of dyed brown hair and a mopey face.

“What’s going on?” I said, not moving. “Detectives?”

“You are breaking and entering a good friend of mine’s house,” the African American cop said.

“This house belongs to Connie Lou Parks, my aunt, who let me in and who rents it to her daughter, my cousin Karen, and, I would guess, to your friend Pete,” I said. “I used to live here when I was a kid, and by the way, I’m a cop too.”

“Sure you are,” said the older one.

“Can I show you my creds?”

“Careful,” he said.

I reached to push back my jacket, revealing the shoulder holster.

“Gun!” the African American officer shouted, and he and his partner dropped into a combat crouch.

I thought for sure they were going to shoot me if I tried to get my ID, so I eased my hand away, saying, “Of course I’ve got a gun. I am a homicide detective with the Washington, DC, police department. And in fact, I have two guns on me. In addition to the Glock forty, I have a small nine-millimeter Ruger LC9 strapped to my right ankle.”

“Name?” the older cop demanded.

“Alex Cross. You?”

“Detectives Frost and Carmichael. I’m Frost,” he said as he and his partner straightened up. “So here’s what you are going to do, Alex Cross. Strip the jacket, right sleeve first, and toss it here.”

There was no sense in arguing, so I did as he asked and threw my light sports jacket down the hallway.

“Cover me, Carmichael,” the older cop said, and he crouched so his partner could keep me squarely in his field of fire.

They were conducting themselves by the book. They didn’t know me from Adam, and they were handling the situation the way any veteran cop back in DC, including me, would have handled it.

When Frost got to my jacket, I said, “Left breast pocket.”

He squinted at me as he backed up a few feet, still in that crouch, and fished out the folder with my badge and ID.

“Drop your gun, Lou,” Frost said. “He’s who he says he is. Dr. Alex Cross, DC homicide.”

Carmichael hesitated, then lowered his weapon slightly and demanded, “You have a license to carry concealed in the state of North Carolina, Dr. Cross?”

“I have a federal carry license,” I said. “I used to be FBI. It’s in there, behind the ID.”

Frost found it and nodded to his partner.

Carmichael looked irritated, but he holstered his weapon. Frost did the same, then picked up my jacket, dusted it off, and handed it to me, along with my credentials.

“Mind telling us what you’re doing here?” Carmichael asked.

“I’m looking into Stefan Tate’s case. He’s my cousin.”

Carmichael went stony. Frost looked like some bitterness had crawled up the back of his throat.

Frost said, “Starksville may not be the big city, Detective Cross, but we are well-trained professionals. Your cousin Stefan Tate? That sonofabitch is as guilty as they come.”

AS I WALKED
across the cul-de-sac on Loupe Street to the third bungalow, I was mindful of the unmarked police cruiser pulling out behind me, and I wondered about the strength of the case against my young cousin. I’d have to get Naomi to show me the evidence, and—

Aunt Connie’s animated voice came through the screen door, followed by the sound of women cackling and men braying over something she’d said. The breeze shifted and carried the mysterious and wonderful odors from the kitchen of my aunt Hattie Parks Tate, my late mother’s younger sister. I hadn’t smelled those scents in thirty-five years, but they made me flash on boyhood memories: climbing these same front steps, smelling these same smells, and reaching for the screen door, eager to be inside.

This house had been one of my refuges, I thought, remembering how peaceful and orderly it was compared to the routine chaos across the street. Nothing had changed about that,
I decided after peering in through the screen and seeing my family sitting around Hattie’s spotless house with plates piled high with her remarkable food, contentment on all their faces.

“Knock, knock,” I said as I opened the door and stepped in.

“Dad!” Ali shouted from a wicker couch, waving a bone at me. “You gotta try Aunt Hattie’s fried rabbit!”

“And her potato salad,” Jannie said, rolling her eyes with pleasure.

Hattie Tate bustled out of her kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron and beaming from ear to ear. “Land sakes, Alex, what took you so long to come see me?”

I hadn’t seen my mother’s sister in nearly ten years, but Aunt Hattie hadn’t aged a day. In her early sixties, she was still slender and tall with a beautiful oval face and wide almond-shaped eyes. I’d forgotten how much she looked like my mom. Long-buried grief swirled through me again.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Hattie,” I said. “I …”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, tearing up. She rushed over and threw her arms around me. “You’ve given me hope just being here.”

“We’ll do everything we can for Stefan,” I promised.

Hattie beamed through her tears, said, “I knew you’d come. Stefan knew too.”

“How is he?”

Before my aunt could answer, a man in his midseventies shuffled into the room with a walker. He was dressed in slippers, brown sweatpants, and a baggy white T-shirt, and he looked around, puzzled, then became agitated.

“Hattie!” he cried. “There’s strangers in the house!”

My aunt was off across the room like a shot, saying soothingly, “It’s okay, Cliff. It’s just family. Alex’s family.”

“Alex?” he said.

“It’s me, Uncle Cliff,” I said, going to him. “Alex Cross.”

My uncle stared at me blankly for several moments while Hattie held his elbow, rubbed his back, and said, “Alex, Christina and Jason’s boy. You remember, don’t you?”

Uncle Cliff blinked as if spotting something bright in the deepest recesses of his failing mind. “Nah,” he said. “That Alex just a scared little boy.”

I smiled weakly at him, said, “That boy grew up.”

Uncle Cliff licked his lips, studied me some more, and said, “You tall like her. But you got his face. Where he got to now, your daddy?”

Hattie’s expression tightened painfully. “Jason died a long time ago, Cliff.”

“He did?” Cliff said, his eyes watering.

Hattie rested her face against his arm and said, “Cliff loved your father, Alex. Your father was his best friend, isn’t that right? Cliff?”

“When he die? Jason?”

“Thirty-five years ago,” I said.

My uncle frowned, said, “No, that’s … oh … Christina’s next to Brock, but Jason, he’s …”

My aunt cocked her head. “Cliff?”

Her husband turned puzzled again. “Man, Jason, he liked blues.”

“And jazz,” Nana Mama said.

“He like blues most,” Cliff insisted. “I show you?”

Hattie softened. “You want your guitar, honey?”

“Six-string,” he said, and he shuffled on his own to a chair, acting as if no one else were with him.

Aunt Hattie disappeared and soon came back carrying a
six-string steel guitar that I vaguely remembered from my childhood. When my uncle took the guitar, fused it to his chest, and began to play some old blues tune by heart and soul, it was as if time had rolled in reverse, and I saw myself as a five- or six-year-old sitting in my dad’s lap, listening to Clifford play that same raucous tune.

My mother was in that memory too. She had a drink in her hand and sat with my brothers, hooting and cheering Clifford on. That memory was so real that for a second I could have sworn I smelled both my parents there in the room with me.