“No, they are not,” Naomi said. “The placement of those three pieces of evidence is illogical at best, especially since they were left by a so-called berserk killer. My client’s semen was clearly planted. So were the vodka, the meth, and the ID.”
My niece turned to face the bench. “In short, Judge Varney, the state no longer has a viable case against my client. I move for mistrial and release of Stefan Tate from custody immediately.”
The courtroom exploded.
Stefan rocked back in his chair, looking toward the heavens and hugging himself. Aunt Hattie started cheering and clapping. Pinkie, Nana Mama, and I joined her.
Judge Varney looked panicked when he whacked his gavel and called for order in his courtroom.
Bree tapped my elbow and held her iPhone in front of me, showing me riderless boxcars going through one of the railroad crossings south of Starksville. Then she showed me a picture of the same containers going through the crossing on the main Starksville road. Two riders were aboard.
“What—” I began.
Delilah Strong cried, “Judge, there remains other compelling evidence that links Mr. Tate to this murder.”
Naomi said, “Judge, it’s clear now that someone else killed Rashawn Turnbull and framed my client for the crime.”
“The defense offers no evidence of that at all,” Strong said. “Who does she think killed that boy?”
“That’s really not our concern,” Naomi said. “But we have a theory.”
“Alex, you have to see this,” Bree said, shoving the iPhone in front of me again. I glanced at the screen, saw a satellite view of train tracks by an industrial complex. I held up my index finger and then looked back to Naomi.
My niece glanced at me, and I nodded.
She said, “Judge, we have evidence that the meth planted in Mr. Tate’s basement is tied to a drug ring using the trains that pass through Starksville to distribute methamphetamine and other drugs up and down the East Coast. My client had growing suspicions about the freight trains, and we believe the drug traffickers killed Rashawn and framed my client for the murder to keep him from digging further.”
“This is ridiculous,” Strong said. “The defense has introduced no evidence of any such drug ring. Judge, you can’t—”
The rear doors to the courtroom were flung open with a bang.
Strong, Naomi, Judge Varney, the bailiff, the clerk, and many of the jurors gaped in disbelief and fear.
I twisted around in my seat to see what they were gawking at and got the shock of my life.
Palm Beach County’s Detective Sergeant Peter Drummond looked like he was out for blood as he pressed the muzzle of a sawed-off pump-action Remington twelve-gauge to the side of Marvin Bell’s head.
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“Nobody moves or this man dies!” Detective Sergeant Drummond roared, and he jerked at the rope he had tied around Bell’s neck and hands, which were horribly swollen and bruised. Several of Bell’s fingers pointed in directions they shouldn’t.
Spectators began to cry, panic, and push back toward the walls. Nana Mama squealed in fear beside me, and I held up an arm to shield her. Bree started for her backup pistol, but I said, “Don’t. I know this guy.”
Drummond shouted, “Unload your gun there, Bailiff, and put it on the floor. You. In the witness box. Same.”
Frost and the bailiff did as they were told.
Drummond scanned the room for threats, said, “You too, Chief Sherman, and you, Detective Carmichael. Primary weapons and backups on the floor.”
Sherman and Carmichael seemed shocked that the madman knew their names, but they did as they were told. Then Drummond marched Bell deeper into the courtroom. Marvin Bell looked more lost than frightened, shuffling forward, staring at his hands and quivering in pain.
As they got close, I stood up, said, “Sergeant, what are you doing?”
Drummond turned his scarred, expressionless face past Bree and toward me, said, “Something I should have done a long time ago.”
“C’mon, Drummond. You don’t want to do this.”
“You don’t understand, Dr. Cross. I have to do this.”
The sergeant pushed and dragged Bell into the well of the court. He glanced at Strong and Naomi, said, “Take a seat, Counselors.”
Then he motioned for Frost to get down, said, “This man wants to testify.”
The detective hesitated, but then climbed from the witness stand. Drummond said, “Sit there on the floor by the jury box.”
Frost did as he was told. The sergeant maneuvered Marvin Bell into the chair and got behind him, keeping the gun at his head and dropping the rope so it dangled off the back of the chair.
“Sergeant, whoever you are,” Judge Varney began, “and whatever problem you might have with Mr. Bell, this is not the way to address the—”
“With all due respect, Judge,” Drummond said, “we are no longer in a court of law. This is truth-seeking where the ends justify the means.”
Beside me, Bree typed on her phone and then held it up. I realized she was filming him. I looked over my shoulder and saw that Patty Converse and Pinkie Parks had gone wide-eyed.
What do we do? Pinkie mouthed.
“Not a thing,” I whispered, and looked at my aunts, who were sitting forward in their chairs and raptly watching Drummond.
The sergeant peered around the courtroom as if he owned it, then focused on the jury box, said, “Wouldn’t you just like to know what happened for once? No BS. The whole thing out in the open for you to judge?”
Despite their collective fear, several jury members nodded.
“I would too,” Nana Mama whispered. “You know him, Alex?”
“Met him in Florida,” I whispered. “He’s a cop.”
“What happened to his face?”
“First Gulf War.”
I knew the source of the scarring, but what had happened to Drummond in the few days since I’d seen him? Why in God’s name would he do something this rash? Destroy his career and reputation? His life?
I’d talked to Drummond about Marvin Bell and how frustrated I was at not being able to link him to the web of secrets we’d been uncovering in Starksville. And the sergeant had asked me about Bell several times. He’d done it on the phone that very morning. Drummond had obviously been close by when he called me. And Bell had never left the area. The sergeant had been holding him hostage somewhere, torturing him into a confession.
But why?
“We’ll start at the beginning, Marvin, way, way back, more than thirty-five years,” Drummond said. “You sold drugs in Starksville then, built a nice little business out of it, didn’t you?”
“No,” Marvin Bell said, sounding bewildered. “I—”
From out of nowhere, Drummond pulled out a small ball-peen hammer. He snapped it forward with power, speed, and accuracy. The round head of the hammer smashed into Bell’s swollen left hand, and he howled in agony.
“Try again, Marvin,” Drummond said, waving the hammer in Bell’s peripheral vision. “You sold drugs. You built a gang.”
“Yes,” Marvin Bell whimpered. “I sold drugs. I built a gang.”
“Here in Starksville?”
“Yes.”
“Name of that gang?”
“The Company.”
There it is, I thought. Bell started the Company. He’s Grandfather.
Drummond said, “You had a ruthless business model, Marvin. Got people addicted on freebies until they were like your slaves. You had people killed. You killed people yourself.”
“I never killed anyone,” Marvin Bell said, crying. “I keep telling you that and you don’t believe me.”
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“I don’t believe you,” Drummond said, wagging the hammer. “But we’ll come back to that. You admit you made a lot of money dealing drugs?”
Marvin Bell looked from his hands to the hammer, and nodded sullenly.
“You laundered that money
in legitimate businesses all around Starksville,” Drummond went on.
Looking as if his world was ending, Bell said, “Yeah.”
“But even after you’d bought the legit businesses, you didn’t stay away from the drug trade, did you?”
Bell set his jaw as if he were going to argue, but then he shook his head.
“Course not,” the sergeant said. “Moving coke and heroin and meth was just too lucrative. The money was almost too easy if you were smart about it. So one day you noticed the freight trains going back and forth all day and all night through Starksville, and thought, Why not use them? Why not expand? Am I summarizing your personal history correctly?”
Bell tried to move his hands and gasped before nodding.
“Yes,” Drummond said. “You built a distribution network that stretches from Montreal to Miami?”
Again, Bell said, “Yes.”
“And with all that money, you bought yourself an estate up on Pleasant Lake, a gorgeous beachfront place down on Hilton Head, and a condo in Aspen. Trips all over the world. Art collector. Isn’t that right?”
He nodded.
“Got your adopted son, Finn Davis, involved too.”
Bell swallowed, said, “Finn’s part of it.”
“Finn kill his ex-wife?” Drummond asked. “Sydney Fox?”
I heard a creak behind me as Pinkie sat forward.
Marvin Bell looked around the room as if desperate for someone to rescue him. Drummond lashed out again with the hammer, hit Bell’s right hand. Bell let out a scream that shook everyone in the room except Drummond, who seemed calm, clinical.
“Answer the question, Marvin,” the sergeant said. “Did Finn Davis shoot Sydney Fox?”
“Yes.” Bell moaned.
“Fucking knew it,” Pinkie said, and he smacked his fist in his palm. “That sonofabitch.”
“Why did he kill her?” Drummond asked.
“’Cause he hated her, and she needed killing.”
“Why did Sydney Fox need killing?”
“Having been married to Finn, she suspected too much,” Bell said. “And she was talking to Tate, who was poking around the train tracks. It was all no good, so he killed her.”
Drummond asked, “Did Sydney Fox know about your supplier?”
Marvin Bell groaned and shifted in his chair, said, “No.”
“Your distribution system got so big you were having trouble getting supply, especially methamphetamine, correct?” Drummond flipped the hammer in the air and caught it.
Marvin Bell flinched, said, “Yes.”
“So you found a secret partner right here in Starksville who could manufacture meth for you. In fact, a partner who could provide you with an almost unlimited supply and never get caught. Right?”
A secret partner? I thought.
“I called it,” Bree whispered, lowering her iPhone and pumping her fist.
“Called what?” I said.
Before she could answer, Drummond said, “Is that correct, Marvin?”
“Yes. I had a partner.”
Judge Varney had broken out in a sweat and looked agitated, and I feared he was about to keel over again from kidney-stone pain.
Drummond said, “You and your partner, you didn’t like Stefan Tate sneaking around, looking into things by the tracks, did you?”
“No.”
“You and your partner decided that Stefan Tate had to go.”
Marvin Bell moved his hands, winced, said, “I agreed Tate had to go. But I had no idea what he had in mind. No idea that he’d do all that to the boy.”
“You know for a fact your partner killed Rashawn Turnbull?”
Bell looked out into the spectators and seemed to be speaking directly to Cece Turnbull. “I know for a fact he killed Rashawn and framed Tate. He told me so himself afterward.”
“What did your partner say?” Drummond said. “Word for word.”
Bell swallowed and replied, “He said he’d gotten rid of two problems at the same time, Stefan Tate and his black bastard grandson.”
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For two seconds, the silence in that courtroom was so deep and complete you could have heard a mouse in the walls. I was tired, wrung out. It took me a full two seconds to figure out the killer, and then I twisted around, looking for Harold Caine.
Rashawn’s grandfather. Owner of a fertilizer company. Chemist, no doubt. Racist? Grandfather?
Caine’s expression seemed electrified by the charge. His body had gone rigid. His lips were peeled back. And he was clinging so hard to the bench in front of him that I thought his fingers might snap like Bell’s.
Caine’s wife stared at him like he was something unthinkable and cowered from his side.
Caine noticed, turned his head to her, said, “It’s not true, Virginia. He’s—”
“It is true!” Cece Turnbull screeched.
Caine’s daughter had twisted around and was looking past Ann and Sharon Lawrence to face her father two rows back. “You always hated Rashawn! You always hated that a nigger fucked your lily-white Southern daughter and left you with a living, breathing tarnish on the Caine family name!”
“No, that’s not true!”
Cece went over the back of her bench then, stepped up next to Ann Lawrence, and launched herself at her father. She crashed into him, slapping and scratching at his face.
“You treated my boy worse than dirt his entire life!” she screamed. “And you stole my Lizzie. Rashawn had as much of your precious blood as my Lizzie, and you cut it out of him with a pruning saw!”
Bree jumped up and went to Cece, who’d broken down sobbing as she feebly tried to continue her assault on her father. Bree pulled Cece off and held her while Caine slumped there, chest heaving, blood oozing from those scratches, looking around like a cornered animal at all the people in the courtroom watching him.
“None of it’s true,” Caine told them in a hoarse whisper. “None of it!”
“It’s all true!” Bell shouted from the witness stand. “You sick fuck. You deserve to burn in hell for what you did.”
The courtroom doors were flung open again. Two men and a woman, all wearing business suits, came in carrying pistols and badges.
The woman said, “My name is Carol Wolfe, FBI special agent in charge of the Winston-Salem office. Put the gun down, Sergeant Drummond.”
Drummond kept the shotgun to the back of Bell’s head, said, “I’m not quite done yet, Agent Wolfe. Mr. Bell here has one more thing to get off his chest.”
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Marvin Bell seemed genuinely puzzled, said, “I told you everything.”
“Not all of it,” Drummond said. “You said you’ve never murdered anyone in your life.”
“That’s a fact,” Bell said.
“Never smothered anyone—a woman, maybe?” Drummond said. “Thirty-five years ago?”
“No.”
“You were her drug dealer,” the sergeant insisted. “She was dying of cancer, and no one was paying you for the heroin her husband was using to ease her pain.”
Bell shook his head.
“You got her husband damn-near-overdose high on smack,” Drummond said. “And then you smothered her with a pillow while he watched, so numb he couldn’t stop you.”
Drummond was breathing hard. He said, “Then, for almost a year, you made him work for you, and finally, when he was no use to you anymore, you tied that man to your car with a rope just like the one around your neck here, and you dragged that poor bastard through the streets, called him a wife killer, a mother killer.
“You alerted the police, said he’d murdered his wife, and gave him to the young men who were already in your pocket. Officer Randy Sherman and Deputy Nathan Bean. You paid them to make it look like he tried to escape. Judge Varney, a young assistant district attorney at the time, was there too. They pushed that man to the railing, and he didn’t understand why they went back to the cruisers and then turned and pulled th
eir guns. Then they shot him, and he fell off the bridge and into the gorge. Isn’t that the way it happened, Marvin?”
Drummond had dropped the hammer and was holding the shotgun against Bell’s head so hard his hands were shaking.
“Yes, yes,” Bell whined. “That’s what happened.”
Judge Varney pounded with his gavel. “That is not true!”
Police Chief Sherman was on his feet, about to protest, but the FBI agent said, “Chief, you’re under arrest. And you too, Judge Varney.”
I don’t remember getting to my feet, only that I was, suddenly, and staring across the courtroom at Drummond as if down a vast tunnel of time.
“Who are you, Sergeant?” I said, realizing that Nana Mama was standing up beside me. “How do you know all these things?”
Tears streamed down Drummond’s expressionless face as he withdrew the shotgun barrel from Bell’s head and looked toward me and my grandmother.
“I know these things, Alex,” he choked out, “because in another lifetime, my name was Jason Cross.”
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Nana Mama gasped, reached for her heart, and toppled against me. Her frail ninety-pound body almost bowled me off my own liquid feet. I had to take my eyes off Drummond to regain my balance and hold her up.
“Is it true?” my grandmother whispered into my chest, as if she couldn’t bear to look Drummond’s way.
“That’s impossible,” Bell said, craning his neck to look at Drummond. “Jason Cross took a bullet, went into the gorge. He never came out.”
“Yes, he did,” said Pinkie, who’d also gotten to his feet. “My uncle Clifford found him down on the river that night. Nursed him back to health.”
“Is Clifford here in Starksville?” Drummond called to Pinkie. “I would sure like to see the second best friend I’ve ever had. Maybe take him to Bourbon Street like we always talked about.”
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