Deadly Cross

by Patterson, James

  He looked up at us, adjusted his glasses. “Don’t you guys make appointments?”

  “Not as a rule,” Mahoney said.

  He sighed. “Bobby’s not around. He’s at a hearing until eleven.”

  “That’s okay, we’re here to see Nina Larch,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, brightening. “She just came in.”

  A few minutes later, a woman in her mid-forties with a bad slouch came down the circular staircase. She looked very unsure of herself.

  “Ms. Larch?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re with the FBI,” Mahoney said, and we showed her our credentials.

  “Bobby said you stopped by yesterday. How can I help?”

  I gestured toward the conference room. “Is it empty?”

  “Until ten,” Reggie said.

  We went in and Larch shut the door. “If it’s about the will or any of the probate, I can’t talk about it unless there’s a court order rescinding the seal.”

  “We’re working on that,” Ned said. “But for the moment, we’re interested in what you can talk about. Kay’s earlier wills and testaments.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “They’re considered null and void and therefore not subject to the seal,” I said. “So you can talk about them.”

  She thought about that for a few moments. “That’s correct.”

  Mahoney showed her the twenty-month-old will that had the land being sold to charities and then the five-year-old will that had the plantation going to the state for a park.

  “Can you say which option is in the actual will?” Ned asked.

  She shook her head. “Sealed.”

  “Okay, why did she change her will from giving the land to the state to selling it for charity?”

  The lawyer looked blankly at the table and frowned. “I can’t say that Mrs. Willingham ever mentioned specifically why she made that decision. I received a formal letter from her announcing her intentions, and I followed them.”

  “And the same thing happened when she changed the will more recently? You received a formal letter?”

  “Duly notarized.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Was she still paying for all of Napoleon Howard’s legal bills in the most recent will?”

  “That I can answer: No. Mr. Howard had a heart attack and died in prison shortly before it was revised the final time.”

  The door opened, and Bobby Carson stepped inside with a shark smile on his face.

  “You’re back!” he said with feigned enthusiasm. “And I see you’ve met Ms. Larch. I hope she’s filled you in.”

  “Only on what I was allowed to discuss outside the sealed material.”

  “We were talking about Kay’s wills,” Mahoney said. “How they changed so often.”

  Carson glanced at Larch and then sat down, looking uncomfortable. He stared at his phone and said, “Yes, my cousin could be impetuous and mercurial.”

  I said, “We went up to the Sutter plantation yesterday and took a look around. Seems like whoever inherited it is going to take out most of the timber.”

  “You went in without a search warrant?” Carson said. “Are you kidding me?”

  Mahoney said, “Gate was open and we wanted to see the most important remaining asset our victim had when she was murdered.”

  “Who controls it now?” I asked. “And when did they get it?”

  Both attorneys looked at each other. Carson closed his eyes and said, “You see the bind we are in — I am in — because of the… oh, the hell with it.”

  He opened his eyes, looked at Larch, and said, “If it comes to an ethics violation, I’ll take the heat for breaking the seal, Nina.”

  Then he gazed at us each in turn and said, “I had no idea.”

  “That is correct,” Larch said. “He absolutely did not.”

  “Out with it,” Mahoney said.

  Larch said, “Shortly after the twenty-month-old will was filed — I can get you the exact date — Mrs. Willingham wrote me a notarized letter authorizing me to change the will yet again. This time the beneficiary of the plantation was Mr. Carson.”

  He held his hands up. “I had zero idea until I saw the new will. I thought it was going to the state.”

  “That is true, he did not know!” Larch said. “Kay — Mrs. Willingham — she swore me to secrecy in the letter. She said she’d had another change of heart about the land and thought her only living relative should decide what to do with the plantation, with the bulk of her estate going to charity.”

  Carson said, “Gentlemen, I know this has to look funky.”

  “In the extreme,” I said. “How long ago was this?”

  “Eighteen months?” Larch said.

  “And you never told Mr. Carson?” Mahoney asked her, sounding skeptical.

  “I take my job seriously. I said nothing to anyone about any of the changes.”

  “Until when?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When did you tell Mr. Carson about his inheritance?”

  “Later on the day I heard she died, after I notified the court clerk and confirmed that probate was duly sealed per her wishes. I walked into Rob’s office to express my condolences. He was shaken by her death. I mean, his last living relative. Then I told him about the inheritance.”

  I said, “And what was Mr. Carson’s response?”

  “He was so shocked he almost missed his chair sitting down, and then he kept looking at the will to make sure I was right.”

  “I told you I didn’t believe it,” Carson said. “I still don’t.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “You move pretty fast, then.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We saw all the timber up there already marked for logging.”

  He held up his hands. “That was Kay’s decision over a year ago.”

  “Also true,” Larch said. “She needed to raise cash for reasons that were not made clear to me. I have the documents authorizing the timber sale with her signature notarized on all of them.”

  “Where will the proceeds of that sale go now?” I asked.

  “To the charities stipulated in the will, I suppose,” Carson said. “Someone smarter than me will have to figure that out.”

  “We’d like to see those documents,” Mahoney said.

  “You don’t believe us?” Carson said.

  “Trust but verify, Counselor. Especially since someone took a shot at us near that cove last evening and a truck ran us off the road from the plantation. The government frowns on people trying to kill federal agents twice in one day.”

  “Whoa, wait a second there, Special Agent Mahoney,” Carson said, hardening. “I have no idea who the truck belonged to, but that was probably crazy Althea taking a potshot at you.”

  “It looked like an African-American male,” I said. “Lean. Bald. Hunting rifle.”

  He nodded. “That’s Althea Lincoln. Nutcase artist who’s taken a vow of silence for… anyway, she thinks she owns the north point of that cove, but she does not. She got Kay to sign some shaky title-transfer document when Kay was at West Briar the last time. There isn’t even an address on the document for her, which is illegal. I predict it won’t hold up in court.”

  “Was Kay aware of this?”

  “I doubt it. She was totally out of it on antipsychotics when she signed that thing.”

  Larch said, “I found out about Ms. Lincoln’s transfer filing only last week, when probate began.”

  “We’d like copies of all the documents you’ve mentioned,” Mahoney said. “It saves us all the hassle of a court order.”

  Before they could answer, Mahoney’s phone began to ring and buzz with an alert. He pulled it out, stared at the screen, and said, “We’ve got the go-ahead to look at her medical files.”

  Sounding discouraged, Carson said, “Whatever you find in there, please be kind to Kay. She deserves that much in death.”

  CHAPTER 62

  WE RENTED A NEW CAR, and as Mah
oney drove us north to West Briar, I went through my notes on the conversation.

  “You believe them?” Mahoney asked.

  I looked up from my notes about Napoleon Howard. “Like you said, trust but verify. Kay could be fickle, and she did suffer from mental illness, but something about it just seems a little off.”

  “I hear you.”

  I did an internet search on the dead prison inmate and read out loud what I’d found to Mahoney while he drove. Howard was forty-nine when he died at the state penitentiary at Hunts-ville after spending more than half his life on death row. He had made multiple appeals. All were denied.

  Almost thirty years prior to his death, Howard was arrested, tried, and condemned for the savage murder of twenty-three-year-old Jefferson Ward in what the state said was a drug-fueled dispute over profits. Howard had steadfastly maintained his innocence, said Ward was his best friend, his idol, and that he would never have killed him. He claimed he was being framed.

  But eyewitnesses put Howard at the scene the evening of the murder, and police found blood and fingerprint evidence that put his hand on the murder weapon, a nine-inch buck knife that was used to decapitate Ward after his death.

  I read out loud: “‘Due to the viciousness of the crime, J. Walter Willingham, the prosecutor assigned to the case, filed for special circumstances and sought the death penalty, which he got.’ And then after sentencing, Willingham said, ‘This punishment fits the crime. That’s the way it should be with animals like Mr. Howard.’ ”

  Mahoney turned the car into the winding drive that led up to the psychiatric facility. He said, “And yet Willingham’s ex-wife came to believe that Howard did not commit the crime. How did that happen?”

  “And why did she even care in the first place?” I said. “Who got her on Howard’s side? She told me he wrote her letters. Did we ever find any in her house?”

  “Letters from death row? No, I don’t remember seeing anything like that on the evidence manifest.”

  We went inside the building, found Abigail, the same cheery receptionist with the ice daggers for eyes, and told her we wanted to see Drs. Nathan Tolliver and Jeanne Hicks.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Abigail sniffed. “They’re making rounds.”

  Mahoney said, “You like your computer, Abigail?”

  She craned her head around at the monitor. “I do. Brand-new.” He held up a piece of paper and pressed it to the glass that separated us. “This is a federal order. We want to see Tolliver and Hicks and all documents pertaining to Kay Sutter Willingham now or I will bring in an army of FBI agents and they will take your brand-new computer and every other computer in this place along with all the records.”

  Abigail pulled back. “You can’t do that. We have patients.”

  “Watch me,” Mahoney said. “I’m giving them five minutes.”

  Four minutes later, a flushed Nathan Tolliver ran to the security door and motioned us in, breathing hard. “Do you have to threaten people like that?”

  “If I’m not getting what I want when I want it, yes.”

  “The files are being gathered, and Dr. Hicks is just finishing up,” he said. “May I see the court order?”

  Mahoney handed it to him. He studied it, his lips moving, while we walked.

  “Everything look right?” I asked when we arrived at his office.

  “Appears so,” he said, handing the order to Ned. He gestured toward the office. “Please.”

  We entered. A few moments later, his secretary came in holding several files. She was followed by Dr. Hicks.

  “There’s a lot to digest,” Tolliver said. “We’re here to help.”

  “And we appreciate it,” I said.

  The secretary put two files down in front of us. I flipped one open. Ned opened the other. I scanned the first few pages, recognizing them as much the same as the file the vice president had shown us. I said, “You believed Kay Willingham’s problem was largely chemical.”

  Dr. Hicks nodded. “She’d go off her meds and within weeks, she’d have a crash.”

  “What were the triggers for her going off the meds?”

  “Usually a traumatic incident.”

  “Such as the death of her mother?”

  “That occurred shortly before she checked in last time, yes.”

  Ned said, “Big mom issues?”

  Hicks glanced at Tolliver, who was listening intently. She said, “She had all sorts of issues, some of which included her mother. But then again, I’d hear about them when she was fragmented mentally. One day her mother was a saint and her father her best friend. The next she’d claim her father was a racist who killed black people and that her mother was a willing accomplice and so was half of Montgomery and on and on, all the way to the White House and back. It was incredibly paranoid, delusional, and hard to follow.”

  “And the parents?” Mahoney asked.

  Tolliver said, “Both her mother and father had deep local roots, money, and land going back generations. The dad was a city father in Montgomery. Her mother hosted charity balls.”

  “When Kay was here, even in her fragmented state, did she ever talk about Napoleon Howard?”

  CHAPTER 63

  DR. HICKS HESITATED, THEN SAID, “She believed he was innocent, framed for murder, but she couldn’t prove it. She obsessed on his case, as a matter of fact.”

  “Any reason for her interest and belief in his innocence?”

  Tolliver said, “He wrote her. I think they carried on a correspondence.”

  “That’s right,” Dr. Hicks said.

  I said, “In the file, there’s not a lot of narrative about her state of mind and not a lot of history about her earlier stays here.”

  Dr. Hicks smiled. “There’s not a lot of narrative because we are psychiatrists, not psychologists, Dr. Cross. Whatever Kay’s issues were, as far as we could tell, her psychiatric challenges were largely chemical. It’s the population we serve.”

  “And earlier files we have to shred after seven years,” Tolliver said. “That’s the law.”

  “Of course,” I said, because I had to do the same with my client files. I began wondering if this had been a wild-goose chase, coming down to Alabama, sticking our noses in Kay’s past because of Higgins’s dying words.

  While Mahoney determined how Kay paid for her stays at West Briar, I went back to her medical file and started going through the pages again, deeper this time. I found the intake form for her most recent stay at the facility. Near the bottom, I saw a scrawled notation I must have missed in the vice president’s copy of the file.

  Patient friend AL says patient state deteriorating rapidly since she went off meds while dealing with two deaths, mother and close friend.

  Two deaths? I thought. Who’s the close friend?

  Mahoney said, “We can keep this copy of the file?”

  “Federal judge says you can,” Tolliver said. “I hope we’ve been of some help.”

  I was going to ask them about the two deaths and then decided not to. In the same way I’d felt something off about Bobby Carson and Nina Larch, there was something a little shifty about the doctors. Or at least Tolliver. He struck me as a man who was hiding something.

  Outside, I tore off my jacket and told Mahoney my feelings about Tolliver.

  “Could be,” Mahoney said, opening the front door of the car to let the heat out. “There was nothing in that file we haven’t seen before.”

  “Not true. There was something I didn’t notice in Willingham’s copy,” I said and I told him about the notation on Kay’s intake form. “I think AL is Althea Lincoln. She brought Kay to West Briar the last time.” Ned started the car and fired up the AC. “The same one who shot at us?”

  I nodded. “She told the admitting nurse that Kay had been deteriorating after going off her meds as the result of two deaths, her mother and a close friend.”

  “You have an address for Ms. Lincoln?”

  “I do not, and she’s not listed any
where online.”

  “Then how do you propose to find her?”

  “Go for a swim later?”

  CHAPTER 64

  AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME in Washington, Bree Stone was close to losing her mind with boredom after just a handful of days away from the chief of detectives job.

  She had gotten a deeper appreciation for just how creative a cook Nana Mama was by working with her in the kitchen every day. And she enjoyed being home when Ali and Jannie returned from school, which had just started up again.

  But most of the time she felt caged. She’d talked to Alex about it after he’d told her about being shot at and run off a road in rural Alabama. He said the caged sense was her feeling anxious about what came next.

  That was true. Bree had been trying to envision a different life for herself during her daily runs but had not come up with one that excited her deep in her gut. And at this stage of the game, she’d decided that was the minimum she was willing to settle for.

  “You’re thinking about going back, aren’t you?” Nana Mama said as the midday news played on the screen on the counter.

  “Not if it’s more of the same,” Bree said. “I do love certain aspects of my job, but I despise others. If I could stay with the roles I love and delegate the others, I’d consider it. But only if I got that in writing.”

  “Smart lady. I don’t count on much if I don’t see it spelled out and signed.”

  Both of them heard a crash in the basement.

  The kids were at school. Alex was still in Alabama. Bree went to the hall closet to retrieve her backup weapon.

  Nana Mama had an iron skillet in one hand when Bree returned.

  “Hear anything?” Bree whispered.

  “No, you want me to call 911?” Nana Mama said.

  Bree toed off her sandals. “I want you to turn down the television as I open the door. When I start to close it, raise the volume back to normal.”

  The old woman’s eyes widened at the sight of the pistol, but she lowered the skillet and picked up the remote with her other hand. Bree nodded and eased open the door as the volume dropped on the news.