The People vs. Alex Cross Read Free Page B

detonated several, killing multiple people before we cornered him in a vast abandoned tunnel system below Manhattan. He’d almost killed me, but I was able to shoot him first. He staggered away and was swallowed by the darkness before the bomb he wore exploded.
    Flash-forward ten years. My partner at the DC Metro Police, John Sampson, and I were helping out in a church kitchen. A dead ringer for Soneji broke in and shot the cook and a nun, and then he shot Sampson in the head.
    Miraculously, all three survived, but the Soneji look-alike wasn’t found.
    It turned out there was a cult dedicated to Soneji that thrived on the dark web. The investigation into that cult led me, in a roundabout way, to an abandoned factory in Southeast DC, where three armed people wearing Soneji masks confronted me. I shot three, killing two.
    But when police responded to my call for backup, they found no weapons on any of the victims, and I was charged with two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
    The elevator doors opened on the third floor of the courthouse. We headed straight to courtroom 9B, cut in front of the line of people trying to get seats, and, ignoring the furious whispers behind us, went in.
    The public gallery was almost full. The media occupied four rows on the far left of the gallery. The front row behind theprosecution desk, which was reserved for victims and victims’ families, was empty. So was the row reserved for my family, on the right.
    “Stay standing,” Marley murmured after we’d passed through the bar and reached the defense table. “I want everyone watching you. Show your confidence and your pride at being a cop.”
    “I’m trying,” I whispered back.
    “Here comes the prosecution,” Naomi said.
    “Don’t look at them,” Marley said. “They’re mine.”
    I didn’t look their way, but in my peripheral vision I picked up the two assistant U.S. attorneys stowing their briefcases under the prosecution table. Nathan Wills, the lead prosecutor, looked like he’d never met a doughnut he didn’t eat. In his mid-thirties, pasty-faced, and ninety pounds overweight, Wills had a tendency to sweat. A lot.
    But Anita and Naomi had cautioned me not to underestimate the man. He’d graduated first in his class from Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley and clerked at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals before joining the Justice Department.
    His assistant, Athena Carlisle, had a no less formidable background. A descendant of sharecroppers, Carlisle came from abject poverty in Mississippi and was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. She’d won a full scholarship to Morehouse College, graduated at the top of her class, and then attended law school at Georgetown, where she’d edited the
Law Review
.
    According to profiles of the prosecutors that had appeared the week before in the
Washington Post,
both Wills and Carlisle were ambitious in the extreme and eager to prosecute the federal government’s case against me.
    Why the U.S. government? Why the high-powered U.S. Attorney’s Office? That’s how it’s worked in Washington, DC, since the 1970s. If you’re charged with a homicide in the nation’s capital, the nation is going to see you punished.
    I heard shuffling and voices behind me, turned, and saw my family taking their seats. Bree smiled at me bravely, mouthed,
I love you.
    I started to say it back to her but then stopped when I saw a sullen teenage boy in khakis and a blue dress shirt with too-short sleeves enter the courtroom. His name was Dylan Winslow. His father was Gary Soneji. His mother had been one of the shooting victims. Dylan came up to the bar, not ten feet away from where I stood, pushed back his oily dark hair, and glared at me.
    “Frickin’ hell’s in session for you, Cross,” Winslow said, his smile smug and malicious. “Honestly, I can’t wait to see you go down in flames.”
    Ali jumped up and said, “Like your dad did?”
    I thought Winslow was going to