Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(51)

The hail-fellow-well-met expression melted from Carson’s face. “I am afraid I cannot help you there,” he said. “I know for a fact that Kay feared being ripped apart and dissected after her death. She stipulated that — ”

“Hold on,” Mahoney said. “‘Ripped apart and dissected’? How do you know that?”

“She told me so herself,” he said. “She worried about what the media might do with her mental illness and got a judge to agree to seal her medical and probate files.” Mahoney said, “Local judge?”

“State level.”

“We’ll have to see a federal judge, then,” I said.

We started to go, but Carson said, sounding pained, “Kay’s not going to get her wish, is she? Since it’s a murder case, once the files become part of the chain of evidence, they’re fair game, I suppose.”

“We’re not out to destroy Kay’s reputation if that’s what you mean,” I said.

“No, no,” he said. “My poor sweet cousin did a lot of that on her own, long before she inherited her grandma’s money and land.”

Before we could reply to that, there was a knock at the door, and Reggie gingerly put his head in. “Your four-thirty is waiting, Bobby.”

Carson looked at us. “Can’t put this one off, gentlemen. Can you let me know what the judge decides? I feel very protective of Kay and just want to make sure her wishes are taken into consideration.”

“Of course,” Mahoney said.

He shook our hands and we went out into the inferno of an Alabama August day. The rental car felt like the inside of a blast furnace until the AC kicked in.

“I’m not going to bother with the local judges,” Mahoney said, picking up his phone. “I’m going straight to the U.S. Attorney General’s office to get them to file for it in federal court here in Montgomery.”

He spent several minutes on the phone with an assistant U.S. attorney, and when he hung up, he said, “She says we’ll probably get it in the morning. Hotel? Shower?”

“Tempting, but we’ve got daylight left,” I said. “Let’s go find that plantation. Kay was always conflicted when she talked about her grandmother’s place. She’d light up about its beauty and then express remorse at the history of it. I think she told me she was giving the property to the state for a park when she died. I’d like to see it.”

“It’s also where she’s buried, isn’t it?”

“That too.”





CHAPTER 56





THE ROAD GOING OUT TO the Sutter family’s plantation was badly in need of repair after a spring of flooding. After the car bottomed out several times, we finally found the entrance to the property some seven miles east of the highway on the south side of the road. Crumbling brick pillars supported an iron gate with peeling paint.

The Sutter name was still discernible in the rusted ironwork, as was a faded No Trespassing sign on one pillar. The gate was chained and padlocked. Beyond it, a gravel road disappeared into the woods.

“Feel like a walk?” I said.

“In this heat?”

“I think we can lose the coats, ties, and starched white shirts this once, don’t you, Agent Mahoney?” He gave me a glum gaze for several seconds, then sighed. “J. Edgar will be rolling over in his grave.”

“I think that’s already happened a few times for a lot of different reasons.”

We both stripped down to our undershirts, suit pants, and shoes before getting out. It was past six and the heat had ebbed a little, but it was still ungodly hot and humid as we went to the gate. I was about to start climbing when Mahoney gave the padlock a shake.

It opened.

“See?” he said. “We don’t need to bother J. Edgar.”

We pushed open the gate. Mahoney drove through and I shut it, wrapped the chain and lock the way we’d found it.

“I hope no one decides to close that lock,” Mahoney said as I got in the rental. “We don’t have bolt cutters.”

We drove down the gravel road, raising dust, then crossed a low spot that had flooded during the rain. There was mud splashed out on both sides.

“Other trucks have been in here recently,” I said.

“More than the burial detail?”

I stuck my head out the window, saw water glistening on tire tracks. “More recent.”

We drove through the woods into fields that must once have been full of cotton plants but were now overgrown with bramble and thistle. It was a deeply disturbing feeling to imagine the backbreaking hours that enslaved people had spent in those fields.

The plantation house appeared. In its day, from the way Kay had described it to me, her paternal grandmother’s mansion must have been breathtaking, a sprawling antebellum manor finished in alabaster white and forest-green trim with a covered porch that wrapped around the entire house and a well-tended flower garden on the front lawn.

Now, however, the neglect showed everywhere. The alabaster finish was speckled and splashed with mold and peeling away in big strips. Parts of the porch roof had caved in. Kudzu choked the front columns and the entire porch railing. Tentacles and shrouds of the creeping vine had already reached the upper floors, where birds were flashing in and out of dark windows with broken, jagged glass.