Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(63)

“Well,” Mahoney said, breaking into a smile. “The gang’s all here, aren’t they?”

“This is a private meeting,” Carson sputtered. “You can’t just barge in like this. You could have the decency to — ”

“Save it for your closing argument, Mr. Carson,” Ned said. “We’d like to ask you all some questions.”

“How long will this take?” Dr. Hicks said, looking at her watch. “I have rounds this morning and — ”

“Don’t worry,” I said, closing the door and taking a seat. “We called West Briar and told them you and Dr. Tolliver will both be delayed.”

“What’s this about?” Hicks said nervously. “I don’t understand.”

“I think you do,” I said. “I think it’s why you’re all here.”

“We were discussing taking on West Briar as a client,” Carson began.

“West Briar has been a client of this firm for twenty-five years,” Mahoney said. “Since the very first day the institution opened.”

“A client in other ways,” Tolliver said. “We — Dr. Hicks and I — have been discussing an expansion of our facility or a second one, and we need legal work done at the state level to make that happen in a timely and…”

Mahoney opened the file he was carrying and set two separate piles of documents on the table in front of the doctor. He sat down and stared at Tolliver, who’d gone silent.

They were all trying not to look at the documents, but four out of four stole glances at them as we waited and watched. It didn’t take long until Carson said, “I thought you were here to ask questions.”

I waited a beat, then said, “I get that there’s a wink-and-a-nod, good-ol’-boy way of getting things greased and done down here in Alabama. But we’re federal and we don’t take kindly to being shot at or to people trying to kill our witnesses.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Carson said. “What in Sam Hill are you talking about?”

Mahoney said, “We were attacked by heavily armed gunmen on the north point of the cove at the plantation three evenings ago. Althea Lincoln was badly wounded and would have died if Dr. Cross had not been able to get her to the hospital.”

“Wait!” Dr. Hicks said. “We haven’t heard a thing about this!”

“Because we did not want you to hear about it,” Mahoney said. “Althea’s in a hospital in Florida under FBI protection.”

Carson said, “Well, we had nothing to do with you getting shot at and Althea getting wounded. I think this is her past catching up with her. Her family has been involved in drug dealing and other criminality for generations.”

“She said you’d say that. She said a lot, actually.”

Dr. Tolliver started to get up. “I see no connection whatsoever between the affairs of West Briar and this shooting event, so I am leaving.”

Mahoney put on his angry face and said, “Sit down, Doctor, or you will have no chance of seeing life outside prison walls for decades.”





CHAPTER 71





THE PSYCHIATRIST ACTED LIKE HE’D been gut-punched. He sat back down, saying, “Prison? I … I believe I want an attorney present.”

“I am an attorney,” said Nina Larch, who’d been quiet up until now. “I advise you not to say another word, Dr. Tolliver.”

“Then I will,” I said, gesturing across the table at the two piles in front of Mahoney. “It took five agents from the local office a lot of hours to help us run down what we needed, but there it is. The weight of evidence against you.”

Dr. Hicks stared at the documents like they could damn her, but Carson had not lost his cool. “I think this is a stunt.”

Mahoney slid the first pile to me.

I spun it around in front of me. “Thanks to Ms. Larch’s fine assistant, we have the letters that Kay Willingham sent to Ms. Larch to amend her will the last two times. And we have the documents authorizing Mr. Carson to conduct the timber sale on the plantation. And thanks to Kay’s medical record, we also know the time periods when she was a patient at West Briar on powerful antipsychotic drugs that left her incompetent to make sound legal decisions.”

Mahoney said, “Isn’t it interesting that they overlap? The letters amending the will five years ago and twenty months ago were all signed and dated when she was at West Briar. So were the timber-sale documents.”

I said, “The least you could have done is postdate the letters. But you must have thought, Who’s going to try to match up dates on a legal document with time spent in an ultra-secretive, ultra-exclusive psychiatric facility? ”

The junior attorney, Nina Larch, said forcefully, “I am not a part of any fraud. I had no idea whatsoever that Kay Willingham was at West Briar when she wrote those letters. They all bore a Montgomery postmark on the envelopes and a Montgomery notary’s seal and signature on every letter.”

“We saw them,” Mahoney said. “We called the notary, who’s retired and living down on the Gulf now. She said Mr. Carson sent her up to West Briar multiple times to get Kay Willingham’s signature on documents. She said you were there once or twice, Dr. Tolliver, and you too, Dr. Hicks.”