Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(78)

CHAPTER 89





VICE PRESIDENT WILLINGHAM’S BROW FURROWED after we’d told him that Kay’s father had ordered the murder of Jefferson Ward and the framing of Napoleon Howard.

“Roy Sutter?” he said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, my late ex-father-in-law might have been a racist but I can’t believe he’d — ”

“Why not?” Mahoney said. “He put his daughter in a psych ward and had her doped to the gills, and then he sent her to Switzerland for years to keep her and Ward apart.”

“Why have Ward killed, then? As you said, Kay had been in Switzerland for nearly six years by that time. She had a life over there.”

I said, “Kay was coming home, returning to Montgomery because her grandmother was terminally ill with cancer. And she was going to reunite with Ward. She told her father as much in a letter two months before Ward was killed.”

“Says who?” Barnes said. “Althea Lincoln?”

“No,” I said, flipping my file open. “Kay’s letter states it clearly.”

“You have the letter?” Willingham said, shocked.

“Mr. Vice President,” his chief of staff said. “I don’t like where this is — ”

“We have a copy of it, sir,” I said, pushing the document to Willingham.

He said, “And where did you find this letter Kay allegedly wrote?”

Mahoney said, “In a storage unit in Montgomery. With your old files from the Ward trial, sir. You must have left them behind when you ran for Congress.”

Willingham stared at Ned and me, blinking, then he put on reading glasses and scanned the letter and the envelope Mahoney slid across to him.

Barnes shifted in her chair, said, “Mr. Vice President — ”

“Give me a damn minute, Claudette,” Willingham said, his eyes on the letter as he read and reread it. After a moment, he lifted his head. “I can tell you, gentlemen, I have never seen this before in my life. And you say it was found in my trial files? That is impossible. If authenticated, this letter might have been exculpatory at trial.”

“Exactly, sir,” I said.

“Stop!” Barnes said. “This conversation is over, Mr. Vice President!”

Willingham glanced in bewilderment at the letter again and then at her. “Why?”

“Because I am also serving as your counsel here, sir,” Barnes replied, agitated. “Whatever that letter says, they found it in your files and they are, in effect, accusing you of withholding evidence in a capital crimes case, a violation of Napoleon Howard’s constitutional rights as well as a gross obstruction of justice.”

The vice president blinked again and shook his head. “But Claudette, I have a near-photographic memory, and I have honestly never seen this letter before. And I remember going through those trial boxes before I had them moved to storage. There was an index of everything. I would have seen this in the index or in the evidence log, and I didn’t.”

Mahoney cleared his throat. “I never said the letter was in your files, sir. We said the letter was with your boxes in the Carson and Knight storage unit. But the files that contained the letter and other documents were markedly different than yours. They were light blue and had a different labeling and coding system.”

“Whose files were they, then?” he demanded. “Who did they belong to?”

Mahoney and I turned our full attention on Barnes, who was staring at us like we’d morphed into a firing squad.

“They belonged to Claude Knight, sir,” I said. “Your chief of staff’s late father.”





CHAPTER 90





CLAUDETTE BARNES’S LIPS BARELY TREMBLED as she said softly, venomously, “How dare you impugn the reputation of my father. He was one of the finest — ”

“— liars, cheats, and legal con artists Montgomery has ever known,” Ned Mahoney said. “At least, that’s his reputation among people old enough to remember him in his early days. ‘A bag man’ was how some described him.”

“Corrupt,” I added. “A man without a conscience. A man willing to sell his soul.”

Barnes’s face flushed and she shouted, “Do not talk about my daddy like that! He was a good man and I’m not listening to any more of this.”

She got to her feet. Willingham put his hand on hers and said, “Sit down, Claudette. You’ve said yourself he was a lousy lawyer.”

“He was not a criminal,” she said, sitting down, not looking our way. “I went through his files before he died and he was not a criminal. I would have seen evidence of that and I did not.”

“Why did you go through his files?” I asked.

“It’s what you do when your father has died,” she said.

“Except you went through the files before he died,” I said. “We’ve seen the sign-out sheets. Why before?”

Barnes shook her head. “I don’t remember it that way.”

“Your sister remembers it that way,” Mahoney said. “She says a week after your father’s first stroke, she overheard him ordering you to go through his old files and destroy anything that linked him to any criminality.”