The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(40)
“You may proceed, Mr. Wills,” Judge Larch said, and she coughed.
The assistant U.S. attorney adjusted his pants, grinned sheepishly at the jury again, and then said, “Ms. Binx, what is it you do exactly?”
“Web design and coding,” she said.
“Good at it?”
“Very.”
“Well,” Wills said, and he smiled at the jury once more. “Do you remember the afternoon and early evening of March the twenty-ninth?”
“Like it was yesterday.”
The prosecutor led Binx through her version of events. She reported that she’d found me waiting for her outside her apartment door when she came in from a run, that I’d tracked her through a website dedicated to Gary Soneji that she’d designed, and that I asked her to take me to see her partner in the website, Claude Watkins.
“What’s your big interest in Gary Soneji?” Wills asked.
Binx shrugged. “It was a phase, like that woman who wrote the book where she visits all the graves of assassinated presidents? Kind of ghoulish, but interesting at the moment, you know?”
“So you’re not obsessed with Gary Soneji?”
“Not anymore. Seeing friends of mine killed for their intellectual interests soured me on it.”
“Objection!” Anita said.
“Sustained,” Judge Larch said. “The jury will ignore the last statement.”
Wills bowed his head, crossed to the jury box. “So you led Dr. Cross to an abandoned factory to see Mr. Watkins, isn’t that correct?”
Binx nodded and said that Claude Watkins and some of his friends had been using the old factory as an art studio and living space.
“Did you coerce Dr. Cross in any way to go find Watkins?”
She leaned forward to the mike. “I didn’t have to. He wanted to go.”
“But you wanted him there as well, correct?”
“Well, Claude did, that’s right.”
“Why’s that?”
“Claude’s an artist—visual and performance. He thought it would be interesting and telling to see what Cross would do if he were confronted with one Soneji after another.”
Under further questioning, Binx continued her tale in mostly accurate fashion until she had us moving deeper into the factory and reaching a large rectangular room. At that point, she began to lie through her teeth.
Wills said, “When you went inside, was Claude Watkins at the far end of that long room wearing the Soneji disguise?”
“Yes,” Binx said.
“Was Mr. Watkins armed?”
“No.”
“No nickel-plated revolver in his hand?”
“No. Claude had his hands open, and he turned his palms to show Cross.”
CHAPTER
53
I LEANED OVER to Naomi, whispered, “That is categorically false.”
My niece patted me on the arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll get our chance.”
Wills said, “What happened next?”
“Cross aimed his gun at Claude and told him to drop the gun and get down on the floor.”
“Did he?”
“He didn’t have a gun, but Cross didn’t seem to care. I knew he was going to shoot Claude, so I hit Cross’s gun hand. Claude took off and tried to hide.”
“What was Dr. Cross’s state before you hit him?”
“He was acting weird, creepy.”
“In what way?”
“Sweating, looking like he was loving the fact he was aiming down on Claude, you know, like he dug it.”
Wills crossed to a blown-up diagram of the factory floor and pointed at the far left end of the rectangle. “Watkins was here before he ran?”
“Yes, in front of that alcove.”
“What happened then?”
For the first time, Binx looked over at me. “Cross went crazy.”
“Objection!” Anita cried.
“Overruled,” Judge Larch said. “Continue.”
Binx testified that Virginia Winslow stepped out of the shadows of an alcove in the middle of the far long side of the factory room and that I then shot Soneji’s widow without provocation.
“Was Mrs. Winslow armed?” Wills asked.
“No way,” Binx said. “She hated guns.”
“Tell us why she was part of this performance in the first place.”
“Virginia told me that she couldn’t get away from Soneji’s legacy, so she’d decided to try to make art out of it, a bitter commentary, you know?”
“And Dr. Cross shot her?”
“Right in the chest. I couldn’t believe it. I started screaming, but he didn’t care. He just kept shooting, Claude, and then Lenny Diggs.”
“All of them unarmed?”
“Yes. And after he shot Lenny, he was swinging his pistol around and yelling for more.”
“What exactly was Dr. Cross yelling?”
“Like ‘Who’s next? C’mon, you bastards! I’ll kill every single Soneji before I’m done.’”
Wills looked at the jury. “‘I’ll kill every single Soneji before I’m done.’”
Juror five was shaking his head. Juror eleven was shaking hers.