The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(41)

Wills rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them and said, “Thank you, Ms. Binx, that must have been difficult. Your witness, Ms. Marley.”





CHAPTER


54


ANITA HAD BEEN scribbling notes on her legal pad. She looked up and said, “Your Honor, the defense asks the Court’s leave to delay our cross-examination of Ms. Binx pending an ongoing line of inquiry we are following.”

“An ongoing line of inquiry?” Wills asked.

“Right,” Anita said.

Judge Larch didn’t like that. “How much of a delay are you asking for?”

“I would think tomorrow afternoon would work, Your Honor.”

Larch got a sour look on her face, but then seemed to think of something that brightened her mood. She said, “Ms. Binx, you are excused for the day. Ten minutes’ recess before Mr. Wills calls his next witness.”

The judge banged her gavel, got up fast, and hurried for the door, no doubt dreaming of that first puff.

Larch came back in a much better mood exactly ten minutes later. She returned to the bench, popped a mint, and said, “Mr. Wills?”

“The prosecution calls Claude Watkins to the stand.”

I heard a creak as the double doors to the courtroom swung open. I turned to see a man in a wheelchair being pushed by Gary Soneji’s son, Dylan. Claude Watkins was in his late forties with salt-and-pepper hair, a stubble beard, and a buff upper body. A blanket hid his withered legs.

Dylan left him at the bar, and Claude Watkins rolled the chair over in front of the witness stand.

The prosecutor looked at Judge Larch and said, “I’d like to treat the witness as hostile. He has been highly uncooperative.”

Larch glanced at the man in the wheelchair, who looked fuming mad.

“You going to answer questions under oath?” she asked.

“Depends on what’s asked,” Watkins said, not looking at her.

She ordered the bailiff to administer the oath, which he did without enthusiasm.

“How are you, Mr. Watkins?” Wills asked.

Watkins sneered at him. “About as good as you can be when you’re confined to a wheelchair and have to use a catheter to take a piss.”

“How did you wind up in that chair?”

Watkins’s face bunched up in loathing before he pointed at me and said, “He put me in it. Cross. Shot me for no good reason.”

“Objection,” Anita said.

“Overruled,” Judge Larch said. She popped another mint into her mouth.

Wills said, “Can you take us through the events of March twenty-ninth?”

Watkins grudgingly said he’d gotten interested in Soneji and then me by accident. But the more he read about me, the more he was convinced I was “borderline out of control” when it came to the mass murderer.

He testified that he decided to entice me into a situation that could result in an “interesting and revealing piece of performance art.” He would lure me to an abandoned factory where he’d confront me with one Soneji after another.

“So you could see his reaction?” Wills asked.

“Oh, hell no. I wanted everyone in the world to see Cross’s reaction.”

Beside me, Anita cocked her head to one side.

Wills squinted as if he’d heard something new from the witness and said, “How were you going to do that?”

“By filming it, of course,” Watkins said.

“What?” Wills said.

“What?” Naomi whispered.

Anita said, “What the hell is—”

“You had to have found them,” Watkins said. “I mean, you had to have searched the factory and found the smartphones with the add-on lenses, right?”

Anita and the prosecutor’s assistant both shot to their feet.

Anita said, “Judge, there has been no mention of any such cameras or phones in discovery.”

“Because we found no cameras or phones,” Wills said.

Watkins looked like he wanted to spit in disgust. “I put them there myself. What is this? A cover-up? I was wondering why you weren’t badgering me about them from the get-go. I’m telling you, we got the whole thing from three different angles!”





CHAPTER


55


THE COURTROOM ERUPTED. Judge Larch banged her gavel, demanding order. She told the jury to ignore Mr. Watkins’s testimony for the time being and ordered both prosecution and defense into chambers along with the U.S. marshals who worked in her courtroom.

“Judge, the government asks that it be given time to find the phones Mr. Watkins claims are in that factory,” Wills said when they were all in chambers.

“Judge, there is no way to know if these phones, if there are any, have been put there after the fact as a ploy by Mr. Watkins,” Anita said. “Whatever is on them should be excluded.”

“That factory has been sealed for months,” Wills said.

“But not guarded.”

“We don’t even know if the phones exist, Ms. Marley,” Judge Larch said. She looked at one of her marshals. “Collins, you and Avery, please go talk to Mr. Watkins. Find out where he says he hid these phones, call a forensics team, and go look. If you find them, establish a perfect chain of custody and bring them here.”