Judge Varney called for a recess at noon.
My poor aunts and Nana Mama were exhausted. Patty Converse drove them home. After taking Cece Turnbull home, Bree joined Pinkie and me for lunch at the Bench, a barbecue joint that catered to the courthouse crowd.
“You thought any more about Finn Davis?” Pinkie asked after we took a booth and ordered.
“A little,” I admitted.
“What about Finn Davis?” Bree asked.
As he had with me the evening before, Pinkie filled Bree in on Sydney Fox’s ex. Born and raised in Starksville, Finn Davis had been orphaned when his parents died in a car crash. Marvin Bell, the man who’d hooked my parents on drugs, took Finn Davis in, treated the boy like his son.
“Marvin spoiled Finn, trained Finn, probably abused Finn,” Pinkie said. “You ask me, Finn turned out just like his adoptive dad. They can both turn on the charisma, make you forget what they are deep down.”
“And what’s that?” Bree asked.
Pinkie started to speak, but then stopped and stared over my shoulder. He muttered, “The devil himself just walked in.”
A thin, angular man, Marvin Bell put me in mind of the actor Bruce Dern as he walked up to our booth. Longish steel-gray hair. Gaunt, narrow face. Sharp nose. And opaque green eyes that, as Bree said, roamed all over you.
Marvin Bell ran those weird opaque eyes over me and then Bree, showing no reaction. Then he leveled his gaze at Pinkie.
“My two cents, Parks?” he said. “At funerals, all grudges are off. My boy had every right to grieve for Sydney and pay his respects.”
“Unless your boy shot her,” my cousin said. “Which, in my mind, goes along with his threat to piss on her grave.”
The muscles in Bell’s cheeks flickered with tension, but his voice remained calm when he said, “Finn signed the divorce papers. He’d moved on. There is no reason he’d do something like that to his ex-wife.”
“Oh, I think a case could be made for obsession,” Pinkie said. “But I’m thinking spite. You and your boy have never liked to lose face.”
Bell stood there a moment, looking as if it was taking all his control not to smash my cousin in the face. “Finn’s no murderer.”
Then he walked across the room to another booth.
“Think I’ll go introduce myself,” I said.
Bree said, “That a good idea?”
“Sometimes, you shake something, it rattles,” I said, getting up.
The waitress set a cup of coffee in front of Bell and walked away. I slid in across from him. If I unnerved him at all, he didn’t show it. If he’d been shaken by Pinkie’s accusations, he didn’t show it.
“Didn’t know I’d invited you to sit down, stranger,” Bell said, tearing open a sugar packet and tapping it into the coffee.
“We’ve met, Mr. Bell,” I said. “A long time ago.”
“That right?” he said, stirring the coffee and turning his weird green eyes on me. “I don’t recall you.”
“Alex Cross,” I said. “Jason Cross was my father.”
Bell cocked his head in reappraisal, tapped the spoon on the side of the cup, and smiled softly. “There now, I see the resemblance.”
“I’m a homicide detective in Washington, DC.”
“Long way from home, Detective Cross,” he replied, setting the spoon down. “And funny, I don’t recollect ever meeting you.”
“I was young,” I said. “It was about a year after my mother died.”
“You mean after she was murdered, don’t you?” he said in a straight tone delivered with an expression that revealed nothing.
“I remember that night,” I said. “You tied my father to your car with a rope, dragged him through the streets.”
Bell sipped his coffee, never taking his eyes off me. “It was another time. It was what you did to a man who’d kill his own wife in cold blood and call it good.”
I hadn’t expected that and said nothing while Bell talked on.
“I gave your father some of the punishment he deserved. And then I did the right thing and immediately turned him over to the police. Sad what happened next, but probably for the good of all. Even you. Even your brothers.”
I hadn’t expected that either, and it took a few beats before I could reply.
“You sold my mom and dad drugs,” I said. “Got them hooked.”
Eyes still, Bell smiled with precision. He altered the position of his cup on the saucer by a quarter turn.
“That statement is not true,” he said. “I have never sold drugs or been involved with them. Your mother and father, I actually tried to get them clean, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.”
“Never been involved with drugs?” I said.
“I am involved in business,” Bell said, sipping the coffee. “I have several enterprises, all successful. Why would I need to pursue something risky like drugs?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But every time your name comes up, people tell me that I should be looking at you.”
Bell seemed amused. “Looking at me in what way?”
“As some kind of criminal mastermind,” I said.
Bell laughed, reached for another sugar, said, “That’s a small town with a lot of poor folks for you.”
“What does poor have to do with it?”
“Everything,” Bell said. “Most poor people think that anyone who becomes successful couldn’t have done it legitimately, with initiative, with hard work. It’s just not part of the myth most poor people want to believe. So they sit around and invent bullshit stories to explain things when someone makes it in the world.”
“So there’s nothing to the charge?”
“Zero to the charge,” Bell said, holding my gaze. “How’d you come to be back in town, Detective Cross?”
I had the feeling he knew this, but I played along, said Stefan Tate was my cousin.
“Butcher,” Bell said, hardening. “Sorry that he’s your cousin, but based on what I’ve read, I hope that boy fries.”
“It’s a popular sentiment.”
“There you go.”
“You heard the defense’s position?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Bell said, reaching up to pick a coffee ground off the tip of his tongue.
“Stefan came to believe that there is a large and complex criminal organization operating in Starksville,” I said.
“If there is, I haven’t heard a thing about it,” Bell said.
“They run drugs,” I said. “Maybe more.”
“Maybe more?” Bell said. “Sounds like maybe more bullshit to me. Sounds like a fantasy designed to muddle the facts, which, as I understand them, are conclusive beyond a reasonable doubt. Your cousin murdered that poor boy, and he’s gonna pay for it. I had my way? Someone would rope him up and drag his ass through the streets on the way to the death chamber.”
“If you were running a criminal enterprise, I imagine you would,” I said.
Bell flicked the coffee ground away, leveled his green eyes at me, and said, “If I were you, Detective Cross, I would not be casting aspersions that are unfounded. It looks bad. It looks like you are desperate. If I were you, I’d face the facts about your cousin, pack your bags, and leave the sonofabitch to his fate.”
“That’s not happening,” I said, standing. “Sorry to have taken your time.”
“Anything for the son of an old friend,” Bell said. “But you tell your niece there that if she tries to bring my name up in this trial in any way, I will surely sue her ass from here to Raleigh and back.”