Cross Justice (32 page)

I drove to the lake, following the directions Bree had given me, and found the house where she’d watched Finn Davis deliver a payoff to Pedelini. It was a nice place, gorgeous lot, big house, well cared for, with a swing on the grass and a dock. It faced east, and I thought that the dawns must be special there.

I drove on, parked behind Detective Pedelini’s car, and went around and up onto the deck. Inside, the television was playing, a baseball announcer calling a game. Over that there was the louder sound of children giggling, and I smelled baking chicken. I knocked on the screen door.

“Daddy!” a girl called. “There’s someone at the door.”

I heard him say something that sounded like “I’m busy with the cat. Go see who it is.”

A second later, a pretty girl about ten came to the door, said, “Hello?”

“Hello to you,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Tessa Pedelini.”

“Tessa Pedelini, can you tell your father that Alex Cross is here to see him?”

She nodded and scampered away to relay the message.

There was a pause, and then I heard Pedelini say, “Here, you help her, then. Slow, right?”

“Right,” Tessa said.

The detective came to the screen door, hesitated, and then came out onto the porch. He extended his hand to shake mine. I didn’t take it.

“I was as surprised as you must have been to see those reports on your daughter,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets. “But they’re conclusive.”

Feeling cold and merciless, I said, “I had you wrong, you know?”

“How’s that?” he asked, frowning.

“I’ve known my share of dirty cops in my time, but you didn’t trip my alarms at all when I met you,” I said. “You came across as one of the good guys. Bree thought so too.”

“I
am
one of the good guys,” Pedelini said, looking me in the eye. “The best around here.”

“That’s not saying much, is it?”

His eyes narrowed. “If I’m out there doing my job, you can jaw all you want at me like that. But here on my own back porch, I won’t tolerate it. I’ll ask you to leave now before one of us does something stupid.”

Pedelini looked at me expectantly.

I stood my ground, said, “My wife saw you accept a payoff from Finn Davis the other night. Right here. And your daughter was there to witness it.”

He was rocked by that, took a step back, said, “Wasn’t like that.”

“What wasn’t like that?” I asked. “Payoff’s a payoff.”

Pedelini’s entire body tensed as if he were going to launch himself at me; he rose up on his toes, his fists curling and uncurling, before he said in a thin voice, “You have no idea of the pressures I’m under.”

I could see it everywhere about him, then. What I’d taken for a pre-attack pause was actually his body’s tensing under some heavy burden.

“Why don’t you tell me?” I said.

“Why would I?”

“I’m a shrink as well as a cop,” I said. “I’m offering you a twofer.”

Pedelini almost smiled. Then he gazed around as if looking for an escape route.

“Maybe I wasn’t wrong,” I said, wanting him to open up. “Maybe my initial read of you was the correct one. Maybe you are a good man and I just lack understanding.”

“Damn right you do,” he said.

“Tell me.”

He struggled, finally said, “Come with me.”

The detective turned and entered the house. I followed him into a short hallway off a country-style kitchen where a small-screen television was showing the baseball game. A younger girl, eight, maybe nine, was sitting at a round table eating pretzel sticks, transfixed by the game.

“Braves up by two, Daddy,” she said.

“There’s a God after all, Lassie,” Pedelini said.

“When’s dinner?” Lassie asked.

He glanced at a timer on the stove, said, “Thirty-two minutes.”

Pedelini left the kitchen. His daughter never glanced at me as I followed him into a family room with a large window that overlooked the lake.

“Beautiful place,” I said.

“If you think dirty money bought it, you’re wrong,” Pedelini said. “My late wife inherited it from her father.”

He turned into a doorway.

I stepped in after him and found myself in a hospital room.

MEDICAL EQUIPMENT FILLED
two stainless-steel racks of shelves. An elaborate wheelchair stood empty in the corner. Glowing monitors were mounted on wall brackets above and to the sides of a hospital bed with high railings.

“Cat?” Pedelini said to the girl sitting up in the bed, straining to open her mouth to get the spoonful of food Tessa was offering. “This is Dr. Cross. He wanted to meet you.”

The detective’s youngest took the spoonful, closed her mouth, and turned her eyes toward me. In a thick, garbled voice, she said, “Another one?”

Catrina Pedelini was her name, and she reminded me of a baby robin I’d seen once when I was walking with my mother to the linen factory. The newly hatched bird, sparse-feathered and bony and broken, had fallen from its nest. Cat Pedelini was all angles with a pigeon chest, a spine that arched to the left, and crippled hands and arms that curled back toward her torso
so that she appeared to be holding something dear. Her face was at once disfigured and attractive.

“I’m not a medical doctor,” I said. “I’m here to see your father, but I’m very glad to meet you.”

“Dad needs a doctor?” she asked, looking to her father.

“He’s here about work, sweetheart,” Pedelini said, coming over to stroke the wispy silver-blond hair on her head. “You’re doing a good job.”

“I watch
Criminal Minds
after dinner?” she asked.

Tessa looked at me, said, “That’s Cat’s favorite show.”

“You eat everything on your plate, you can watch one episode before bath time,” Pedelini said.

She made a gurgling, pleased sound in her throat and then said, “But I use a bowl.”

“Bowl, then,” Pedelini said gently and kissed her on the head. “I’ll be in soon.”

The detective moved by me, back out into the hall, and I followed him to the kitchen, where his middle daughter said, “Braves up by one, Dad. When’s dinner?”

“There is a God after all,” Pedelini said as he passed. “And twenty-four minutes. Have a pretzel.”

“I’ve eaten almost the whole bag.”

“Another of life’s tragedies.”

He went down a short hall, out the screen door, and onto the deck.

“Tell me about Cat,” I said.

Pedelini shrugged, said, “She had a damaged gene to begin with, or so they tell me. But she was further damaged in the labor that took my Ellen. The official diagnosis is cerebral palsy.”

“She seems sharp,” I said.

“Very. She’s quite a girl. A fighter.”

The sheriff’s detective had tears in his eyes. He wiped at them.

“She why you take money from Finn Davis?” I asked.

“You have any idea what it’s taken to get her this far?”

“I can’t imagine,” I said.

“Every cell, every fiber of my being. I promised my wife when she knew she was dying and had already seen Cat. I promised her I would move heaven and earth for our baby. And I have.”

I had been right. Guy Pedelini was a man of conscience and inner goodness. I could almost feel it pulsing out of him at that moment.

“But care like that costs a lot of money,” I said, pressing the issue.

“Whole lot,” he agreed. He scuffed his shoes, looked at the deck.

“More than your insurance will pay.”

“That too,” he said, and sniffed.

“So, what, Marvin Bell’s money makes up the difference?”

He paused as if disgusted with himself, said, “Almost.”

“What’s he pay you to do?” I asked.

The detective took a deep breath, went to the railing, and looked out over the lake, where the reflection of the three-quarter moon shimmered on the water.

“To look the other way?” I asked, following him. “When the trains come through Starksville with guys who use a three-finger salute riding on top of freight cars carrying loads of drugs bound for dealers up and down the line? Is that what you do to help Lassie, Tessa, and Cat?”

Pedelini had his back to me. His shoulders trembled slightly, and he started to pivot toward me. We were less than sixteen
inches apart. The sheriff’s detective had turned nearly ninety degrees to his left and was facing the narrow cove and the shore road beyond it when the rifle shot rang out. I caught the muzzle flash from across the cove a split second before I heard the blast.

Pedelini spun around, sagged on the railing, and then ragdolled to the deck.

Blood trickled from a head wound.

I DOVE ACROSS
the detective to shield him from a second shot, but it never came. All I heard was the screaming of Pedelini’s girls.

“Call 911!” I yelled at Tessa, who’d come to the screen door.

I didn’t wait to see if she complied, just turned to her father, whose eyes had rolled up in his head. He was breathing, though. And his pulse was strong.

I didn’t want to move him, but I turned his head slightly to look at the wound. The bullet had dug a nasty groove through the scalp and along the surface of his skull, like a wood-carving tool had worked it. But I couldn’t see anywhere the bullet had penetrated his cranium.

I heard a car start, wheels squealing. I stood, peered across the cove, and spotted the taillights of a car racing away on the shore road. The car swerved, and I saw an old couple dive out of the way.

The car lost control, hit something hard with a tremendous crash. The brake lights never came on.

I started to run. That was my shooter.

“Wait!” Tessa screamed after me.

“Your dad’s going to be all right!” I yelled, jumping off the porch and sprinting to the rental car.

I threw it in reverse, spit gravel onto the road, and jammed it in gear. I almost lost control going around the hairpin at the back of the cove and slowed at the curve near the spot from where the shooter must have fired. When my headlights came around, I could see an older couple standing, shaken, by the road. But there was no car beyond them.

I roared up to them and they looked frightened.

“I’m a police officer,” I said. “Where did that car go?”

The elderly man’s hand was trembling. “Up the road. A white Impala. Almost hit us.”

A white Impala. I drove away slow, trying not to spin up rocks that might hit the couple, my attention darting off the road to a stripped and gouged stump with bits of steel embedded in it. I figured he’d hit it hard head-on, which meant the radiator might have been damaged, or the front end.

In any case, I couldn’t see the car being able to maintain its pace down the winding mountain road from the lake back toward town. The moment I turned off the shore road onto the main route, I sped up again.

Halfway down the mountain, I spotted brake lights ahead of me, and then they were gone around a curve. I caught up on the next bend, my high beams finding the rear of the Impala. Judging from the silhouettes showing through the back window, there were only two inside.

The passenger twisted around as if to look back at me, raised a pistol. I mashed the pedal and rammed the rear bumper before he could shoot. The impact flung the Impala at a steep
angle up the road and away from me. My headlights caught the driver clawing at the wheel.

Finn Davis managed to regain control of the car and picked up speed through the next turn. When I came around the curve, a guy was hanging out the passenger window and aiming a shotgun at me left-handed.

HE FIRED JUST
as I hit the brakes.

Double-aught buckshot shattered the right side of the windshield. I hit the gas again when I saw the shooter awkwardly trying to work the pump action. He wasn’t a lefty.

I swung into the other lane where he couldn’t get an easy shot at me, then caught up and cut the wheel to ram the Impala a second time. My bumper hit the car at a quartering angle. The rear end of the Impala swung hard right. The guy with the shotgun was hurled from the car; he sailed through the air and disappeared into the night.

Finn Davis was in my headlights again, clawing at the wheel.

I didn’t give him a second chance, just sped up and rammed the Impala a third time, hitting it almost broadside. My car threatened to spin, and I had to slam the brakes. But Finn’s car reached a tipping point on the road shoulder.

It flipped off the embankment.

I skidded to a halt, heard sirens coming, dug out my pistol
and flashlight, and ran back up the road. The Impala had turned over at least two times and was wedged at an angle against the trunk of an old pine. One of the headlights was still on, cutting deeper into the forest.

I shone my flashlight down into the gully, tried to find the driver-side door and Davis. He wasn’t there.

I flicked the light up to the car’s roofline and found him. He was bleeding, leaning out the passenger-side window, and leveling a scoped hunting rifle at me.

We fired at virtually the same time, me from the hip at fifty feet and Davis at that same distance from a dead rest. His scope had to have been off because, as it had with Pedelini, the bullet went left of me by no more than an inch or two.

I clicked off the light, threw myself flat on the shoulder, and listened for the sound of a rifle’s action over the hissing of the Impala’s radiator and the sirens coming up the mountain. I counted to twenty, stayed belly down, extended my hand to the edge of the gully, and rapidly clicked the light on and off.

Nothing.

I flicked it on again, slid to the side, and looked down into the gully. Finn Davis was rocked back against the tree trunk, blank eyes open and already dulling. A gout of blood showed in the wound at the center of his throat.

“
ARE YOU ARRESTING
me?” I asked eight hours later.

“Just trying to get the story straight in our heads,” said Detective Frost, rubbing his belly in an interrogation room.