The People vs. Alex Cross

Chapter 45

Juror five was craning his neck and shoulders to look at me, and juror eleven seemed impressed enough to jot something down on her notepad.

“Sadly, that is why the U.S. Attorney’s Office is pressing this case,” Anita Marley said, returning to my side. “You see, with the rash of police shootings across the country, the Justice Department needs a prominent individual to prosecute as a way of demonstrating to the outraged masses that the government is actually doing something about police violence.”

She put her hand back on my shoulder and said, “But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you not to be swayed by the government’s tactics because the facts of this case are on this good man’s side, and they demonstrate far, far beyond a reasonable doubt that he is innocent. Let me lay them out for you.”

Anita took the jurors through a straightforward summary of the events that led me to shoot three followers of Gary Soneji in self-defense, starting with telling them about the Soneji, a violent cult that had risen up around the myth of the late kidnapper and bomber.

“The cult targeted the investigators who had hunted Gary Soneji,” Anita said. “They targeted Detective John Sampson, and they targeted Alex Cross. They made death threats to Dr. Cross and to his family.”

Then she explained how the FBI Cyber Division identified a woman named Kimiko Binx as the secretive builder of a website dedicated to the cult. Records showed that Binx had a partner in the website named Claude Watkins. When he was sixteen, Watkins was tried as an adult and convicted of carving the skin off a little girl’s fingers.

“Ms. Binx told Dr. Cross she could take him to see Watkins, who had served his time and was now a successful artist,” Anita said. “Ms. Binx led Dr. Cross to an abandoned factory where Watkins and a group of his followers were waiting, all dressed up as Soneji, using Hollywood-quality masks.”

She nodded to Naomi, who hit a button on her laptop. An old mug shot of Gary Soneji popped up on the courtroom screen along with a crime scene photograph of one of the masks.

“Three of the cult members wearing masks like this one were armed,” Anita said. “They carried nickel-plated pistols that they used to threaten Detective Cross, an officer in the course of his duties. Dr. Cross gave them fair warning, and then he defended himself.

“When he left the crime scene to meet police and ambulances he’d called to the factory, someone took the three pistols. The defense believes a member of the cult did this in order to frame Dr. Cross, to portray him as yet another policeman gone over the edge.”

Anita paused, and then showed outrage. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office should be ashamed for buying into what is obviously a fabricated story. The Justice Department and the attorney general should be ashamed as well. They don’t care about Alex Cross’s exemplary record with the FBI. They don’t care about the great good he’s done repeatedly in the course of his career. They just want a high-profile scapegoat, and Dr. Cross fits the bill.”

She crossed back to me, put her hand on my shoulder, and said in an even, forceful tone, “But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I say to you: Not Alex Cross. Not this good man. This good man will not be made a scapegoat. This good man’s reputation as one of the country’s finest detectives will not be dragged through the mud. Dr. Cross’s remarkable career will not be ruined, and he will never see the inside of a prison cell, because this good man is completely innocent of these charges.”