Alex Cross's Trial

contradict me. If he does, he’ll have to admit they made up that warrant out of thin air, a long time after the raid.”

    “Oh, I understand what you were doing, all right,” I said. “I just want to know what gives you the right to—”

    “Ben,” said L.J. “I don’t see how this hurts us. I think it can only help.”

    I sank onto a chair. “I think so too, as bad as that is. What do you think, Jonah?”

    Jonah was looking out the narrow second-floor window.

    “It must be six-thirty. The usual mob is beginning to form,” he said.

    Then he turned from the window and faced the three of us.

    “So, what do you think?” I repeated.

    “I think what Moody did was… interesting. I must say, I did enjoy watching Loophole Lewis and Judge Corbett squirming like worms on a hook…”

    I smiled. We had all enjoyed that sight.

    “… but it won’t make any difference,” Jonah finished. “I’m afraid it won’t.”

    “Yes, it will,” Moody protested. “It’ll cast doubt in their minds. It’ll make it seem like we tried to cooperate, and they attacked us anyway.”

    Jonah shook his head. “Oh, Moody. Those jurors have lived here their whole lives. They don’t care who’s telling the truth and who’s lying! The phony warrant? Some of the jurors were probably down at the town hall when Eversman was writing it up.”

    There was silence then. A long minute of it.

    The chanting outside began again.

    Free the Raiders!

    Let ’em go!

    Moody stood and smoothed her blue skirt. She adjusted her straw hat and slipped on her white gloves.

    “I got to go. Papaw is in bad shape. Coming to the court, he didn’t hardly know who he was,” she said.

    Without thinking about it I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Tell Abraham I’m coming out tomorrow to see about him.”

    Jonah said, “Thank you for trying to help, Moody. From the bottom of my heart.”

    Chapter 116

    IT WAS TIME TO TRY OUT the plan I had concocted. Maybe it was even past time, too late. Moody and L.J. had come with me. Jonah wanted to but knew he couldn’t. After all, he was representing the great state of Mississippi, and we were about to break the law in too many ways to count.

    “Stinks bad in here,” Moody said.

    The awful smell was everywhere, a sharp, nauseating odor, like a cross between bad patent medicine and rancid moonshine. It was the foul scent of the chemicals Scooter Willems used to develop his photographs.

    I had just climbed through an unlocked window, with Moody and L.J. behind me, into Scooter’s old cabin off the East Point Road. Now we were in his studio, one large room with black curtains dividing it into three. The front part was a portrait studio, with a backdrop and a stool for the subject to pose on. In the middle section two large wooden tables held trays of foul-smelling chemicals. But it was in the last section that we found what we’d come for: boxes and boxes of Willems’s photographs, with dozens more pinned to the walls.

    There was one box full of nothing but photographs of lynchings. Scooter Willems had been busy these past months. Beside that box sat a stack of postcards manufactured from the photos, souvenir pictures of hanged corpses, burned bodies, twisted victims, like the one I’d received in the mail.

    “God Almighty,” Moody said. “The man has taken pictures of everybody who ever got hanged.”

    “Look here,” said L.J., working his way along the wall. “These are all from the Bobby Burnett lynching.”

    I held up the lantern to see.

    “First, take a look at poor old Bobby hanging there,” L.J. said. “Now look who’s standing next to him. There . By his feet.”

    There they were, plain as day in the flickering lamplight: Chester Madden and Lincoln Alexander Stephens, two of the three White Raiders on trial. They grinned up at the bloated, bloody, bursting head of Bobby Burnett.

    One by one I pulled the photographs down from the wall, gathering them in a manila folder I found on Scooter’s desk.

    “Look at this!” Moody exclaimed, holding a photo up to the light.

    I came up beside her. There was her brother Hiram, dead on the ground, with a rope around his neck. His grinning killers each had a foot on his body, as if he were a prize lion they’d slain on safari.

    L.J. pointed to the man on the end. “I’ll be damned if that ain’t Lester Johnson.”

    I almost stopped breathing. “And now he sits on our jury.”

    Then I recognized the man beside him. It was Jacob, Jacob Gill, with his foot resting on Moody’s dead