Alex Cross 27: The People vs. Alex Cross by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson [Patterson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

61

I FOLLOWED HER inside, remarking to myself how good she looked after only a month off the various interacting drugs that had helped put her behind a locked door with her backup pistol talking about rats, and her father and I outside thinking suicide.

It turned out that the construction projects up and down the street had disturbed the neighborhood’s urban rat population and caused a migration. Tess had seen rats twice in her closet upstairs earlier that day. After her fight with her dad, and in a semidelusional state due to the drugs, she decided she’d clean out the closet, put crackers and birdseed in a pile, and then sit back and wait for a shot. It was why she’d insisted on talking quietly. She’d been hunting.

After Tess shot the rat, the ringing in her ears was so loud that for several long, agonizing moments, she didn’t hear her father pounding on the door. Then she’d opened the door and looked at us with bloodshot, drug-puzzled eyes, as if she couldn’t imagine what we were so upset about.

It had taken several hours to convince Tess to enter a psychiatric facility in Virginia so she could be properly evaluated. But she eventually agreed and spent a week there getting clean and undergoing tests. She’d gone into the psych ward taking a multi-pill cocktail and left on a single drug for depression. The doctors said that in her effort to forget, she was lucky she hadn’t done permanent brain damage.

“You want a beer?” Tess said. “Dad left some.”

“Water if you’ve got it,” I said.

“Coming up,” she said and got me some chilled from the fridge.

I sat in Bernie Aaliyah’s favorite chair. Tess gave me my water, curled her feet under her on the couch, and said, “Thank you again for helping me, Alex. You were the only one who saw I was a danger to myself.”

“I’m glad you agreed to get help,” I said. “Which is why I came to see you.”

“Okay?”

“Have you been following my trial?”

She shook her head. “My therapist advised me to go on a no-media diet for a few months.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” I said, but then I brought her up to speed on the latest trial developments, including the video and Rawlins’s contention that it had not been doctored.

“But you saw those pistols?”

“Every time I close my eyes, I see them,” I said.

“Any chance you imagined them?”

I started to tell her absolutely not but then said, “Part of me doesn’t know anymore, Tess, and it’s got me scared that I did something heinous and that my mind has somehow erased it and put something else in its place to justify my actions. Does that make sense? Has that ever happened to you?”

Pain flickered on her cheeks before she shook her head. “I remember every detail, the first shots, me returning fire, and then hearing the Phelps’s nanny wailing beyond that apartment door. I can’t forget a second of it.”

“That’s how the other part of me feels.”

“Then those pistols were there and removed from the videos.

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