Chapter 5
"Miller," Raymond barked, walking down the linoleum hallway toward the elevators. "Where's Cross?"
"County lockup, medical bay three," Miller answered, his voice competing with the background roar of three desktop printers and a squawking police radio. "Surgeon pulled the lead out of his meat. Clean pass through the bicep, grazed the clavicle. They stitched him up, shot him with antibiotics, and threw him into holding. Captain wants you down here yesterday, Ray. The DA is already drafting the press release."
"I’m ten minutes out," Raymond said. "Don't let anyone touch him until I'm in the box."
***
The basement holding cells beneath the county courthouse smelled of three things that never changed: industrial floor wax, cold grease from yesterday’s commissary trays, and the sour vinegar of human fear.
Raymond badged through the magnetic airlock, his wet coat dripping onto the textured rubber runner. Detective Miller was waiting near the guard desk, a lukewarm paper cup of precinct coffee in his hand and a thick manila case file tucked under his arm.
"Media’s having a field day," Miller said without preamble, falling into step beside Raymond. "The Mayor’s office already issued a statement commending the entry team. *'Decisive intervention in suburban darkness.'* They’re turning you into the local folk hero, Ray. Channel 4 is calling the kid *'The Ghost of Linden Lane.'*"
"The kid gave me something," Raymond said, keeping his eyes on the heavy iron doors at the end of the corridor. "A journal. Kitchen drawer, next to the breadbox. Cross was planning an active shooter incident at the elementary school across the avenue. Tuesday run."
Miller stopped dead on the rubber runner, his face slackening. "Jesus Christ. An active shooter?"
"Cross isn't just a sadist, Marcus. He's a mass-casualty planner who had a warm-up act in the basement. I want our forensic sweep on Linden Lane doubled at first light. Every drawer, every floorboard, every loose brick."
"Copy that. I’ll call the crime lab supervisor." Miller gestured toward Interview Room C, where a heavy rectangular observation window looked in on a bare concrete box. "You ready for this prick? He hasn't stopped hyperventilating since the paramedics wheeled him out of the ambulance. Captain thinks he’s angling for an insanity plea before the ink on the warrant is dry."
"Let him try," Raymond muttered, stepping up to the two-way mirror.
He peered into the box.
The man sitting on the metal bench inside Interview Room C did not look like the rabid beast who had leveled a .308 rifle at Raymond’s sternum two hours ago.
Gavin Cross sat hunched on the bolted-down bench, his knees drawn together, his handcuffed wrists resting between his shins. He wore a stiff, unbleached canvas suicide smock—the heavy, tear-resistant garment they issued to inmates who couldn't be trusted with bedsheets or elastic waistbands. His right shoulder was wrapped in a thick white compression bandage, fresh pink seepage staining the center of the pad.
His wild, matted hair hung over his forehead in greasy cords, but his face was deathly pale, the gray skin stretched taut across his skull like parchment over an ossuary. He wasn't glaring at the mirror. He wasn't spitting curses.
He was shaking.
It wasn't the rhythmic tremor of a man coming down off an adrenaline surge, nor the twitching chill of withdrawal. It was a violent, whole-body vibration, his teeth clicking together with a wet, brittle clatter that Raymond could hear faintly through the intercom speaker on the wall. Gavin was rocking forward and back, three inches at a time, his forehead nearly striking the edge of the steel table with every repetition.
"Look at him," Miller said, his lip curling in contempt. "Act two of the sadist's playbook: the poor, misunderstood hermit. Makes me sick."
Raymond adjusted his necktie, checked the recording indicator beside the door—red light steady—and pushed the steel door open.
The air inside Interview Room C was stifling, heavy with the sharp reek of dried blood and stale sweat.
The moment the latch clicked, Gavin Cross stopped rocking.
His head snapped up, his neck muscles straining like cables against his pale throat. His eyes—wild, blood-veined, the pupils wide and frantic despite the harsh glare of the fluorescent strip overhead—locked onto Raymond.
He didn't flinch from Raymond’s badge. He didn't curse.
Instead, Gavin let out a ruined, shuddering gasp and surged forward against the table, the chain between his wrist cuffs rattling violently against the steel top.
"Is he strapped down?" Gavin wheezed. The voice was shredded, tearing out of his throat in broken, gravelly shards. Spit flecked his graying beard. "Tell me you strapped him down! Did you use the four-points? The leather ones? You have to use the leather ones with the brass buckles, the nylon doesn't hold, he knows how to lever his thumbs out—"
"Sit down, Cross," Raymond commanded, stepping into the room with his chest square, his voice dropping into the icy, low register that brooked no resistance.
"You didn't strap him down," Gavin whimpered. The man’s face collapsed into an expression of such pure, abject horror that Raymond’s foot paused half an inch above the floor. Gavin sank back onto the bench, his handcuffed hands flying up to clutch his wild hair, his fingernails digging into his scalp until small crescents of blood welled through the gray strands. "You left him in a soft bed. Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ. You left him in a soft bed with nurses."
"I said sit down and keep your hands on the table," Raymond repeated, pulling out the opposite metal chair and seating himself with deliberate, unhurried calm. He laid a yellow legal pad and a pen on the steel between them.
Gavin wasn't listening. He was weeping.
It was not the self-pitying snivel of a cornered criminal; it was the broken, helpless sobbing of a man who had watched a tidal wave crest over his front porch and knew his legs were tied to the dock. Tears poured down his gaunt cheeks, soaking into his matted beard, his chest heaving under the heavy canvas smock.
"You don't understand," Gavin choked out, rocking again, his bloody fingers still tangled in his hair. "You think you're the hero. I saw your eyes through the door, Detective. You had that look... that righteous, beautiful look. I had that look once. Three years ago, when the state gave him to me. I thought I was saving him too."
"You shot at two police officers, Gavin," Raymond said, leaning his forearms on the table, fixing the man with an unyielding glare. "You kept a sixteen-year-old boy chained to a radiator in an unheated room with an inch of filth on the floor. You starved him until his ribs look like a washboard. You beat him until his wrists were raw to the marrow. There is no story you tell in this room that saves you from twenty-five to life."
Gavin let out a dry, barking laugh that instantly curdled into a cough, spitting dark phlegm onto the steel table.
"Starved him?" Gavin looked up, his bloodshot eyes boring into Raymond’s with a terrifying, earnest desperation. "I fed him three thousand calories a day, Detective! Canned beef, whole milk, vitamin paste! You think he’s emaciated because I didn't feed him? He makes himself vomit! He purges every ounce of fat so he looks like a skeleton, so when the door comes down, people like you will look at him and want to wrap him in a blanket and shoot whoever is holding the keys!"
