He looked annoyed at the intrusion. “What now?” he asked. “That's short for get out of here and leave me alone. I'm working.”
This is Ronald Hodge,“ Sampson said. ”Ronald, this is Detective Cross. I told you about him when we spoke before."
The boy nodded but didn't say anything, just stared angrily my way.
“Ronald, will you tell us your story again?” Sampson asked. “We need to hear it.”
The boy rolled his eyes. “I already told the other policemen. I'm sick and tired of it, 'know. Nobody cares what I think anyway.”
“Ronald,” said his mother. “That's not true and you know it.”
“Please tell me,” I said to the boy. “What you have to say could be important. I want to hear it in your words.”
The boy frowned and continued to shake his head, but his eyes held mine. “The other policemen didn't think it was important. Fuckheads.”
“Ronald,” said the boy's mother. “Don't be rude. You know I don't like that attitude. Or that kind of language.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I'll tell it again.” Then he began to talk about the night Tanya Jackson was murdered, and what he'd seen.
“I was up late. Wasn't s'posed to be. I was playing on the computer. ”He stopped and looked at his mother.
She nodded. “You're forgiven. We've been over this before. Now please tell your story. You're starting to get me a little crazy.”
The boy finally cracked a smile, then went on with his story. Maybe he had just wanted to set up his audience a little.
"I can see the Jacksons'yard from my room. It's just past the corner of the Harts' house. I saw somebody out in the yard. It was kind of dark, but I could see him moving. He had like a movie camera or something. I couldn't tell what he was taking pictures of, so it made me curious.
“I went up close to this window to watch. And then I saw there were three men out there. I saw 'em in Mrs. Jackson's yard. That's what I told the police. Three men. I saw 'em just like I see two of you in my room. And they were making a movie.”
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Fourteen
I asked young Ronald Hodge to repeat his story, and he did.
Exactly, almost word for word. He stared me right in the eye as he spoke, and he didn't hesitate or waver. It was obvious that the boy was troubled by what he had witnessed, and that he was still scared. After learning that murders had been committed in the house, he'd been living in fear of what he'd seen that night.
Afterward, Sampson and I talked to Anita Hodge in the kitchen. She gave us iced tea, which was unsweetened, with big chunks of lemon in it, and was delicious. She told us that Ronald had been born with spina bifida, an outcropping of the spinal cord that had caused paralysis from the waist down.
“Mrs. Hodge,” I asked,“ what do you think about the story Ronald told us in there?”
“Oh, I believe him. At least I believe he thinks he saw what he said. Maybe it was shadows or something, but Ronald definitely believes he saw three men. And one of them with a movie camera of some kind. He's been consistent on that from the first. Spooky. Like that old Hitchcock movie.”
“Rear Window,” I said. “James Stewart thinks he sees a murder outside his window. He's laid up with a broken leg at the time.” I looked over at Sampson. I wanted to make sure he was comfortable with me asking the questions this time. He nodded that it was okay.
“What happened after the Fayetteville detectives talked to Ronald? Did they come back? Did any other policemen come? Anyone from Fort Bragg? Mrs. Hodge, why wasn't Ronald's testimony part of the trial?”
She shook her head. “Same questions I had my ex-husband and I both. A captain from CID did come a few days later. Captain Jacobs. He talked to Ronald some. That was the end of it, though. No one ever came about any trial.”
After we finished our iced teas, we decided to call it a night. It was past eight and we thought we'd made some progress. Back at the Holiday Inn Bordeaux, I called Nana and the kids. Everything was fine and dandy on the home front. They had taken up the cry that I was on' Daddy last case', and they liked the sound of that. Maybe I did, too. Sampson and I had dinner and a couple of beers at Bowties inside the hotel, then we turned in for the night.
I tried Jamilla in California. It was around seven her time, so I called her work number first.
“Inspector Hughes,”she answered curtly. “Homicide.”
“I want to report a missing person,” I said.
“Hey, Alex,” she said. I could feel her smile over the phone. “You caught me at work again. Busted. You're the missing person. Where are you? You don't write, you don't call. Not even a crummy e-mail in the last few days.”
I apologized, then I told Jam about Sergeant Cooper and what had happened so far. I described what Ronald Hodge had seen from his bedroom window. Then I broached the subject that had prompted my call. “I miss you, Jam. I'd like to see you,” I said. “Any place, any time. Why don't you come East for a change? Or I could go out there if you'd rather. You tell me.”
Jamilla hesitated, and I found that I was holding my breath. Maybe she didn't want to see me. Then she said, “I can get off work for a few days. I'd love to see you. Sure, I'll come to Washington. I've never been there. Always wanted to when I was a kid.”
“Not so long ago,” I said.
“That's good. Cute,” she laughed.
My heart fluttered a little as the two of us made a date. Sure, I'll come to Washington. I played that line of Jamilla's over and over in my head for the rest of the night. It had just rolled off her tongue, almost like she couldn't wait to say it.
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Fifteen
Early the next morning I got a call from a friend of mine at Quantico. I had asked Abby DiGarbo to check on rental-car companies in the area and to look for any irregularities that took place during the week of the murders. I'd told her it was urgent. Abby had already found one.
It seemed that Hertz had been stiffed on the rental of a Ford Explorer. Abby had dug deeper and discovered an interesting paper trail. She told me that scamming a rental-car company wasn't all that easy, which was good news for us. The scam required a fake credit card and a driver's license on which everything matched, including the description of the driver renting the car.
Someone had hacked into SEC files that are maintained as a public record. The fake identity used on the card was obtained and the information submitted to a company in Brampton, Ontario, where the card was made. A fake driver's license to match was then obtained from a web-site, Photoidcards.com. A photograph had been submitted, and I was staring at a copy of it right now.
White, male, nothing memorable about the face, which possibly had been changed with makeup and costume props anyway.
The FBI was still checking to see what else they could find. It was a start, though. Somebody had gone to some trouble to rent a car in Fayetteville. We had somebody's picture, thanks to Abby DiGarbo.
On the way over to Sergeant Cooper's house I told Sampson about the rent-a-car scam. Sampson was drinking steaming hot coffee and eating an eclair from Dunkin' Donuts, but I could tell he was appreciative in his own way. “That's why I asked you in on this,” he said.
Cooper lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Spring Lake, north of Fort Bragg. He had one side of a redbrick duplex. I saw a sign: Caution, Attack Cat!
“He has a sense of humor,” Sampson said. “At least he did.”
We had been given a key to open the front door. Sampson and I stepped inside. The house still smelled like cat after all this time.
“It's good not having anybody in the way for a change,” I said to John. “No other police, no FBI.”
“Killer's been caught,” Sampson said. “Case is closed. Nobody cares but us now. And Cooper sitting there on death row. The clock's ticking.”
Apparently, nobody had figured out what to do about the apartment yet. Ellis Cooper had felt secur
e enough in his posting that he'd bought the place a few years back.
When he retired, he'd planned to stay in Spring Lake.
The table in the front hallway contained photos of Cooper posing with friends in several locations: what looked like Hawaii, the south of France, maybe the Caribbean. There was also a more recent photo of Cooper hugging a woman who was probably his girlfriend, Marcia. The furniture in the apartment was comfortable-looking, not expensive, and appeared to have been bought at stores like Target and Pier One.
Sampson called me over to one of the windows. “It's been shimmied. The place was broken into. Could be how somebody got Cooper's knife, then returned it. If that's what happened. Coop said he left it in the closet of his bedroom. The police say the knife was in the attic.”
We went into the bedroom next. The walls were covered with more photographs, mostly from places where Cooper had been posted: Vietnam, Panama, Bosnia. A Yukon Mighty Weightlifting Bench was lined up near one wall. Near the closet was an ironing board. We searched through the closet. The clothes were mostly military but there were civilian threads, too.
“What do you make of this stuff?” I asked Sampson. I pointed to a table with a grouping of odd knickknacks that looked like they came from Southeast Asia.
I picked up a straw doll that looked strangely menacing, even evil. Then a small crossbow with what looked like a claw for its trigger. A silver amulet in the shape of a watchful, lidless eye. What was this?
Sampson took a careful look at the creepy straw doll, then the eye. "I've seen the evil eye before. Maybe in
Cambodia or Saigon. Don't remember exactly. I've seen the straw dolls, too. Think they have something to do with avenging evil spirits. I've seen the dolls atViet funerals."
The creepy artifacts notwithstanding, the sense I got from the apartment was that Ellis Cooper had been a lonely man without much of a life besides the Army. I didn't see a single photograph of what might be called family.
We were still in Cooper's bedroom when we heard a door open inside the apartment. Then came the sound of heavy footsteps approaching.
The bedroom door was thrown open and banged hard against the wall. Soldiers with drawn pistols stood in the doorway.
“Put your hands up! Military Police. Hands up now!” one of them yelled.
Sampson and I slowly raised our arms.
“We're homicide detectives. We have permission to be here,” Sampson told them. “Check with Captain Jacobs at CID.”
“Just keep those hands up. High!” the MP in charge barked.
Sampson spoke calmly to the leader of the three MPs who now crowded into the bedroom with their guns leveled at us.
“I'm a friend of Sergeant Cooper's,” Sampson told them.
“He's a convicted murderer,” snarled one MP out of the side of his mouth. “Lives on death row these days. But not for much longer.”
Sampson kept his hands high, but told them there was a note from Cooper in his shirt pocket and the house key we'd been given. The head MP took the note and read:
To whom it may concern, John Sampson is a friend, and the only person I know who's working on my behalf. He and Detective Cross are welcome in my house, but the rest of you bastards aren't. Get the hell out. You're trespassing!
Sergeant Ellis Cooper.
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Sixteen
I woke the next morning with the phrase 'dead man walking' repeating itself in my head. I couldn't get back to sleep. I kept seeing Ellis Cooper in the bright orange death row jumpsuit.
Early in the morning, before it got too hot, Sampson and I took a run around Bragg. We entered the base on Bragg Boulevard, then turned onto a narrower street called Honeycutt. Then came a maze of similar side streets, and finally Longstreet Road. Bragg was immaculate. Not a speck of trash anywhere. A lot of soldiers were already up running
FT.
As we jogged side by side, we planned out our day. We had a lot to do in a relatively short time. Then we needed to get back to Washington.
“Tell you what's bothering me the most so far,” Sampson said as we toured the military base on foot.
“Same thing that's bothering me, probably,” I huffed. “We found out about Ronald Hodge and the Hertz car in about a day. What's wrong with the local police and the Army investigations?”
“You starting to believe Ellis Cooper is innocent?”
I didn't answer Sampson, but our murder investigation was definitely disturbing in an unusual way: it was going too well. We were learning things that the Fayetteville police didn't seem to know. And why hadn't Army CID done a better job with the case? Cooper was one of their own, wasn't he?
When I got back to my room after the run, the phone was ringing. I wondered who'd be calling this early. Had to be Nana and the kids. It was just past seven. I answered in the slightly goofy Damon Wayans voice I sometimes use around the kids. “Yeah-lo. Who's calling me so early in the morning? Who's waking me up? You have some nerve.”
Then I heard a woman's voice. Unfamiliar, with a heavy Southern accent. “Is this Detective Cross?”
I quickly changed my tone and hoped she didn't hang up. “Yes it is. Who's this?”
“I'd rather not say. Just listen, please. This is hard for me to tell you, or anyone else.”
“I'm listening. Go ahead.”
I heard a deep sigh before she spoke again.
“I was with Ellis Cooper on the night of the three terrible murders. We were together when the murders took place. We were intimate. That's all I can say for now.”
I could tell the caller was frightened, maybe close to panic. I had to keep her on the line if I could. “Wait a minute. Please. You could have helped Sergeant Cooper at the trial. You can still help him. You could prevent his execution!”
“No. I can't say any more than I already have. I'm married to someone on the base. I won't destroy my family. I just can't. I'm sorry.”
“Why didn't you tell the police in town, or CID?” Why didn't Cooper tell us? “Please stay on the line. Stay with me.”
The woman moaned softly. “I called Captain Jacobs. I told him. He did nothing with the information, with the truth. I hope you do something. Ellis Cooper didn't kill those three women. I didn't believe my testimony would be enough to save him. And... I'm afraid of the consequences.”
“What consequences? Think about the consequences for Sergeant Cooper. He's going to be executed.”
The woman hung up. I couldn't tell much about her, but I was sure she was sobbing. I stood there staring at the phone receiver, not quite believing what I'd just heard. I had just talked to Ellis Cooper's alibi and now she was gone.
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Seventeen
Around five o'clock, Sampson and I received the terrifically good news that the commanding officer at Bragg was willing to see us at his house on the base. We were to be there at seven-thirty sharp. General Stephen Bowen would give us ten minutes, to share the information we had about the murder case. In the meantime, Sampson got through to Sergeant Cooper at Central Prison. He denied that he'd been with a woman that night. What was worse, Sampson said Cooper wasn't very convincing. But why would he hold the truth back from us? It didn't make sense.
General Bowen's quarters looked to be from the Twenties or Thirties, a stucco house with a Spanish tile roof. Up on the second floor there was a sun porch with glass on three sides, probably the master suite.
A man was watching from up there as we parked in the semicircular driveway. General Bowen himself?
We were met at the front door by an officer aide who identified himself as Captain Rizzo. The general's staff included an officer aide, an enlisted aide who was part of the general's security but also worked as the cook, and a driver who was also security.
We stepped into a large foyer with sitting rooms on either side. The decor was eclectic, and probably reflected the general's career around the world. I noticed a beautiful ca
rved cabinet that looked German, a painted screen showing rolling hills and cherry trees from Japan, and an antique sideboard that suggested a possible posting in New England.
Captain Rizzo showed us into a small den where General Stephen Bowen was already waiting for us. He was in uniform. The aide leaned in to me. “I'll return in exactly ten minutes. The general wants to talk to you alone.”
“Please sit down,” said Bowen. He was tall and solidly built, probably in his mid-fifties. He tented his fingers on top of a well-worn desk that looked like it had been with him for most of his career. “I understand that you've come down here to try and re-open the Cooper murder case. Why do you think we should reconsider the case? And Cooper's death sentence?”
As concisely as I could I told the general what we had already found out, and also our reactions to the evidence as homicide detectives. He was a practiced listener, who punctuated what I had to say by uttering 'interesting' several times. He seemed open to other points of view and eager for new information. For the moment, I was hopeful.
When I stopped, he asked, Ts there anything else either of you wants to add? This is the time for it."
Sampson seemed unusually quiet and reserved in the general's presence. “I'm not going to get into my personal feelings for Sergeant Cooper,” he finally spoke, 'but, as a detective, I find it impossible to believe that he'd bring the murder weapon, plus several incriminating photographs, back to his house."
Surprisingly, General Bowen nodded agreement. “I do too,” he said. “But that's what he did. I don't understand why either, but then again, I don't understand how a man could willfully murder three women, as he most definitely did. It was the worst act of peacetime violence I've seen in my career, and gentlemen, I've seen some bad business.”
The general leaned forward across his desk. His eyes narrowed and his jaw tensed. “Let me tell you something about this murder case that I haven't shared with anyone else. No one. This is just for the two of you. When Sergeant Cooper is executed at Central Prison by the state of North Carolina, I will be there with the families of those murdered women. I'm looking forward to the lethal injection. What that animal did revolts and disgusts me. Your ten minutes are up. Now get the hell out of here. Get the fuck out of my sight.”
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