Sampson took her hands in his. “I was wondering if I could have another cup of coffee,” he said.
She laughed lightly and shook her head. “Are you always this gallant?”
Sampson shrugged. “No,” he said. “I've never been this way in my whole life.”
“Well, c'mon back inside.”
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Fifty-Six
It was almost midnight and Jamilla and I were up to our necks in the shimmering mountain pool that looked down on Phoenix in the distance and on the desert up closer. The sky over our heads seemed to go on forever. A big jet took off from Phoenix and all I could think of was the tragedy at the World Trade Center. I wondered if any of us would ever be able to look at a jet in the sky without having that thought.
“I don't want to get out of this water. Ever,” she said. “I love it here. The desert sky goes on and on.”
I held her close to me, felt her strong heart beating against my chest. The night air was cool and it made being in the pool feel even better.
“I don't want to leave here either,” I whispered against her cheek.
“So why do we do what we do? Live in the big city? Hunt killers? Work long hours for low pay? Obsess on murders?”
I looked into her deep brown eyes. Those were good questions, ones I'd asked myself dozens of times, but especially during the past few months. “It always seems like a good idea at the time. But not right now.”
“You think you can ever quit? Get past the adrenalin? The need to feel that what you do matters. I'm not sure that I can, Alex.”
I had told Jamilla that I was probably going to leave the police force in Washington. She nodded and said she understood, but I wondered if she really did. How many times had she faced down killers? Had any of her partners died?
“So,” she said, 'we've been beating all around it. What do you think about us, Alex? Is there hope for two cops off the beat?"
I smiled. “I think we're doing great. Of course, that's just me.”
“I think I agree,” she smiled. Too early to tell for sure, right? But we're having fun, aren't we? I haven't thought about being a detective all day. That's a first."
I kissed her lips. “Neither have I. And don't knock fun. I could use a lot more of it in my life. This beats solving homicides.”
“Really, Alex?” She grinned and pulled me close against her. Ts this good for you. Well, it's good for me, too. That's enough for right now. I love being here. I love tonight. And I trust you, Alex."
I couldn't have agreed more. At a little before midnight.
In the mountainside pool overlooking Phoenix and the sprawl of the desert.
“I trust you, too,” I said as the big American Airlines jet passed right over our heads.
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
PART THREE
THE FOOT SOLDIER
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Fifty-Seven
I got back to Washington on Sunday night at eleven. There was more of a bounce in my step and a smile plastered on my face. I'd forgotten about the rigors of the murder investigation for a couple of days and Jamilla was the reason why.
Nana was waiting up in the kitchen. What was this? She sat at the table without her usual cup of tea and with no book to read. When she saw me come in, she waved me over and gave me a hug. “Hello, Alex. You have a good trip? You say hello to Jamilla for me? You better.”
I looked down into her brown eyes. They seemed a little sad. Couldn't hide it from me. “Something's wrong.” Fear had grabbed at me already. Was she sick? How sick?
Nana shook her head. “No, not really, sweetheart. I just couldn't sleep. So tell me about the trip. How was Jamilla?” she asked, and her eyes brightened. Nana definitely liked Jamilla. No hiding that either.
“Oh, she's good and she says hello too. She misses everybody. I hope I can get her to come East again, but you know, she's a California girl at heart.”
Nana nodded. “I hope she comes back,” she said. “Jamilla is a real strong woman. You've met your match with that one. I won't hold it against her that she's from out West. Anyway, I guess Oakland is more like DC than San Francisco. Don't you think?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
I continued to look into Nana's eyes. I didn't get it. She wasn't giving me a hard time like she usually does. What was up? We were quiet for the next minute or so. Unusual for us. We usually jabber back and forth until one of us surrenders.
“You know, I'm eighty-two years old. I never felt like I was seventy, or seventy-five, or even eighty. But Alex, suddenly I feel my age. I'm eighty-two. Give or take.”
She took my hand in hers and squeezed it. The sadness was back in her eyes, maybe even a little fear. I felt a lump in my throat. Something was wrong with her. What was it? Why wouldn't she tell me?
“I've had a pain lately, in my chest. Shortness of breath. Angina or whatever. Not so good, not so good.”
“Have you seen Dr. Rodman? Or Bill Montgomery?” I asked.
“I saw Kayla Coles. She was in the neighborhood treating a man a few houses down from us.”
I didn't understand. “Who's Kayla Coles?”
“Dr. Kayla makes house calls in Southeast. She's organized about a dozen doctors and nurses who come into the neighborhood to help people here. She's a fabulous doctor and a good person, Alex. She's doing a lot of good in Southeast. I like her tremendously.”
I bristled a little. “Nana, you're not some charity case. We have money for you to see a doctor of your choice.”
Nana squeezed her eyes shut. “Please. Listen to me. And pay attention to what I'm saying. I'm eighty-two and I won't be around forever. Much as I'd like to be. But I'm taking care of myself so far, and I plan to keep doing it. I like and trust Kayla Coles. She is my choice.”
Nana got up slowly from the table, kissed me on the cheek and then she shuffled off to bed. At least we were fighting again.
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Later that night, I went up to my attic office. Everyone was asleep and the house was quiet.
I liked working when it was peaceful like this. I was back on the Army case; I couldn't get it out of my mind. The bodies painted in bright colors. The eerie straw dolls. The even spookier all-seeing eyes. Innocent soldiers punished by wrongful executions.
And who knew how many more soldiers might be scheduled for execution?
There was plenty of material to go through. If even some of these executions were linked, it would be a huge bombshell for the Army. I continued my research, did some spade work on the straw doll and the evil eye. I did a search on Lexus-Nexus, which held information from most local and national newspapers and the major international ones. A lot of detectives underestimate the usefulness of press research, but I don't. I have solved crimes using information passed to the press by police officers.
I read reports about a former PFC in Hawaii. He'd been accused of murdering five men during a sex-slavery-and-torture spree that occurred from 1998 to 2000. He was currently on death row.
I moved on. I felt I had no choice but to keep going on the case.
An Army captain had killed two junior officers in San Diego less than three months ago. He'd been convicted and was awaiting sentencing. His wife was lodging an appeal. He'd been convicted on the basis of DNA evidence.
I made a note to myself: Maybe talk to this one.
My reading was interrupted by the sound of footsteps peppering the stairs up to the attic.
Someone was coming up.
In a hurry.
Adrenalin fired through my system. I reached into a desk drawer and put my hand on a gun.
Suddenly Damon burst into the room. He was soaked with sweat and looked like hell. Nana had told me he was asleep in his room. Obviously that hadn't been the case. He hadn't even been in the house, had he?
“Damon?” I said as I rose. “Where have you been?”
“Come with me, Dad. Please. It's my friend. Ramon's sick! Dad, I think he's dying.”
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Fifty-Nine
We both ran down to my car and Damon told me what had happened to his friend Ramon on the way. His hands were shaking badly as he spoke.
“He took E, Dad. He's been doing E for a couple of days.”
E was one of the latest drugs of choice around DC, especially among high school and college kids at George Washington and Georgetown.
“Ramon hasn't been going to school?” I asked.
“No. He hasn't been going home either. He's been staying at a crib down by the river. It's in Capitol Heights.”
I knew the river area and I headed there with a red lamp on my car roof and a siren bleating. I had met Ramon Ramirez, and I knew about his parents: they were musicians, and addicts. Ramon played baseball with Damon. He was twelve. I wondered how deeply Damon was involved, but this wasn't the time for questions like that.
I parked, and Damon and I walked into a dilapidated row house down near the Anacostia. The house was three stories and most of the windows were boarded.
“You been in this place before?” I asked Damon.
“Yeah, I was here. I came to help Ramon. I couldn't just leave him, could I?”
“Was Ramon conscious when you left him?” I asked.
“Yeah. But his teeth were clenched together and then he was throwing up. His nose was bleeding.”
“Okay, let's see how he is. Keep up with me.”
We hurried down a dark hallway and turned a corner. I could smell the stench of garbage and also a recent fire.
Then I got a surprise. Two EMS techs and a doctor were in a small room; they were working over a boy. I could see Ramon's black sneakers and rolled-up cargo pants. Nothing moved.
The doctor rose from her kneeling position over Ramon. She was tall and heavy-set, with a pretty face. I hadn't seen her around before. I walked up to her, showed my badge, which didn't seem to impress her much.
“I'm Detective Cross,” I said. “How is the boy?”
The woman focused hard on me. “I'm Kayla Coles. We're working on him. I don't know yet. Someone called nine-one-one. Did you make the call?” She looked at Damon. I realized she was the doctor Nana had talked about.
Damon answered her question. “Yes, ma'am.”
“Did you take any drugs?” she asked.
Damon looked at me, then at Dr. Coles. “I don't do drugs. It's dumb.”
“But your friends do? Do you have dumb friends?”
“I was trying to help him. That's all.”
Dr. Coles' look was severe, but then she nodded. “You probably saved your friend's life.”
Damon and I waited in the bleak, foul-smelling room until we heard news that Ramon would make it. This time. Kayla Coles stayed there the whole time. She hovered over Ramon like a guardian angel. Damon got to say a few words to his friend before they took him to a waiting ambulance. I saw him clasp the boy's hands. It was nearly two in the morning when we finally made our way out of the row house.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded, but then his body started to shake, and he finally began to sob against my arm.
“It's all right. It's all right,” I consoled him. I put my arm around Damon's shoulders and we headed home.
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Sixty
Thomas Starkey, Brownley Harris and Warren Griffin took separate flights to New York City, all leaving out of Raleigh-Durham Airport. It was safer and a lot smarter that way, and they always worked under the assumption that they were the best, after all. They couldn't make mistakes, especially now.
Starkey was on the five o'clock out of North Carolina. He planned to meet the others at the Palisade Motel in Highland Falls, New York, just outside the United States Military Academy at West Point. There was going to be a murder there. Two murders, actually.
Then this long mission was over.
What was it Martin Sheen's commanding officer had told him in Apocalypse Now? “Remember this, Captain. There if no mission. There never was a mission.” Starkey couldn't help thinking that this job had been like that for them a long haul, a relentless nightmare. Each of the murders had been complicated. This was Starkey's fourth trip to New York in the past two months. He still didn't even know who he was working for; he'd never met the bastard.
In spite of everything, he felt confident as the Delta flight took off that evening. He talked to the flight attendant, but avoided the kind of innocent flirting he might do under other circumstances. He didn't want to be remembered, so he stuck his face in a Tom Clancy thriller he'd picked up at the airport. Starkey identified with Clancy characters like Jack Clark and John Patrick Ryan.
Once the jet leveled off and drinks were served, Starkey went over his plan for the final murders. It was all in his head; nothing ever written down. It was in Harris's and Griffin's heads, too. He hoped they didn't get in any trouble before he got to the Point tonight. There was a raunchy strip club in nearby New Windsor called The Bed Room, but they'd promised to stay at the hotel.
Finally, Starkey sat back, closed his eyes and started doing 'the math' again. It was a comforting ritual, especially now that they were close to the end.
$100,000 apiece for the first three hits.
$150,000 for the fourth.
$200,000 for the fifth.
$250,000 for West Point.
$500,000 bonus when the entire job was done.
It was almost over.
And Starkey still didn't know who was paying for the murders, or why.
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Sixty-One
Sharp, steep cliffs of granite overlooked the Hudson River at West Point. Starkey knew the area well. Later that night he drove down the main drag in Highland Falls, passing cheesy-looking motels, pizza shops, souvenir stands. He went through Thayer Gate with its turreted sentry tower and stone-faced MP on guard. Murder at West Point, he thought. Man oh man.
Starkey put the job out of his mind for another few moments. He let impressions of West Point wash over him. Impressions and memories. Starkey had been a cadet here, been a first-year plebe like the two youngsters he saw jogging back to barracks now. In his day he'd shouted the cadet motto' Always the hard way, sirl'over a thousand times if he'd shouted it once.
God, he loved it here: the attitude, the discipline, the whole physical plant.
The Cadet Chapel stood high on a hillside overlooking the Plains. A cross between a medieval cathedral and a fortress, it still dominated the entire landscape. The campus was filled with mammoth gray-stone buildings and emphasized the fortress effect. An overwhelming sense of solidarity and permanence. Soon to be shaken badly.
Harris and Griffin were waiting for him on the grounds. For the next hour, they took turns watching the Bennett house on Bartlett Loop, an area of West Point reserved for officers and their families. The house was redbrick with white trim and plenty of ivy creeping the walls. Smoke curled lazily from the stone chimney. It was a four-bedroom, two-bath unit. On the housing map it was designated as Quarters 130.
Around nine-thirty the three killers reconnoitered on the seventeenth fairway of the West Point golf course. They didn't see anyone on the hilly course that formed one of the boundaries of the military academy. Route 9-W was just to the west.
“This might be easier than we thought, ”Warren Griffin said. “They're both home. Relaxing. Guard down.”
Starkey looked at Griffin disapprovingly. “I don't think so. There's a saying here, ”Always the hard way, sir“. Don't forget it. And don't forget that Robert Bennett was Special Forces. This isn't some big city architect having a sleep-over on the Appalachian Trail.”
Griffin snapped to attention. “Sorry, sir. Won't happen again.”
Just before ten o'clock, the three of them made their way through the bramble and woods that bordered the backyard
of Quarters 130. Starkey pushed back a stubborn branch of a pine tree and saw the house.
Then he spotted Colonel Robert Bennett in the kitchen. War-hero, father of five, husband for twenty-six years, former Special Forces in Vietnam.
Bennett was holding a goblet of red wine and seemed to be supervising the preparation of a meal. Barbara Bennett stepped into view. She was doing the real work. Now she too took a sip of his wine. Robert Bennett kissed the back of her neck. They seemed loving for a couple married well over twenty years. That's too bad, Starkey thought, but kept it to himself.
“Let's do it,”he said. “The last piece in the puzzle.”
And it truly was a puzzle even to the killers.
Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice
Chapter Sixty-Two
Robert and Barbara Bennett were just sitting down to dinner when the three heavily armed men burst through the back door into the kitchen. Colonel Bennett saw their guns, camouflage dress, and also noted that none of the men wore masks. He saw all of the faces and knew this couldn't be worse.
“Who are you? Robert, who are they?” Barbara stuttered out a few words. “What's the meaning of this?”
Unfortunately, Colonel Bennett was afraid that he knew exactly who they were, and maybe even who had sent them. He wasn't sure, but he thought he recognized one of them from a long time ago. He even remembered a name Starkey. Yes, Thomas Starkey. Good God, why now? After all these years?
One of the intruders pulled shut the colorful curtains on the two kitchen windows. He used a free arm to sweep the dinner plates, chicken, salad and wine glasses onto the kitchen floor. Bennett understood this was for dramatic effect.
Another man held an automatic weapon pressed to Barbara Bennett's forehead.
The kitchen was totally silent.
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