I snorted out a laugh. “Is that when the two of you got close? Weekends together in the barracks?”
“I hated his guts back then. Thought he was picking on me. You know, singling me out because of my size. Then we hooked up again in ’Nam.”
“He loosened up some? Once you met him again in ’Nam?”
“No, Cooper is Cooper. He’s no bullshit, a real straight arrow, but if you follow the rules, he’s fair. That’s what he liked about the army. It was mostly orderly, consistent, and if you did the right thing, then you usually did all right. Maybe not as well as you thought you should, but not too bad. He told me it’s smart for a black man to find a meritocracy, like the army.”
“Or the police department,” I said.
“Up to a point,” Sampson said, nodding. “I remember a time,” he continued. “Vietnam. We had replaced a unit that killed maybe two hundred people in a five-month period. These weren’t exactly soldiers that got killed, Alex, though they were supposed to be VC.”
I listened as I drove. Sampson’s voice became faraway.
“This kind of military operation was called ‘mopping up.’ This one time, we came into a small village, but another unit was already there. An infantry officer was ‘interrogating’ a prisoner in front of these women and children. He was cutting skin off the man’s stomach.
“Sergeant Cooper went up to the officer and pressed his gun to the man’s skull. He said if the officer didn’t stop what he was doing, he was a dead man. He meant it too. Cooper didn’t care about the consequences. He didn’t kill those women in North Carolina, Alex. Ellis Cooper is no killer.”
Chapter 6
I LOVED BEING with Sampson. Always had, always would. As we rode through Virginia and into North Carolina the talk eventually turned to other, more hopeful and promising subjects. I had already told him everything there was to tell about Jamilla Hughes, but he wanted to hear more scoop. Sometimes he’s a bigger gossip than Nana Mama.
“I don’t have any more to tell you, big man. You know I met her on that big murder case in San Francisco. We were together a lot for a couple of weeks. I don’t know her that well. I like her, though. She doesn’t take any crap from anybody.”
“And you’d like to know her more. I can tell that much.” Sampson laughed and clapped his big hands together.
I started to laugh too. “Yes, I would, matter of fact. Jamilla plays it close to the vest. I think she got banged up somewhere along the line. Maybe the first husband. She doesn’t want to talk about it yet.”
“I think she has your number, man.”
“Maybe she does. You’ll like her. Everybody does.”
John started to laugh again. “You do find nice ladies. I’ll give you that much.” He switched subjects. “Nana Mama is some kind of piece of work, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, she is. Eighty-two. You’d never know it. I came home the other day. She was shimmying a refrigerator down the back stairs of the house on an oilcloth. Wouldn’t wait for me to get home to help her.”
“You remember that time we got caught lifting records at Spector’s Vinyl?”
“Yeah, I remember. She loves to tell that story.”
John continued to laugh. “I can still see the two of us sitting in that store manager’s crummy little office. He’s threatening us with everything but the death penalty for stealing his crummy forty-fives, but we are so cool. We’re almost laughing in his face.
“Nana shows up at the record store, and she starts hitting both of us. She hit me in the face, bloodied my lip. She was like some kind of mad woman on a rampage, a mission from God.”
“She had this warning: ‘Don’t cross me. Don’t ever, ever cross me, ever.’ I can still hear the way she would say it,” I said.
“Then she let that police officer haul our asses down to the station. She wouldn’t even bring us home. I said, ‘They were only records, Nana.’ I thought she was going to kill me. ‘I’m already bleeding!’ I said. ‘You’re gonna bleed more!’ she yelled in my face.”
I found myself smiling at the distant memory. Interesting how some things that weren’t real funny at the time eventually get that way. “Maybe that’s why we became big, bad cops. That afternoon in the record store. Nana’s vengeful wrath.”
Sampson turned serious and said, “No, that’s not what straightened me out. The army did it. I sure didn’t get what I needed in my own house. Nana helped, but it was the army that set me straight. I owe the army. And I owe Ellis Cooper. Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah!”
Chapter 7
WE DROVE ONTO the sobering and foreboding high-walled grounds of Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The security housing unit there was like a prison within a prison. It was surrounded by razor-sharp wire fences and a deadly electronic barrier; armed guards were in all the watchtowers. Central Prison was the only one in North Carolina with a death row. Currently there were more than a thousand inmates, with an astounding 220 on the row.
“Scary place,” Sampson said as we got out of the car. I had never seen him look so unsettled and unhappy. I didn’t much like being at Central Prison either.
Once we were inside the main building it was as quiet as a monastery, and the extremely high level of security continued. Sampson and I were asked to wait between two sets of steel-bar doors. We were subjected to a metal detector, then had to present photo IDs along with our badges. The security guard who checked us informed us that many of North Carolina’s “First in Flight” license plates were made here at the prison. Good to know, I suppose.
There were hundreds of controlled steel gates in the high-security prison. Inmates couldn’t move outside their cells without handcuffs, leg irons, and security guards. Finally we were allowed to enter death row itself, and were taken to Sergeant Cooper. In this section of the prison each block consisted of sixteen cells, eight on the bottom, eight on top, with a common dayroom. Everything was painted the official color, known as “lark.”
“John Sampson, you came after all,” Ellis Cooper said as he saw us standing in a narrow corridor outside a special hearing room. The door was opened and we were let in by a pair of armed guards.
I sucked in a breath, but tried not to show it. Cooper’s wrists and ankles were shackled with chains. He looked like a big, powerful slave.
Sampson went and hugged Cooper. Cooper had on the orange-red jumpsuit that all of the death row inmates wore. He kept repeating, “So good to see you.”
When the two big men finally pulled apart, Cooper’s eyes were red and his cheeks wet. Sampson remained dry-eyed. I had never, ever seen John cry.
“This is the best thing that’s happened to me in a long, long while,” Cooper said. “I didn’t think anybody would come after the trial. I’m already dead to most of them.”
“I brought along somebody. This is Detective Alex Cross,” Sampson said, turning my way. “He’s the best I know at homicide investigations.”
“That’s what I need,” said Cooper as he took my hand. “The best.”
“So tell us about all this awful craziness. Everything,” Sampson said. “Tell us from start to finish. Your version, Coop.”
Sergeant Cooper nodded. “I want to. It will be good to tell it to somebody who isn’t already convinced that I murdered those three women.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Sampson said. “Because you didn’t murder the women.”
“That Friday was a payday,” Cooper began. “I should have gone straight home to my girlfriend, Marcia, but I had a few drinks at the club. I called Marcia around eight, I guess. She’d apparently gone out. She was probably ticked off at me. So I had another drink. Met up with a couple of buddies. I called my place again — it was probably close to nine. Marcia was still out.
“I had another couple of highballs at the club. Then I decided to walk home. Why walk? Because I knew I was three sheets to the wind. It was only a little over a mile home anyway. When I got to my house, it was past ten. Marcia still w
asn’t there. I turned on a North Carolina–Duke basketball game. Love to root against the Dukies and Coach K. Around eleven o’clock I heard the front door open. I yelled out to Marcia, asked her where she had been.
“Only it wasn’t her coming home after all. It was about half a dozen MPs and a CID investigator named Jacobs. Soon after that, they supposedly found the RTAK survival knife in the attic of my house. And traces of blue paint used on those ladies. They arrested me for murder.”
Ellis Cooper looked at Sampson first, then he stared hard into my eyes. He paused before he spoke again. “I didn’t kill those women,” he said. “And what I still can’t believe, somebody obviously framed me for the murders. Why would somebody set me up? It doesn’t make sense. I don’t have an enemy in the world. Least I didn’t think so.”
Chapter 8
THOMAS STARKEY, BROWNLEY Harris, and Warren Griffin had been best friends for more than thirty years, ever since they served together in Vietnam. Every couple of months, under Thomas Starkey’s command, they went to a simple, post-and-beam log cabin on Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia and spent a long weekend together. It was a ritual of machismo and would continue, Starkey insisted, until the last of them was gone.
They did all the things they couldn’t do at home, played music from the sixties — the Doors, Cream, Hendrix, Blind Faith, the Airplane — loud. They drank way too much beer and bourbon while they grilled thick porterhouse steaks that they ate with fresh corn, Vidalia onions, tomatoes, and baked potatoes slathered with butter and sour cream. They smoked expensive Cuban cigars. They had a hell of a lot of fun in what they did.
“What was the line in that old beer commercial? You know the one I’m talking about,” Harris asked as they sat out on the front porch after dinner.
“It doesn’t get any better than this,” Starkey said as he flicked the thick ash from his cigar onto the wide-planked floor. “I think it was a shit beer, though. Can’t even remember the name. Course, I’m a little drunk and a lot stoned.” Neither of the others believed that. Thomas Starkey was never completely out of control, and especially not when he committed murder, or ordered it done.
“We’ve paid our dues, gentlemen. We’ve earned this,” Starkey said, and extended his mug to clink with his friends. “What’s happening now is well deserved.”
“Bet your ass we earned it. Couple or three foreign wars. Our other exploits over the past few years,” said Harris. “Families. Eleven kids between us. Plus we did pretty good out in the big, bad civilian world too. I sure never figured I’d be knocking down a hundred and a half a year.”
They clinked the heavy beer glasses again. “We did good, boys. And believe it or not, it can only get better,” said Starkey.
As they always did, they retold old war stories — Grenada, Mogadishu, the Gulf War, but mostly Vietnam.
Starkey recounted the time they had made a Vietnamese woman “ride the submarine.” The woman — a VC sympathizer, of course — had been stripped naked, then tied to a wooden plank, face upward. Harris had tied a towel around her face. Water from a barrel was slowly sprinkled onto the towel. As the towel eventually became soaked, the woman was forced to inhale water to breathe. Her lungs and stomach soon swelled with the water. Then Harris pounded on her chest to expel the water. The woman talked, but of course she didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know. So they dragged her out to a kaki tree, which produced a sweet fruit and was always covered with large yellow ants. They tied the mama-san to the tree, lit up marijuana cigars, and watched as her body swelled beyond recognition. When it was close to bursting, they “wired” her with a field telephone and electrocuted her. Starkey always said that was about the most creative kill ever. “And the VC terrorist bitch deserved it.”
Brownley Harris started to talk about “mad minutes” in Vietnam. If there were answering shots from a village, even one, they would have a “mad minute.” All hell would break loose because the answering shots proved that the whole village was VC. After the “mad minute,” the village, or what remained of it, would be burned to the ground.
“Let’s go into the den, boys,” Starkey said. “I’m in the mood for a movie. And I know just the one.”
“Any good?” Brownley Harris asked, and grinned.
“Scary as hell, I’ll tell you that. Makes Hannibal look like a popcorn fart. Scary as any movie you ever saw.”
Chapter 9
THE THREE OF them headed for the den, their favorite place in the cabin. A long time ago in Vietnam, the trio had been given the code name Three Blind Mice. They had been elite military assassins — did what they were told, never asked embarrassing questions, executed their orders. It was still pretty much that way. And they were the best at what they did.
Starkey was the leader, just as he had been in Vietnam. He was the smartest and the toughest. Starkey hadn’t changed much physically over the years. He was six-one, had a thirty-three-inch waist and a tan, weathered face, appropriate for his fifty-five years. His blond hair was now peppered with gray. He didn’t laugh easily, but when he did, everybody usually laughed with him.
Brownley Harris was a stocky five-eight, but with a surprisingly well-toned body at age fifty-one, considering all the beer he drank. He had hooded brown eyes with thick, bushy eyebrows, almost a unibrow. His hair was still black but flecked with gray now, and he wore it in a military-style buzz cut, though not a “high and tight.”
Warren “the Kid” Griffin was the youngest of the group, and still the most impulsive. He looked up to both of the other men, especially Starkey. Griffin was six-two, lanky, and reminded people, especially older women, of the folk-rock singer James Taylor. His strawberry blond hair was long on the sides but thinning on top.
“I kind of like old Hannibal the Cannibal,” Griffin said as they entered the den. “Especially now that Hollywood decided he’s the good guy. Only kills people who don’t have nice manners, or taste in fine art. Hey, what’s wrong with that?”
“Works for me,” said Harris.
Starkey locked the door to the den, then slid a plain, black-box videotape into the machine. He loved the den, with its leather seating arrangement, thirty-six-inch Phillips TV, an armoire filled with tapes that were categorized chronologically. “Showtime,” said Starkey. “Dim the houselights.”
The first image was a shaky view by a handheld camera of someone approaching a small, ordinary-looking redbrick house. Then a second man came into view. The camera operator moved closer and closer until the shot was through a grimy, bug-speckled picture window into a living room. There were three women in the room, laughing and chatting up a storm, totally unaware that they were being watched by three strangers, and also being filmed.
“Take note that the opening scene is one long camera shot without a cut,” said Harris. “Cinematographer is a genius, if I don’t say so myself.”
“Yeah, you’re an artist all right,” said Griffin. “Probably some latent fagola in you.”
The women, who looked to be in their mid-thirties, were now clearly visible through the window. They were drinking white wine, laughing it up on their “ladies’ night.” They wore shorts and had good legs that deserved to be shown off. Barbara Green stretched out a leg and touched her toes, almost as if she were preening for the movie.
The shaky camera shot continued around the brick house to the back door at the kitchen. There was sound with the picture now. One of the three intruders began to bang on the aluminum screen door.
Then a voice came from inside. “Coming! Who is it? Oohh, I hope it’s Russell Crowe. I just saw Beautiful Mind. Now that man is beautiful.”
“It’s not Russell Crowe, lady,” said Brownley Harris, who was obviously the camera operator.
Tanya Jackson opened the kitchen door and looked terribly confused for a split second, before Thomas Starkey cut her throat with the survival knife. The woman moaned and dropped to her knees, then she fell onto her face. Tanya was dead before she hit the black and olive-green checker
board linoleum of the kitchen floor.
“Somebody’s very good with a survival knife. You haven’t lost your touch over the years,” Harris said to Starkey as he drank beer and watched the movie.
The handheld camera shot continued, moving quickly through the kitchen. Right over the bleeding, twitching body of Tanya Jackson. Then into the living room of the house. A jumpy song by Destiny’s Child was playing on the radio and now became part of the movie soundtrack.
“What’s going on?” Barbara Green screamed from the couch, and curled herself into a protective ball. “Who are you men? Where’s Tanya?”
Starkey was on her in an instant with the knife. He even mugged for the camera, leering eerily. Then he chased Maureen Bruno back into the kitchen, where he drove the RTAK into the center of her back. She threw both arms into the air as if she were surrendering.
The camera reversed angle to show Warren Griffin. He was bringing up the rear. It was Griffin who had brought the paint and who would actually paint the faces and torsos of the three murder victims blue.
Sitting in the den of their cabin, the buddies watched the film twice more. When the third showing was over, Thomas Starkey removed the videocassette. “Here, here,” said Starkey, and they all raised their beer mugs. “We’re not getting older, we’re getting better and better.”
Chapter 10
HOO-RAH!
In the morning, Sampson and I arrived at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to continue our investigation into the Bluelady Murders. C-130s and C-141s were constantly flying overhead. I drove along something called the All American Freeway, which I then took to Reilly Road. Surprisingly, there had been no security cordon around the army base, no fence around the post, no main gate until September 11. The army had allowed local motorists to use base roads as transit from one side of Bragg to the other.
The base itself measured twenty-five miles east to west, ten miles north to south. It was home for combat troops ready to be sent anywhere in the world within eighteen hours. And it had all the amenities: movie theaters, riding stables, a museum, two golf courses, even an ice-skating rink.