There were a couple of signs as we entered at one of the new security posts. One read WELCOME TO FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA, HOME OF AMERICA’S AIRBORNE AND SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES.
The second was common to just about every U.S. base around the world: YOU ARE ENTERING A MILITARY INSTALLATION AND ARE NOW SUBJECT TO SEARCH WITHOUT A WARRANT.
The grounds were dusty, and it was still hot in the early fall. Everywhere I looked I saw sweaty soldiers running p.t. And humvees. Lots of humvees. Several of the units were “singing cadence.”
“Hoo-rah!” I said to Sampson.
“Nothing like it,” he grinned. “Almost makes me want to re-up.”
Sampson and I spent the rest of the day talking to men dressed in camouflage with spit-shined jump boots. My FBI connections helped open doors that might have stayed closed to us. Ellis Cooper had a lot of friends, and most had originally been shocked to hear about the murders. Even now, not many of them believed that he was capable of the mayhem and cruelty involved.
The exceptions were a couple of noncoms who had gone through the Special Warfare School under his command. They told us that Cooper had physically bullied them. A PFC named Steve Hall was the most outspoken. “The sergeant had a real mean streak. It was common knowledge. Couple of times, he got me alone. He’d elbow me, knee me. I knew he was hoping I’d fight back, but I didn’t. I’m not that surprised he killed somebody.”
“Just chicken-shit stuff,” Sampson said about the training-school stories. “Coop has a temper and he can be a prick, if provoked. That doesn’t mean he killed three women here and painted them blue.”
I could feel Sampson’s tremendous affection and respect for Ellis Cooper. It was a side he didn’t let show often. Sampson had grown up with a mother who was an addict and dealer, and a father who’d run out on him when he was three. He had never been much of a sentimentalist, except when it came to Nana and the kids, and maybe me.
“How do you feel about this mess so far?” he finally asked.
I hesitated before giving an answer. “It’s too early to tell, John. I know that’s a hell of a thing to say when your friend has less than three weeks to live. I don’t think we’ll be welcome around Fort Bragg much longer either. The army likes to solve its problems in its own way. It’ll be hard to get the kind of information we need to really help Cooper. As for Cooper, I guess my instinct is to believe him. But who would go to all this bother to set him up? None of it makes sense.”
Chapter 11
I WAS STARTING to get used to the C-130s and C-141s that were constantly flying overhead. Not to mention the artillery booming on the shooting range near Fort Bragg. I’d begun to think of the artillery as death knells for Ellis Cooper.
After a quick lunch out on Bragg Boulevard, Sampson and I had an appointment with a captain named Jacobs. Donald Jacobs was with CID, the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. He had been assigned to the murder case from the beginning and had been a key, damaging witness at trial.
I kept noticing that the roads inside Fort Bragg were well trafficked by civilian vehicles. Even now, anyone could get in here and not be noticed. I drove to the section of the base where the main administration buildings were located. CID was in a redbrick building that was more modern and sterile-looking than the more attractive structures from the twenties and thirties.
Captain Jacobs met us in his office. He wore a red plaid sport shirt and khakis rather than a uniform. He seemed relaxed and cordial, a large, physically fit man in his late forties. “How can I help?” he asked. “I know that Ellis Cooper has people who believe in him. He helped a lot of guys when he was a DI. I also know that the two of you have good reputations as homicide detectives up in Washington. So where do we go from there?”
“Just tell us what you know about the murders,” Sampson said. We hadn’t talked about it, but I sensed he needed to be the lead detective here on the base.
Captain Jacobs nodded. “All right, I’m going to tape our talk if you don’t mind. I’m afraid I think that he did it, Detectives. I believe that Sergeant Cooper murdered those three women. I don’t pretend to understand why. I especially don’t understand the blue paint that was used on the bodies. Maybe you can figure that one out, Dr. Cross. I also know that most people at Bragg haven’t gotten over the brutality and senselessness of these murders.”
“So we’re causing some problems being here,” Sampson said. “I apologize, Captain.”
“No need,” said Jacobs. “Like I said, Sergeant Cooper has his admirers. In the beginning, even I had a tendency to believe him. The story he told about his whereabouts tracked pretty well. His service record was outstanding.”
“So what changed your mind?” Sampson asked.
“Oh hell, a lot of things, Detective. DNA testing, evidence found at the murder scene and elsewhere. The fact that he was seen at the Jackson house, but he swore he wasn’t there. The survival knife found in his attic, which turned out to be the murder weapon. A few other things.”
“Could you be more specific?” Sampson asked. “What kind of other things?”
Captain Jacobs sighed, got up, and walked over to an olive-green file cabinet. He unlocked the top drawer, took out a folder, and brought it over to us.
“Take a look at these. They might change your mind too.” He spread out half a dozen pages of photographs from the murder scene. I had looked at a lot of photos like these, but it didn’t make it any easier.
“That’s how the three women were actually found. It was kept out of the trial so as not to hurt the families any more than we had to. The DA knew he had more than enough to convict Sergeant Cooper without using these brutal pictures.”
The photographs were right up there with the most grisly and graphic evidence I’d seen. Apparently, the women had all been found in the living room, not where each of them had been killed. The killer had carefully arranged the bodies on a large flowered sofa. He had art-directed the corpses, and that was an element that definitely caught my attention. Tanya Jackson’s face was resting in Barbara Green’s crotch; Mrs. Green’s face was in Maureen Bruno’s crotch. Not just the faces, but the crotches were painted blue.
“Apparently, Cooper thought the three women were lovers. That may have even been the case. At any rate, that’s why he thought Tanya rejected his advances. I guess it drove him to this.”
I finally spoke up. “These crime scene photos, however graphic and obscene, still don’t prove that Ellis Cooper is your murderer.”
Captain Jacobs shook his head. “You don’t seem to understand. These aren’t copies of the crime scene photos taken by the police. These are copies of Polaroids that Cooper took himself. We found them at his place along with the knife.”
Donald Jacobs looked at me, then at Sampson. “Your friend murdered those women. Now you ought to go home, and let the people around here begin to heal.”
Chapter 12
IN SPITE OF Captain Jacobs’s advice, we didn’t leave North Carolina. In fact, we kept talking to anybody who would talk to us. One first sergeant told me something interesting, though not about our case. He said that the recent wave of patriotism that had swept the country since September 11 was barely noticeable at Fort Bragg. “We have always been that way!” he said. I could see that, and I must admit I was impressed with a lot that I saw on the army post.
I woke up early the next morning, about five, with no place to go. At least I had some time to think about the fact that this could be my last case. And what kind of case was it, really? A man convicted of three gruesome murders claiming to be innocent. What murderer didn’t?
And then I thought of Ellis Cooper on death row in Raleigh, and I got to work.
Once I was up, I got online and did as much preliminary research as I could. One of the areas was the blue paint on the victims. I checked into VICAP and got three other cases of murder victims being painted, but none of them seemed a likely connection.
I then ran down a whole lot of information on
the color blue. One that mildly interested me was the Blue Man Group, performance artists who had started a show called Tubes in New York City, then had branched out to Boston, Chicago, and Las Vegas. The show contained elements of music, theater, performance art, even vaudeville. The performers always worked in blue, from head to toe. Maybe it was something, maybe nothing — too early to tell.
I met Sampson for breakfast at the Holiday Inn where we were staying — the Holiday Inn Bordeaux, to be more precise. We ate quickly, then drove over to the off-base military-housing community where the three murders had taken place. The houses were ordinary ranches, each with a small strip of lawn out front. Quite a few of the yards had plastic wading pools. Tricycles and Cozy Coupes were parked up and down the street.
We spent the better part of the morning and early afternoon canvassing the close-knit community where Tanya Jackson had lived. It was a working-class, military neighborhood, and at more than half the stops nobody was home.
I was on the front porch of a brick-and-clapboard house, talking to a woman in her late thirties or early forties, when I saw Sampson come jogging our way. Something was up.
“Alex, come with me!” he called out. “C’mon. I need you right now.”
Chapter 13
I CAUGHT UP with Sampson. “What’s up? What did you find out?”
“Something weird. Maybe a break,” he said. I followed him to another small ranch house. He knocked on the door, and a woman appeared almost immediately. She was only a little over five feet, but easily weighed two hundred pounds, maybe two-fifty.
“This is my partner, Detective Cross. I told you about him. This is Mrs. Hodge,” he said.
“I’m Anita Hodge,” the woman said as she shook my hand. “Glad to meet you.” She looked at Sampson and grinned. “I agree. Ali when he was younger.”
Mrs. Hodge walked us through a family room where two young boys were watching Nickelodeon and playing video games at the same time. She then led us down a narrow hallway and into a bedroom.
A boy of about ten was in the room. He was seated in a wheelchair that was pulled up to a Gateway computer. Behind him on the wall were glossy pictures of more than two dozen major league baseball players.
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, y’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.”
Chapter 14
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. He’d been living in fear of what he’d seen that night and then learning that murders had been committed in the house next door.
Afterward, Sampson and I talked to Anita Hodge in the kitchen. She gave us iced tea, which was unsweetened and had 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 did. 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 me 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 tea, we decided to call it a day. It was past five and we thought we’d made some progress. I called Nana and the kids back at the Holiday Inn Bordeaux. Everything was fine and dandy on the home front. They had taken up the cry that I was on “Daddy’s 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 turned in for the night.
I tried Jamilla in California. It was about 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 past 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. “Anyplace, anytime. 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 haven’t been there since I was a kid.”
“Not so long ago,” I said.
“That’s good. Cute,” she said with a laugh.
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 as though she couldn’t wait to say it.
Chapter 15
EARLY THE NEXT morning I got a call from a friend of
mine at the FBI. I had asked Abby DiGarbo to check on rental-car companies in the area for any irregularities that took place during the week of the murders. I told her it was urgent. Abby had already found one.
It seemed that Hertz had been stiffed on the rental of a Ford Explorer, the bill never paid. 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 had 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 public-record SEC files to obtain the fake identity used on the card, and the information was submitted to a company in Brampton, Ontario, where the fake card was made. A fake driver’s license to match was then obtained from a website, Photoidcards.com. A photograph had also 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 without using their real ID. We had somebody’s picture, thanks to Abby DiGarbo.
I told Sampson about the rent-a-car scam on the way over to Sergeant Cooper’s house. Sampson was drinking steaming hot coffee and eating an éclair 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.”