Four Blind Mice (Alex Cross 8)

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.”

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 secure enough in his posting that he’d bought the place a few years back. When he retired, he’d planned to live 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 1.

Sampson called me over to one of the windows. “It’s been jimmied. 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 as though 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?