Four Blind Mice (Alex Cross 8)

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 at Viet 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 shoes 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

Chapter 16

I WOKE UP 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 jumpsuit that death row prisoners wore at Central Prison.

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 p.t.

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.