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.