Four Blind Mice Read Free Page A

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 wasn’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