Four Blind Mice Page 10
“Mama bear and two baby bears,” Brownley Harris muttered. “Interesting concept.” Maybe too close to the murders at Bragg, though.
He watched as the three women huddled for a moment around the fire, then took off in a run. Soon he could hear a chorus of war whoops and screams, then laughter and loud splashes as they hit the small brook that ran directly behind their camp.
Brownley Harris moved quickly and silently through the trees until he reached a choice spot where he could watch the mother and pretty daughters frolic in the cold stream. They sure reminded him of the women in the massacre in Fayetteville. Still, they could be the secondary target.
He returned to his camp at a little past six-thirty. Griffin had prepared breakfast: eggs, bacon, plenty of coffee. Starkey was sitting in a familiar lotus position, thinking and plotting. He opened his eyes before Harris announced himself. “How’d you do?” he asked.
Brownley Harris smiled. “We’re right on schedule, Colonel. We’re good. I’ll describe the targets while we eat. Coffee smells good. Hell of a lot better than napalm in the morning.”
Chapter 44
STARKEY TOOK FULL command that morning. Unlike the other hikers on the AT, he kept his men deep in the woods, unseen by their fellow travelers or anyone else.
It wasn’t hard to do. In their past lives they’d spent days, sometimes weeks, being invisible to enemies who were out to find and kill them but frequently ended up getting killed themselves. One time it had been a team of four homicide detectives in Tampa, Florida.
Starkey demanded that they treat this like a real-life combat mission, in real-life war. Total silence was imperative. They used hand signals most of the time. If someone had to cough, he did so in his neck rag or in the crook of an arm. Their rucksacks had been packed tight by Sergeant Griffin so that nothing shook or rattled as they walked.
The three of them had slathered on bug juice, then laid on the cammo. They didn’t smoke a cigarette all day.
No mistakes.
Starkey figured that the kill would take place somewhere between Harpers Ferry and an area known as Loudoun Heights. Parts of the trail were densely forested there, an endless green tunnel that would be good for their purposes. The trees were mostly deciduous, leafy, no conifers. A lot of rhododendron and mountain laurel. They noticed everything.
They didn’t actually make camp that night, and were careful not to leave evidence that they had been in the woods at all.
Brownley Harris was sent on another scouting mission at seven-thirty that night, just before it got dark. When he returned, the sun was gone and darkness had fallen like a shroud over the AT. The woods had a kind of jungle feel, but it was only an illusion. A state road ran about half a mile from where they were standing.
Harris reported in to Starkey. “Target One is approximately two klicks ahead of us. Target Two is less than three. Everything’s still looking good for us. I’m pumped.”
“You’re always ready for a hunt and kill,” said Starkey. “But you’re right, everything’s working for us. Especially this friendly, trust-your-neighbor mind-set all these recreational hikers have.”
Starkey made the command decision. “We’ll move to a point midway between Targets One and Two. We’ll wait there. And remember, let’s not get sloppy. We’ve been too good for too long to blow it now.”
Chapter 45
A THREE-QUARTER MOON made the going easier through the woods. Starkey had known about the moon beforehand. He wasn’t just a control freak, he was obsessive about details because getting them wrong could get you killed, or caught. He knew they could expect mild temperatures, low wind, and no rain. Rain would mean mud, and mud would mean a lot of footprints, and footprints would be unacceptable on their mission.
They didn’t speak as they moved through the woods. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to be so cautious out here, but it was habit, the way they had been conditioned for combat. A simple rule had always been drummed into them: remember how you were trained, and don’t ever try to be a hero. Besides, the discipline helped them concentrate. Their focus was on the killings that would soon take place.
The three men were in their own private worlds as they walked: Harris fantasized about the actual kills with real-life faces and bodies; Starkey and Griffin stayed very real-time, and yet they hoped that Harris wasn’t pulling their chain with his description of the target. Starkey remembered one time Brownley had reported that the prey was a Vietnamese schoolgirl, whom he went on to describe in elaborate detail. But when they got to the kill zone, a small village in the An Lao Valley, they found an obese woman well into her seventies, with black warts all over her body.
The reveries were cut short by a male voice piercing the woods.
Starkey’s hand flew up in warning.
“Hey! Hey! What’s going on? Who’s out there?” the voice called. “Who’s there?”
The three of them stopped in their tracks. Harris and Griffin looked at Starkey, who kept his right arm raised. No one answered the unexpected voice.
“Cynthia? Is that you, sweetie? Not funny, if it is.”
Male. Young. Obviously agitated.
Then a bright yellow light flashed in their direction, and Starkey walked forward in its path. “Hey” was all he said.
“What the hell? You guys army?” the voice asked next. “What are you doing out here? You training? On the Appalachian Trail?”
Starkey finally flicked on his Maglite flashlight. It lit up a white male in his late twenties, khaki walking shorts down around his ankles, a thick roll of toilet paper in one hand.
Skinny kid. Longish black hair. A day’s growth on his face. Not a threat.
“We’re on maneuvers. Sorry to barge in on you like this,” Starkey said to the young man squatting before him. He chuckled lightly, then turned to Harris. “Who the hell is he?” he whispered.
“Couple Number Three. Shit. They must have fallen behind Target Two.”
“All right then. Change of plans,” Starkey said. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Yes, sir.”
Starkey felt a coldness in his chest and knew that the others probably did too. It happened in combat, especially when things went wrong. The senses became more heightened. He was acutely aware of everything going on, even at the periphery of his eyesight. His heartbeat was strong, even, steady. He loved these intense feelings — just before it happened.
“Can I get a little privacy here?” the shitter asked. “You guys mind?”
A brighter light suddenly flashed on — Brownley Harris was shooting another video movie.
“Hey, is that a fucking camera?”
“Sure is,” Starkey said. He was on top of the crouching, shitting man before he knew what was happening. He picked the victim up by his long hair, and slit his throat with the K-Bar.
“What’s the woman like?” Griffin turned to Harris, who was still shooting with the handheld camera.
“Don’t know, you horny bastard. The girlfriend was sleeping this morning. Never saw her.”
“Boyfriend wasn’t too bad-looking,” said Griffin. “So I’m hopeful about the chick. Guess we’ll soon find out.”
Chapter 46
SAMPSON AND I were riding on I-95 again, heading toward Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. There had been a brutal double murder near there. So far, it didn’t make sense to the FBI or the local police. But it made perfect sense to us. The three killers had been there.
We hadn’t had this much time to talk in a long while. For the first hour we were cops discussing the murder victims, two hikers on the Appalachian Trail, any possible connection to Ellis Cooper or the victims in Arizona and New Jersey. We had read the investigating detectives’ notes. The descriptions were bleak and horrific. A young couple in their twenties, a graphic artist and an architect, had their throats slit. Innocents. No rhyme or reason for the murders. Both of the bodies had been marked with red paint, which was why I got the call from the FBI.
“Let’s take a break f
rom the mayhem for a while,” Sampson finally said. We had reached about the halfway point of our ride south.
“Good idea. I need a break too. We’ll be knee-deep in the shit soon enough. What else is going on? You seeing anybody these days?” I asked him. “Anybody serious? Anybody fun?”
“Tabitha,” he said. “Cara, Natalie, LaTasha. You know Natalie. She’s the lawyer with HUD. I hear your new girlfriend from San Francisco came to visit last weekend. Inspector Jamilla Hughes, Homicide.”
I laughed. “Who told you about that?”
John furrowed his brow. “Let’s see. Nana told me. And Damon. And Jannie. Little Alex might have said something. You thinking about settling down again? I hear this Jamilla is something else. Is she too hot for you to handle?”
I continued to laugh. “Lot of pressure, John. Everybody wants me to get hooked up again. Get over my unlucky recent past. Settle down to a nice life.”
“You’re good at it. Good daddy, good husband. That’s how people see you.”
“And you? What do you see?”
“I see all that good stuff. But I see the dark side too. See, part of you wants to be old Cliff Huxtable. But part is this big, bad lone wolf. You talk about leaving the police department; maybe you will. But you like the hunt, Alex.”
I looked over at Sampson. “Kyle Craig told me the same thing. Almost the same words.”
Sampson nodded. “See? Kyle’s no dummy. Sick, twisted bastard, but not dumb.”
“So, if I like the hunt so much, who’s going to settle down first? You or me?”
“No contest. My role models on family are bad ones. You know that. Father left when I was three. Maybe he had his reasons. My mother was never around much. Too busy hooking, shooting up. They both knocked me around. Beat up on each other too. My father broke my mother’s nose three times.”
“Afraid you’ll be a bad father?” I asked. “Is that why you never settled down?”
He thought about it. “Not really. I like kids fine. Especially when they’re yours. I like women too. Maybe that’s the problem — I like women too much,” Sampson said, and laughed. “And women seem to like me.”
“Sounds like you know who you are anyway.”
“Good deal. Self-knowledge is a start,” Sampson said, and grinned broadly. “What do I owe you, Dr. Cross?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll put it on your tab.”
I saw a road sign up ahead: Harpers Ferry, two miles. A man was being held there for murder.
A former army colonel with no past record.
And currently a Baptist minister.
I wondered if anyone had seen three suspicious-looking men in the area of the murder. And if one of them had been filming what happened.
Chapter 47
SAMPSON AND I met with Reverend Reece Tate in a tiny room inside the modest jailhouse in Harpers Ferry. Tate was a slight, balding man with shaped sideburns down to the bottom of his earlobes; he didn’t look much like a former soldier. He had retired from the army in 1993 and now headed a Baptist congregation in Cowpens, South Carolina.
“Reverend Tate, can you tell us what happened to you yesterday on the Appalachian Trail?” I asked him after identifying who we were. “Tell us everything you can. We’re here to listen to your story.”
Tate’s suspicious eyes darted from Sampson to me. I doubt he was even aware of it, but he kept scratching his head and face as he looked around the small room. He also looked terribly confused. He was obviously nervous and scared, and I couldn’t blame him for that, especially if he’d been set up and framed for a double murder.
“Maybe you can answer a few of my questions first,” he managed. “Why do you two care about what happened out there on the Trail? I don’t understand that. Or anything else that’s happened in the past two days.”
Sampson looked at me. He wanted me to explain. I began to tell Tate about our connection to Ellis Cooper, and the murders that had taken place near Fort Bragg.
“You actually believe that Master Sergeant Cooper was innocent?” he asked when I had finished.
I nodded. “Yes, we do. We think he was framed, set up. But we don’t know what the reason is yet. We don’t know why and we don’t know who.”
Sampson had a question. “You and Ellis Cooper ever meet while you were in the army?”
Tate shook his head. “I was never stationed at Bragg. I don’t remember a Sergeant Cooper from ’Nam. No, I don’t think so.”
I tried to remain low-key. Reece Tate was an uptight, buttoned-down, and formal man, so I kept our conversation as nonthreatening as I possibly could.
“Reverend Tate, we’ve answered your questions. Why don’t you answer a few of ours? If you’re innocent of these murders, we’re here to help you out of this mess. We’ll listen, and we’ll keep an open mind.”
He looked thoughtful for a moment before he spoke. “Sergeant Cooper, he was judged guilty, I assume. Is he in prison? I’d like to talk with him.”
I looked at Sampson, then back at Reece Tate. “Sergeant Cooper was executed in North Carolina recently. He’s dead.”
Tate shook his head in a soft, low arc. “My God, my God in heaven. I was just taking a week off, giving myself a break. I love to camp and hike. It’s a carryover from my days in the army, but I always loved it. I was a Boy Scout, an Eagle Scout in Greensboro. Sounds kind of ridiculous, under the circumstances.” I let him talk. The Eagle Scout in him wanted to — needed to — get this out.
“I’ve been divorced for four years. Camping is my only decent escape, my release. I take off a couple of weeks a year, plus a few days here and there when I can grab them.”
“Did anybody know you were planning the trip to the Appalachian Trail?”
“Everyone at our church knew. A couple of friends and neighbors. It wasn’t any big secret. Why should it be?”
Sampson asked, “Did your ex-wife know?”
Tate thought about it, then shook his head. “We don’t communicate very much. I might as well tell you, I beat Helene up before we divorced. She may have drove me to it, but I hit her. It’s on me, my fault. No excuse for a man ever to strike a woman.”
“Can you tell us about yesterday? Go through as much of what you did as you can remember,” I said.
It took Tate about ten minutes to take us through the day in detail. He said he woke up about seven and saw that the morning was fogged in. He was in no hurry to get on the trail, so he had breakfast at camp. He started hiking by eight-thirty and covered a lot of ground that day. He passed two families and an elderly couple along the way. The day before, he’d seen a mother and her two daughters and hoped to catch up with them, but it didn’t happen. He finally made camp about six.
“Why did you want to catch up with the three women?” Sampson asked.
Tate shrugged. “Just crazy daydreams. The mother was attractive, early forties. Obviously, they all liked to hike. I thought maybe we could hike together for a while. That’s pretty common on the AT.”
“Anybody else you saw that day?” Sampson asked.
“I don’t remember anybody unusual. I’ll keep thinking. I have the time in here. And the motivation.”
“All right, so there were the families, the elderly couple, the mother and her two daughters. Any other groups you saw on the trail? Males hiking together? Any single hikers?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t remember seeing anybody suspicious. Didn’t hear any unusual noises during the night. I slept well. That’s one benefit of hiking. Got up the next morning, hit the road by seven-thirty. It was a beautiful day, clear as a bell, and you could see for miles. The police came and arrested me about noon.”
Reverend Tate looked at me. His small eyes were pleading, searching for understanding. “I swear I’m innocent. I didn’t hurt anybody in those woods. I don’t know how I got blood on some of my clothes. I didn’t even wear those clothes the day those poor people were murdered. I didn’t kill anybody. Somebody has to believe me.”
Chapter 48
MY LAST CASE as a homicide detective. A real tricky one. I’d been thinking about it pretty much nonstop for the past few days and it weighed on my mind during the numbing ride home from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
I still hadn’t given notice at work. Why not? I continued to take on homicide cases in D.C., though most weren’t challenging. A small-time drug dealer had been killed in the projects, but nobody cared. A twenty-year-old woman had killed her abusive husband, but it was clearly in self-defense. At least to me it was clear. Ellis Cooper was dead. And now a man named Reece Tate was accused of murders that he probably didn’t commit.
That weekend I used frequent flier miles to take a flight out to Tempe, Arizona. I’d scheduled a meeting with Susan Etra, whose husband had been convicted of murdering a gay enlisted man. Mrs. Etra was suing the army for wrongful death. She believed that her husband was innocent and that she had enough evidence to prove it. I needed to find out if Lieutenant Colonel James Etra might have been framed for murder too. How many victims were there?
Mrs. Etra answered her front door and seemed very uptight and nervous. I was surprised to see a poker-faced man waiting in the living room. She explained that she had requested her lawyer be present. Great.
The lawyer was darkly tan, with slicked-back white hair, an expensive-looking charcoal-gray suit, black cowboy boots. He introduced himself as Stuart Fischer from Los Angeles. “In the interest of possibly getting to the truth about her husband’s wrongful arrest and conviction, Mrs. Etra has consented to talk with you, Detective. I’m here to protect Mrs. Etra.”
“I understand,” I said. “Were you Lieutenant Colonel Etra’s lawyer at his trial?” I asked.
Fischer kept his game face. “No, I wasn’t. I’m an entertainment attorney. I do have experience with homicide cases, though. I started in the DA’s office in Laguna Beach. Six years down there.”