Four Blind Mice

Chapter Fifteen

Early the next morning I got a call from a friend of mine at Quantico. I had asked Abby DiGarbo to check on rental-car companies in the area and to look for any irregularities that took place during the week of the murders. I'd told her it was urgent. Abby had already found one.

It seemed that Hertz had been stiffed on the rental of a Ford Explorer. 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 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 SEC files that are maintained as a public record. The fake identity used on the card was obtained and the information submitted to a company in Brampton, Ontario, where the card was made. A fake driver's license to match was then obtained from a web-site, Photoidcards.com. A photograph had 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. We had somebody's picture, thanks to Abby DiGarbo.

On the way over to Sergeant Cooper's house I told Sampson about the rent-a-car scam. Sampson was drinking steaming hot coffee and eating an eclair 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 stay 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 One.

Sampson called me over to one of the windows. “It's been shimmied. 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 like 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?

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 atViet 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 footsteps 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.