Four Blind Mice by James Patterson Page A

Cooper. He turned his head and looked into the viewing room for the first time. The warden asked him if he’d like to make a statement.
    Cooper’s eyes found us, and he held contact. The eye contact was incredibly powerful, as if he were about to lose us as he fell into the deepest chasm.
    Then Ellis Cooper spoke.
    His voice was reedy at first, but it got stronger.
    “I
did not
murder Tanya Jackson, Barbara Green, or Maureen Bruno. I would say so if I did, take this final injection like the man I was trained to be. I didn’t kill the three women outside Fort Bragg. Someone else did. God bless you all. Thank you, John and Alex. I forgive the United States Army, which has been a good father to me.”
    Ellis Cooper held his head up. Proudly. Like a soldier on parade.
    The executioner stepped forward. He injected a dose of Pavulon, which is a total muscle relaxer and would stop Cooper’s breathing.
    Very soon Ellis Cooper’s heart, lungs, and brain stopped functioning.
    Sergeant Cooper was pronounced dead by the warden of Central Prison at 1:31 A.M.
    Sampson turned to me when it was over. “We just watched a murder,” he said. “Someone murdered Ellis Cooper, and they got away with it.”

Chapter 32
    I WAS EARLY to meet the flight coming into Gate 74 at Reagan National; and once I was at the airport, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was definitely nervous,
good
nervous, with anticipation. Jamilla Hughes was coming to visit.
    The airport was crowded at about four on a Friday afternoon. Lots of weary, edgy businesspeople sitting around ending their workweeks on the computer, or already off the clock at the bar, or reading magazines and popular novels that ranged from Jonathan Franzen to Nora Roberts to Stephen King. I sat down, then popped up again. Finally I walked close to the large, expansive windows and watched a big American jet slowly taxi to the gate.
Well, here we go. Am I ready? Is she?
    Jamilla was in the second wave of passengers getting off the plane. She had on jeans, a mauve top, a black leather car jacket that I remembered from our stakeouts together in New Orleans. The two of us had become fast friends on a bizarre homicide case that had started in her hometown of San Francisco, weaved its way through the South, including the Big Easy, then ended up on the West Coast again.
    We had been talking about seeing each other ever since, and now we were actually doing it. It was pretty courageous on both of our parts; I just hoped it wasn’t dumb. I didn’t think so, and I hoped Jam felt the same way.
    Jesus, I was twitching as she came walking up to me. She looked great, though. Nice, big smile. What was I so worried about?
    “Where are the thick white clouds that are supposed to be covering the city as my plane approached? God, I could see
everything
— the White House, Lincoln Memorial, the Potomac,” Jamilla said, grinning.
    I leaned in and gave her a kiss. “Not every city has mountains of fog like San Francisco. You need to travel more. Your flight okay?”
    “Sucked.” Jamilla grinned again. “I don’t like flying much these days, but I’m glad to be here. This is
good,
Alex. You’re almost as nervous as I am. We never had trouble talking on stakeouts. We’ll be fine. We’ll be just fine. Now calm down, so I can calm down. Deal?”
    She grabbed me in both arms, hugged me, then kissed me lightly, but nicely, on the lips. “That’s much better,” she said, and smacked her lips. “You taste good.”
    “You must like spearmint.”
    “No, I like you.”
    We were a whole lot more comfortable during the ride into Washington in my old Porsche. We talked about everything that had been happening since we’d last seen each other. At first, it was work stuff, but then we got into the whole terrorist mess, then how my family was, and hers, and as usual neither of us shut up once we got started — which I love.
    It was only as I pulled up to the house that things began to feel tense for me