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“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?”
