Take a look at these. They might change your mind, too." He spread out half a dozen pages of copies of photographs from the murder scene. I had looked at a lot of photos like these, but it didn't make it any easier.

“That's how the three women were actually found. It was kept out of the trial so as not to hurt the families any more than we had to. The DA knew he had more than enough to convict Sergeant Cooper without using these brutal pictures.”

The photographs were right up there with the most grisly and graphic evidence I'd seen. Apparently, the women had all been found in the living room, not where each of them had been killed. The killer had carefully arranged the bodies on a large, flowered sofa. He had art-directed the corpses, and that was an element that definitely caught my attention. Tanya Jackson's face was resting in Barbara Green's crotch; Mrs. Green's face was in Maureen Bruno's crotch. Not just the faces but the crotches were painted blue.

Apparently, Cooper thought the three women were lovers. That may have even been the case. At any rate, that's why he thought Tanya rejected his advances. I guess it drove him to this."

Finally I spoke up. “These crime scene photos, however graphic and obscene, still don't prove that Ellis Cooper is your murderer.”

Captain Jacobs shook his head. “You don't seem to understand. These aren't copies of the crime scene photos taken by the police. These are copies of Polaroids that Cooper took himself. We found them at his place along with the knife.”

Donald Jacobs looked at me, then at Sampson. Tour friend murdered those women. Now you ought to go home and let the people around here begin to heal."

Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

Chapter Twelve

In spite of Captain Jacob's advice, we didn't leave North Carolina. In fact, we kept talking to anybody who would talk to us. One first sergeant told me something interesting, though not about our case. He said that the recent wave of patriotism that had swept the country since September 11 was barely noticeable at Fort Bragg. “We have always been that way! ”he said. I could see that, and I must admit, I was impressed with a lot that I saw on the Army post.

I woke early the next morning, around five, with no place to go. At least I had some time to think about the fact that this could be my last case. And what kind of case was it, really? A man convicted of three gruesome murders claiming to be innocent. What murderer didn't?

And then I thought of Ellis Cooper on death row in Raleigh, and I got to work.

Once I was up, I got on-line and did as much preliminary research as I could. One of the areas I looked at was the blue paint on the victims. I checked into VICAP and got three other cases of murder victims being painted, but none of them seemed a likely connection.