“Don't smoke,” I said to him.

“You're the detective, right?” he asked after a couple of minutes.

I nodded and looked at him more closely. I didn't think I'd met him, but it was a small town. We had shown our faces around. By this time a lot of people in Fayetteville knew who we were.

“Strange shit going down,” the man said. He took out a pack of Camels. Grinned. Tapped one out. Today's Army, man. “An army of one.” What kind of bullshit is that?"

“You Army?”I asked,“ I thought they took you guys to the stockade at Fort Bragg.”

He smiled at me. “Ain't no stockade at Bragg, man. Tell you something else. I was in here when they brought. Sergeant Cooper in. He was nuts that night. They printed him down here, then took him upstairs. Man was a psycho killer for sure that night.”

I just listened. I was trying to figure out who the man was, and why he was talking to me about Ellis Cooper.

“I'm going to tell you something for your own good. Everybody around here knows he did those women. He was a well-known freak.”

The man blew out concentrated rings of smoke, then he pushed himself off the floor and shuffled away. I wondered what in hell was going on. Had somebody arranged the fight at the bar? The whole thing tonight? Who was the guy who had come over to talk to me? To give me advice for my own good?

A short while later, a guard came and took him away. He glanced my way as he was leaving. Then Sampson and I got to spend the night in the crowded, foul-smelling holding cell. We took turns sleeping.

In the morning, I heard someone call our names.

“Cross. Sampson.” One of the guards had opened the door to the holding cell. He was trying to wave away the stink. “Cross. Sampson.”

Sampson and I pushed ourselves stiffly up off the floor. “Right here. Where you left us last night,” I said.

We were led back upstairs and taken to the front lobby, where we got the day's very first surprise. Captain Jacobs from CID was waiting there. “You all sleep well? ”he asked.

“That was a setup,” I said to him. “The fight, the arrest. Did you know about it beforehand?”

“You can go now,” he said. That's what you should do. Get your stuff and go home, Detectives. Do yourselves a big favor while you still can. You're wasting time on a dead man's errands."

Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The awful strangeness and frustration continued the day I got back to Washington. If anything, it got even worse. An e-mail was waiting for me in my office at home. The message was from someone who identified himself as Toot Soldier'. Everything about it was troubling and impossible for me to comprehend at this point.

It began: For Detective Alex Cross,

Your general interest: The Pentagon is currently taking steps to prevent some of the more than one thousand deaths each year in the 'peacetime Army'. The deaths come from car crashes, suicides and murders. In each of the past three years, at least eighty Army soldiers have been murdered.