"Only it wasn't her coming home after all. It was about a half-dozen MPs and aCID investigator named Jacobs.

Soon after that, supposedly, they found the RTAK survival knife in the attic of my house. And traces of blue paint used on those ladies. They arrested me for murder."

Ellis Cooper looked at Sampson first, then he stared hard into my eyes. He paused before he spoke again. “I didn't kill those women,” he said. “And what I still can't believe, somebody obviously framed me for the murders. Why would somebody set me up? It doesn't make sense. I don't have an enemy in the world. Least I didn't think so.”

Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

Chapter Eight

Thomas Starkey, Brownley Harris and Warren Griffin had been best friends for more than thirty years, ever since they served together in Vietnam. Every couple of months, under Thomas Starkey's command, they went to a simple, post-and-beam log cabin in the Kennesaw Mountains of Georgia and spent a long weekend together. It was a ritual of machismo and would continue, Starkey insisted, until the last of them was gone.

They did all the things they couldn't do at home: played music from the Sixties the Doors, Cream, Hendrix, Blind Faith, the Airplane loud. They drank way too much beer and bourbon; they grilled thick Porterhouse steaks that they ate with fresh corn, Vidalia onions, tomatoes, and baked potatoes slathered with butter and sour cream. They smoked expensive Cuban cigars. They had a hell of a lot of fun in what they did.

“What was the line in that old beer commercial? You know the one I'm talking about?” Harris asked as they sat out on the front porch after dinner.

“It doesn't get any better than this,” Starkey said as he nicked the thick ash from his cigar onto the wide-planed floor. “I think it was a shit beer, though. Can't even remember the name. ”Course, I'm a little drunk and a lot stoned." Neither of the others believed that. Thomas Starkey was never completely out of control, and especially not when he committed murder, or ordered it done.

“We've paid our dues, gentlemen. We've earned this,” Starkey said, and extended his mug to clink with his friends. “What's happening now is well deserved.”

“Bet your ass we earned it. Couple of three foreign wars. Our other exploits over the past few years,” said Harris. “Families. Eleven kids between us. Plus we did pretty good out in the big, bad civilian world, too. I sure never figured I'd be knocking down a hundred and a half a year.”

They clinked the heavy beer glasses again. “We did good, boys. And believe it or not, it can only get better,” said Starkey.

As they always did, they re-told old war stories -Grenada, Mogadishu, the Gulf War, but mostly Vietnam.

Starkey recounted the time they had made a Vietnamese woman 'ride the submarine'. The woman, a VC sympathizer of course, had been stripped naked then tied to a wooden plank, face upward. Harris had tied a towel around her face. Water from a barrel was slowly sprinkled onto the towel. As the towel eventually became flooded, the woman was forced to inhale water to breathe. Her lungs and stomach soon swelled with the water. Then Harris pounded on her chest to expel the water. The woman talked, but of course she didn't tell them anything they didn't already know. So they dragged her out to a kaki tree which produced a sweet fruit and was always covered with large yellow ants. They tied the mamasan to the tree, lit up marijuana cigars and watched as her body swelled beyond recognition. When it was close to busting they 'wired' her with a field telephone and electrocuted her. Starkey always said that was about the most creative kill ever. “And the VC terrorist bitch deserved it.”