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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 online and did as much preliminary research as I could. One of the areas 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.
    I then ran down a whole lot of information on the color blue. One that mildly interested me was the Blue Man Group, performance artists who had started a show called
Tubes
in New York City, then had branched out to Boston, Chicago, and Las Vegas. The show contained elements of music, theater, performance art, even vaudeville. The performers always worked in blue, from head to toe. Maybe it was something, maybe nothing — too early to tell.
    I met Sampson for breakfast at the Holiday Inn where we were staying — the Holiday Inn Bordeaux, to be more precise. We ate quickly, then drove over to the off-base military-housing community where the three murders had taken place. The houses were ordinary ranches, each with a small strip of lawn out front. Quite a few of the yards had plastic wading pools. Tricycles and Cozy Coupes were parked up and down the street.
    We spent the better part of the morning and early afternoon canvassing the close-knit community where Tanya Jackson had lived. It was a working-class, military neighborhood, and at more than half the stops nobody was home.
    I was on the front porch of a brick-and-clapboard house, talking to a woman in her late thirties or early forties, when I saw Sampson come jogging our way. Something was up.
    “Alex, come with me!” he called out. “C’mon. I need you right now.”

Chapter 13
    I CAUGHT UP with Sampson. “What’s up? What did you find out?”
    “Something weird. Maybe a break,” he said. I followed him to another small ranch house. He knocked on the door, and a woman appeared almost immediately. She was only a little over five feet, but easily weighed two hundred pounds, maybe two-fifty.
    “This is my partner, Detective Cross. I told you about him. This is Mrs. Hodge,” he said.
    “I’m Anita Hodge,” the woman said as she shook my hand. “Glad to meet you.” She looked at Sampson and grinned. “I agree. Ali when he was younger.”
    Mrs. Hodge walked us through a family room where two young boys were watching Nickelodeon and playing video games at the same time. She then led us down a narrow hallway and into a bedroom.
    A boy of about ten was in the room. He was seated in a wheelchair that was pulled up to a Gateway computer. Behind him on the wall were glossy pictures of more than two dozen major league baseball players.
    He looked annoyed at the intrusion. “What
now?
” he asked. “That’s short for
get out of here and leave me alone. I’m working.
”
    “This is Ronald Hodge,” Sampson said. “Ronald, this is Detective Cross. I told you about him when we spoke before.”
    The boy nodded but didn’t say anything, just stared angrily my way.
    “Ronald, will you tell us your story again?” Sampson asked. “We need to hear it.”
    The boy rolled his eyes. “I already told the other policemen. I’m sick and tired of it, y’know. Nobody cares what I think anyway.”
    “Ronald,” said his mother. “That’s not true and you know it.”
    “Please tell me,” I said to the boy. “What you have to say could be important. I want to hear it in your words.”
    The boy frowned and continued to shake his head, but his eyes held mine. “The other policemen didn’t think it was important.
Fuckheads.
”
    “Ronald,” said the boy’s mother. “Don’t be rude. You know I don’t like that attitude. Or that kind of language.”
    “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll tell it again.” Then he began to talk about the night Tanya Jackson was murdered,