Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

by Patterson, James

  “No, I won't.”

  I won't. I couldn't hurt you. And I won't let anybody hurt you.

  She smiled, rolled over, and then slid up on top of him. “How's that? Is that better for you?”

  He ran his strong hands up and down her back and over her buttocks. She hummed "One Night With You'. They began to move together, really slowly at first. Then faster. And faster still. Billie rose and fell hard on him. She liked it that way.

  When they finally collapsed with the pleasure of it all, she looked into his eyes. Not bad for your first time. You'll get better."

  Later, Sampson lay in the bed with Billie snuggled up against his side. It still made him smile to see how small she was. Small face, small hands, feet, breasts. And then the thought hit him stunned him: he was at peace for the first time in years. Maybe ever.

  Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  I was pumped up to see Nana and the kids when I got home from my trip to Florence prison that night. It was only seven and I'd been thinking we might go to the IMAX theater, or maybe the ESPN Zone some nice treat for the kids.

  As I climbed the front steps of the house, I spotted a note stuck onto the screen door, flapping in the breeze.

  Uh-oh.

  Messages left at the house always make me a little queasy. There'd been too many bad ones during the past few years.

  I recognized Nana's handwriting: Alex, we've gone to your Aunt Tin's. Be back by nine or so. Everybody misses you. Do you miss us? Of course you do in your own way. Nana and the kids.

  I'd noticed that Nana Mama had been unusually sentimental lately. She said she was feeling better, back to her old self again, but I wondered if that was true. Maybe I should talk to her doctor, but I didn't like interfering in her business. She'd been doing an excellent job of taking care of herself for a long time.

  I shuffled on into the kitchen and grabbed a cold beer from the fridge.

  I saw a funny drawing of a pregnant stork that Jannie had stuck up on the door. Suddenly, I felt lonely for everybody. The thing about kids for some people for me anyway is that they complete your life, make some kind of sense out of it, even if they do drive you crazy sometimes. The gain is worth the pain. At least in our house it is.

  The telephone rang and I figured it was Nana.

  “Hooray, you're home!” came a welcome voice. Well, surprise, surprise. It was Jamilla, and that cheered me right up. I could picture her face, her smile, the bright shine in her eyes.

  “Hooray, it's you. I just got home to an empty house,” I said. “Nana and the kids deserted me.”

  “Could be worse, Alex. I'm at work. Caught a bad one on Friday. Irish tourist got killed in the Tenderloin district. So tell me, what was a fifty-one-year-old priest from Dublin doing in one of the seediest parts of San Francisco at two in the morning? How did he get strangled with a pair of extra-large pantyhose? My job to find out.”

  “Sounds like you're enjoying yourself anyway.” I found myself smiling. Not at the murder, but at Jamilla's enthusiasm for the Job.

  Jamilla was still laughing. "Well, I do enjoy a good mystery. How's your case going? Now that sucker is nasty. I've been thinking about it in my free moments.

  Somebody “murdering” Army officers by framing them for crimes they didn't commit."

  I brought her up to speed, detective to detective, then we talked about more pleasant subjects, like our time together in Arizona. Finally, she said she had to run, to get back to her case. I thought about Jam after I hung up the phone. She loved police work, and she said so. I did too, but the demons were getting to me.

  I grabbed another beer out of the fridge, then I headed upstairs. I was still ruminating about Jamilla. Nice thoughts. Nothing but blue skies...

  I opened the bedroom door, then I just stood there, shaking my head back and forth.

  Sitting on my bed were two large glass jars. Pretty ones. Maybe antiques. They were filled with what looked to be hundreds of cat's-eye marbles.

  I went over to the bed. Took one out.

  I rolled the marble between my thumb and forefinger. I had to admit that it felt precious.

  The Saturdays I still had left.

  How did I plan to use them?

  Maybe that was the biggest mystery of all.

  Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  I had the feeling that I was being followed around in Washington during the next few days. Watched. But I couldn't seem to catch them at it. They were either very good, or I was completely losing it.

  On Monday I was back at work. All that week I put in my time at the precinct, on the Job. I made sure I spent extra hours at home with the kids before I did overtime in my office in the attic. A colonel named Daniel Boudreau at the Pentagon was cooperating somewhat. He'd sent me Army records from the Vietnam War. Lots of paperwork that appeared not to have been looked at in years. He also suggested I contact the Vietnamese Embassy. They had records, too.

  I read through the old files until I couldn't stay awake any longer and my head was throbbing severely. I was searching for anything that might link Ellis Cooper, Reece Tate, Laurence Houston, James Etra, Robert Bennett, or even Tran Van Luu to the string of murders.

  I found no connection, nothing remotely promising. Was that possible?

  None of the men had ever served together in Asia.

  Late that night I got another e-mail from the Foot Soldier. Jesus Christ. Obviously, he wasn't Owen Handler. So who was sending the messages? Kyle Craig? Was he still trying to play with my head? How could he get the messages out of a super max prison?

  Somebody was sending them and I didn't like it. I also didn't trust the information I was getting. Was I being set up, too?

  Detective Cross,

  lama little disappointed in your progress. You get on a good track, then you get off it. Look back at where you've been already. The answers are all in the past. Isn't that always the way it works out?

  The note was signed Foot Soldier.

  But there was something else at the bottom of the page. A very disturbing icon a straw doll. Just like the ones we'd found.

  After work on Wednesday of that week I visited the Vietnamese Embassy on Twentieth Street in Northeast. The FBI had made a call for me. I arrived at a little before six and went up to the fourth floor. I was met there by a translator named Thi Nguyen. At her desk were four large boxes of old records kept by the government of her country.

  I sat in her small office and Thi Nguyen read passages to me. She didn't want to be doing this, I could tell. I supposed she'd been ordered to work late. On a wall behind her was a sign: Embassy Of The Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Also a portrait of Ho Chi Minh.

  “There's nothing here, Detective. Nothing new,” she complained as she went through dusty files that were over thirty years old. I told her to please stay with it. She would sigh loudly, adjust her odd, black-rimmed glasses, and sullenly dig into another file. This pouty ritual went on for hours. I found her incredibly unpleasant.

  At around nine o'clock, she looked up in surprise. “There's something here,” she said. “Maybe this is what you're looking for.”

  Tell me. Don't edit, please. Tell me exactly what you're reading."

  “That's what I've been doing, Detective. According to these records, there were unauthorized attacks on small villages in the An Lao Valley. Civilians seem to have been killed. This happened half a dozen times. Somebody must have known about it. Maybe even your Military Advisory Council.”

  Tell me everything that's in there,“ I repeated. ”Please don't leave anything out. Read from the texts."

  The boredom and exasperation she had shown before were gone. Suddenly the translator was attentive, and also seemed a little frightened. What she was reading now was disturbing her.

  “There are always unfortunate incidents during a war,” she lectured me. “But this is a new pattern in the An Lao Valley. The killings seem to have be
en organized and methodical. Almost like your serial killers here in America.”

  “There are serial killers in Asia, too,” I said.

  Ms Nguyen bristled at my comment. “Let me see. There were formal complaints made to your government and the US Army by officers in the ARVN. Did you know that? There are also repeated complaints from what was then called Saigon. This was a murder case, according to the ARVN. Murder, not war. The murder of innocent civilians, including children.” She frowned and shook her head. “There's more about the precise pattern of the murders. Men, women and children, innocent villagers were killed. Often the bodies were painted.”

  “Red, white, blue,” I said. “The painting was a calling card left by the killers.”

  Ms Nguyen looked up in alarm. “How did you know? Did you already know about these horrible murders? What is your role in all this?”

  “I'll tell you when we're finished. Don't stop now. Please. This could be what I've been looking for.”

  About twenty minutes later, Ms Nguyen came upon something that I asked her to read a second time. “A team of Army Rangers was sent into the An Lao Valley. It's unclear, but it seems they were dispatched to the area to investigate the murders. I'm sorry, Detective. It's also unclear here whether they succeeded or not.”

  “Do you have any names?” I asked. “Who was on this team?” I could feel the adrenalin ripping through my body now.

  Ms Nguyen sighed and shook her head. Finally, she rose from her desk. “There are more boxes on the fifth floor. Come with me, Detective. You say that people are still being killed?”

  I nodded, then I followed Thi Nguyen upstairs. There was an entire wall of boxes and I helped her carry several of them down to her office.

  The two of us worked late on Wednesday, then again on Thursday night, and we even got together during her lunch hour on Friday. She was hooked now, too. We learned that the Rangers sent to the An Lao Valley were military assassins. Unfortunately, none of the paperwork had been organized according to dates. It had just been thrown into boxes and left to collect dust, never to be read by anyone again.

  Around two-fifteen on Friday we opened another few boxes crammed with papers pertaining to the investigation in the An Lao Valley.

  Thi Nguyen looked up at me. “I have names for the assassins,” she said. And I think I have a code name for the operation. I believe it was called Three Blind Mice."

  Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

  PART FOUR

  EXIT WOUNDS

  Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  I had three names now three men who had been dispatched to the An Lao Valley to stop the murder of civilians there. I needed to be extremely careful with the information, and it took Sampson and I another week to track the men down and find out as much as we could about them.

  The final confirmation that I needed came from Ron Burns at the FBI. He told me that the Bureau had suspected these men of doing two other professional hits: one a politician in Cincinnati, the second a union leader's wife in Santa Barbara, California.

  The names were:

  Thomas Starkey.

  Brownley Harris.

  Warren Griffin.

  The Three Blind Mice.

  The following weekend, Sampson and I went to Rocky Mount, North Carolina. We were chasing men who had played a part in mysterious violence in the An Lao Valley thirty years before. What in hell had really happened there? Why were people still dying now?

  Less than five miles outside the city limits of Rocky Mount, tracts of farmland and crossroad county grocers still dominated the landscape. Sampson and I drove out into the country, then back to town again, passing the Rocky Mount-Wilson Airport and Nash General Hospital, as well as Heckler and Koch where Starkey, Harris and Griffin worked as the sales team for several military bases, including Fort Bragg.

  Sampson and I entered Heels, a local sports bar, at around six o'clock. Race-car drivers as well as a few basketball players from the Charlotte Hornets frequented the place, so it was racially mixed. We were able to fit into the crowd, which was noisy and active. At least a dozen TVs blared from raised platforms.

  The sports bar was less than a mile from Heckler and Koch US, where some of these men and women worked. Other than the thriving high-tech business community, Heckler and Koch (pronounced "Coke') was one of the largest places of employment in town, just behind Abbott Laboratories and Consolidated Diesel. I wondered if the gun company might have some connection to the murders. Probably not, but maybe.

  I struck up a conversation with a plant supervisor from H and K at the bar. We talked about the plight of the Carolina Panthers, and then I worked in the subject of the gun manufacturer. He was positive about his company, which he referred to as' like a family and definitely one of the best places to work in North Carolina, which is a good state to work in'. Then we talked about guns, the MP5 submachine gun in particular. He told me the MP5 was used by the Navy SEALS and elite SWAT teams, but it had also found its way into inner-city gangs. I already knew that about the MP5.

  I mentioned Starkey, Harris and Griffin, casually.

  “I'm surprised Tom and Brownie aren't here already. They usually stop in on a Friday. How do you know those boys?” he asked, but didn't seem surprised that I did.

  “We served together a long time ago,” said Sampson. “Back in sixty-nine and seventy.”

  The supervisor nodded. “You Rangers too?” he asked.

  “No, just regular Army,”said Sampson. “Just foot soldiers.”

  We talked to some other H and K employees, and they spoke positively about the company. The guys we talked to knew Starkey, Harris and Griffin, and everybody knew they'd been Rangers. I got the impression that the three men were popular and might even be local heroes.

  Around quarter past seven, Sampson leaned in close and whispered into my ear. “Front door. Look who just blew in,” he said. “Three business suits. Don't much look like killers.”

  I turned slowly and looked. No, they didn't look like killers.

  “But that's what they are,” I said to Sampson. Army assassins who look like the nicest guys in the bar, maybe in all of North Carolina."

  We watched the three of them for the rest of the night -just watched the trio of hit men.

  Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

  Chapter Eighty

  Sampson and I were staying out at a Holiday Inn near the Interstate. We were up the next morning by six.

  We had a potentially heart-stopping, but rather tasty breakfast at a nearby Benny's (omelets and 'home fries covered and smothered'). Then we planned out our big day. We'd learned the night before that Heckler and Koch had a big family-style picnic going that afternoon. We were planning to crash it. Cause a little trouble if we could.

  After breakfast we took a spin past the houses of the three murder suspects. A slick DC group we liked called Maze was playing from the CD. Nice contrast to the folksiness of Rocky Mount. City meets country.

  The killers' houses were in upscale developments called Knob Hill, Falling River Walk, and Greystone. It looked as if a lot of young professionals with families lived there. The new South. Quiet, tasteful, civilized as hell.

  “They know how to blend in,”Sampson said as we drove by Warren Griffin's two-and-a-half story Colonial. “Our three killer boys.”

  “Good at what they do,” I said. “Never been caught. I really want to have a chat with them.”

  Around eight, we went back to the Holiday Inn to get ready for the picnic and whatever else might happen today. It was hard to believe that the three killers fit so well into Rocky Mount. It made me wonder about pretty, innocent-looking small towns and what might be lurking behind their facades. Maybe nothing, maybe a whole lot of everything.

  Sampson and I were originally from North Carolina, but we hadn't spent that much time here as adults, and unfortunately, most of it had been working on a couple of celebrated murder cases. The gun-company picnic was sc
heduled to start at eleven, and we figured we would show up at around one when the crowds were large. We knew from the night before that just about everybody from H and K, from the mailroom to stockroom to the corporate suite, would be on hand for the big day.

  That included Starkey, Harris, Griffin and their families.

  And of course, Sampson and I. It was time for a little payback.

  Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

  Chapter Eighty-One

  It was a hot, humid day and even the cooks at the company picnic were checking the grill infrequently. They much preferred to stay in the shade and sip cold Dr. Pepper soft drinks in their "BBQ from Heaven' aprons. Everybody seemed to be taking it easy, having a good time on a pretty Saturday. Another cat's-eye marble bites the dust.

  Sampson and I sat under an ancient, leafy oak tree and listened to the symphony of local birds. We drank iced tea from Lucite cups that looked like real glass. We wore H and K Rules tee-shirts and looked as if we belonged, and always had.

  The smell of ribs was strong in the air. Actually, the smoke from the grills was probably keeping the bugs from becoming an immediate problem.

  “They sure know how to cook those ribs,” Sampson said.

  They did, and so did I. Ribs, to cook properly, need indirect heat, and the fires had been built with two piles of charcoal one in front, one in the back, but none in the middle where the racks with the ribs had been placed. I

  had learned about ribs, and all kinds of cooking, from Nana. She'd wanted me to be as good in the kitchen as she was. That wasn't going to happen real soon, but I was decent, at least. I could fill in when needed.

  I even knew that there was a standing argument in the grilling world about the relative merits of the 'dry rub' versus the 'wet mop'. The dry rub was a mixture of salt, pepper, paprika and brown sugar, which was said to have both the heat and the sweetness to bring out the true flavor of the meat. The wet-mop mix had a base of apple cider, with added shallots, jalapeno peppers, ketchup, brown sugar and tomato paste. I liked the mop and the rub just fine so long as the meat was cooked until it just about fell off the bone.