Four Blind Mice (Alex Cross 8)

Nothing was as it seemed. Ellis Cooper had lied from the start. He’d proclaimed his innocence to Sampson and me. But I believed Tran Van Luu. The way he told the story was entirely convincing. He had witnessed atrocities in his country, and maybe even committed them himself. What was the phrase Burns had used? Wreak havoc.

“There was a saying the army had in the An Lao Valley. Do you want to hear it?” he asked.

“Yes. I need to understand as much as I can. It’s what drives me.”

“The phrase was, If it moves, it’s VC.”

“Not all our soldiers did that.”

“Not many, actually, but some. They came into villages in the out-country. They would kill everyone they found. If it moves . . . They wanted to frighten the Viet Cong, and they did. They left calling cards — like the straw dolls, Detective. In village after village. They destroyed an entire country, a culture.”

Luu paused for a moment, possibly to let me think about what I had heard so far. “They liked to paint the faces and bodies of the dead. The favorite colors were red, white, and blue. They thought this was so humorous too. They never buried the bodies, just left them for the loved ones to find.

“I found my family with their faces painted blue. Their ghost shadows have been haunting me since that day.”

I had to stop him for a moment. “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you go to the army when this was happening?”

He looked straight into my eyes. “I did, Detective. I went to Owen Handler, my first CO. I told him what was happening in An Lao. He already knew. His CO knew. They all knew. Several teams had gotten out of control. So he had the assassins sent in to clean up the mess.”

“And what about all the innocent victims here? What about the women Starkey and his crew murdered in order to set up Cooper and the others?”

“Ah, your army had a term for that: ‘collateral damage.’”

“One more question,” I said to Luu while everything he’d told me was boiling inside my head.

“Ask. Then I want you to leave me alone. I don’t want you to come back.”

“You didn’t kill Colonel Handler, did you?”

“No. Why should I put him out of his misery? I wanted Colonel Handler to live with his cowardice and shame. Now go. We are finished.”

“Who killed Handler?”

“Who knows? Perhaps there is a fourth blind mouse.”

I got up to leave, and the guards came into the cell. I could see that they were afraid of Luu, and I wondered what he had done in his time here. He was a scary and complicated man, a Ghost Shadow. He had plotted several murders of revenge.

“There’s something else,” he finally said. Then he smiled. The smile was horrible — a grimace — no joy or mirth in it. “Kyle Craig says hello. The two of us talk. We even talk about you sometimes. Kyle says that you should stop us while you can. He says that you should put us both down.” Luu laughed as he was led from the cell. “You should stop us, Detective.”

“Be careful of Kyle,” I said, offering some advice. “He isn’t anybody’s friend.”

“Nor am I,” said Tran Van Luu.

Chapter 108

AS SOON AS Luu was taken away, Kyle Craig was brought into the interview room on death row in the isolation unit. I was waiting for him. With bells on.

“I expected you’d stop by to visit, Alex,” he said as he was escorted inside by three armed guards. “You don’t disappoint. Never, ever.”

“Always one step ahead, isn’t that right, Kyle?” I asked.

He laughed, but without a trace of mirth as he looked around at the cell, the guards. “Apparently not. Not anymore.”

Kyle sat across from me. He was so incredibly gaunt and seemed to have lost even more weight since I’d seen him last. I sensed that his mind was going a mile a minute inside that bony skull.

“You were caught

because you wanted to be caught,” I said. “That’s obvious.”