Patterson, James - Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

“Probably familiar to a lot of people,” I said. “Men and women. Go ahead, though, Nana. This hardworking man with the extraordinarily nice family living outside San Diego. What happened to him?”

“Well anyway, this man had a kindly grandfather who adored both him and his family. He'd noticed that his grandson was working too hard, and he was the one who told him about the marbles. He told it this way. He said that the average life span for men was around seventy-five years. That meant thirty-nine hundred Saturdays to play when you were a kid, and to be with your family when you got older and wiser.”

“I see,” I said. “Or to play once you got older. Or even to give lectures to anyone who'll listen.”

“Shush, Alex. Now, listen. So the grandfather figured out that his grandson, who was forty-three, had about sixteen hundred and sixty Saturdays left in his life. Statistically speaking. So what he did was he bought two large jars and filled them with beautiful cat's-eye marbles. He gave them to his grandson. And he told him that every Saturday, he should take one marble out of the jar. Just one, and just as a reminder that he only had so many Saturdays left, and that they were precious beyond belief. Think about that, Alex. If you have the time,” said Nana.

So here I was at a super max prison on a Saturday. I didn't think I was wasting the day, not at all. But Nana's message had sunk in anyway.

This was my last murder case. It had to be. This was the end of the road for Detective Alex Cross.

I focused my mind on the baffling case as I walked toward the cell of Tran Van Luu. He would make my trip worth at least one marble.

Or so I had to hope.

Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

Chapter Seventy-Two

Tran Van Luu was fifty-four years old and he informed me that he spoke Vietnamese, French and English fluently. His English was excellent and I couldn't help thinking that he looked more like a college professor than a prison inmate convicted of several murders. Luu wore gold wire-rim glasses and had a long, gray goatee. He was philosophical about everything apparently. But was he the Foot Soldier?

“Nominally, I am a Buddhist,” he said as he sat in a cell that was only seven by twelve feet. A bed, a stool and a fixed writing shelf filled more than half of the space. The fixtures were all made of poured concrete so they couldn't be moved or disassembled by the inmates.

“I will give you some history, ”he said. The back story.“ I nodded. ”That would be a good place to start.“ ”My birthplace is Gon Track Village in the Quang Bihn Province, just north of what was the DMZ. This is one of the country's poorest provinces, but they are all relatively poor. I started work in my family's rice fields at five.

Everyone was always hungry, even though we grew food. We had one real meal a day, usually yams or cassava. Ironically, our rice was handed over to the landlord. All loyalty was to family, including ancestors, a plot of land and the village. Nationalism was non-existent, a Western notion imported by Ho Chi Minh.

“My family moved south in nineteen sixty-three and I enlisted in the Army. The alternative was starvation, and besides, I had been brought up to hate the Communists. I proved to be an excellent scout and was recommended to MAC-V/Recondo school run by US Army Special Forces. This was my initial encounter with Americans. I liked them at first.”

“What happened to change that?” I asked Luu.

"Many things. Mostly I came to understand that many of the Americans looked down on me and my countrymen. Despite repeated promises, I was left behind in Saigon. I became a boat person.

“I finally got to America in seventy-nine. Orange County in California, which has a very large Vietnamese population. The only way we could survive was to recreate the family village structure from our own country. I did so with a gang the Ghost Shadows. We became successful, at first in California, then in the New York area, including Newark. They say I murdered members of rival gangs in New York and Jersey.”

“Did you?” I asked Luu.

“Oh, of course. It was justifiable, though. We were in a war.” He stopped talking. Stared at me.

“So now you're here in a super max prison. Have you received a date for the execution?”

“No. Which is very humorous to me. Your country is afraid to execute convicted murderers.”

“It's comical? Because of things you saw in Vietnam?”

“Of course. That is my frame of reference.”

“Atrocities committed in the name of military activity.”

“It was war, Detective.”

“Did you know any of these men in Vietnam: Ellis Cooper, Reece Tate, James Etra, Robert Bennett, Laurence Houston?”

Luu shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Over thirty years. And there are so many American surnames to remember.”

“Colonel Owen Handler?”

“I don't know him.”

I shook my head. “I think you do. Actually, Colonel Handler was in charge of the MAC-V/Recondo school when you were there being trained as a Kit Carson scout.”

Luu smiled for the first time. “Believe it or not, Detective Cross, the scouts didn't usually get to meet the man-in-charge.”

“But you met Colonel Handler. He remembered you to the day he was killed. Can you help me stop the murders?” I asked Luu. “You know what happened over there, don't you? Why did you agree to see me?”

He gave another indifferent shrug. “I agreed to see you... because my good friend asked me to. My friend is Kyle Craig.”

Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

Chapter Seventy-Three

I could feel a cold spot where my heart was supposed to be. This couldn't all be leading to Kyle Craig. I had put him here in Florence for all the murders he had committed and now, somehow, he'd gotten me to come and visit.

“Hello, Alex. I thought you'd forgotten all about me,” Kyle said when he saw me. We met in a small interviewing room near his cellblock. My head was full of paranoid thoughts about the 'coincidence' of seeing him again. He couldn't have set this up. Not even he could do that.

Kyle had changed physically, so much so that he resembled one of his older brothers, or maybe his father, more than himself. When I had been pursuing him, I'd met everyone in Kyle's family. He'd always been gaunt, but in prison he had lost at least twenty pounds. His head was shaven and he had a tattoo on one side of his skull: it was part dragon, part snake. He actually looked like a killer now.

"Sit down, Alex. I missed you even more than I thought

I would. Sit, please. Let's talk the talk. Catch up with the catch up."

“I'll stand, thanks. I'm not here to make small talk, Kyle. What do you know about these murders?”

“They've all been solved by the police or the Army, Alex. The guilty have been charged, and in some cases executed. Just as I will be eventually. Why waste your time on them? I'm a hundred times more interesting. You should be studying me.”

His words were delivered in a low-key manner, but they went through me like a powerful electric current. Was Kyle the missing goddamn connection? He couldn't be behind the murders? They had started long before he'd been arrested. But did that really matter?

“So, you don't know anything that can help me? Then I'm leaving. Have a nice life.”

Kyle raised a hand. “I'd like to help, Alex. I mean that sincerely. Just like the old days. I miss it. The chase. What if I could help?” he asked.

“If you can, then do it, Kyle. Do it right now. We'll see where it goes from there.”

Kyle leaned back in his chair. Finally, he smiled, or maybe he was laughing at me? "Well since you didn't ask, it's better here in prison than I could have hoped. Believe it or not, I'm a minor celebrity. And not just among my peers. Even the kick-ass guards cater to my wishes. I have lots of visitors. I'm writing a book, Alex. And, of course, I'm figuring out some way to get out of here. Trust me, I will some day. It's just a matter of time. It almost happened a month ago. This close. I would have come to visit,