I floored it again, got back up to ninety in an awful hurry.
I passed two cars heading north, both blaring their horn at me. I couldn’t blame them. I was over the double line and racing about forty miles per hour over the speed limit. They must have thought I was drunk or mad, or both.
When I was sure no one was following, I slowed down.
“Handler? Colonel?” I called out.
He didn’t answer. Sampson hung over the backseat to check on him. “He’s been hit, Alex.” I pulled over to the side of the road and turned on the interior light.
“How bad? Is he alive?”
I saw that Handler had been shot twice. Once in the shoulder. And once in the side of the head.
“He’s dead,” Sampson said. “He’s gone.”
“You all right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I wasn’t the target, and that boy in the car could shoot. He was after Handler. We just lost our first real lead.”
I wondered if we had lost Foot Soldier as well.
Chapter 70
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE an attempt on your life to get you properly focused, and also to get the blood boiling.
It was an exercise in futility, but Sampson and I rushed Owen Handler to the ER at the West Point hospital. He was pronounced dead at about nine. I’m certain he was dead when we brought him in. The shooter in the other car was a chillingly good marksman, a professional killer. Had three men actually been in the pursuing car?
We were questioned by the local police and also CID officers from West Point. Captain Conte even came to see us, spouting his concern for our safety but also playing twenty questions with us, almost as if we were suspects. Conte informed me that the commanding officer at West Point, General Mark Hutchinson, was personally supervising the investigation now. Whatever that was supposed to mean.
Then General Hutchinson actually showed up at the hospital. I saw him speaking to Captain Conte, then a few other grim-faced officers gathered in the hallway. But Hutchinson never came over to see Sampson and me. Not a word of condolence or concern.
How goddamn strange, and inconsiderate. It was maddening. The gray wall of silence, I thought, remembering Owen Handler’s words. General Mark Hutchinson left the hospital without even making contact with us. I wasn’t going to forget that.
All the while I was at the West Point hospital, I couldn’t get one thought out of my head: There is nothing like an attempt on your life . . . to get your blood boiling. I was shaken by the attack on Colonel Handler, but I was also angry as hell.
Wasn’t that part of the motive behind the massacre at My Lai and others like it? Anger? Fear? The need for retribution? Unthinkable things happened during combat. Tragedies were inevitable. They always had been. What was the army trying to cover up now? Who had sent the killers after us tonight? Who had murdered Colonel Handler, and why?
Sampson and I spent the night at the Hotel Thayer again. General Hutchinson decided to put MPs on the second floor to protect us. I didn’t think it was necessary. If the gunmen had been after us, they wouldn’t have driven off and left us alive.
I kept thinking: two men had been in the car that attacked us.
There had been three men involved in the earlier Fort Bragg and West Point killings.
I couldn’t get the fact out of my head either.
Three, not two.
Finally, I called Jamilla and shared with her everything that had happened. Detective to detective, friend to friend. She didn’t like the actions of General Hutchinson and the army either. Just talking it through with her helped tremendously.
I was thinking about doing it more often, like maybe every night.
I finally fell asleep on that thought.
Chapter 71
THE FOLLOWING MORNING the New York papers were filled with a story about the murder of four call girls, a madam, and a bouncer on the East Side. The women were Vietnamese and Thai, and because of that I talked to the detective in charge of the investigation in Manhattan. So far, the NYPD was nowhere on the grisly case. I thought about going to New York, but there were other things pressing on my mind.
There was an important lead I hadn’t even begun to satisfactorily check out. Foot Soldier. Who the hell was he? Or she? And why had Foot Soldier contacted me by e-mail? What was the mystery person trying to tell me?
Owen Handler had given me a few names, and I had Ron Burns track a few of them down. The most interesting to me was Tran Van Luu, a former ARVN scout who was now living in the United States.
There was a catch, a big one. Tran Van Luu was on death row in Florence, Colorado. He’d been found guilty of murdering nine people in Newark and New York City. I knew a little about the federal prison at Florence and had even been there once. That was the second catch. Kyle Craig was imprisoned there, my old nemesis. Kyle was also on death row.
The Florence ADX was one of the so-called supermax prison facilities. Thirty-six states now had them. Death row was located in the Security Housing Unit, a kind of prison within a prison. It turned out to be a bland, sand-colored building with extraordinarily heavy security inside and out. That was comforting, since Kyle Craig was being held inside — and Kyle had nothing but disdain for prison security.
Two heavily armed guards accompanied me to death row. As we walked down the otherwise empty, fluorescent-lit hallways, I heard none of the usual chaotic noise of a prison. My mind was somewhere else anyway.
I had arrived in Colorado about noon. Everything was running smoothly on the home front, and hopefully I’d be back in D.C. that night. Nana wasn’t missing any opportunities, though. Before I left the house, she sat me down and told me one of her story-parables. She called it The Story of the Thousand Marbles. “I heard this on NPR, Alex. It’s a true story, and I’m passing it along to you for what it’s worth. Seems there was this man who lived in southern California, around San Diego, I believe it was. He had a family, nice family; and he worked very hard, long hours, lots of weekends. Sound familiar?”
“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 had only 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 supermax 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.
Chapter 72
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-rimmed glasses and had a long gray goatee.
He was philosophical — about everything, apparently. But was he 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 Son Trach village in the Quang Binh 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 the family, including ancestors, a plot of land, and the village. Nationalism was nonexistent, a Western notion imported by Ho Chi Minh.
“My family moved south in 1963 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 MACV Recondo School run by U.S. 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 re-create 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 supermax 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 MACV Recondo School when you were there being trained as a 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.”
Chapter 73
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 interview 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 his previous self. 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 shaved 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 someday. It’s just a matter of time. It almost happened a month ago. This close. I would have come to visit, of course. You and Nana and those sweet children.”
“Does Luu know anything?” I asked.
“Oh, absolutely. He’s very well read. Speaks three languages fluently. I like Luu very much. We’re dear friends. I also like Ted Kaczynski; Yu Kikimura, the Japanese terrorist; and Ramon Matta, formerly with the Medellín cartel. Interesting inmates, fascinating lives, though more conservative than I would have expected. Not Ted, but the others.”
I’d had enough. Of Kyle Craig. Luu. Florence.
“I’m going,” I said. I started to walk away.
“You’ll be back,” Kyle whispered. “Or maybe I’ll come and visit you next time. At any rate, best of luck with your fascinating murder case.”
I turned back. “You’ll be in here for the rest of your life. Not too long, I hope.”
Kyle Craig laughed heartily in his cell. More than ever, he gave me the creeps.
Chapter 74
AS JOHN SAMPSON drove into Bay Head, New Jersey, he felt his spirits rise dramatically, and the very pleasant sensation inside made him smile to himself. He was doing a lot of that lately. Hell, he was going to ruin his tough-guy image if he kept this shit up much longer.
He drove along Route 35, past sprawling beach houses, Central Market, and a couple of picturesque, whitewashed churches. This part of the Jersey Shore was quiet and undeniably pretty. He couldn’t help but appreciate the serenity and the well-preserved beauty. A slight breeze from the ocean blew through the open windows of his Cougar. Geraniums and rose hips bloomed along the side of the road, obviously planted by the village itself.
What was not to like? He was glad to be here again.
Long ways from D.C., he found himself thinking. And it’s not all bad. For a change of pace anyway. For a break from all the murders.
During the drive up from D.C., Sampson had tried to convince himself that this excursion to the Jersey Shore was all about Ellis Cooper and the other murders, but that wasn’t the whole truth. Coop was definitely a big part of it, but this was also about
Billie Houston.
He thought about her all the time. What was it about that wisp of a woman?
Actually, he knew at least part of the answer. From the moment he’d met her, he was completely comfortable. She was the female friend he’d been hoping to meet for a long time. It was hard to describe the feeling, but he knew he’d never had it before. He felt that he could tell Billie things about himself that he’d held inside for a long time. He trusted her already. When he was with her, he could come outside of himself, leave the castle he had constructed to guard the person he really was from being hurt.
On the other hand, John Sampson had never had a successful long-term relationship with any woman. Never been married, not even seriously tempted. So he wasn’t going to delude himself or get too soppy and sentimental about Billie either. He had good reasons to be here in Jersey. A few more questions had to be asked about her husband’s time in Vietnam. He and Alex had learned things from Owen Handler that needed filling in. He was going to solve this murder case. Somehow, someway.
Well, hell, that cynical little introspection had sure dampened his spirits and any burgeoning romance in his soul.
Then he happened to see her up ahead on East Avenue.
Yep, it was her!
Billie was climbing out of her light green convertible with an armful of groceries. He’d called ahead and said he might be coming.
Now who had she been shopping for? Did she expect him to stay for dinner? Oh brother, he needed to calm himself down. Slow down. You’re on the job, that’s all. This is just police business.
Then Billie saw his car and waved her free arm, and he found himself leaning out of the window of the Cougar, calling up the street, “Hey there, little one.” Hey there, little one?
What the hell had happened to smooth and cool and detached John Sampson? What was happening to him?
And why did he feel good about it?
Chapter 75
BILLIE UNDERSTOOD THAT she and John Sampson needed to talk about her husband and his murder. That was why he’d come back, probably the only reason. She made a pitcher of sweetened iced tea, and they went out to the oceanside porch. Might as well be comfortable. Try not to make an ass out of yourself.
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