Four Blind Mice

and saw Dr. Coles coming into the waiting room. I took a quick breath and tried not to let the kids see how anxious and nervous I really was.
    Then Kayla Coles smiled. What a beautiful, glorious smile that was, the very best I’ve seen in a long while.
    “She’s all right?” I asked.
    “Aces,” she said. “Your nana is a tough lady. She’s asking for you already.”

Chapter 103
    WE VISITED WITH Nana in the recovery room for an hour, then we were asked to leave. She needed to rest up.
    I dropped the kids off at school about eleven that morning. Then I went home to do a little more scut work in my office.
    I was looking into something for Ron Burns, a strange but intriguing case involving convicted sex offenders. In return, he’d gotten me some U.S. Army records that I wanted to check out. Some of it had come off ACIRS and RISS, but most came straight from the Pentagon. One of the subjects was the Three Blind Mice.
    Who was the real killer? Who gave orders to Thomas Starkey? Who sanctioned the murders? Why were these particular men targeted?
    And, most important, why were they set up instead of just having the Three Blind Mice kill them? Was the goal to show them fear — fear that they were being hunted, fear that someone else had taken over their lives?
    I kept thinking about Nana, and how tough she was and how much I would have missed her if something had gone wrong that morning. The terrible, guilt-ridden fantasy kept running through my head that I was going to get a call from Kayla Coles and she would say,
I’m sorry, Nana passed away. We don’t know what went wrong. I’m so sorry.
    The call didn’t come, and I threw myself into the work. Nana would be home tomorrow. I needed to stop worrying about her and put my mind to better use.
    The army records were interesting but also about as depressing as an IRS audit. Obviously, there had been rogue activity in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The army, at least officially, seemed to turn a blind eye and not look too closely at what had happened. There weren’t civilian review boards, of course, like the police departments had to investigate misconduct. The press had no way to judge what was going on either. They rarely interviewed victims’ families in the small villages. Few of the American reporters spoke much Vietnamese. The good and the bad of it was that the army had sometimes fought fire with fire. Maybe it was the only way to effectively fight a guerilla war. But I still didn’t know what had happened over there to inspire the murders stateside during the past few years.
    I spent several grueling hours looking through more records of Colonel Thomas Starkey, Captain Brownley Harris, and Sergeant Warren Griffin. I saw that their army careers were exemplary, at least in written form. I went back as far as Vietnam, and the pattern continued. Starkey was a highly decorated officer; Harris and Griffin were good soldiers. There was nothing in the records about assassinations in Vietnam committed by the trio. Not a single word.
    I wanted to know when they had met and where they had served together. I kept leafing through records, hoping, but not finding the connect point. I knew they’d fought together in Vietnam and Cambodia. I went through every page a second time.
    But there was nothing in any of the records to indicate they’d worked together in Southeast Asia. Not a goddamn word.
    I sat back and stared out onto Fifth Street, letting my eyes glaze over. There was only one conclusion I could come up with, and I didn’t like it.
    The army records had been doctored.
    But why? And by whom?

Chapter 104
    IT WASN’T OVER yet.
    I could feel it in the pit of my stomach, and I hated the queasy feeling, the uncertainty, the lack of closure. Or maybe I just couldn’t let go. All those unsolved murders.
Who was the real killer? Who was behind the strange murders?
    A week after the shooting in Georgia, I sat in Ronald Burns’s office on the fifth floor of FBI headquarters in Washington. Burns’s assistant, a crew-cut male in his mid-twenties, had just brought us coffee in beautiful china cups. There were also fresh mini-pastries on a silver tray.
    “Pulling out all the stops?” I asked the director. “Hot coffee and Danish.”
    “You got it,” he said, “shameless manipulation. Go with it.”
    I’d known him for years, but it was only during the past few months that I’d worked closely with Burns. What I’d seen so far, I liked, but I’d been fooled