Four Blind Mice

Chapter One Hundred and Three

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 around eleven that morning. Then I went home to do a little more scud 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 US Army records that I wanted to check out. Some of it had come off AC IRS and RISS, but most had come 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?

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 away 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. Plus, 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 guerrilla 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?