I smiled. “You're the hothead. That's good to know. Starkey is the leader. So what does that make you, Griffin? You just muscle?”

Warren Griffin laughed out loud. That's right. I'm just muscle. And artillery. I'm the one who eats guys like you for breakfast."

I didn't move a muscle. Neither did Sampson. We continued to stare at the three of them. “I am curious about one thing, Starkey. How do you know about us? Who told you?”

His answer shook me to the core.

“Foot Soldier,” he said. Then Colonel Thomas Starkey smiled and tipped his ball cap.

Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

Chapter Eighty-Five

Sampson and I rode the Interstate back to Washington late that afternoon. I was really starting to dislike, or at least tire of 1-95 and its thundering herd of slip-sliding, exhaust-spewing tractor-trailers.

“The circumstances could be better, but it's good spending all this time with you,”I said as we tooled along in the passing lane. “You're too quiet, though. What's up? Something's bothering you.”

He looked my way. “You remember a time you were about eleven -I came over? Spent a couple of weeks with you and Nana?”

“I remember a lot of times like that,” I told him. “Nana used to say we were brothers, just not flesh and blood ones. You were always at the house.”

“This time was different, sugar. I even know why you don't remember. Let me tell it.”

“All right.”

"See, I never used to go home after school. Reason being, nobody was there most of the time. That night I got home around nine, nine-thirty. Made myself corned beef hash for dinner. Sat down to watch some tube. I used to like Mission Impossible back then, wait for it all week. There was a knock at the door.

“I went to see who was there, and it was Nana. She gave me a big hug, just like she still does when she sees me. Asked me if I had some corned beef hash for her, too. Said she liked hers with eggs on top. Then she cackled her cackle, you know.”

“I don't remember any of this. Why was she at your house so late at night?”

Sampson continued with his story. "That afternoon my mother was convicted for possession of heroin to sell. She'd been sentenced. Social Services came by, but I was out. Somebody called Nana Mama.

“So Nana came over, and she actually ate a little of the hash I'd cooked. Told me it was pretty good. Maybe I would be a famous chef one day. Then she said I was coming over to your house for a while. She told me why. She had done some of her magic with Child Welfare. That was the first time that Nana saved me. The first of many times.”

I nodded. Listened. Sampson wasn't finished with his story.

“She was the one who helped get me into the Army after high school. Then into the police academy when I got out of the service. She's your grandmother, but she's more a mother to me than my own flesh. And I never had a father, not really. Neither of us did. I always thought that held us together in the beginning.”