DEDICATION
For
Caroline Hungerford Iles
I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.
—Jane Austen, Persuasion, paraphr.
EPIGRAPH
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know.
He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.
—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Wednesday
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Thursday
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Friday
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Saturday
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Greg Iles
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
SPECIAL AGENT JOHN Kaiser stood at the window of the FBI’s “tactical room” in the River Bend Hotel and stared at the lights of Natchez twinkling high over the dark tide of the Mississippi. After struggling silently with his convictions for more than an hour, he had decided to use the authority granted him under the Patriot Act to take a step that under any other circumstances would have been a violation of the Constitution—the unauthorized invasion of computers belonging to a public newspaper. He had not done this lightly, and Kaiser knew that his wife—an award-winning journalist and combat photographer—would condemn him if she ever learned what he’d done. But by his lights, the deteriorating situation demanded that he cross the Rubicon. And so he’d quietly risen from bed and, without disturbing his wife, slipped down the hall to where two FBI technicians sat behind computers connected by secure satellite to a high-speed data link in Washington.
This is the Deep South, Kaiser reflected, watching the bow lights of a string of barges round the river bend to the north, from Vicksburg, and push slowly southward toward Baton Rouge. The real South. After being stationed in New Orleans for seven years, he’d realized that the Big Easy, while technically a southern city, was in fact an island with a unique identity: a former French possession, deeply Catholic, multiracial, bursting at the seams with joy and pain, corrupt to its decaying marrow. But the farther north you drove out of New Orleans, the deeper you penetrated into the true South, a Protestant land of moral absolutes, Baptist blue laws, tent revivals, fire and brimstone, heaven and hell, good and evil, black and white, and damn little room between.
Natchez on its bluff was a soeurette, a little sister, to New Orleans—not quite as cosmopolitan in this century as it once was, but still an enclave of license and liberality in the hard-shell hinterlands of cotton and soybeans. Yet Natchez had once been the capital of this cotton kingdom, and a hundred years after the Civil War the hatred that simmered in her outlying fields had infected the city, and murder had roamed her streets like a scourge. If you drew a thirty-mile circle around Natchez, it would encompass more than a dozen unsolved murders from the 1960s alone, and twice that number that were officially solved, but begged for deeper investigation.
Kaiser pressed the palm of his hand against the cold windowpane and watched the barge lights through the fog of his breath on the glass. Two days ago, when he’d mobilized a massive FBI corpse-recovery effort here in Concordia Parish, his goals had been to solve some cold case murders and to save the life of a heroic journalist—not to unravel the darkest thread of the Kennedy assassination. But twenty-four hours after his arrival in this embattled parish, that was exactly the position in which he found himself.
Was it possible that a group of long-unsolved race murders in this neglected corner of the South held the key to the biggest cold case in American history? Given what he’d learned in the past twelve hours, it just might be. Texas bordered Louisiana, after all, and in 1963 Dallas had been a fundamentalist redoubt of reactionary political conservatism, seething with rabid Kennedy hatred. More unsettling still, in that era Dallas had been a feudal possession of New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. For decades, finding a link between Marcello and Dealey Plaza had proved maddeningly elusive. But today new evidence had emerged, revealing a credible plan by the Double Eagle group to assassinate Robert Kennedy in April of 1968 as well as actions by the group’s founder that suggested complicity in the 1963 assassination. Kaiser had long known of a connection between certain Double Eagles and Carlos Marcello. And while he could not explain his certainty, he sensed that the missing links that would tie Marcello to the dead president would soon be within his reach.
Now that Kaiser had authorized an invasion into the computer servers of the Natchez Examiner, his dilemma was how much information to pass up the chain to Washington. In the three months since Hurricane Katrina struck, he had been operating with near-complete autonomy, and he liked it. The breakdown of basic human services in New Orleans—most notably the evaporation of the NOPD—had created a situation of unprecedented chaos on American soil. A veteran of the final phase of the Vietnam War, Kaiser had pushed into that vacuum and deployed Bureau resources with the independence and assertiveness of a military officer, and Washington had allowed him all the rope he desired. The fact that New Orleans lay in a part of the country that the D.C. nabobs never thought much about had been useful in this regard. But Kaiser knew all too well that once he started passing explosive information up the chain, those same bureaucrats would instantly go into ass-covering mode and force his operation to a grinding halt. And almost nothing was more explosive than evidence tying the New Orleans Mafia and a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan to Dealey Plaza.