The glow in Snake’s eyes rose like a stoked furnace. Snake drew a pistol from his pants and aimed the barrel down at Tom’s face.

“Snake, don’t!” cried a frightened voice from somewhere in the van. “You can’t do it! Not yet. Think about Forrest. Think about tomorrow!”

“Fuck him,” Snake said. “You know the score. It was always gonna come to this.”

I COME OUT OF blackness grabbing for the cell phones on the bedside table, but all are dark. Propped on my elbow, I try to orient myself in time. Only after I switch on my new BlackBerry and read its face do I see that it’s two thirty in the morning.

What woke me up, if not a cell phone?

Swinging onto the edge of the bed, I pull on my pants and shoes, then take my .357 from the table and walk onto the landing outside my bedroom.

A quick glance into Annie’s room tells me she and my mother are fine, their fragile forms outlined beneath a chenille bedspread. Moving carefully, I descend the narrow staircase with my gun at the ready and alight on the ground floor of the Abrams house. Ambient light from the outside streetlamps leaks through the cracks in the curtains, giving enough illumination to navigate the furniture.

After checking the ground floor, I open the back door and slip into the backyard. The cold night air raises the hair on my skin, but I move steadily around the perimeter of the house, my eyes focused in the darkest parts of the yard. My eyes will pick up movement in the lighter areas; it’s the pools of blackness where death may wait. My forefinger twitches against the thin metal curve of the trigger. I’d hate to have to explain firing a .357 Magnum in the middle of town, but better that than the alternative.

After making a full circuit of the house and finding nothing, I return to the front yard and gaze out over the old ninth hole of the Duncan Park golf course, a long, misty slope that falls away from Duncan Avenue, then terminates at the fences where I played Little League baseball as a boy. The sight triggers one of those temporal dislocations I’ve sometimes experienced since moving back to my hometown. At my back stands a house where I studied for advanced chemistry exams with my high school friends, yet now it’s a makeshift safe house that protects my family from men who were killing people while I was learning how to make a double play on the baseball field down the slope. How is it that, decades later, it falls to me to bring those men to justice? Perhaps it’s only fitting. This is my town, after all. And its legacy is the one my father and his contemporaries left me and mine: a community crippled by unresolved conflict, anger, and grief.

I wish that I felt equal to the task, but in truth I feel as lost as I’ve ever been. I began this week by investigating a relatively simple murder. Now I find myself caught in a skein of connections I never knew existed. Through my father’s secret actions, and possibly by blood, I am bound to Viola Turner’s family, to the Knox family, and through them to the Royal and Marcello families, and their crimes. At the farthest reach of this tangled web may lie the assassination of a president.

Surely I must stand at that hinge point where in novels and films the hero suddenly reexamines his situation and discovers that the answer has been staring him in the face all along. Alas, I feel no looming epiphany. All I possess is a plan for disruption: sow discord among the enemy and pray for a miracle.

Centuries ago, Heraclitus made a famously sweeping assertion: Character is fate. Almost without fail, men make choices based on instinct, eternally proving his maxim. As a lawyer I exploited this knowledge to dissect defendants, opponents, and even judges. As a novelist, I use it as a charting compass. But to profit from the principle in my present circumstance—to see where I must go and what I must do—I need to know my own character.

And what is character but the sum of our genes and the pressures of human interaction? Our parents are the door through which we enter the world. In coming together they fix our essential natures, but it’s after we become self-aware that they begin weaving the narrative that will ultimately shape the people they send into society. If our parents lie to us—not merely by omission, as all do, but by commission—then how can we ever know ourselves?

For most of my life, my father’s character seemed a static and transparent thing, a multifaceted diamond whose essential trait was clarity. Then four days ago, that stone cracked along some pre-existing fault and became milky, opaque. It happens. Even fine diamonds contain flaws, inclusions invisible to the naked eye that weaken the whole. But the revelations about Viola Turner were only the beginning. Soon the milky stone had broken in two. As I tried to piece the halves back together, Henry Sexton began tapping at them, fracturing each into still smaller fragments. Then tonight Kaiser and Stone shattered those fragments into jagged shards, each reflecting light in all directions, creating interference patterns I may never be able to penetrate. Even if I do, how can I possibly piece the original stone back together, when I know my memory of it to be flawed?

Only my father can put himself back together. And if he dies before he does that, I will never truly know him. I will never have known him. Which means I may never know myself. I’ll be a man without a past, and a man without a past is like a nation without a history, or worse, with a myth of one. If the narrative of my life has been woven from lies, then how can I choose my next move? What crimes were my father’s lies told to conceal? If Shad Johnson is right, then simple, selfish murder. If Kaiser and Stone are correct, then murder on a historic scale. The latter proposition seems incredible, but the ties binding my father to the Knoxes, to Royal, and even to Marcello and beyond have been established beyond doubt. At least I’m not alone in my ignorance. If murder has haunted my family, it has also haunted my country. From the humblest victims—forgotten black boys vanishing into the night—to the most privileged and high—President Kennedy cut down on national television—these killings and the darkness that enshrouds them deny us the truth about ourselves.

Standing here in the darkness, my best hope may be to heed Carl Jung’s admonition: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you. Though I am poorly informed and inadequately armed, this now must be my quest, whatever the cost. Men still live who shared the secret paths of my father’s hidden history, and the history of this nation. Soon I will face some of them across an interrogation table. And this I know: to learn what they know, I will stop at nothing.

The howl of a dog from the shadows makes me whirl toward the house, but I see no sign of the animal. Looking back at the street, I half expect to see Lincoln Turner’s white pickup rolling along the pavement, but the scene is almost ghostly in its stillness.

I still don’t know what awakened me. Yet as I walk back to the door, I’m gripped by a certainty that something terrible has happened on this night. And since my mother and child are with me—and Caitlin is safe at the Examiner—I can only surmise that the object of this jarring premonition is my father.

Locking the door behind me, I realize that sleep will not return soon. I switch on my laptop in the kitchen, check my e-mail and find that the most recent is from John Kaiser. It reads: If tonight didn’t persuade you to hold off on questioning the Double Eagles, then at least you should go into battle prepared. Do your due diligence and read the attached file.

With bleary eyes, I open the attachment and find a typed letter headed KNOX FAMILY PATHOLOGY. The first subject line reads: Nathan Bedford Forrest Knox. 1876–1927. With a long-suffering sigh, I turn on the coffee percolator, then carry my computer to the little banquette, turn down its screen brightness, and begin to read.