“I will.”

Dennis switches off the engine, then looks at me. The eyes in his fleshy face burn with fearsome conviction. “Before I’m done, Forrest Knox is gonna wish his family never set foot in my parish.”

Forrest Knox’s ancestors probably arrived here generations before Dennis’s did, but the sheriff could not care less about that. Subtlety isn’t his strong suit. Special Agent John Kaiser is like a Predator drone, circling high above Forrest Knox and the Double Eagle group with an array of precision-targeted missiles. Sheriff Dennis is more like the iron bombs that dropped from the bellies of B-17s during World War II: dumb and heavy, but deadly enough to bring down a city block. And for my new purpose, Walker Dennis is just what the doctor ordered.

CHAPTER 5

CAITLIN MASTERS HAD wasted no time after getting into the cruiser. The deaths she’d witnessed, the torture she’d endured—all that was working its way through her like slow poison, she knew, but there was no quick antidote. And if what Brody Royal had said about having a mole at her paper was true, then every passing minute might mean more deleted computer files. She prayed that if there was a mole, he had not located the digital scans of Henry Sexton’s journals. The fire wasn’t even out of sight when she said, “I need to call my editor, Deputy. May I use your cell phone?”

Deputy Grady Wells pulled a Nokia from his shirt pocket and passed it over. “Walker said you could. I just hope to hell the state police don’t find out about this.”

“Don’t worry, you’re on the side of the angels tonight.”

Wells grunted skeptically.

Her editor’s cell phone rang four times, but then he answered. “Jamie Lewis. Who’s this?”

“It’s me, Jamie.”

“Christ, I was afraid you were dead.” Lewis’s crisp northern speech sounded alien compared to the drawl of Deputy Wells.

“I almost was. And some people are sure going to wish I was.”

“One minute you were here arguing with Penn, and the next you were gone. Now the police scanner’s going nuts about an explosion on Lake Concordia.”

“I was in the damned explosion. Or next to it, anyway. Don’t say anything more, Jamie. Just listen and do what I say.”

“Go.”

“Shut down our computers, right now. The servers, everything.”

“What?”

“Our system’s been breached. Somebody’s in our intranet, wiping out information. Brody Royal had a mole on our staff. Henry’s scanned backup files are probably gone, and God knows what else. You haven’t noticed anything weird going on?”

“I did accidentally delete a story about an hour ago.”

Caitlin’s stomach did a queasy roll. “No, you didn’t. They already stole the physical copies of Henry’s journals and backup files, right out of our fire cabinet. Have you shut down the system yet?”

“I’m trying to now. We’re going to lose unsaved stories people are working on.”

“Pull the fucking plug, Jamie! We’ve got to start the whole edition over anyway.”

“Okay, okay. When will you be back here?”

“I don’t know. I need to read over the hub story I wrote before this happened—I can access the copy I sent to Daddy’s other papers via e-mail. Then I’ll call you back and try to dictate a new one from here.”

“Where is here?”

“I can’t tell you that on the phone. But I’ll tell you this: I’ve never worked a story this big in my life. Brody Royal just closed about five murder cases in as many minutes. He shot a black man named Sleepy Johnston right in front of us, a witness to the Albert Norris murder in 1964. I’ve got Snake Knox for murdering Pooky Wilson and trying to skin him alive. Royal admitted raping Viola Turner, and also killing his own daughter.”

“Holy shit. I heard she died in the ICU earlier tonight.”

“That’s right. Royal knew Katy was starting to talk about his involvement in her mother’s murder, and the others, too. Either Royal or his son-in-law did that. Oh, Randall Regan’s dead as well, by the way.”

Jamie’s amazement only silenced him for a moment. “How did Royal know that his daughter had talked to you?”

Because Penn played him the recording of her voice . . . “I don’t know,” Caitlin lied. “But he did.”

“You still have that recording, right?”

“No. Royal burned both copies, mine and Penn’s.”

“Fuck!”

“I know, I know. But Penn and I both heard him admit the murders. It’ll be okay. Tomorrow’s edition is going to be like a bomb going off, Jamie. By tomorrow at noon, every media outlet in the country is going to be chasing this story. And the FBI is going to look like the Keystone Kops. I just have to stay clear of certain people until we get the issue done.”

“Such as?”

“The Adams County sheriff, for one. How are your dictation skills?”

“Meredith’s a lot better. I’ll get her ready.”

“No. Just you. When Penn and I were kidnapped from the back parking lot, I almost made it back inside, but one of our people locked me out. I don’t know who did that, and it could have been a woman as easily as a man. Has anybody left their post tonight?”

“Now that you mention it, Nick has been out of touch for an hour or more.”

“Nick Moore, the press operator?”

“Yeah. We figured he went out for some food, since the press obviously wouldn’t run for some hours yet.”

“Try to track him down. Anybody else?”

“I don’t think so. Everybody’s working like this is the biggest story of their lives.”

“It is. Okay, I’ll call you back in two minutes, max, and dictate the new story in case I get arrested. At the very least, I’ll be stuck in a police interrogation room for a while. For now, tomorrow’s edition is on your shoulders. You’re probably going to have to try to reconstruct almost everything that’s been written from memory.”

“We’ll do it, if we have to stay till dawn.”

“Count on that. None of us will be sleeping for a long time.”

Caitlin hung up and began punching commands into the cell phone’s tiny keypad. Only then did she realize that her hands were shaking. Normally, she was an ace with a cell phone, but not now. The trauma she’d endured in Brody Royal’s basement was part of it, of course. But the larger part, she knew, was her realization that within an hour or two, Special Agent John Kaiser would learn that Royal had not only verified the existence of the Bone Tree, but also placed the murder of Pooky Wilson there. Given the massive effort Kaiser had expended to drain the Jericho Hole in search of the bones of the Double Eagles’ civil rights victims, what resources might he marshal to locate Pooky Wilson’s remains? Two hours ago, Caitlin was certain she’d had the only real chance of finding the near-mythical race-murder site that most authorities considered apocryphal. Now she was likely to be competing with a battalion of National Guardsmen and satellite imagery specialists. As soon as she could get to a safe phone, she would try yet again to call Toby Rambin, the Lusahatcha County poacher who had sworn to Henry Sexton that he knew the location of the Bone Tree. Calling him in the middle of the night wouldn’t be ideal, but she had no choice now.

After several curses and mistakes, she finally got into her digital mailbox and called up the file attachment she needed. Blocking out the pain of her injuries, she focused on the tiny screen, processing her own words with ruthless efficiency, deciding which elements of the existing lead story could function as a foundation for the new one she would dictate before they reached the sheriff’s department. As she stared at the glowing LCD, it finally sank in how profoundly the world had changed in the two hours since she’d written that piece. The entire story would have to be rewritten.