A wave of exhaustion rolled over her, giving her the sense that she was being smothered. When at last she caught her breath, her stomach rolled with nausea. The only thought she could hold in her mind was of the poacher, Rambin. Only days ago, this stranger had contacted Henry Sexton with an offer to guide him to the Bone Tree for a price. But did Toby Rambin know what he claimed to know? Henry had been misled by greedy “guides” before. And since he’d been attacked the night after Rambin contacted him, he’d been unable to keep his scheduled rendezvous. In a narcotic fog in his hospital room—only minutes before a sniper fired a bullet at his head—Henry had given Caitlin the poacher’s telephone number. With a twinge of guilt she recalled altering the entry in Henry’s cell phone so that no one else would be able to find the right number if they checked his phone. As ruthless as that was, Caitlin was glad now that she’d done it. She only hoped she could reach Rambin before the poacher heard about Henry’s murder and fled the state.

Calm down, she told herself. Caitlin closed her eyes and tried to blank her thoughts, but the image of Henry Sexton immolating himself and Brody Royal only grew more distinct in her mind’s eye.

She opened her eyes and punched the keypad of Deputy Wells’s cell phone.

“Caitlin?” Jamie said. “Is that you?”

“Have you had any word from the press operator?”

“None. Nick’s dropped off the face of the earth.”

“With a lot more money than he had last week,” she muttered.

“You really think Nick would help somebody hurt you?”

“I doubt he thought they would kill me. But . . .” Caitlin fell silent as another memory from the basement returned to her. “Jamie . . . before he died, Brody Royal was bragging about how little it had cost him to buy one of our people.”

“Okay. And?”

“I’m pretty sure he said he’d bought a journalist. A scribbler, he said. I remember now. So even if Nick was the one who locked me out, he might not be the only person Royal bribed. I mean, would Nick know where we were keeping Henry’s journals? Would he know how to work the computers, navigate our intranet? Would he know the user names or passwords of the reporters?”

“No. But if Nick didn’t delete the files, then it could be anybody. How the hell do we go forward from here?”

“Think hard about who you trust. With Royal dead, the mole will assume their payday is over. So from this point forward, they might just go back to doing their job.”

“I guess. It still creeps me out, though. And it pisses me off.”

A worrisome thought struck her. “There’s another possibility. When Royal mentioned the mole, he said he had taken a page out of Forrest’s book. He was talking about Forrest Knox, chief of the Criminal Investigations Bureau of the Louisiana State Police. That means Knox was also paying a reporter somewhere. Probably Baton Rouge, where he lives, I’d guess. Or maybe New Orleans. But if Forrest knows about Royal’s mole at the Examiner, who’s to say he can’t extend the arrangement?”

“What if Forrest Knox’s mole was at Henry Sexton’s paper?” Jamie asked. “Or at half a dozen of them? Why limit a good thing, if you’ve got the money to spend?”

“You’re right. Jeez, that would explain a lot. We’ll have to keep our plans confined to a very tight circle. Tomorrow’s stories will have to be written on two computers only, yours and mine. No sharing files, no Internet connection for them.”

“Okay.”

Caitlin looked out at the lights flashing by outside the cruiser. At last she recognized a building. “I’m only five minutes from the sheriff’s office. I need to start dictating.”

“I’m ready.”

“Jamie, this really is the most—”

“You’re not seriously going to waste time telling me how big this is, are you? Go.”

She took a deep breath, then shut her eyes and began to compose her new story on the fly. “Last night, Henry Sexton of the Concordia Beacon laid down his life for a fellow journalist. That journalist was me . . .”

As Caitlin spoke, a soft voice at the center of her mind asked a deeply troubling question: Could Jamie be the mole? Almost instantly another voice answered, No way. She had known her editor for six years. He was a flaming liberal, a crusader for justice who hated greed and repression in all their forms. But probably more persuasive than this, Jamie—like Caitlin herself—was rich. He’d been born into a family with money, and thus had the luxury of being immune to blandishments that might tempt those less fortunate.

“Caitlin?” Jamie said. “What the hell? Are you there?”

“Yeah, can you not hear me?”

“You stopped talking thirty seconds ago.”

“I’m sorry. God, it’s been a crazy night. Where was I?”

“The last thing you said was, ‘This lone reporter, working from a tiny newspaper in the slowly dying delta of Louisiana, accomplished more than an army of FBI agents did in forty years—’ and then you trailed off.”

“Okay . . . okay. Ready?”

“Go,” Jamie said.

Banishing the mole from her mind, Caitlin picked up the story again.

CHAPTER 6

LIEUTENANT COLONEL FORREST Knox was seventy miles north of New Orleans and nearing Baton Rouge when he considered switching his cell phone back on. He’d spent the past three hours in New Orleans, but he didn’t want anyone knowing he’d been there. That’s why he was driving an unmarked car, and at the speed limit. Blackmail missions were best carried out under the radar, especially when your target had the kind of connections that Forrest’s boss did. Colonel Griffith Mackiever had headed the Louisiana State Police for seven years, and bringing him down was no small task. Forrest would have preferred a couple of more months to get his ducks in a row, but the moneymen in New Orleans who stood to make millions off the post-Katrina reconstruction wouldn’t wait. They wanted a full-time state police presence in New Orleans to calm jittery investors (by filling the vacuum created by the dysfunctional NOPD). The most ruthless among them wanted certain human obstacles to their plans neutralized by any means necessary. Forrest knew well the impatience that accompanied ambition, but he would not let recklessness destroy him on the verge of success.

At nearly fifty-four, he had never been closer to achieving his goals. Using unerring instincts and iron self-control, he had worked his way up through the ranks of the most powerful law enforcement organization in his home state. Now he stood within a heartbeat of commanding it. Once he cemented his control of the LSP, he would be as bulletproof as a criminal could be in America. Unlike Griffith Mackiever, who had vainly battled the forces of human nature throughout his tenure, Forrest had leveraged his pragmatic worldview into something unique. By combining his cousin Billy’s statewide meth operation with the manpower surviving from his father’s Double Eagle days, and then enlisting an army of avaricious politicians and hungry police officers for protection, Forrest had built a criminal network of unrivaled reach and power in the South.

His philosophy was based on principles understood by every cop in the world: no matter what the law did to discourage them, people were going to use drugs, gamble, and fuck whores (both male and female). Any sane government would have legalized all three practices decades ago and co-opted the criminals. But thankfully, the remnants of America’s religious ethics prevented that from happening, which left the field wide open for a man of vision. Long ago, Forrest had realized that he was that man.

The only problem was that Hurricane Katrina had shown him just how picayune his vision had been. The ravaged city left behind by the receding floodwaters was a vacuum that attracted the true predators of twenty-first-century America—the real estate developers and bankers. Multimillionaires like Brody Royal had been waiting for a catastrophe like Katrina for decades. For the storm and the flood had accomplished what no human activity could: it had flushed the poor blacks out of the city, like a biblical purge. Royal and his friends intended that those blacks should never return. In place of the dilapidated housing projects and single-story rental houses that had blighted the city, they saw upscale housing and corporate offices with mouthwatering proximity to downtown and the French Quarter. The men who planned this remaking of the Crescent City reckoned their profits in tens of millions, not the paltry numbers to which Forrest was accustomed. And thanks to Brody Royal, they had settled on Forrest as one of the lieutenants who could help bring their vision to fruition.