“Okay. And the FBI?”

“If Kaiser backs off like he did at the hospital, then we’ll know we’ve got it made.”

“And if not?”

“We’ll sandbag that blue-flame son of a bitch before he knows what hit him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t call me again.”

“I won’t.”

Forrest switched off the phone and dropped it on the seat beside him. Despite his best efforts to control the situation, the bodies were piling up fast. With Henry Sexton dead and the Masters girl involved, one thing was sure: a media storm was coming. Any hope of solving his problems quietly would vanish with the publication of tomorrow’s Natchez Examiner. Forrest pulled the red bubble light from his glove box and set it on the dash, then switched it on and floored the gas pedal. He needed to get to headquarters. Speed was everything now.

CHAPTER 7

I’M SITTING ON a bench outside an interrogation room in the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office, with Special Agent John Kaiser staring down at me with a mixture of fury and disappointment. The trim and usually well-dressed agent looks like someone shook him awake from a nap in his car: hair sticking up, clothes askew, eyes bloodshot and heavy-bagged. Sleep deprivation is finally taking its toll on him.

There’s nothing in the corridor but a battered vinyl couch, a metal chair, and a card table with a plastic Christmas tree and a dying Mr. Coffee standing on it. The coffee in the carafe looks like river mud mixed with tar, but that didn’t stop Caitlin from pouring herself a full cup before going into the interrogation room. She’s obviously prepping for a marathon of work once she gets out of this place.

Ten minutes ago, I finished my statement to Sheriff Dennis and his video camera, while the sheriff’s brother-in-law stood guard over Caitlin in a nearby office. As agreed with Caitlin, I mostly told the truth, while omitting a few dangerous facts, among them Brody Royal’s assertion that my father murdered Viola Turner three days ago. By the time Sheriff Dennis called Caitlin into his office, she was nearly crazy to get back across the river to the Examiner. She’d been talking to her editor on a departmental landline, and she’d managed to assemble her full staff, which now awaits her arrival. Sheriff Dennis promised to finish with her as soon as possible, but his intentions meant nothing unless we could get clear of this building before the state police or FBI arrived to detain us further. And that was exactly what happened. Five minutes after Caitlin disappeared into Walker’s office, Agent Kaiser walked up the hall from the front entrance and called out my name.

In response to the FBI agent’s questions, I’ve given a reasonably detailed summary of the night’s events. About seventy percent of what I told Kaiser is true. Twenty percent was lies, and another ten percent I omitted altogether. In the silences between my words and his, I fought to drown out internal echoes of gunfire, Caitlin’s screams, and the bone-chilling hiss and roar of Brody Royal’s flamethrower.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” Kaiser tells me, obviously working hard to keep his anger under control. “But we both know that if Henry Sexton and Sleepy Johnston hadn’t broken into Royal’s house and sacrificed their lives, you and Caitlin would be dead now.”

I don’t look up from the floor tiles. “That’s all I’ve been thinking about since it happened.”

“I warned you to stay out of this, Penn. But you went ahead, and now six people are dead—maybe more.”

The guilt I’ve felt since the fire is so lacerating that Kaiser’s words add nothing to the pain. I look up at him without a hint of apology. “As long as we’re telling the truth, John, I’d say you’ve given me mixed messages from the start. This morning at the Jericho Hole I told you I was going to poke a stick in a rattlesnake hole, the same as you. Did you tell me not to? No. You also knew I’d tangled with Regan in the restroom of that café. You warned me to be careful, but that’s it. I think you were hoping I’d stir things up just enough to get Royal and Regan to incriminate themselves, but not enough to cause a disaster—which, admittedly, is what we have now.”

Kaiser returns my gaze with a stony stare. “Okay, I bear some blame for this. But in any case, you’re done now. You’re the mayor of Natchez, not the district attorney of Adams County. You have no jurisdiction whatever.”

“Obviously. If I was the DA of Adams County, the Double Eagles would already be in a cell in Natchez, begging for a plea bargain.”

“Then thank God you’re not. Because that would be exactly the wrong thing to do.”

“How do you figure that?”

Kaiser walks to a folding metal chair opposite me, then sits beside the card table and hangs his hands over his knees. “Penn, we’ve held a lot back from each other over the past two days, but I’m going to be straight with you now. I knew more about Brody Royal than I let on to you. About Forrest Knox, too. Some I knew before I got here, and the rest I got from Henry Sexton.”

“I can’t believe Henry told you much.”

“Henry had a certain amount of bitterness toward the Bureau, granted. For our civil-rights-era failures, and for the way a lot of agents treated him over the years. But after Glenn Morehouse was murdered, Henry decided that safety demanded he pass me a certain amount of information. It was Henry who told me about the link between Royal and the Double Eagles going back to 1964. He also told me his suspicions about Forrest Knox protecting the Eagles’ drug business, and possibly even being a partner. I’d heard a few rumors prior to that, but Henry had more facts than the Bureau did.”

I say nothing, still trying to process the fact that Henry confided so much in Kaiser.

“He didn’t tell me about his backup files,” says the FBI agent. “His change of heart didn’t extend to that. I think he worried that if he gave his journals to the Bureau, they might disappear forever. He wanted a journalist to have them, so Caitlin got it all. A bad decision, considering what’s happened to them.”

Earlier tonight Caitlin told me she intended to let Kaiser view Henry’s files tomorrow, but given what happened at Brody’s house, I don’t want to speak for her.

“I visited Henry one last time this afternoon,” Kaiser says, “only a few hours before the sniper tried to finish him off. He was pretty depressed, but he told me what Glenn Morehouse said about Jimmy Revels’s murder.”

I give Kaiser a puzzled look, but he’s having none of it.

“The RFK assassination plan?” he says. “Carlos Marcello, all that? Don’t play dumb, for God’s sake. Not after what’s happened tonight.”

Before I can reply, Kaiser says, “We need to talk about what you told me about your father when I first called you from New Orleans.”

He’s referring to me saying that Brody Royal and my father might possess information about the major 1960s assassinations. I only told him that to lure him to Natchez, and now I regret it. I need to sleep and be ready for the drug raid at dawn. But one thing Kaiser does need to know, no matter how crazy it may sound.

“Do you have any agents at the fire scene?” I ask.

“Three. Why?”

“Can they stop the state police from taking evidence away from it?”

“Absolutely. Brody Royal’s lake house and property are now a federal crime scene.”

To my surprise, relief washes through me. “As soon as the ruins cool, your guys need to grid-search the place and sift the ashes.”

“What are we looking for?”

Something makes me put off revealing the most explosive information. To stall him, I lay out some bait that could get him out of my way tomorrow. “Depending on the heat of the fire, you might find the remains of a one-of-a-kind letter opener. Royal told us that Frank Knox carved it from one of Pooky Wilson’s arm bones. The blade was bone, and the handle was covered in the tanned skin of Wilson’s penis. Or so Royal claimed. He admitted that murder to us, John. He gave the order, Snake and Frank Knox carried it out, and all this happened at the Bone Tree.”