CHAPTER 12

IN THE END, Caitlin decided to enter the Examiner by her usual route, the employees’ door at the rear of the building. If Billy Byrd had a deputy lying in wait, Jordan Glass was ready to snap fifty pictures of the arrest with her motor-drive Nikon. As Caitlin walked through the rear parking lot, noting the familiar cars of her reporters, she spied the door that had been locked against her by one of her own staff. Without warning she flashed back to the kidnapping with a clarity that made her pulse pound and her breath go shallow. She saw Penn being held on tiptoe with an arm around his throat and a pistol to his head. Then came a rush of images from all that had followed, from the basement, and the fire.

How close we came to dying, she thought, touching her burned cheek for the first time since the lake. And if I had died, the child I’m carrying would have died with me, and no one would have known—not unless they discovered it in the autopsy. Caitlin had only known about the baby herself for twenty hours or so, and she’d only told one soul on the planet about it: Tom Cage, via text message. Tom hasn’t even seen that message, she thought. He doesn’t have his cell phone on. If he did, they’d have caught him by now. Killed him, probably. In fact, he could be dead already. As much as Caitlin blamed Tom for the events of the past days, the thought of him lying facedown in a ditch somewhere stopped her breath in her throat.

Sensing her distress, Jordan took Caitlin’s hand and squeezed, bringing her back to the present. As her heartbeat slowed, Caitlin started toward the door again. A Natchez Police Department squad car was parked in the handicapped space to the right of it, exhaust rising from its tailpipe. Caitlin waved at the young cop behind his fogged window glass, thinking of the officer who had probably been murdered by Brody Royal’s men. She’d known him only as a prone form lying on the floor of the van that had carried them to Royal’s house. Stopping at the back door, she raised her hand and turned the knob. Against all logic, it opened.

“I called ahead, remember?” Jordan said, sensing her confusion. “One step at a time, girl.”

“Thanks.”

THE EXAMINER BUILDING SEEMED eerily quiet as Caitlin and Jordan moved up the back hall, but the moment Caitlin walked into the newsroom, the place erupted in applause. She raised her hands to quiet the grinning staff, but new people kept coming in from other rooms, photographers and service people and even one of the advertising girls. They were obviously happy to see her alive, and she was glad to be that way, so she let the clapping go on for a bit.

They were a young group, she realized. Almost no one over thirty. For many years the Examiner had served as a sort of farm program for the larger papers in the Masters chain, but during her tenure as publisher Caitlin had changed that. She’d managed to assemble a bright cadre of journalism majors from all over the country, most from top schools. She paid them well and did her best to keep them busy. Whenever she’d lost one to a larger paper, she somehow managed to replace him or her with someone of equal talent. This eclectic group she had supplemented with some of the brightest liberal arts graduates from Natchez, kids who’d wanted to return to their hometown after college.

Now they stood before her, gathered between the computer workstations that lined the walls, fourteen kids with all the talent in the world and a desperate hunger to work on something important. They’d known since Tuesday that something big was afoot. The initial attack on Henry and the burning of the Beacon had galvanized them into action, and Henry’s backup files had given them something to sink their teeth into. But according to Jamie Lewis, the assassination attempt on Henry in the hospital—followed by the attack on Penn and Caitlin—had stunned them into a kind of paralysis. They’d read about attacks on reporters in places like Colombia and Myanmar, but murderous attacks on journalists in America seemed incomprehensible. The discovery that the Examiner’s press operator had disappeared after probably assisting in Caitlin’s kidnapping only added to their collective sense of shock. Yet not one had refused to come in when Jamie called in the middle of the night; indeed, few had left the building during the past forty-eight hours, except to catch four or five hours of sleep.

Caitlin looked at each face in turn: taut lips, worried eyes, the young men with arms folded across their chests, the women biting fingernails, everyone gathered closer together than they normally would. The silence truly was eerie, and then she realized why: the computers had been shut down. She couldn’t remember ever having heard the newsroom so quiet. I must have, she thought, during electrical storms. But of course then there was the drumming of rain and the roll of thunder. Now there was absolute silence—the silence of expectation.

Into that silence, she began to speak.

“Thank you for that,” she said. “Every one of you. First, let me say that I’m all right physically, except for this burn on my cheek, and Penn is, too. But it was a near thing, and if Henry Sexton and a heroic man who worked for Albert Norris as a boy hadn’t sacrificed their lives for ours, we would both be dead. That’s one of the stories we’ll be printing tomorrow. We will honor those men as they deserve. But that’s only a small part of a much larger duty we have tonight.”

She took a moment to gather herself. “It’s axiomatic that people in small towns don’t get their news from newspapers. They never have. Local papers print stories about Little League baseball and garden clubs and the press releases from the local factory. But the real news—the reasons for layoffs or why someone lost an election or the facts behind a murder—usually travel by a different route: word of mouth. Long before Myspace and blogging, the real news traveled over backyard fences and via telephone, around watercoolers and on golf courses. The newspaper functioned as a Chamber of Commerce billboard advertising the town, while the real story lived behind the glossy sign, off the page, or at best, between the lines.

“My father’s newspapers have been as guilty of this irrelevance as any other chain. And even before Dad bought it, the Examiner was one of the worst offenders. The old Wise family made sure of that. If you go back and check the week that Delano Payton was murdered in 1968, you’ll find a perfunctory story about the bombing, then a follow-up announcing the offer of a reward by his national union—and very little else. If you go back to the week Albert Norris was burned to death, you’ll find nothing.

“During my time as publisher, I’ve tried to change that policy. All of you have helped me. Seven years ago, our Del Payton stories carried the message of justice delayed to the entire world. Now, tonight, we’re going to break the biggest story that any of us are likely to touch in our entire lives. As you know, it spans over a dozen civil rights murders committed during the 1960s. The perpetrators of those crimes have been allowed to roam free for forty years, and now they’ve killed again in their efforts to avoid being exposed and punished for their crimes. The death toll tonight is unprecedented in the history of this area, and a Natchez police officer will probably be added to the list before dawn.”

Several people gasped.

“We’re going to be dealing with next-of-kin issues, so I’m not sure if we’ll be printing names in all cases. But beginning now, we’re going to devote every waking minute to doing justice to this epic story. A single edition of the paper can’t possibly contain it. So, after physical publication this morning, I hope that those willing to remain will do so and continuously update our online edition. I fully expect that by noon tomorrow—or today, rather—we’ll be in the eye of a media storm. This is what we live for, people. For about twelve hours, we’re the only news staff in the country in possession of the facts of this story. Television, radio, the blogosphere—they’ve got nothing. But tomorrow that will change. So . . . right now, I want everyone in this room to take thirty seconds and think about Henry Sexton, who was murdered for his courage and convictions. For those of you who don’t know, on the first night he was attacked, Henry had already agreed to write for this paper, so he is your colleague in more ways than one.”