Rereading Kaiser’s e-mail, I wonder why he bothered to code anything when the overall meaning of the message is so clear. Maybe he was in a hurry. “M-C” obviously refers to the Mannlicher-Carcano, and “LHO” is Lee Harvey Oswald. The six-month separation between the sale of the two rifles must have miffed Kaiser, but the fact that Cruz went missing one day before the Kennedy assassination would have more than made up for that. That the Carcano was purchased by a Cuban student living in New Orleans is doubly provocative. First, because New Orleans was the private preserve of Carlos Marcello, and second, it throws Cuba into sharp focus in relation to the assassination. The answer to whether Eladio Cruz was pro- or anti-Castro will push Kaiser’s theory either toward or away from Fidel Castro and Russia. Away from Castro would mean toward the Cuban exiles who landed in the Bay of Pigs, and their CIA and Mafia backers. John Kaiser—and Dwight Stone’s Working Group—must be salivating over this possibility.

I’m suddenly more sure than ever that I don’t want to open this can of worms with Caitlin. After double-checking that I’ve signed out of my e-mail account, I switch off the laptop, then return to the guest room, take hold of her upper arm, and gently shake her.

She makes no sound.

I shake her again. This time she groans like a teenager who doesn’t want to get out of bed on a school day.

“Caitlin?” I say sharply. “Wake up.”

“Nooooo,” she moans. “I feel like hell.”

“I know. But we’ve got to get moving.”

She raises her head and brushes black hair out of her eyes. “Did you even finish? I don’t remember.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She smiles lazily. “For half a second there I felt guilty.”

With a deep sigh she rolls over and sits up on the edge of the bed. The ladder of her spine shows through her skin. “This sucks,” she says.

“Yep.”

“I’m freezing.” She flips back her hair and searches the covers for her panties. I try not to laugh while I watch this familiar ritual. At last she finds them, tangled in the sheet near the foot of the bed. As she pulls then on, she says, “Do you realize if all this hadn’t happened, we would be getting married in nine days?”

“I do.”

“I guess we’ll get there eventually.”

“We will.” While I pull on my own pants, it strikes me that once I’ve moved Annie and my mother out of Edelweiss, I could take Caitlin over there and show her what would have been her wedding present.

“You know what?” I stand beside the bed. “If we can find half an hour later on, I could show you a real surprise.”

She pauses with her bra halfway on and stares at me with narrowed eyes. “What kind of surprise?”

I realize I’m grinning stupidly at her. “A one-of-a-kind surprise.”

She looks suspicious for several seconds, but then she seems to intuit that I won’t reveal my secret no matter how hard she presses me. “I’ll see what I can do. Call me after eight or so?”

“Before sundown would be better.”

She draws back her head, once again mistrustful. “What did you do?”

“You’ll see.”

“Before sunset is tough. There’s too much going on, and too much competition in town. Plus, we already stayed here too long—my fault, I know. Are you sure it can’t be later than that?”

“I guess later’s okay. But it won’t be as good.”

She sighs and snaps her bra, then begins hunting her shoes. “Later will have to do. Story of our lives, right?”

Right.

CHAPTER 29

WALT GARRITY PAUSED behind a large oak tree and stared up a hill at the Valhalla hunting lodge. He’d been working his way through the forest of Lusahatcha County for nearly ninety minutes, and he was winded. He’d cut through the game fence a mile south of the main gate, then taken a circuitous path through the hunting camp to avoid the wildlife cameras he saw mounted on pine trees at regular intervals. He could still see the gate in his mind, an enormous wrought-iron thing set between stone pillars. A brass sign on one of the pillars read:

VALHALLA EXOTIC HUNTING RESERVE

Absolutely No Trespassing

Nailed to a tree to the right of the gate was a smaller wooden sign with letters burned into it. Those letters read: FORT KNOX. Beyond the gate, an asphalt road led deep into the forest. Walt had given the road a wide berth, but during his hike into the hunting camp, he’d crossed several logging roads that led nowhere, food plots for game, and always the cameras, affixed to trees with plastic flex-cuffs.

When the lodge appeared through the trees, he approached it with extreme caution. Though the GPS tracker in Drew’s truck had told him Forrest was back at state police headquarters in Baton Rouge, there might be anything from a gang of Double Eagles to a full complement of visiting hunters staying at the camp. As Walt neared the big building, the hum of a central heating unit reached his ears. He paused behind a large thornbush and watched for another five minutes, then made a careful circuit of the house.

Its rustic appearance was merely an illusion. The rough-hewn timber building was served by both power lines and a massive backup generator, while the telephone wires, satellite dishes, and various antennas made it look more like an army outpost than a hunting camp. Walt saw no vehicles, which encouraged him. Then, to his amazement, he saw that a sliding glass door on a deck at the side of the lodge was standing partly open. Taking a Browning 9 mm from the holster at the small of his back, he moved quickly up to the door and scanned the interior.

The great room of Valhalla looked as he’d expected: dozens of stuffed animal heads adorned the walls, many of them of African origin. Some appeared to be threatened or endangered species; a fully grown mountain gorilla stood in one corner as though pondering a charge toward the center of the room. A staircase led up to a broad landing on the second floor. Following his instincts, Walt slipped inside, bypassed the stairs, and moved along one wall to a cypress door at the far end of the room.

Near the door, he noticed a display of weapons on the wall. Most prominent in the rack were four katanas—samurai swords—that appeared to be antiques. To the right of the rack hung the framed photographs Mackiever had told him about early that morning: a Japanese officer with two Caucasian heads hanging from his belt, brandishing a samurai sword; and beside it Sergeant Frank Knox beheading the same officer, who knelt like a slave at his feet. Walt suspected that one of the swords on the wall was the one from the photos, but he didn’t waste time finding out.

Beyond the door, Walt found an office containing an antique desk that might have belonged to Teddy Roosevelt. The room’s appointments also seemed to fit that era, but what dominated the room was a massive feral hog stuffed and mounted on a polished stand against the wall opposite the desk. Walt had hoped to find filing cabinets, or even a safe, but he saw nothing like that. Taking a seat in the black leather chair behind the desk, he quickly went through the drawers. He found little: some ledgers pertaining to Billy Knox’s legitimate business interests, particularly a television program about hunting; a messy drawer filled with pens and office supplies; a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon; a few tins of Skoal; and a box of Cuban cigars. There was also a letter from Jimmy Buffett’s management company, expressing doubt that their artist could perform for a private birthday party in Mississippi, regardless of the fee.

Walt was about to get up and start working his way through the rest of the lodge when he noticed that a rectangular section of the floor beneath him was lighter than the rest. Standing, he looked down, trying to work out why this was so. It appeared that the hardwood around the rectangle had been darkened by sunlight, while the rectangle had escaped this aging, as though a rug had covered it for a long period. As he stared, Walt realized that the rectangle was exactly the size of the base upon which the big razorback had been mounted—which now stood on the opposite side of the office.