“A full week,” says Kaiser. “Plenty of time to reconnoiter Dealey Plaza and settle on the Dal-Tex Building as his sniper’s nest. You see? Frank Knox wasn’t the primary shooter. Oswald was already set up to use the School Book Depository, and Frank was his backup.”

“No, I don’t see. Not at all.”

“Slow down, John,” says Stone. “Penn, we obviously need to know whether your father had any idea what Knox was actually doing on those dates.”

My ears roar as I shake my head in denial. “Can you prove Frank Knox was in Dealey Plaza on that day?”

“No.”

My head snaps up. “Can you prove he was even in Dallas?”

Stone slowly shakes his head. “We can’t even prove Frank Knox was in Texas. Not yet, anyway. Of course we just got on this track. All we know for sure is that he wasn’t at work, and he almost certainly wasn’t at home.”

“That’s not all we know,” says Kaiser.

I look back at the paper in my hand. “How did you even get hold of this? There’s no way Triton Battery saved this kind of crap from 1963.”

“You’re right, of course,” Stone concedes. “Your father’s written excuse form was in Knox’s personnel record. It turns out I requisitioned a copy of that back in 1965, while working some other cases. Knox was still pretending to be part of the mainstream KKK at that time, and for some reason I decided to keep his file along with a few others. If I hadn’t done that, we might have solved the Kennedy assassination years ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the concerted efforts of our team—some of the best investigators in the world—were stymied by the kind of clerical accident that often sways history, without anyone being the wiser. When I was fired from the Bureau in 1972, that record I’d requested in 1965 was still in the Jackson, Mississippi, field office. The murders I had investigated were still open cases. When the Working Group came together in the mideighties and began investigating cold cases, its members couldn’t request Bureau files. They had to rely on what files they’d kept—illegally—or whatever active agents would photocopy or smuggle out for them. We did send an agent into the Mississippi field office to locate all the old civil rights records he could—which included Double Eagle files—and he got quite a few. But he was told that some had been shipped back to Central Records in Maryland. He took a quiet look around the building for them, but he found nothing. That excuse remained lost.”

“Then how did you locate it?”

Kaiser leans forward and says, “This morning, after I convinced the director that Stone’s group is onto something, I sent two agents up to the Jackson field office in a pickup truck. By this afternoon, I had six crates of files dating back to the 1960s. They found them in the basement. One of those crates contained Frank’s Triton Battery file. It had been sitting there since 1965, with that medical excuse inside it.”

The irony is obvious, but something else is tickling my brain. “Is this excuse form all you have on Frank Knox that relates to Dallas?”

Stone shakes his head. “We put Frank and Snake Knox through the wringer years ago. They became suspects in the Kennedy investigation the moment we learned that Frank was listed on the CIA payroll of JMWAVE/Operation Mongoose.”

I faintly remember Henry Sexton telling me this. “Frank Knox worked for the CIA?”

“It wasn’t as cloak-and-dagger as it sounds. The agency ran its own anti-Castro training camps prior to the Bay of Pigs. As for the private camps, the agency didn’t want to have to rely on what the bosses like Marcello and Trafficante told them. So they paid some vets to hire on as instructors. To Frank Knox, that just meant two paychecks instead of one. All he had to do was give his CIA contact a call now and then and update him on progress in the camp.”

“Would Marcello have known Knox was doing that?”

“No. Frank wasn’t stupid. The point is, we discounted Frank and Snake Knox as suspects in the JFK assassination years ago. We figured them for racist rednecks who’d killed a lot of black people, but not much more. Even after we came to suspect Marcello, we didn’t see Frank as a soldier or employee of his, because in theory he’d been informing on Marcello to the CIA.”

“They didn’t know about the Brody Royal connection,” Kaiser explains. “Royal was the cutout between Marcello and the Knoxes in later years. But once Glenn Morehouse exposed that connection, everything clicked into place. Marcello’s plan to lure RFK here in ’68 and use the Eagles to kill him was like a billboard pointing back at 1963.”

“When I saw that medical excuse,” Stone intones, “I knew Frank had done it.”

“This is bullshit,” I insist. “There’s no way my father knowingly took part in a criminal conspiracy, much less a presidential assassination. No way in hell.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Stone says softly.

Everyone in this room knows my father probably withheld critical knowledge about the murders of Albert Norris and Dr. Leland Robb for nearly forty years. But that doesn’t change my conviction.

“Is this all you’ve got?”

Kaiser starts to say something, but Stone stops him. “The thing is, Penn, even if Tom didn’t knowingly assist Frank Knox in wrongdoing, he may know things of critical importance. He just might not know he knows them.”

This is slightly more palatable, but I can’t tell whether Stone really believes it.

“In any case,” says the old agent, “I’m certain that one or more surviving Double Eagles know what Frank Knox did in 1963—most likely his brother, Snake. Snake might even have helped Frank bring off the assassination. Even if he didn’t, he may well know the truth about your father and that medical excuse.”

“Where was Snake on November twenty-second?”

“We don’t know. Some people have told us he was at work, but we can’t verify that. Nevertheless,” Stone says, his voice wearing away my resistance like a steady flow of water, “now you can see why all the Double Eagles must be handled with the utmost care.”

In my mind’s eye I see Walker Dennis, the ex–baseball player and newly appointed sheriff, clumsily trying to break Snake Knox in a CPSO interrogation room. The prospect makes me light-headed.

“Now you’re getting it?” says Kaiser.

Shit.

CHAPTER 35

AS CAITLIN COASTED along the great concrete crescent before Quentin’s Tudor mansion, she saw faint light glowing at the edges of one of the window blinds on the side of the house. She wished she had some way to warn Tom that she was no threat to him, but honking the horn might alert neighbors she couldn’t see. As she got out of her car, she realized that it had been four days since she’d seen Penn’s father. Last Sunday, she and Penn had taken Annie over to eat a late dinner. Peggy had pulled out all the stops and cooked one of her classic southern feasts, including “Ruby’s Fried Chicken.” Now, only four days later, the world in which such a simple domestic scene could occur had been blown apart by the actions of the family patriarch, whom she would confront in less than a minute. Trying to stay calm, she walked around the house to a side door and knocked three times, as normally as she could.

Nothing happened.

She knocked again, this time giving the child’s version of a “secret knock.”

Putting her ear to the door, she was surprised to hear a shuffling sound behind it. Then a woman’s voice said, “Who is it?”

“Melba, it’s Caitlin Masters,” she said loudly. “I’m alone.”

Several seconds of silence followed. Then she heard a dead bolt slide back, and the door opened to reveal Tom Cage standing in the crack with a pistol pointed through it. Caitlin could see Melba’s tall form in the foyer behind him.