STONE: Well. Either Tom had just figured out what he’d been a part of, and wanted to check it, or . . .

KAISER: That’s not it, guys. I know you don’t want to hear it, but he wouldn’t risk asking for that file out of simple curiosity. Dr. Cage knew what he’d done back in ’63. And once Marcello was dead, he did what he could to wipe out the traces. He just didn’t count on the Bureau having that record.

STONE: John—

KAISER: He nearly got away with it, too. Because nobody at the Bureau could find the file when Triton Battery made their request. They simply reported back to Triton that the file couldn’t be found. If a conscientious Bureau clerk hadn’t decided to open a file to note the unfulfilled request, the whole event would have been lost in the sands of time.

As I listen to Stone try to ameliorate the effects of Kaiser’s accusation, my cell phone vibrates on Caitlin’s desk. The incoming text reads: I just pulled into the lot. I see your car. Be inside in a sec. Love you!

I switch off the recorder, glad to be spared the last two minutes of conversation. My argument with Kaiser was as intense as it was pointless. I won’t know what prompted Dad to request that medical record until I can question him directly, and until he’ll tell me the truth. But what lingers in my mind is the lump in my throat as I took leave of Stone. Though the old agent put on a brave face, and I tried to match it, I couldn’t suppress the conviction that I would never see him again. And though he’d brought me unwelcome news, I knew that Stone’s heart had always been in the right place. The tragedy was that his news had made me confront even more starkly the question of whether the same was true of my father.

I’ve barely gotten my recorder back into my pocket when Caitlin’s office door flies open and she steps inside, obviously looking for me.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah. Where have you been? I’ve been worried.”

It’s instantly obvious my tone has angered her. “I went to see a couple of my contacts in the black community,” she says, setting her purse down on the desk.

I try to make eye contact, but she turns away and begins heating water for tea. She speaks with her back to me.

“The Jackson radio station has been running that Lincoln Turner interview all day, and I heard he’s been swaying some people—persuading them I’ve been protecting Tom in the Examiner. As I told you this afternoon, some of my own reporters seem to believe the same thing.”

“And what did you find out?”

“Reverend Ransom says most of his flock still love your father, but that doesn’t mean they don’t think he’s human. What they call ‘outside children’ are a fact of life, especially from white fathers, so they have no problem buying that Lincoln could be Tom’s son. That obviously might have led to some real problems between Tom and Viola.”

“Great.”

Caitlin finally turns back to me, her arms folded across her chest almost defensively. “How’s Dwight Stone doing?”

“Worse than I expected. I don’t think he has long. Days, at the most.”

“God. I should go see him.”

Not wanting to encourage this, I say nothing.

“If he’s that sick, what’s he doing here?” she asks, fixing me with her gaze.

And here we come to it: do I lie or tell the truth? After all I heard in room 406, I’ve got no desire to tease through every new fact with Caitlin, especially those dealing with Dad’s possible complicity in crimes. Nor do I want her hounding a dying man for a scoop on the JFK assassination. “After Henry’s death and all John’s discovered, he couldn’t stay away. I think this trip was Dwight’s last hurrah on the unsolved cases from his past. That’s probably all that’s keeping him going now.”

“The JFK thing? Or the civil rights cases?”

“The Double Eagle stuff, mostly.”

Caitlin looks almost disappointed by my answer. She turns and drops a tea bag into her mug, then looks over her shoulder and says, “So . . . what’s this big surprise you wanted to show me?”

“You’ll see, sooner or later. It’s really too dark now.”

She shrugs. “Your car has headlights, doesn’t it? What is it we’re trying to see?”

Since Edelweiss stands atop the bluff facing the Mississippi, the combination of streetlamps, the house lights, my headlights, and the moon might be enough to create quite a dramatic reveal. And since the last thing I want to do is sit in this office while she probes me about my meeting with Kaiser and Stone . . .

“Come on!” I say, bouncing up from the chair and taking her hand. “Let’s get our minds off all this bullshit for half an hour.”

The sound of her sudden laugher is almost a shock after the last couple of days. “Where are we going?” she screeches as I try to drag her into the hall. “Wait!”

She darts back into the office long enough to turn off her teapot, then follows me down the hall. Hand in hand, we run through newsroom together, laughing with near hysterical relief, not knowing why, only sensing that the terrible weight of the past few days has been lifted for a few precious moments. Caitlin’s reporters and staff people look up openmouthed, but a few of them smile. For them, the Double Eagle murders are just a story—a big one, to be sure, but only a way station on the long careers they see ahead. Whereas for Caitlin and me . . .

The stakes are life and death.

CHAPTER 39

SHADRACH JOHNSON AND Sheriff Billy Byrd had been talking in the DA’s office since Byrd walked over at 5:45 P.M. Neither man could quite believe the turns that the Tom Cage matter had taken, or the casualties that had swiftly mounted in and near their jurisdictions. Together, they had worried every thread of the Viola Turner case until Sheriff Byrd pulled a flask of bourbon from his pocket and started drinking.

For Shad, meeting with Billy Byrd was always a little uncomfortable. For while they shared common cause against the Cage family, Billy was no good old boy with his heart in the right place. He was an unreconstructed redneck who—if it were thirty years earlier—would have liked nothing better than to horsewhip Shad for daring to walk on the same sidewalk with him. Beyond that, Byrd wouldn’t have been able to get hired as a janitor at Harvard Law, while Shad had the school’s diploma hanging on his wall. Yet in the present circumstances, Shad was forced to treat the corpulent, Skoal-dipping sheriff like an equal.

Shad was about to suggest that Byrd continue his drinking elsewhere when he heard pounding feet on his staircase. Five seconds later, someone threw open the door with such force that Billy Byrd grabbed for his gun.

“Goddamn it, don’t do that!” the sheriff cried, pointing his flask at Lincoln Turner, who stood in the door like an angry juke-joint bouncer.

Lincoln ignored Byrd and looked straight at Shad. “I think I’ve found Tom Cage.”

“Where?”

“That big green house at the top of Silver Street, looking over the river? Looks like a Swiss chalet or something.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Shad said. “Nobody lives there.”

“Maybe not. But I just followed Penn Cage and that Masters girl to it, and they walked right up on the porch like they were playing a scene in a movie.”

Shad couldn’t believe the speed with which Sheriff Byrd heaved his bulk from the chair and bolted through the door.

“Wait!” Shad cried, yanking open his top drawer in search of his car keys. “Wait for me, damn it! A lot of people go up there to look at the river! Don’t do anything crazy, Billy!”

CAITLIN FELT AS THOUGH she were trapped in a surreal romantic comedy, or even a farcical one. Penn had driven her down Canal Street, then turned onto Broadway and parked just past the head of Silver Street, where tourists often stopped to gaze over the Mississippi River before driving down to the Natchez Under-the-Hill district. Penn’s city car smelled stale, and it nauseated her. She looked to her left, at Edelweiss, which had been her favorite house since she’d first visited Natchez seven years earlier. In a city filled with Greek Revival mansions, the three-story chalet with its wraparound gallery on the second floor seemed to float above the bluff like a clean-lined ship. The mere sight of it usually lifted her mood, and tonight was no exception. Owned by an elderly woman in a nursing home, the 1883 gem had been falling into disrepair for years. Only recently had some mystery buyer begun restoring it to its former splendor.