Текст книги "The Bone Tree"
Автор книги: Greg Iles
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DEDICATION
For
Caroline Hungerford Iles
I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.
–Jane Austen, Persuasion, paraphr.
EPIGRAPH
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know.
He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.
–Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Wednesday
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Thursday
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Friday
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Saturday
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Greg Iles
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
SPECIAL AGENT JOHN Kaiser stood at the window of the FBI’s “tactical room” in the River Bend Hotel and stared at the lights of Natchez twinkling high over the dark tide of the Mississippi. After struggling silently with his convictions for more than an hour, he had decided to use the authority granted him under the Patriot Act to take a step that under any other circumstances would have been a violation of the Constitution—the unauthorized invasion of computers belonging to a public newspaper. He had not done this lightly, and Kaiser knew that his wife—an award-winning journalist and combat photographer—would condemn him if she ever learned what he’d done. But by his lights, the deteriorating situation demanded that he cross the Rubicon. And so he’d quietly risen from bed and, without disturbing his wife, slipped down the hall to where two FBI technicians sat behind computers connected by secure satellite to a high-speed data link in Washington.
This is the Deep South, Kaiser reflected, watching the bow lights of a string of barges round the river bend to the north, from Vicksburg, and push slowly southward toward Baton Rouge. The real South. After being stationed in New Orleans for seven years, he’d realized that the Big Easy, while technically a southern city, was in fact an island with a unique identity: a former French possession, deeply Catholic, multiracial, bursting at the seams with joy and pain, corrupt to its decaying marrow. But the farther north you drove out of New Orleans, the deeper you penetrated into the true South, a Protestant land of moral absolutes, Baptist blue laws, tent revivals, fire and brimstone, heaven and hell, good and evil, black and white, and damn little room between.
Natchez on its bluff was a soeurette, a little sister, to New Orleans—not quite as cosmopolitan in this century as it once was, but still an enclave of license and liberality in the hard-shell hinterlands of cotton and soybeans. Yet Natchez had once been the capital of this cotton kingdom, and a hundred years after the Civil War the hatred that simmered in her outlying fields had infected the city, and murder had roamed her streets like a scourge. If you drew a thirty-mile circle around Natchez, it would encompass more than a dozen unsolved murders from the 1960s alone, and twice that number that were officially solved, but begged for deeper investigation.
Kaiser pressed the palm of his hand against the cold windowpane and watched the barge lights through the fog of his breath on the glass. Two days ago, when he’d mobilized a massive FBI corpse-recovery effort here in Concordia Parish, his goals had been to solve some cold case murders and to save the life of a heroic journalist—not to unravel the darkest thread of the Kennedy assassination. But twenty-four hours after his arrival in this embattled parish, that was exactly the position in which he found himself.
Was it possible that a group of long-unsolved race murders in this neglected corner of the South held the key to the biggest cold case in American history? Given what he’d learned in the past twelve hours, it just might be. Texas bordered Louisiana, after all, and in 1963 Dallas had been a fundamentalist redoubt of reactionary political conservatism, seething with rabid Kennedy hatred. More unsettling still, in that era Dallas had been a feudal possession of New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. For decades, finding a link between Marcello and Dealey Plaza had proved maddeningly elusive. But today new evidence had emerged, revealing a credible plan by the Double Eagle group to assassinate Robert Kennedy in April of 1968 as well as actions by the group’s founder that suggested complicity in the 1963 assassination. Kaiser had long known of a connection between certain Double Eagles and Carlos Marcello. And while he could not explain his certainty, he sensed that the missing links that would tie Marcello to the dead president would soon be within his reach.
Now that Kaiser had authorized an invasion into the computer servers of the Natchez Examiner, his dilemma was how much information to pass up the chain to Washington. In the three months since Hurricane Katrina struck, he had been operating with near-complete autonomy, and he liked it. The breakdown of basic human services in New Orleans—most notably the evaporation of the NOPD—had created a situation of unprecedented chaos on American soil. A veteran of the final phase of the Vietnam War, Kaiser had pushed into that vacuum and deployed Bureau resources with the independence and assertiveness of a military officer, and Washington had allowed him all the rope he desired. The fact that New Orleans lay in a part of the country that the D.C. nabobs never thought much about had been useful in this regard. But Kaiser knew all too well that once he started passing explosive information up the chain, those same bureaucrats would instantly go into ass-covering mode and force his operation to a grinding halt. And almost nothing was more explosive than evidence tying the New Orleans Mafia and a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan to Dealey Plaza.
What Kaiser most wanted was time and freedom to follow the leads he’d unearthed—to wherever they led, unhampered by oversight and regardless of consequences. J. Edgar Hoover might be long dead, but his paranoid ghost still haunted the halls of FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Already two men had died since Kaiser and his team had driven north from New Orleans to Vidalia, and more had died in the days before that. These deaths had not gone unnoticed in Washington, and by early this evening a few reporters at national newspapers had picked up on the violent doings in the backcountry of Louisiana. None had yet learned that Kaiser had designated the Double Eagle group a terrorist entity under the Patriot Act (which gave him unprecedented power to combat the survivors of the Klan offshoot), but someone soon would, and that would only increase the political pressure to quickly resolve events.
The problem was, Kaiser saw no hope for a quick resolution. The Double Eagle group was tied to at least a dozen unsolved rape, kidnapping, and murder cases in and around Concordia Parish and Natchez, Mississippi. And while Kaiser had made remarkable progress during the past twenty-four hours, it might take weeks or even months to solve them all. The surviving Double Eagles were tough men who had never been compromised, much less infiltrated. Breaking them would be difficult. The one Eagle who had shown signs of wanting to wash his conscience clean—a terminal cancer patient named Glenn Morehouse—had been ruthlessly murdered by his old comrades two days ago, before the FBI even became aware that he’d opened talks with a crusading journalist named Henry Sexton. Sexton himself had nearly perished in a subsequent attack by unknown assailants, and he now lay in a heavily protected room in the nearby Concordia Parish hospital.
It was Sexton’s working files and notes that Kaiser hoped to access by breaching the computers of the Natchez Examiner. Early that morning, Kaiser had learned from Sexton’s girlfriend that the injured reporter had given a bundle of Moleskine notebooks containing the results of years of Double Eagle investigations to Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Examiner. Kaiser had tried both bribes and threats to persuade Masters to allow him access to those notebooks, but so far she had refused. Just before going to bed, his wife had told him that she’d spoken to Masters (who was a great admirer of her work) about them all being on the same side, and Jordan believed the publisher would allow Kaiser access to the notebooks tomorrow. He’d made up his mind to subpoena Sexton’s records under the Patriot Act in any case. But as he’d lain awake in the dark beside his wife, he’d begun to believe that waiting even eight hours for that information would be a mistake.
Though few knew it, Kaiser had twice today visited Henry Sexton in the hospital, and during the second meeting he’d heard a story that had stunned him. According to Sexton, the 1968 kidnapping of two young black men—Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis—had been anything but a simple racist attack by the Ku Klux Klan. Glenn Morehouse, a founding member of the Double Eagles, had told Sexton that Revels and Davis had been kidnapped as part of a plan to lure Robert Kennedy to Mississippi to be assassinated. This plan had come into being after RFK announced his intention to enter the 1968 presidential race, a decision that had enraged Carlos Marcello, who’d been targeted for deportation multiple times by Kennedy, both as a senator and as attorney general. According to Morehouse, Marcello believed that if Robert Kennedy was elected president, he would be permanently deported and lose his criminal empire, which stretched from Dallas, Texas, to Mobile, Alabama. Through case work of his own, Kaiser knew this to be true.
He did not, however, know anything about the rest of Morehouse’s Kennedy revelation, which was: first, that Marcello had gone through local millionaire and power broker Brody Royal to recruit his assassin; and second, that the assassin was Frank Knox, the founder of the Double Eagle group. Morehouse claimed that Knox had chosen Jimmy Revels as his victim because Revels had worked tirelessly to register black voters for a Kennedy presidential run, and also because Revels was personally known to Bobby Kennedy. The boy had even spoken to the senator by telephone only days earlier. Frank Knox believed that if Revels were brutally murdered, Kennedy would be unable to resist the temptation to travel to Mississippi to attend his funeral. Only the accidental death of Knox during this operation had prevented the assassination plan from coming to fruition. Despite Knox’s death, Revels and his friend Davis had still perished, and horribly. Earlier today, Kaiser’s team had brought up Davis’s bones from a deep pond after thirty-seven years of submersion, proving that at least one of the young men had been handcuffed to the wheel of his Pontiac convertible and driven into the water after being both shot and tortured. Revels’s body remained undiscovered, but Kaiser hoped to find it next—and soon.
The aborted plot to kill Robert Kennedy was not what had triggered Kaiser’s present fears. No, it was something Henry Sexton had told him during their first hospital visit, something Sexton himself had learned from Morehouse only eighteen hours earlier. On the day Frank Knox founded the Double Eagles—during the summer of 1964—Knox had drawn three groups of letters in the sand beside the Mississippi River. “The three K’s,” he’d called them: JFK, RFK, MLK. Then Knox had crossed out the JFK and said, “One down, two to go.” To his stunned followers, Knox had then shown a photo of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. standing in a group in the White House Rose Garden, with red circles drawn around their heads.
After Kaiser heard this, every instinct told him that Carlos Marcello’s approach to Frank Knox about killing RFK in 1968 was not the first time the mobster had gone to the former marine for that kind of help. In 1961 and ’62, Frank Knox had been training Cuban expatriates in a South Louisiana camp funded by Marcello. And in 1963 Marcello had even more reason to believe Robert Kennedy meant to destroy him than he would have in 1968. Given all these factors, Kaiser had come to believe that he was working the most important FBI investigation outside the war on Al Qaeda. In historical terms—given the FBI’s abysmal failure on so many civil rights murders, and Hoover’s sabotaging of the Warren Commission investigation—it might be the most important case of all.
What complicated Kaiser’s effort to redeem the Bureau’s record—and honor—was the fact that the Louisiana State Police were working against him. In a uniquely southern twist, the chief of the LSP’s Criminal Investigations Bureau was the son of Frank Knox. Forrest Knox had worked hard to distance himself from his family’s racist past, and he’d been so successful that many Louisiana politicians supported him as the next superintendent of the state police. For Kaiser, this possibility represented a nightmare. If his suspicions were correct, Forrest Knox was the architect of a statewide criminal organization that used corrupt police officers and ex–Double Eagles to facilitate drug smuggling, gambling, and prostitution—the rackets once ruled by the Marcello organization of old. Whispered rumors that Knox had used a state police SWAT team to wipe out drug competitors during the chaos of Katrina were starting to seem more like fact than fantasy. Worse still, Kaiser had begun to uncover connections between Forrest Knox and the ruthless developers and bankers intent on rebuilding New Orleans as a whiter and more marketable version of itself in the wake of the storm.
“I’m almost through,” said one of the technicians behind Kaiser. “They have better security than I expected. It’s run out of the home office in South Carolina.”
“John Masters owns twenty-seven newspapers,” Kaiser said, the fog of his breath blanking out the glass again. “I’d expect him to spend at least some money on information security.”
“Two minutes, tops,” said the tech, tapping rapidly at his keyboard.
Kaiser checked his watch, wondering where Caitlin Masters was at this moment. Almost certainly in her office at the Examiner, working on the next day’s stories, chasing her second Pulitzer. “Will she be able to see that we’re inside her system?” he asked.
“No. No worries there.”
Kaiser grunted. He liked Caitlin Masters. Earlier tonight, when a state police captain named Ozan had shown up at the Concordia hospital to take over the Sexton case, the slightly built newspaper publisher had gotten right up into his face to challenge his authority and reaffirm federal jurisdiction. You had to admire spunk like that.
The paternal warmth Kaiser felt toward Masters reflected the conflicts he felt about the overall case, and none was more complex than that he felt about the Cage family. Penn and Tom Cage represented a unique problem for him. Penn Cage was not only Caitlin Masters’s fiancé, but also the mayor of Natchez, a successful novelist, and a former prosecutor from Houston. Even more impressive to Kaiser, Cage had been the primary mover behind the scandal that resulted in the resignation of FBI director John Portman in 1998. While working a cold civil rights murder, Cage had uncovered criminal actions on the part of the young Portman that could not bear modern scrutiny. By any standard, Kaiser saw Cage as a modern-day hero. And yet, in the present circumstance, the mayor was more a pain in the ass than anything else.
The reason for that was his father.
Tom Cage was almost a relic of a bygone era. A former combat medic in Korea, Cage had gone on to practice medicine for nearly fifty years in Natchez, where he’d worked tirelessly for decades to treat the black community with no thought of recognition or reward. Yet paradoxically, this beloved physician’s irrational actions had directly or indirectly triggered every tragedy that had happened over the past three days.
In the wee hours of Monday morning, Viola Turner, Dr. Cage’s sixty-five-year-old former nurse, had died in her sister’s home in Natchez. After living in Chicago for thirty-seven years, the Natchez native had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and returned home to die in the care of her old employer. Few people had known that Dr. Cage was treating Turner, and even if they had, no one would have expected the explosion that followed her death. That only occurred because Turner’s son, a Chicago lawyer, had shown up at the Natchez DA’s office and demanded that Dr. Cage be charged not with euthanasia, but with murder. And because the black district attorney, Shadrach Johnson, had a long history of antipathy for Penn Cage, he had obliged the angry son.
Things might have progressed with some semblance of order had not Dr. Cage jumped bail after being indicted by a grand jury with lightning speed. From what Kaiser could ascertain, the doctor had been aided in this task by an old war buddy, a former Texas Ranger named Walt Garrity. Worst of all, within hours of making their escape, either Cage or Garrity had killed a Louisiana state trooper who’d cornered them near the Mississippi River. Kaiser strongly suspected that the dead trooper had been working for Forrest Knox, not the State of Louisiana, when he’d caught up with the two fugitives, but sadly Kaiser could not prove that.
“I’m in!” crowed the tech. “I’m looking at the front page of tomorrow’s Examiner.”
“Let me see,” Kaiser said, turning from the window.
“Give him your screen, Pete,” ordered the tech.
The second tech got up and went over to the coffeemaker. As Kaiser took the warm seat, the first tech said, “I routed the front page to you. I’ll keep looking for any mention of Henry Sexton’s notebooks.”
With his aging eyes, Kaiser had to tilt his head at exactly the right angle to read what was on the screen, and he could barely make out what the tech was saying on his left. Kaiser had lost nearly all the hearing in that ear two years ago, when a drug dealer holding him hostage on Royal Street in New Orleans had fired off a 9 mm pistol only inches from his ear.
From what Kaiser could see on the screen, Caitlin Masters had led off her story with the true events at the Concordia hospital. Kaiser had hoped to lull the Double Eagles into making a mistake by putting out the story that the Eagles had succeeded in killing Henry Sexton rather than merely wounding him, but the appearance of Captain Ozan at the hospital had seriously lowered the odds of success. He couldn’t blame Masters for printing the truth.
“I’ve got a folder!” cried the tech. “‘Henrys Moleskines’ is the name. Jesus, do you think—?”
“She digitized his notebooks!” Kaiser cried, his pulse racing. “Put the folder on my screen.”
“Doing it now.”
“Can we copy the files?”
“Sure.”
“Will they know we did it?”
“If they hire a forensic firm down the road, yes. But not anytime soon. Do you have it?”
A cluster of typical Windows folders appeared on Kaiser’s screen. “Just click on it?” he asked, his right hand tingling as it hung over the mouse.
“Sure. Just like your computer.”
Kaiser clicked on the folder, but no files opened. “I’ve got nothing. Is the folder password protected or something?”
“Not that I could see.”
Kaiser tried twice more, then clicked on Properties. “The folder appears to be empty on this screen. Are you sure I have access to the file from here?”
“You should have access to everything I do. Hang on.”
Kaiser waited, fingers twitching. If he could get immediate access to every note that Henry Sexton had taken over decades of investigation, there was no telling what deductive leaps he might make. Plus, despite Sexton’s apparent candor in the hospital, the reporter might have held back critical information, hoping to follow it up himself after he recovered. Kaiser suspected, for example, that Sexton might have some notion of the location of the Bone Tree, a long-rumored dump site for Double Eagle corpses and a killing ground that dated to the pre-Columbian years of the Natchez Indians.
“Oh, no,” groaned the tech, his voice taut.
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Somebody erased the files in that folder.”
“Just now?”
“Yep. I can see their tracks. Somebody just deleted the file containing what must have been digital scans of Sexton’s notebooks. There was thirty gigabytes of data in that folder. Now it’s empty. And I think they’re still deleting stuff.”
“Who the hell would do that?” Kaiser demanded, a bubble of panic in his chest.
“User 23. That’s all I can tell you.”
“You can’t tell who User 23 is?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
“Shit!”
“What do you want me to do, boss?”
“Can you copy their whole server drives? Everything they have?”
The tech’s eyes went wide. “That’s a lot of data.”
“That’s not an answer, goddamn it.”
“It would take a long time. And it would definitely increase the odds of their IT people in Charleston noticing something.”
“Do it anyway.”
Kaiser was trying to think outside the box when his cell phone rang. He expected it to be his wife, asking where he’d gone, but it was one of the agents guarding Henry Sexton at the Concordia hospital.
“What is it?” he snapped. “Is Sexton still stable?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sexton’s not in his hospital bed. I just walked in and found his seventy-eight-year-old mother lying in his place. She’s hooked up to the heart monitors and everything.”
“What?”
“She used to be a nurse, apparently. When you gave permission for Henry’s mother to visit him, he got hold of a cell phone and asked her to bring him a few things to help him sneak out. She did, and Henry pulled it off. He walked out of here wearing his mother’s coat and hat. Right past our guards.”
Kaiser slammed his hand on the table. “Damn it! What else does she know?”
“We’re trying to find out. But I’ve already learned one thing that’s not good.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the things Sexton asked for was a shotgun. And she brought him one.”
Kaiser thought fast. “Could Henry even drive? He was heavily sedated when I saw him earlier today.”
“He probably skipped his last doses of meds, except the pain pump.”
“Did Mrs. Sexton know where he was going with the shotgun?”
“She claims she doesn’t.”
“Do you believe her?”
The agent paused. “Yeah.”
“Keep her there! You hear me? I’m coming straight over. And put out an APB on her vehicle. The vehicle and Sexton both. Wait—don’t do that. If the state police hear that, they’ll find Henry and kill him before we get close. He’ll just disappear. Tell our guys to hit the streets. Everybody but you. I’ll wake up the troops here.”
“Got it.”
Kaiser clicked END and started to get up, but at that moment his wife touched his shoulder. Jordan Glass was wearing a LEICA T-shirt and sweatpants, but her eyes were glued to the screen in front of Kaiser.
“Has Caitlin already posted tomorrow’s edition?” she asked. “I figured she’d be writing right up to the last possible deadline.”
For a moment Kaiser considered lying, but experience had taught him that would come back later and bite him on the ass.
“No,” he said. “We went into their intranet.”
Jordan’s gaze slowly moved to him. “You didn’t.”
“I had to see Henry’s notebooks, if I could. Things are happening too fast to wait.”
“I told you she was going to show them to you tomorrow.”
“You can’t be sure of that, Jordan.”
His wife gave him a look of infinite reproof. “I was sure.”
Kaiser endured her gaze as long as he could, out of penance, but then he turned to his techs and said, “Wake everybody up, and I mean everybody. We’ve got to find Henry Sexton ASAP.”
“The Double Eagles murdered the woman he loved earlier this evening,” Jordan said. “They were gunning for him, and she died in his place. Whoever Henry thinks did that, he’s going to kill them.”
Kaiser couldn’t believe this. “Henry is the most mild-mannered guy I’ve met in all this.”
“Everybody has a breaking point, John. You know that.”
As Jordan turned to leave, half a dozen phones began to ring.
