The Bone Tree Read online

  “Where is here?”

  “I can’t tell you that on the phone. But I’ll tell you this: I’ve never worked a story this big in my life. Brody Royal just closed about five murder cases in as many minutes. He shot a black man named Sleepy Johnston right in front of us, a witness to the Albert Norris murder in 1964. I’ve got Snake Knox for murdering Pooky Wilson and trying to skin him alive. Royal admitted raping Viola Turner, and also killing his own daughter.”

  “Holy shit. I heard she died in the ICU earlier tonight.”

  “That’s right. Royal knew Katy was starting to talk about his involvement in her mother’s murder, and the others, too. Either Royal or his son-in-law did that. Oh, Randall Regan’s dead as well, by the way.”

  Jamie’s amazement only silenced him for a moment. “How did Royal know that his daughter had talked to you?”

  Because Penn played him the recording of her voice . . . “I don’t know,” Caitlin lied. “But he did.”

  “You still have that recording, right?”

  “No. Royal burned both copies, mine and Penn’s.”

  “Fuck!”

  “I know, I know. But Penn and I both heard him admit the murders. It’ll be okay. Tomorrow’s edition is going to be like a bomb going off, Jamie. By tomorrow at noon, every media outlet in the country is going to be chasing this story. And the FBI is going to look like the Keystone Kops. I just have to stay clear of certain people until we get the issue done.”

  “Such as?”

  “The Adams County sheriff, for one. How are your dictation skills?”

  “Meredith’s a lot better. I’ll get her ready.”

  “No. Just you. When Penn and I were kidnapped from the back parking lot, I almost made it back inside, but one of our people locked me out. I don’t know who did that, and it could have been a woman as easily as a man. Has anybody left their post tonight?”

  “Now that you mention it, Nick has been out of touch for an hour or more.”

  “Nick Moore, the press operator?”

  “Yeah. We figured he went out for some food, since the press obviously wouldn’t run for some hours yet.”

  “Try to track him down. Anybody else?”

  “I don’t think so. Everybody’s working like this is the biggest story of their lives.”

  “It is. Okay, I’ll call you back in two minutes, max, and dictate the new story in case I get arrested. At the very least, I’ll be stuck in a police interrogation room for a while. For now, tomorrow’s edition is on your shoulders. You’re probably going to have to try to reconstruct almost everything that’s been written from memory.”

  “We’ll do it, if we have to stay till dawn.”

  “Count on that. None of us will be sleeping for a long time.”

  Caitlin hung up and began punching commands into the cell phone’s tiny keypad. Only then did she realize that her hands were shaking. Normally, she was an ace with a cell phone, but not now. The trauma she’d endured in Brody Royal’s basement was part of it, of course. But the larger part, she knew, was her realization that within an hour or two, Special Agent John Kaiser would learn that Royal had not only verified the existence of the Bone Tree, but also placed the murder of Pooky Wilson there. Given the massive effort Kaiser had expended to drain the Jericho Hole in search of the bones of the Double Eagles’ civil rights victims, what resources might he marshal to locate Pooky Wilson’s remains? Two hours ago, Caitlin was certain she’d had the only real chance of finding the near-mythical race-murder site that most authorities considered apocryphal. Now she was likely to be competing with a battalion of National Guardsmen and satellite imagery specialists. As soon as she could get to a safe phone, she would try yet again to call Toby Rambin, the Lusahatcha County poacher who had sworn to Henry Sexton that he knew the location of the Bone Tree. Calling him in the middle of the night wouldn’t be ideal, but she had no choice now.

  After several curses and mistakes, she finally got into her digital mailbox and called up the file attachment she needed. Blocking out the pain of her injuries, she focused on the tiny screen, processing her own words with ruthless efficiency, deciding which elements of the existing lead story could function as a foundation for the new one she would dictate before they reached the sheriff’s department. As she stared at the glowing LCD, it finally sank in how profoundly the world had changed in the two hours since she’d written that piece. The entire story would have to be rewritten.

  A wave of exhaustion rolled over her, giving her the sense that she was being smothered. When at last she caught her breath, her stomach rolled with nausea. The only thought she could hold in her mind was of the poacher, Rambin. Only days ago, this stranger had contacted Henry Sexton with an offer to guide him to the Bone Tree for a price. But did Toby Rambin know what he claimed to know? Henry had been misled by greedy “guides” before. And since he’d been attacked the night after Rambin contacted him, he’d been unable to keep his scheduled rendezvous. In a narcotic fog in his hospital room—only minutes before a sniper fired a bullet at his head—Henry had given Caitlin the poacher’s telephone number. With a twinge of guilt she recalled altering the entry in Henry’s cell phone so that no one else would be able to find the right number if they checked his phone. As ruthless as that was, Caitlin was glad now that she’d done it. She only hoped she could reach Rambin before the poacher heard about Henry’s murder and fled the state.

  Calm down, she told herself. Caitlin closed her eyes and tried to blank her thoughts, but the image of Henry Sexton immolating himself and Brody Royal only grew more distinct in her mind’s eye.

  She opened her eyes and punched the keypad of Deputy Wells’s cell phone.

  “Caitlin?” Jamie said. “Is that you?”

  “Have you had any word from the press operator?”

  “None. Nick’s dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “With a lot more money than he had last week,” she muttered.

  “You really think Nick would help somebody hurt you?”

  “I doubt he thought they would kill me. But . . .” Caitlin fell silent as another memory from the basement returned to her. “Jamie . . . before he died, Brody Royal was bragging about how little it had cost him to buy one of our people.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “I’m pretty sure he said he’d bought a journalist. A scribbler, he said. I remember now. So even if Nick was the one who locked me out, he might not be the only person Royal bribed. I mean, would Nick know where we were keeping Henry’s journals? Would he know how to work the computers, navigate our intranet? Would he know the user names or passwords of the reporters?”

  “No. But if Nick didn’t delete the files, then it could be anybody. How the hell do we go forward from here?”

  “Think hard about who you trust. With Royal dead, the mole will assume their payday is over. So from this point forward, they might just go back to doing their job.”

  “I guess. It still creeps me out, though. And it pisses me off.”

  A worrisome thought struck her. “There’s another possibility. When Royal mentioned the mole, he said he had taken a page out of Forrest’s book. He was talking about Forrest Knox, chief of the Criminal Investigations Bureau of the Louisiana State Police. That means Knox was also paying a reporter somewhere. Probably Baton Rouge, where he lives, I’d guess. Or maybe New Orleans. But if Forrest knows about Royal’s mole at the Examiner, who’s to say he can’t extend the arrangement?”

  “What if Forrest Knox’s mole was at Henry Sexton’s paper?” Jamie asked. “Or at half a dozen of them? Why limit a good thing, if you’ve got the money to spend?”

  “You’re right. Jeez, that would explain a lot. We’ll have to keep our plans confined to a very tight circle. Tomorrow’s stories will have to be written on two computers only, yours and mine. No sharing files, no Internet connection for them.”

  “Okay.”

  Caitlin looked out at the lights flashing by outside the cruiser. At last she recognized
a building. “I’m only five minutes from the sheriff’s office. I need to start dictating.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Jamie, this really is the most—”

  “You’re not seriously going to waste time telling me how big this is, are you? Go.”

  She took a deep breath, then shut her eyes and began to compose her new story on the fly. “Last night, Henry Sexton of the Concordia Beacon laid down his life for a fellow journalist. That journalist was me . . .”

  As Caitlin spoke, a soft voice at the center of her mind asked a deeply troubling question: Could Jamie be the mole? Almost instantly another voice answered, No way. She had known her editor for six years. He was a flaming liberal, a crusader for justice who hated greed and repression in all their forms. But probably more persuasive than this, Jamie—like Caitlin herself—was rich. He’d been born into a family with money, and thus had the luxury of being immune to blandishments that might tempt those less fortunate.

  “Caitlin?” Jamie said. “What the hell? Are you there?”

  “Yeah, can you not hear me?”

  “You stopped talking thirty seconds ago.”

  “I’m sorry. God, it’s been a crazy night. Where was I?”

  “The last thing you said was, ‘This lone reporter, working from a tiny newspaper in the slowly dying delta of Louisiana, accomplished more than an army of FBI agents did in forty years—’ and then you trailed off.”

  “Okay . . . okay. Ready?”

  “Go,” Jamie said.

  Banishing the mole from her mind, Caitlin picked up the story again.

  CHAPTER 6

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL FORREST Knox was seventy miles north of New Orleans and nearing Baton Rouge when he considered switching his cell phone back on. He’d spent the past three hours in New Orleans, but he didn’t want anyone knowing he’d been there. That’s why he was driving an unmarked car, and at the speed limit. Blackmail missions were best carried out under the radar, especially when your target had the kind of connections that Forrest’s boss did. Colonel Griffith Mackiever had headed the Louisiana State Police for seven years, and bringing him down was no small task. Forrest would have preferred a couple of more months to get his ducks in a row, but the moneymen in New Orleans who stood to make millions off the post-Katrina reconstruction wouldn’t wait. They wanted a full-time state police presence in New Orleans to calm jittery investors (by filling the vacuum created by the dysfunctional NOPD). The most ruthless among them wanted certain human obstacles to their plans neutralized by any means necessary. Forrest knew well the impatience that accompanied ambition, but he would not let recklessness destroy him on the verge of success.

  At nearly fifty-four, he had never been closer to achieving his goals. Using unerring instincts and iron self-control, he had worked his way up through the ranks of the most powerful law enforcement organization in his home state. Now he stood within a heartbeat of commanding it. Once he cemented his control of the LSP, he would be as bulletproof as a criminal could be in America. Unlike Griffith Mackiever, who had vainly battled the forces of human nature throughout his tenure, Forrest had leveraged his pragmatic worldview into something unique. By combining his cousin Billy’s statewide meth operation with the manpower surviving from his father’s Double Eagle days, and then enlisting an army of avaricious politicians and hungry police officers for protection, Forrest had built a criminal network of unrivaled reach and power in the South.

  His philosophy was based on principles understood by every cop in the world: no matter what the law did to discourage them, people were going to use drugs, gamble, and fuck whores (both male and female). Any sane government would have legalized all three practices decades ago and co-opted the criminals. But thankfully, the remnants of America’s religious ethics prevented that from happening, which left the field wide open for a man of vision. Long ago, Forrest had realized that he was that man.

  The only problem was that Hurricane Katrina had shown him just how picayune his vision had been. The ravaged city left behind by the receding floodwaters was a vacuum that attracted the true predators of twenty-first-century America—the real estate developers and bankers. Multimillionaires like Brody Royal had been waiting for a catastrophe like Katrina for decades. For the storm and the flood had accomplished what no human activity could: it had flushed the poor blacks out of the city, like a biblical purge. Royal and his friends intended that those blacks should never return. In place of the dilapidated housing projects and single-story rental houses that had blighted the city, they saw upscale housing and corporate offices with mouthwatering proximity to downtown and the French Quarter. The men who planned this remaking of the Crescent City reckoned their profits in tens of millions, not the paltry numbers to which Forrest was accustomed. And thanks to Brody Royal, they had settled on Forrest as one of the lieutenants who could help bring their vision to fruition.

  Moving in this world was surreal to him. This morning he’d been at a brunch with politicians, insurance executives, and hedge-fund managers, and he’d known without asking that not one of them had set foot in Vietnam, unless it was as a tourist with a designer backpack and a Black Card. Yet they were predators, just as he was. Instead of crystal methamphetamine and whores, they dealt in political influence, rigged construction contracts, secret real estate deals, and inside stock trades. And right now—thanks to an accident of weather—they needed him. It was these men who had quietly informed the governor that they would like to see a change in leadership at state police HQ. But tacit support from the capitol was not enough. First, Forrest had to move Colonel Mackiever out of the seat at the top of the pyramid.

  It wasn’t like the old man hadn’t asked for it. Mackiever had been trying to nail Forrest for months now, and if the superintendent made common cause with the FBI, they just might be able to find enough evidence to tie Forrest to the Double Eagles’ meth operation and bring him down. Everything that had happened in Concordia Parish over the past three days would make that job a hell of a lot easier. Agent John Kaiser had already used extraordinary measures to bring up 1960s-vintage bones from a sinkhole beside the Mississippi River, and he’d used the Patriot Act to take possession of the corpse of Glenn Morehouse, the Double Eagle whom Sonny and Snake had killed to keep quiet (one day too late, apparently). To effectively fight these tactics, Forrest needed full control of the state police. Only then could he take over the investigation into the sniper attack on Henry Sexton—which he himself had ordered—and sandbag the FBI’s efforts to solve the old Double Eagle murders.

  Since Griffith Mackiever was virtually incorruptible, Forrest had chosen a tactic calculated to hit the man in the only place he was vulnerable. It was a dirty business, and Forrest would never forget the old man’s face after he’d seen the strangling net of false evidence Forrest had meticulously woven together while Mackiever had been working so ineptly to nail him. Only a supreme effort had allowed the old man to choke back tears. An ex–Texas Ranger, Mackiever had worked in law enforcement long enough to know that there were certain kinds of accusations from which no man ever recovered, regardless of what facts emerged in the wake of the initial smear. Forrest had given him forty-eight hours to resign, and he felt sure the old man would cave by midday tomorrow. If he didn’t, Forrest had no problem pulling the trigger and destroying the man’s career—and his personal life along with it.

  Now that he’d moved against Mackiever, Forrest’s immediate concern was finishing off Henry Sexton. Forrest could never have imagined that Snake Knox—a trained combat sniper in his youth—would miss Sexton and kill his girlfriend by mistake. The simple truth was, Snake and the other Eagles were getting too old for the work they were doing. That was why Morehouse had cracked: he was dying of cancer and scared shitless. He’d wanted to clean his conscience before he faced his maker. After Snake missed his shot at Mercy Hospital in Ferriday, the FBI had moved Sexton to a windowless hospital room under Bureau guard. Getting to him there would not be easy. But it had to
be done. Sexton had spent at least an hour speaking to Glenn Morehouse in person, and then again later on the telephone, and Morehouse had known more than enough to send not only his fellow Double Eagles, but also Forrest himself, to Angola Prison for the rest of their lives, and possibly even to death row.

  Forrest also needed to know how much information Sexton had confided to Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Natchez Examiner. The two were competitors and normally would not cooperate on a story. But Forrest worried that with Henry wounded and out of commission, he might have passed what he knew to the girl in order to hit the Eagles as hard and as fast as possible. And no mole, no matter how well placed, could tell Forrest what was inside the girl’s head.

  WHEN THE POINTED TOWER of the state capitol appeared in the distance, Forrest switched on the encrypted cell phone he’d been using to communicate with Alphonse Ozan. Yesterday he’d ordered Billy’s drug organization to begin using “Al Qaeda rules,” which meant no electronic contact, only face-to-face meetings. But that wasn’t practical for the man sitting at the top of the pyramid. Forrest felt reasonably confident that the FBI didn’t know about his satellite phone, but he had occasional nightmares about the NSA and their automated intelligence-collection algorithms. He decided to wait until he reached headquarters to talk to Ozan.

  The instant his phone found a satellite, it began to ring. As the LED read out Alphonse Ozan’s number, the hair on Forrest’s arms stood erect. Ozan should not be calling him. He had no idea what the trouble might be, but the odds were, it involved Concordia Parish. Instinct told Forrest he was behind the curve of events, and that was never a good place to be.

  “What’s happened?” he asked, holding the phone to his head.

  “Colonel, I’ve been trying to reach you,” said Ozan, sounding rattled. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course. I’ve been following the goddamned rules. You ought to try it.”

  “I couldn’t wait. We’ve got trouble.”