“I’ve got an agent over at the hospital, covering Henry Sexton. Last night, a former Double Eagle named Sonny Thornfield was dropped off outside the Mercy Hospital ER. He was having a heart attack. I wondered if he could have been faking, trying to get close enough to finish the job on Henry. But the ER doc says the coronary was real, and Thornfield made no attempt to reach Henry’s room.”
“What’s the connection to my father?”
“Around the time Thornfield appeared, a nurse saw your father driving a big silver van in the hospital parking lot.”
A chill rockets up my spine. Walt Garrity’s Roadtrek. I remember the sleek silver van parked in front of my house only two months ago.
“The nurse had gone outside to smoke a cigarette,” Kaiser goes on. “The van looked empty, but when the hospital’s rent-a-cop pulled alongside to check it out, your father suddenly climbed behind the wheel. He moved the van to a parking space near the front. When the guard came around the building again, the van was gone. Do you know anybody with a big silver conversion van?”
Oh, man …
“Obviously you do.”
“I didn’t say that. Was this nurse sure it was my father?”
“Positive. She’d worked with him for fifteen years at St. Catherine’s Hospital in Natchez.”
I shake my head as though confused, but all I’m thinking is, What the hell are Walt and Dad trying to accomplish? “Have you told anyone else about this?”
“No, but it won’t stay secret long. Nurses talk. And don’t bother trying your dad’s cell phone. He’s shut it off. Whoever owns that van is giving him good advice.”
Thank you, Walt. A low-grade panic has begun to build in my chest. To distract Kaiser, I say, “You know you’re about forty years late, if you’re here to solve the murders of Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis.”
“Better late than never.”
“According to Henry, the Bureau hasn’t even classified their disappearances as murders.”
Kaiser’s eyes look somber. “Henry’s been holding back a lot from the Bureau. I don’t blame him. We didn’t give these victims much respect back in the day. Some shine got burned to death in Armpit, Louisiana? If Bobby Kennedy wasn’t calling Hoover about it every day, he didn’t want to know.”
The mention of Bobby Kennedy makes me think of Brody Royal. “Your agency has had a lot of years to make up for that, and it chose not to.”
“I know it.” Kaiser reaches into his inside coat pocket and takes out a yellowed piece of paper. It looks like an old typed letter, folded twice to fit into an envelope, then once again to fit into a pocket. He hands it to me, and on its face I find three typed sentences:
To Mr. J. Edgar Hover,
It was July 18, 1964 on a hot night about eleven o’clock the KKK burned down Albert Norris store and him with it, as of now we have not hear what happen to the hill. Is it possible these men are going to get away with this act without being exposed, even though the police was apart of the gang that permitted this terrible thing to happen. Your office is our only hope so don’t fail us.
The Colored People of Concordia Parish
“That came in to Bureau headquarters in Washington five months after Norris was murdered,” Kaiser informs me. “I still haven’t found out who wrote it. Did you see the bottom of the page?”
Beneath my thumb, scrawled in blue ink, are the letters: J. E. Hoover.
“Hoover read that letter,” Kaiser says. “He initialed it himself. But he didn’t give those people what they deserved. He poured his resources into Neshoba County, the case that would make the Bureau’s reputation against the Klan. But I intend to make up for that failure. I’m going to finish what Dwight Stone started back in sixty-eight. We owe it to the families. Not only the families of the victims, but also of the agents who served down here. A lot of them have died already, but there are some left.”
No one could deny the fierce resolve in John Kaiser’s eyes. “How do you plan to do that?” I ask, passing the letter back to him.
“By busting every Double Eagle still walking this earth. I don’t give a shit how old they are. I want life sentences for every last one of them. And I’m not going to rely on any local juries. I can get them under the conspiracy statutes, and also for domestic terrorism.”
“Don’t sell local juries short. Even Mississippi juries have been doing the right thing on old civil rights murders lately.”
Kaiser takes his cell phone out of his pocket, checks a text message, taps quickly on the keypad, then puts it away. “Almost all of Henry’s computers and records were stolen or destroyed last night,” he says. “I find it hard to believe that he kept no copies, but that’s what he’s telling me.”
Part of me wants to tell Kaiser that Henry did in fact keep backups, but I’m not about to take that step without consulting Caitlin.
“If Henry does have copies,” Kaiser goes on, “I need them. And if you know about files or ledgers or anything like that, please don’t sit on them in the hope that they’ll somehow help your father.”
“I don’t have anything like that,” I tell him, praying that Kaiser hasn’t bugged Henry’s hospital room.
The FBI agent gives me a long look. “You spent nearly two hours alone with Henry in his newspaper office Monday night. He must have confided quite a bit to you.”
“He wanted to help my father, if he could. He told me the Double Eagles had threatened to kill Viola if she ever returned to Natchez. He didn’t know why. That’s mostly what we covered. Then he played his guitar and we talked about old times.”
Kaiser pulls a wry face, but he doesn’t press me.
“Let me ask you something,” I say, as a wild idea strikes me. “If you’re investigating the Double Eagles under the Patriot Act, you must have turned on the Big Ears.”
Kaiser looks disingenuous. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you have the NSA monitoring their phones and e-mail. Right?”
The FBI agent sniffs and looks down the shore. “Is there a motive behind that question?”
“Absolutely,” I reply in a tone that makes him turn back to me. “What do you know about a man named Brody Royal?”