IN ALL HER life, Caitlin had never felt the kind of journalistic responsibility she did today, nor such frustration. Last night she’d been stunned by the horrific details contained in the single Moleskine notebook she’d found near the burned hulk of the Concordia Beacon. But today Henry Sexton had given her the fruits of decades of painstaking investigation into one of the darkest chapters in American history. Whatever it cost in time and money, she meant to vindicate the full measure of Henry’s faith. Yet Penn had made that impossible, by insisting that her story must run in tomorrow’s newspaper, as Henry had originally intended. Penn’s intentions were good—he meant for the story to render physical violence against Caitlin and his family pointless—but the result, she was sure, could only be a journalistic embarrassment.
The sheer volume of Henry’s files astounded her. The multiple murder cases were unimaginably complex; the historical context alone would consume all the column inches usually devoted to news stories. Pursuing Penn’s plan would be like trying to tackle the Watergate story in a single night. She and her staff might be able to produce a sketch of the Double Eagle group’s crimes over the years, but they couldn’t possibly explore the larger implications, or the FBI’s failure to achieve justice for the victims and their families. Henry Sexton’s solitary struggle on behalf of the victims deserved a book in itself. And yet, Caitlin reminded herself, Henry had planned to publish one comprehensive story tomorrow, in the interest of his loved ones’ safety. Henry’s publisher had verified this plan by telephone.
If only Henry’s first draft hadn’t been destroyed with his computer, she thought.
Never one to shrink from a challenge, Caitlin had brought the full resources of her staff to bear on the problem. They’d begun with brute-force analysis. For the past two hours, five Examiner employees had been scanning every scrap of Henry’s files into their computer system using high-speed imaging machines. Their goal was to create a searchable database of Henry’s archive. From this epic record they would distill the macro story into discrete parts that could be handled by specific reporters. Caitlin would act as editor in chief, and write a master story that functioned as a hub for the others. Some stories would only be published in the Examiner’s online edition, and for the first time, stories in the actual paper would carry footnotes directing readers to the website for further detail. Caitlin had another groundbreaking idea, but executing it would require the permission of her father, and he had yet to call her back with an answer.
She took a sip of green tea and went back to her computer display. In studying Henry’s files so far, she’d learned three things: Sexton was a gifted investigator, a solid writer, but a twentieth-century organizer. To address the organizational challenge, a Columbia-educated reporter named Donald Pinter had begun creating data maps and spreadsheets containing breakdowns of every major and minor personality related to the 1960s-era murders. Victims were highlighted in blue, Double Eagles and Klansmen in red, and police and FBI informants in orange, which denoted uncertain allegiance. Any local police officer of that era had to be considered potentially corrupt or ideologically loyal to the Ku Klux Klan, while FBI agents could have been motivated more by fear of or loyalty to J. Edgar Hoover than by a sense of justice.
Pinter was also building a master timeline that began with the birth of Albert Norris in 1908 and ran to the present day. Contained within that master line were markers that kicked viewers to “sub-lines” with more detail. The most important of these gave a month-by-month chronology from January 1963 to December 1968. The watershed assassinations bookended this timeline in flaming red—Medgar Evers and John Kennedy at the beginning, Reverend King and Bobby Kennedy at the end—while local race murders were highlighted in dark blue. The simple beatings and “rabbit hunts,” as the Klan had called nonlethal attacks, were marked in yellow and dotted the line like a chain of daisies. Pinter had created a digital masterpiece of organization, yet still Caitlin felt overwhelmed by the data. Her personal story notes had already run to fifteen pages, and even her outline was already three pages long. In truth, she hadn’t been planning a news story, but a comprehensive investigation that would take weeks to accomplish, at the least.