AS SOON AS Caitlin got back to the Examiner building, she’d found herself in the eye of a hurricane. Not only was her full staff working frantically to finish the stories they planned to run on various threads of Henry Sexton’s murder investigations, but the editors of her father’s satellite papers were screaming for the stories they’d been promised by a deadline that had passed an hour ago. After passing a taped copy of her phone recording to Penn, Caitlin had deflected her staff by issuing a quick barrage of orders, then told Jamie to call his counterparts at the satellites and tell them thirty minutes of overtime had been authorized. It was a lie, but one she was banking no one would test by waking her father in Charlotte. As everyone left to implement her instructions, she’d retreated to her private office and locked the door.
She was confident that the six stories on Henry’s murder investigations had been well written; she trusted Jamie to make sure of that. But without her master story to provide historical context, readers would have no way to place the dramatic events that her reporters had dealt with elsewhere. And her master story had one major problem. If Brody Royal agreed to Penn’s demand, and Penn asked her to leave Royal out of her story—even for one day—the resulting gaps would be like antitank trenches dug in the highway of her narrative. She didn’t know if she could bear to butcher her story that way. Reality was fast overtaking Penn’s concerns anyway. The rumor mill had already spread the news of Katy Royal’s attempted suicide to every corner of Adams County and Concordia Parish. Speculation about her motive was rampant, and right now Caitlin was the only journalist in the world who knew the truth. Better still, she understood how that motive fit into the forty-year-old matrix of rape and murder that had divided the community and triggered two assassination attempts on one of the South’s best journalists.
Bottom line: the Katy Royal tape had changed everything.
The revelation that a man of Brody Royal’s wealth and position had ordered (and possibly taken part in) the murders of Albert Norris, Pooky Wilson, Dr. Leland Robb, Jimmy Revels, Luther Davis, Viola Turner, and other collateral victims dwarfed Caitlin’s 1998 story of the murder of black Korean war vet Delano Payton, and that story had won her a Pulitzer. If she wrote tonight’s story as she wanted to—as it demanded to be written—a second Pulitzer was a lock, a prize she would happily share with Henry Sexton.
To write that story, though, she might have to break faith with Penn. With him still closeted somewhere with Royal, she saw no way to finish her story before the other Masters papers closed out their editions—not if she waited to find out Royal’s answer about the APB. Caitlin had never felt so strangled by conflicting loyalties. She loved Tom as she loved her own father. But how could she abandon her duty to Henry Sexton, Katy Royal, and all the families of the victims of the Double Eagle group to save a man who had refused to try to save himself?
Taking a Mountain Dew from the mini-fridge in the corner, she poured several ounces into her mouth and swished it around so that the caffeine would be absorbed more quickly. Then she called up iTunes, selected David Gray’s “Please Forgive Me,” and opened a clean page in her word processor. The text of the toolbar swam before her eyes for several seconds, then resolved into black letters on a field of taupe, her preferred color scheme. Thus prepared, in a single sustained burst of clarity she wrote a nine-hundred-word lead story titled LOCAL JOURNALIST SURVIVES SNIPER ATTACK.
She led off with a firsthand account of the attack on Henry Sexton and Sherry Harden, and concluded with the contents of the Katy Royal interview. She spared Brody Royal nothing. The only person she treated with kid gloves was Tom Cage. As she corrected the last typo, she knew in her gut that this was the story to print tomorrow. Penn might hate her for it, but he would be judging her by inverted priorities. He was so deep inside the nightmare that he could no longer tell right from wrong. She was preparing to send the story to Jamie for a read-through when someone knocked at her door.
“Working!” she shouted.
“It’s Penn,” said a male voice, muffled by the wood.
Was that a male staffer telling her Penn was out front? she wondered. Or was Penn actually at the door?
“Caitlin!” Penn shouted. “Open up!”
A ripple of irrational fear crossed her skin. She sat frozen for three seconds, then got up and opened the door. Penn stood there, looking as tired as she’d ever seen him.
“You talked to Royal?” she asked.
He nodded.
She took his hand and pulled him into her office, then closed the door. “And?”
Penn’s other hand held a leather holster with his .357 inside. He laid the pistol on the credenza to his right. Caitlin stared at it for a couple of seconds, realizing how seriously he was taking the danger. “So? What did he say?”
“He’s going to do it. He’s going to get the APB canceled. He didn’t have any choice, really. He’s going to fix everything.”
“Fix everything?” she echoed, unable to conceal her disappointment. “What does that mean?”
“The APB, the dead trooper, even Viola’s murder case.”
“And you believed him?”
“I did. I do. The whole conversation was anticlimactic. More surreal than confrontational, like a weird business deal. I think Royal has dealt with this kind of crap his whole life, though not with quite so much at stake. He realizes that his freedom and wealth are in danger, so he’ll do whatever’s necessary to preserve them.”
Caitlin shook her head in disbelief. “How can he do those things? Magic?”
Penn ran his hands through his hair, then collapsed into the chair opposite her desk. “By calling the right people, apparently. It’s not what you know, right? It’s who.”
She knew her disgust showed on her face. “There’s got to be more to it than that. How can he muzzle Shad Johnson? And Sheriff Byrd?”
Penn laughed with bitter amusement. “I don’t think Shad or Billy would even flirt with the idea of crossing Brody Royal.”
A sudden wave of nausea nearly made Caitlin double over. Grabbing her lukewarm Mountain Dew, she drank what was left to try to settle her stomach. “I don’t understand. This is exactly the kind of backroom deal you’ve despised all your life.”
“You’re right. But I had no choice. Why are you so upset? I told you what I was going to do.”