“Don’t be late. And don’t speak to anyone about this. It’s a very sensitive case.”
Henry cursed and hung up, wishing he’d never answered in the first place. Why today, of all days? In two hours, the first Double Eagle in history to grant an interview to a reporter was going to go on the record about the group’s crimes. It had taken Henry weeks to set up the conversation, which would be held in secret. He couldn’t risk losing this chance. If Viola Turner had indeed been murdered, then today’s interview was even more critical than before.
“What’s the matter, Henry?” asked Dwayne Dillard, the sports editor. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“It’s nothing,” he lied, his mind only half under conscious direction.
Glancing around the small newsroom, Henry stood, grabbed his coat off the back of his chair, then hurried out to his Ford Explorer. He couldn’t possibly sit waiting in this building for half an hour with so much happening. Having no idea where he was going, he backed into First Street, then headed into Ferriday proper. Little Walter was blowing blues harp on the CD player, wailing with a passion born just fifty miles from Ferriday, in Rapides Parish. Henry sang a couple of lines with the song. He wasn’t even thinking, really, just following the half-shuttered streets of his decaying town.
One way or another, Henry had been hunting the Double Eagle group for more than thirty years. His ex-wife claimed that his obsession had cost him their marriage, and she was probably right, yet Henry had refused to abandon his quest. For the past five years, in the pages of the little weekly newspaper he’d once delivered from a bicycle as a boy, he had been publishing stories about the group he considered the deadliest domestic terror cell in American history. And people were starting to pay attention. Henry’s successes had embarrassed certain government agencies—the FBI, for example—and they had let him know it. Along with Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Henry had pushed the Bureau into belatedly forming a cold case squad to revisit unsolved murders from the civil rights era. But though the FBI had infinitely more investigative resources than he, Henry always seemed to stay ahead of them.
The Double Eagle group was a textbook example. Founded in 1964, the Eagles were an ultrasecret splinter cell of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. By Henry’s reckoning, they had murdered more than a dozen people, yet they’d evaded capture by the Justice Department at a time when the FBI had saturated the entire Mississippi Klan structure with informants. In forty-one years, only a few members’ names had been discovered, and none had been confirmed. No Double Eagle had ever been convicted of a race-related crime, and some had even worked as law enforcement officers. Henry had repeatedly tried to interview reputed members, but they’d always answered with silence or defiance. When he doggedly persisted in his investigations, Henry found himself ostracized by all kinds of people—some racists, others regular citizens who resented him “stirring up the past for no good reason.”
One burly redneck had sucker-punched him in the local Winn-Dixie and had to be pulled off Henry by a brave stock boy. But now—after years of painstaking work to separate truth from legend—Henry had finally done the impossible: he had persuaded a Double Eagle to go on the record. At eleven o’clock this morning, he would meet a seventy-seven-year-old man named Glenn Morehouse. And if Morehouse lived up to his promise—made in the shadow of terminal cancer—he would become the first Double Eagle to break his vow of silence and confess to hate crimes that included assault, arson, rape, kidnapping, torture, and murder.
Like most of his violent brethren, Glenn Morehouse had been raised in a hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist church. Branded on his heart was the certainty that when you died, your soul either flew up to heaven or sank into hell. And by that reckoning, no man could get into heaven without first confessing his sins and honestly repenting them. Henry didn’t care what had prompted Morehouse to open up; he only wanted to be there when the truth poured out. For if a Double Eagle ever really told the truth, a dozen murders might be solved in a single hour, a dozen families granted peace after decades of misery.
Since confirming the secret interview at dawn, Henry had been unable to contain himself. Sitting at his desk this morning, the slightest noise in the newspaper office had made him jump. The shocking call about Viola Turner had been the last straw. Before he could even begin to grasp the implications of the old nurse’s death, Henry found himself parking before an empty lot that was the barren touchstone of his past, and also of the Albert Norris case.
The weed-choked lot lay between two abandoned buildings on Third Street. Forty-one years ago, Norris’s Music Emporium had stood on this hallowed piece of dirt, beating like the secret heart of Henry’s hometown. Now empty bottles, paper cups, used condoms, and cigarette packs lay among the dying johnsongrass that covered the mud where Albert Norris’s “pickin’ porch” had once stood.