“Not a damn thing,” Sonny said, grabbing Snake’s arm and pulling him to the study door.
Billy stayed on his feet and watched them go. He hoped to hell Brody Royal wasn’t under the delusion that he was free to whack people on his own anymore. That era had come and gone, only some men refused to see it. And the more power they had, the longer it seemed to take them. When the main door banged shut, Billy sat down and pulled up the Web page of Jimmy Buffett’s agent. But his mind was no longer on his birthday party. It was on Viola Turner, and all the men who might have had a motive to kill her.
CHAPTER 14
THOUGH MOST OF the staff had left the Beacon office, Henry had stayed at his desk, working patiently at his computer. The Morehouse interview had forced him to rethink his entire view of the Double Eagle cases, and also to rejigger his priorities. The old Klansman had confessed to or described at least ten murders, and he’d hinted at others, but one confession had left Henry in a dilemma. He needed to inform the FBI that Jerry Dugan, a Bureau informant, had been murdered at Triton Battery in 1964. But doing so would instantly create problems. The Bureau would want to know Henry’s source, and that he could not reveal. Also, he usually published new information within a day of talking to the FBI, yet he’d promised Morehouse that he wouldn’t publish anything until death took him. Who could predict when that would occur? Morehouse appeared to be at death’s door, yet Henry had known many cancer patients to far outlive even the most optimistic prognoses.
Then there was the question of missing corpses. Of the dozen-odd murders Henry was investigating, four involved missing men, and without a corpus delicti, a murder case was stillborn, almost without exception. He’d never doubted that Pooky Wilson, Joe Louis Lewis, Jimmy Revels, and Luther Davis were dead, and today Morehouse had confirmed his instincts (with the exception of Lewis, whom Henry had forgotten to ask about before time ran out). Yet Henry still had no clue to the location of the bodies. The Jericho Hole and the Bone Tree had always been rumored dump sites, yet Morehouse had discounted both. Dragging the Jericho Hole was beyond Henry’s resources, and while he had a fresh lead on the Bone Tree, finding this near-mythical totem had eluded everyone who’d tried it since the 1960s.
Something about the murders of Revels and Davis haunted Glenn Morehouse in a way that the other killings did not, Henry was sure. He suspected it was the gang rape of Jimmy’s sister Viola, in which Morehouse had almost surely participated. The old Eagle had exposed the depraved brutality of the Revels-Davis murders by revealing that the boys’ military tattoos had been cut from their bodies (after death, Henry hoped) and might even have been kept as trophies. More disturbing still, Morehouse had mumbled half coherently about witnessing deaths by flaying, burning, drowning, and crucifixion. Yet he hadn’t specified who had suffered these fates. Henry had always heard that Pooky Wilson and Joe Louis Lewis had suffered the most cruel treatment, but now he wondered whether Revels and Davis had endured equally horrific deaths.
More germane to the present, Glenn Morehouse seemed absolutely sure that Snake Knox had murdered Viola Turner to fulfill their decades-old threat, or else had ordered it done. But as for why this threat had originally been made, the old Eagle had refused to speak. It might simply be that she could identify the men who’d raped her, but Henry suspected that Viola had specific knowledge about her brother’s death. Most puzzling was Morehouse’s assertion that Viola never would have made it to Chicago alive had it not been for Ray Presley and Dr. Tom Cage. How had a dirty cop (and inveterate racist) teamed up with a beloved physician to save Viola Turner from the vengeance of the Double Eagles?
All told, today’s interview had generated enough leads to keep an FBI field office busy for six months, and Henry felt overwhelmed. Simply reviewing and prioritizing his notes would take a full night’s work, and he was exhausted already. But the more he reflected on the day’s revelations, the more certain he became that he should call Penn Cage. After only twenty minutes with Shadrach Johnson, Henry had sensed that the Natchez DA intended to try to convict Tom Cage for Viola’s murder. And that Henry could not let stand.
He was about to call Penn from his desk phone when his cell phone rang. The LCD read: G. MOREHOUSE. Scarcely able to believe that the old man had fulfilled his promise, Henry hit the answer button with shaking hands.
“Hello?” he said, filled with irrational fear that he would hear the voice of Wilma Deen (or God forbid, Snake Knox) checking to find out whom Henry had called earlier.
“It’s me,” whispered Glenn Morehouse.
“Are you okay?” Henry asked. “Can you talk?”
“Wilma’s back in her room watching TV. I think she took a sleeping pill, so I took the chance.”
“What’s on your mind, Glenn?” He was half afraid that Morehouse would try to deny everything he’d said this morning.
“I been thinking about all we said today. About Viola, mostly. It pains me something fierce to look back on all that. I know you don’t understand, but … things was just different then.”
“I know,” Henry said, thinking Morehouse sounded different than he had face-to-face, smaller and less imposing. He wondered if the old Klansman had taken a pill himself.
“You asked me about the bodies,” Morehouse said. “Where they might be.”
“Do you know?”
“Them places you mentioned? The Jericho Hole and the Bone Tree? You won’t go far wrong if you check them out.”
Henry’s pulse picked up. “Are you saying the Bone Tree really exists?”
“I wish it didn’t.” Morehouse wheezed, then burped. He sounded drunk. “But it does. At least it did about fifteen years ago. That was the last time I saw it.”