When Stone looks to Kaiser again, as though for permission, I finally lose my patience. “Goddamn it, guys. That call I took earlier? Before I came in here? That was Sheriff Dennis. Claude Devereux had just told him the Double Eagles will be in his office at seven A.M. tomorrow for voluntary questioning.”
Both men stare at me as though I’ve just announced the Second Coming.
“Bullshit,” says Kaiser. “I don’t believe that.”
“They’re coming. Devereux claims they’ve got nothing to hide.”
Kaiser is angrily shaking his head. “Nothing to fear, more like. They wouldn’t be coming if they had anything to worry about. Something’s wrong, Penn. Forrest has put in the fix somehow. You and Dennis are walking into a trap.”
“What kind of trap?”
“I don’t know. But I know Forrest Knox.”
“John’s right,” says Stone. “This is trouble. The Knoxes have more to hide than you can possibly imagine.”
After staring at both men in stony silence for a few seconds, I sit back on the edge of my chair. “Tell me what you know about my father and Marcello. Then I’ll decide how to handle tomorrow’s meeting. Otherwise I walk out now. I’m sorry, Dwight, more than you know. But that’s the way it is.”
Kaiser starts to argue, but Stone raises his hand to silence him. Then he lifts the top page of his legal pad, picks up a white sheet of paper, and passes it to me. It appears to be a photocopy of a small rectangular business form. The image quality is poor, but at the top of the rectangle a logo reads “TBC.” That means nothing to me, but at the bottom I see a cursive signature I instantly recognize.
Thomas J. Cage, M.D.
“What’s this?” I ask, my face tingling with heat.
“An excuse form,” Stone informs me, almost sadly. “From the Triton Battery Corporation in Natchez, Mississippi.”
“Notice the dates?” asks Kaiser.
Despite my father’s scrawled handwriting, I can just make them out: Nov. 18–22, 1963. Below this line are the words Chronic Hepatitis.
“What does this mean?” I ask.
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” says Kaiser.
“John,” Stone says sharply. “We don’t know what it means, Penn. What we do know is that your father signed a medical excuse for Frank Knox to be absent from work at the Triton Battery plant from the Monday prior to John Kennedy’s assassination through the Friday he was killed in Dealey Plaza.”
“A full week,” says Kaiser. “Plenty of time to reconnoiter Dealey Plaza and settle on the Dal-Tex Building as his sniper’s nest. You see? Frank Knox wasn’t the primary shooter. Oswald was already set up to use the School Book Depository, and Frank was his backup.”
“No, I don’t see. Not at all.”
“Slow down, John,” says Stone. “Penn, we obviously need to know whether your father had any idea what Knox was actually doing on those dates.”
My ears roar as I shake my head in denial. “Can you prove Frank Knox was in Dealey Plaza on that day?”
“No.”
My head snaps up. “Can you prove he was even in Dallas?”
Stone slowly shakes his head. “We can’t even prove Frank Knox was in Texas. Not yet, anyway. Of course we just got on this track. All we know for sure is that he wasn’t at work, and he almost certainly wasn’t at home.”
“That’s not all we know,” says Kaiser.
I look back at the paper in my hand. “How did you even get hold of this? There’s no way Triton Battery saved this kind of crap from 1963.”
“You’re right, of course,” Stone concedes. “Your father’s written excuse form was in Knox’s personnel record. It turns out I requisitioned a copy of that back in 1965, while working some other cases. Knox was still pretending to be part of the mainstream KKK at that time, and for some reason I decided to keep his file along with a few others. If I hadn’t done that, we might have solved the Kennedy assassination years ago.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the concerted efforts of our team—some of the best investigators in the world—were stymied by the kind of clerical accident that often sways history, without anyone being the wiser. When I was fired from the Bureau in 1972, that record I’d requested in 1965 was still in the Jackson, Mississippi, field office. The murders I had investigated were still open cases. When the Working Group came together in the mideighties and began investigating cold cases, its members couldn’t request Bureau files. They had to rely on what files they’d kept—illegally—or whatever active agents would photocopy or smuggle out for them. We did send an agent into the Mississippi field office to locate all the old civil rights records he could—which included Double Eagle files—and he got quite a few. But he was told that some had been shipped back to Central Records in Maryland. He took a quiet look around the building for them, but he found nothing. That excuse remained lost.”
“Then how did you locate it?”
Kaiser leans forward and says, “This morning, after I convinced the director that Stone’s group is onto something, I sent two agents up to the Jackson field office in a pickup truck. By this afternoon, I had six crates of files dating back to the 1960s. They found them in the basement. One of those crates contained Frank’s Triton Battery file. It had been sitting there since 1965, with that medical excuse inside it.”
The irony is obvious, but something else is tickling my brain. “Is this excuse form all you have on Frank Knox that relates to Dallas?”
Stone shakes his head. “We put Frank and Snake Knox through the wringer years ago. They became suspects in the Kennedy investigation the moment we learned that Frank was listed on the CIA payroll of JMWAVE/Operation Mongoose.”
I faintly remember Henry Sexton telling me this. “Frank Knox worked for the CIA?”