And what is character but the sum of our genes and the pressures of human interaction? Our parents are the door through which we enter the world. In coming together they fix our essential natures, but it’s after we become self-aware that they begin weaving the narrative that will ultimately shape the people they send into society. If our parents lie to us—not merely by omission, as all do, but by commission—then how can we ever know ourselves?
For most of my life, my father’s character seemed a static and transparent thing, a multifaceted diamond whose essential trait was clarity. Then four days ago, that stone cracked along some pre-existing fault and became milky, opaque. It happens. Even fine diamonds contain flaws, inclusions invisible to the naked eye that weaken the whole. But the revelations about Viola Turner were only the beginning. Soon the milky stone had broken in two. As I tried to piece the halves back together, Henry Sexton began tapping at them, fracturing each into still smaller fragments. Then tonight Kaiser and Stone shattered those fragments into jagged shards, each reflecting light in all directions, creating interference patterns I may never be able to penetrate. Even if I do, how can I possibly piece the original stone back together, when I know my memory of it to be flawed?
Only my father can put himself back together. And if he dies before he does that, I will never truly know him. I will never have known him. Which means I may never know myself. I’ll be a man without a past, and a man without a past is like a nation without a history, or worse, with a myth of one. If the narrative of my life has been woven from lies, then how can I choose my next move? What crimes were my father’s lies told to conceal? If Shad Johnson is right, then simple, selfish murder. If Kaiser and Stone are correct, then murder on a historic scale. The latter proposition seems incredible, but the ties binding my father to the Knoxes, to Royal, and even to Marcello and beyond have been established beyond doubt. At least I’m not alone in my ignorance. If murder has haunted my family, it has also haunted my country. From the humblest victims—forgotten black boys vanishing into the night—to the most privileged and high—President Kennedy cut down on national television—these killings and the darkness that enshrouds them deny us the truth about ourselves.
Standing here in the darkness, my best hope may be to heed Carl Jung’s admonition: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you. Though I am poorly informed and inadequately armed, this now must be my quest, whatever the cost. Men still live who shared the secret paths of my father’s hidden history, and the history of this nation. Soon I will face some of them across an interrogation table. And this I know: to learn what they know, I will stop at nothing.
The howl of a dog from the shadows makes me whirl toward the house, but I see no sign of the animal. Looking back at the street, I half expect to see Lincoln Turner’s white pickup rolling along the pavement, but the scene is almost ghostly in its stillness.
I still don’t know what awakened me. Yet as I walk back to the door, I’m gripped by a certainty that something terrible has happened on this night. And since my mother and child are with me—and Caitlin is safe at the Examiner—I can only surmise that the object of this jarring premonition is my father.
Locking the door behind me, I realize that sleep will not return soon. I switch on my laptop in the kitchen, check my e-mail and find that the most recent is from John Kaiser. It reads: If tonight didn’t persuade you to hold off on questioning the Double Eagles, then at least you should go into battle prepared. Do your due diligence and read the attached file.
With bleary eyes, I open the attachment and find a typed letter headed KNOX FAMILY PATHOLOGY. The first subject line reads: Nathan Bedford Forrest Knox. 1876–1927. With a long-suffering sigh, I turn on the coffee percolator, then carry my computer to the little banquette, turn down its screen brightness, and begin to read.
FRIDAY
CHAPTER 48
IT WAS NEARING dawn when Walt Garrity finally managed to slip out of the Valhalla hunting lodge, and he only made it then because the humans inside had either left the camp or gone elsewhere on the property. After drumming on his legs to wake them up after hours under the twin bed, he sneaked down the stairs and out the front door, then worked his way through the trees toward the main road, where Drew Elliott’s truck waited. In the forest, he’d avoided the same half-dozen game cameras mounted on trees that he’d detected on the way in. The problem was, he’d almost certainly missed at least one. While they probably weren’t part of the security system, whoever reviewed the SD cards in those cameras would eventually realize that he had been on the property, and the time stamps would tell them when.
Don’t sweat the small stuff, he told himself. You’ll be lucky if you’re alive by then.
From Lusahatcha County he drove north up Highway 61 to Natchez, then through it and on into Jefferson County. Quentin Avery’s estate lay in the northwestern corner of the county, not too far from Fayette, which had once been the realm of Mayor Charles Evers. Walt tried Tom’s burn phone twice on the way, but he got no answer. That in itself wasn’t a bad sign; Walt had warned Tom not to leave the device on. But still . . . knowing Tom, he would have expected some additional reassurance after such a long period apart. He prayed that his old friend was laid up in his lawyer’s softest bed, swallowing Vicodin with Maker’s Mark for a chaser.
Walt had been watching the woods to his right for a mile when he saw a turn that looked likely. He took it and soon found himself entering a circular drive before an imposing Tudor mansion, which looked almost absurd in the Mississippi backwoods. With a Glock pistol in his hand, he walked to the door and tried the knob.
It turned.
Bad sign. With practiced stealth he moved quickly through the ground-floor rooms, and in half a minute he found himself standing over the body of a black woman at the end of a short hallway.