“What’s the good news?”
“One of our highway units stopped Claude Devereux on the causeway outside Lafayette.”
Forrest pumped a fist in the air. “I’ve got to go,” he told Ford. “You tell Snake what I said.”
“I will if I can.”
“And call me in fifteen minutes if they’re still talking to Thornfield.”
“Will do. Out.”
Forrest clicked off and pocketed his phone, then turned to Ozan. “You tell whoever stopped Claude to escort him all the way back to his office in Vidalia. And if Claude raises a fuss, arrest him.”
Ozan nodded. “So Dr. Cage is alive?”
Forrest blew out a lungful of air. “I don’t know. Snake sent word that he is, but that doesn’t mean a thing now. He’s just trying to get out from under those meth charges. For all I know, the doc has been dead since last night.”
CHAPTER 61
TO SPARE MYSELF the torture of waiting to hear whether or not the body in the swamp belongs to my father, I’ve designed a puzzle that will allow Sonny Thornfield to tell us what he knows without it being recorded in any way. I did this by drawing a grid on a piece of notebook paper, then listing the known murder victims vertically on the left side of the page. Across the top I created columns for the killers, the murder weapons or torture methods, the dump sites. Then I gridded a second page and filled it with names, murder weapons, torture methods, and dump sites (multiple copies of each place name). Finally, using Kaiser’s scissors, I cut that page into small rectangles with one word on each. As I did this, an FBI agent helped Kaiser tape a bedsheet over the one-way observation mirror. And though he did it quietly, I also heard Kaiser post an FBI guard at the cellblock door with orders not to let me inside under any circumstances. After what he witnessed in the utility closet, he isn’t going to let me near Snake Knox again.
With the interrogation room’s two doors shut and the camcorder unplugged, I spread the columned page on the table in front of Sonny Thornfield and pile the rectangular “puzzle pieces” beside it. Then Kaiser and I take up stations on either side of the old man so that we can watch his progress, like parents watching a toddler work a puzzle.
Thornfield is hesitant to begin, but Kaiser finally convinces him we have no way to record what he might do. That’s the beauty of this method. The revelation only exists for a moment, and once the puzzle is completed, Sonny can simply toss the rectangles in the air, obliterating all evidence of what he’s “told” us.
After staring at the collection of names and words for a while, Sonny finally sets to work. His wrinkled hands move tentatively across the page, trembling as though he’s in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. Time seems to slow as the quivering hands slide the rectangles across the page, and every second that ticks by feels like weight being piled on my heart. At any moment Carl Sims could call back and say they’ve found my father dead.
I feel trapped in some bizarre, real-world demonstration of the physics paradox known as Schr?dinger’s cat. At this moment, while an old murderer uses a child’s puzzle to reveal the knowledge that resides in his aging brain, a body floats facedown in the Lusahatcha Swamp. At this moment, that body both is and is not my father. It exists as a superposition of probabilities, and I must somehow hold myself together while accepting both outcomes as possible. But soon Caitlin—or Carl Sims, or Jordan Glass—will turn that body over, and all possible states will collapse into the single observed reality: the corpse will either be my dead father or it will not. And even if one believes that this choice has already been made, or is known, until it is made known to me, both realities must be endured.
“Look,” Kaiser whispers, pointing over Sonny’s shoulder.
Thornfield hasn’t filled in the second column—the killers’ identities—but the third and fourth columns: the weapons and methods of torture or killing, and the dump sites.
Albert Norris flamethrower
Pooky Wilson flamethrower Bone Tree
Joe Louis Lewis flayed Bone Tree
Jimmy Revels shot Bone Tree
Luther Davis shot, drowned Jericho Hole
Viola Turner overdose Home
Glenn Morehouse overdose Home
“You haven’t filled in the killers’ column,” Kaiser points out. “I get you leaving the dump site blank for Norris, because he died in the hospital. But if you want lifetime protection for your family, you’ve got to give me every name of the killers.”
Sonny looks up like a reluctant child. Then, slowly, he tears off a new sheet of paper, writes about twenty names on it—many of them repetitions—and asks Kaiser to cut them into rectangles. Once Kaiser has complied, Sonny slides most of the new squares onto the paper. After he’s finished, Kaiser stands so still that I’m sure he’s stopped breathing. The first two columns of the puzzle now read:
Albert Norris Frank
Royal
Snake
Glenn
Pooky Wilson Frank
Snake
Royal
Joe Louis Lewis Frank
Snake
Glenn
Jimmy Revels Snake
Glenn
Forrest
Royal
Luther Davis Snake
Viola Turner
Glenn Morehouse Royal
Snake
Forrest
As I stare at the gridded page, I note that our prisoner has not only omitted his own name from every murder, he’s listed no killers beside Viola Turner’s name. Before I can comment on this, he lifts the makeshift puzzle and shakes it in the air, creating a snowstorm of paper. While the rectangles flutter to the floor, he puts his head down on his desk like a schoolboy.
I give Kaiser an angry, questioning look.
“All right, Sonny,” he says, “we’ve got two problems. First, if you’re not willing to implicate yourself, this is worthless. You’ll be given immunity, but you have to tell the whole truth. And second, we need to know who killed Viola.”