A little overwhelmed by Kaiser’s revelations, I walk over to the door to the interrogation room and lay my ear against its face. Walker Dennis’s sonorous voice passes through the wood in a muted drone. Caitlin must be bursting to get out of there.
I turn back to Kaiser. “How the hell could you hold all this back? This morning you acted like you didn’t know shit about Forrest Knox.”
“I tried to tell you Brody Royal wasn’t the real power behind all this. Just three hours ago, outside the hospital, after the sniper tried to get Henry, I told you Forrest was the real enemy. But then I got called away, and you took your chance to bug out. You didn’t want to hear it.”
He’s right, of course, but that’s not what bothers me. “But how long have you known this?”
Kaiser rubs his stubbled cheek, his eyes distant. “Look, if I told you what I really believe about this situation, you’d think I’m out of my mind.”
Given that Walker Dennis and I intend to declare war on the Knox family tomorrow morning, any intelligence I can gather in the meantime could be critical. “We’re already in the twilight zone. Cough it up.”
Kaiser clucks his tongue softly, then gets up and begins pacing the hall with me. “There’s a synchronicity to Forrest turning up in this Double Eagle mess that feels like fate, like it was supposed to happen. I feel like I’ve been brought to this place—after years of chasing ghosts—specifically to oppose and destroy him.”
“I didn’t figure you for a Jungian.”
The FBI agent smiles strangely. “Hey, I’m a child of the sixties. Seriously, though, this is the third time Forrest and I have grazed past each other, in historical terms. He doesn’t even know about the first time.”
“When was that?”
“Vietnam. In 1970 I was stuck on a hill on the northern rim of the A Shau Valley, a hellhole called FSB Ripcord.”
“FSB?”
“Fire Support Base. Ripcord was one of the last major engagements of the war. A twenty-one-day siege. I was 101St Airborne. We took beaucoup casualties during that particular nightmare. You don’t hear much about Ripcord, because in the end we sneaked out and let the B-52s carpet-bomb the place into oblivion, but we lost that battle.”
“Forrest Knox was there?”
“I didn’t know it then, but he was. He was a Lurp.”
“A what?”
“A Lurp. That’s the phonetic version of an acronym—L-R-R-P: Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol. The Lurps were precursors of the modern-day Delta operators. They weren’t at Ripcord the whole time I was, and they had technically been folded into the Seventy-Fifth Rangers by then, but they were still Lurps in every way that counted. And Forrest’s army record puts him there during the first phase of the battle. I must have seen him several times—all the time, really—but the Lurps kept to themselves. They were truly elite soldiers, and a few were stone killers. As a unit, the Lurps had a four-hundred-to-one kill ratio.”
“Jesus.”
“Like I said, you don’t fuck with a guy with that résumé. But it’s weird, isn’t it? I was from Idaho, Knox was from Louisiana, yet fate kept putting us in the same place.”
“When was the second time you ‘grazed past’ him?”
“Hurricane Katrina. While I was out in the field trying to hold the city together for the Bureau, Forrest was theoretically doing the same thing for the state police. But as the situation deteriorated, I started getting reports of crazy shit going on in the wee hours. Vigilante stuff. Scores being settled, prisoners disappearing, sniping . . . Lurp-type stuff, only directed against certain elements of the U.S. population. Black drug dealers, mainly.”
“I thought those stories were bullshit.”
“Most were, but not all. Between the time the levees broke on Monday and Saturday afternoon when General Honoré got his troops into the city, things literally went to hell. The NOPD virtually ceased to function, and civil unrest was rampant. You saw the daylight stuff on TV. At night it was worse. Bands of predators roamed the streets, preying on desperate people, using the sound of emergency generators to locate victims. Quite a few young black men turned up dead during that time, from head or heart shots, and most got written off as flood deaths or unexplained homicides.”
“Forrest was involved with that?”
Kaiser shrugs. “A couple of sources have told me he had a private SWAT crew down there, operating off the reservation. At the time, I assumed that if it was true, it was cowboy law enforcement. After all, Forrest was the son of an infamous Klansman. I figured he and some racist buddies took their chance to declare open season on black drug dealers. But after talking to Henry, I think those killings were business.”
“Christ, John.”
“The thing is, Forrest has gone to great lengths to appear above reproach. He has quite a few fans in state government. There’s even talk of making him the next superintendent of state police.”
This seems beyond belief. “Will you try to stop that?”
“A week ago, I’d have said I couldn’t. Tonight . . . things have changed a bit. Depending on how far he and Ozan stick their dicks out to protect the Knox family, I might just be able to rip Forrest’s mask off.”
I stop walking and take hold of his arm. “You’ve held back a hell of a lot more than I have.”
“Have I?” The FBI agent looks skeptical. “I could tell you some mind-blowing pathology about the Knox family. History that explains the mutilations and trophy taking—”
“Screw telling me stuff! Why haven’t you done anything about it?”
Kaiser seems surprised by my anger. “I’m doing something now. But it takes time to build a case against cops—especially one as powerful as Forrest.”