“Just one more minute. Tell me about the rifles. What kind of guns were they?”
I close my eyes and think back to the awful few seconds between Royal and Regan pushing us toward the indoor firing range and Caitlin going after Royal with the straight razor. “Hunting rifles,” I say softly.
“Not military?”
“No. Wooden stocks, hunting scopes.”
“What make?”
“I don’t know. My father’s the gun expert, not me. The rifle on the bottom might have been a Winchester. Yeah . . . and the top one was bolt-action.”
“Do you remember which rifle was dated for which assassination?”
“The bolt-action was Dallas. The Winchester-style gun was April fourth. Memphis.”
“That’s good detail for a quick glimpse. I guess former prosecutors make good witnesses. We’ll have to see what comes out of the ashes after the wreckage of Royal’s house cools.”
“Good luck with that.” I reach for the door handle. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Hold up,” Kaiser says, betraying some tension. “We’re not quite done.”
“Damn it, John. Yes, we are. I’m exhausted.”
“You didn’t think the story about the founding of the Double Eagles was relevant to all this? To the rifles, even?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The sandbar south of Natchez? Nineteen sixty-four? Henry didn’t tell you that story?”
I think back to the long conversation in Henry’s “war room,” but nothing rings a bell. “I don’t think so.”
Kaiser purses his lips like he’s surprised. “Frank Knox founded the Double Eagles on a sandbar south of the International Paper Company in the summer of ’64, five days after the FBI found the three civil rights workers in that dam in Neshoba County. That’s the first day Frank handed out the Double Eagle gold pieces.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of that.”
“Snake Knox was there, and Sonny Thornfield, and Glenn Morehouse. They were having a family campout and practicing with plastic explosives. Just good ol’ all-American fun.”
“Okay. So?”
“On that day, Frank told the others they were splitting off from the Ku Klux Klan. Then he drew three K’s in the sand.” Kaiser takes a small notepad from his coat and draws three capital K’s as the points of a triangle. “Morehouse and Thornfield were confused until Frank took out a magazine photo of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Junior, standing with President Johnson in the White House Rose Garden.”
“Go on.”
“Frank had drawn red circles around the heads of Kennedy and King.”
“Shit, that doesn’t mean anything.”
“You don’t think so? When Sonny and Morehouse still didn’t get it, Frank drew more letters in the sand—two before each K.”
As I watch, Kaiser adds letters to his notepad. Now the points of his triangle read:
JFK
MLK RFK
To my surprise, the sight of these letters starts a low buzzing in my head. “But it’s what Frank said,” Kaiser goes on, “that makes me take all this seriously. He scratched an X through the JFK with a barbecue fork and said, ‘One down, two to go.’”
A wave of sweat breaks through my skin inside my coat. “Henry didn’t tell me anything about that.”
“I guess he was too busy telling you other things.”
I don’t bite on this bait, but Kaiser’s probably right. Since the founding of the Double Eagles had nothing to do with my father, Henry didn’t waste time telling me about it. I’ll bet he didn’t tell me half of what he knew that night. He’d been working for twenty years on those cases. Thirty, maybe.
“John, are you seriously working the JFK assassination?”
This time, when Kaiser’s eyes meet mine, it’s as if I’m truly seeing the man for the first time. The intensity in his gaze is not that of a fanatic, but of a soldier committed to his cause. “Like I said, I’m helping Dwight and his buddies. But you still don’t understand. We know who ordered John Kennedy’s murder. We’ve been certain for more than two years. We just haven’t been able to prove who fired the kill shot.”
Now we’ve come full circle, back to cuckooland. “That’s great, John. But I’ve got no time for conspiracy theories.”
I reach for the door handle again, but Kaiser catches hold of my arm. “Yes, you do. Because your father knows the same thing we do. He’s known it for forty-two years.”
Kaiser’s words don’t quite seem real. “If you believe that, you don’t know my father at all.”
He concedes this with a small nod. “Are you sure you do?”
This freezes me in my seat. I want to argue, yet everything that’s happened over the past three days has happened because my father has refused to speak about the past—a past that it’s becoming increasingly clear is very different from the one I believed in only days ago.
“Penn, your father’s being hunted for killing a state trooper. I need very much to talk to him. And ultimately, his only chance to survive is to turn himself in to me.”
My heart leaps at this new tack. “Are you saying you’ll take him into protective custody?”
“I don’t know yet. I was trying to set it up with the director, but after all the deaths tonight, it’ll be a hard sell. However—if Dr. Cage can link the Double Eagles to the Kennedy or King assassinations, I will make the case and spirit him out of harm’s way before the Louisiana State Police even know what happened.”
Why does Kennedy’s death mean more than all the civil rights martyrs put together? “What about Dad’s fishing boat story? The Frenchman talking about Dallas? Is that enough?”
“Too thin. We need more.”
“I’ve got a photograph taken on that trip. Henry gave it to me. It shows Dad, Presley, Royal, and Devereux in the stern of the boat.”
Kaiser’s eyes widen. “Is the Frenchman in the shot?”
I shake my head.
“Damn. Where is this picture?”