AFTER LEAVING Leroy’s place in Maryland Knox did not drive home. One question had been bothering him so badly that he had to have an answer. He headed not for Langley, but for a nondescript building in the heart of Washington. He’d called ahead and was admitted without issue, what with his military background and government credentials.

He entered a vast room filled with long, scarred tables where gray-haired men, probably grizzled vets of past wars, along with some bow-tied historians, sat reading through piles of yellowed documents. It was windowless and seemed nearly airless as well. As Knox looked around, the one emotion he sensed was misery. This place contained the recorded and too brief lives and violent deaths of far more people than one would ever want to think about.

The main collection center for U.S. Army records was in St. Louis. Unless you were next of kin, to get access to an enlisted person’s complete service record there required either that person’s permission or a court order. However, Knox had learned something unknown to most people: The St. Louis facility didn’t have all the records. There were some in D.C.—and, indeed, copies of some of the ones housed in St. Louis. And they weren’t simply records of enlisted personnel. Here were housed documents chronicling America’s wars. That was why many historians came here to do research, many with FOIA requests in hand, since the military only reluctantly revealed anything about itself.

Many of the records he wanted to look at had not been computerized yet, but some had. Still, after Knox showed his creds, the attendant was able to pull the boxes he wanted very quickly and showed him how to access the computerized files. His butt parked in front of a PC, Knox started with the digital ones first, flicking from screen to screen. He had a hunch and he wanted to see if it was true. What had been bugging him was why Macklin Hayes would want to get to John Carr so badly. If Carr had killed Simpson and Gray, he was now on the run. He was not going to hold a press conference and start blabbing about secrets from the past. Knox could understand Hayes wanting him to nail Carr before the police did. If the cops caught up to Carr he might start talking in exchange for a deal. But Hayes had also said that the cops had been put on a short leash on this investigation, giving Knox, in essence, a clear field in which to operate. And even if the police somehow got to Carr first, the CIA could, like Hayes had said, just swoop in and take him away under cover of national security interests. Carr would never even reach a press conference or make a phone call to his lawyer.