Klay knew if he didn’t access genuine grief he would lose Eady. He forced himself to remember his mother’s casket lying above its grave. He recalled his grandfather standing beside him and his brother, Sean. His father standing alone. It was the only time he would ever see his father cry. Sadness sparked on the flint, then caught. Klay wiped a tear from his eye. “You spoke to him?”

Klay wanted to take Eady’s throat in his hands.

“I did. Just before the attack, I expect,” Eady replied. “He was happy, excited. He said you found something . . . ?”

“I did. Did he tell you?”

“I didn’t want him to use the unsecure line. I told him to have you call me back . . .”

Eady waited, but Klay did not respond. “He told me he was doing good work, Tom. That’s what each of us hopes for in the end, isn’t it? To say, ‘I did a good job with the time God gave me.’”

Klay watched the undertaker hand each of Tenchant’s mourners a carnation. One by one they stepped forward and laid a flower on Tenchant’s casket.

“Come see me. My apartment,” Eady said. “We’ll talk.”

Klay shook his head no.

“We need to talk, Tom.”

“Don’t be eager, but don’t play too hard to get,” Barrow had counseled.

“I don’t want to see anyone, Vance.”

“Come out to the farm then. Ruth is visiting her sister. We’ll catch a trout for supper. Just the two of us. I have something, Tom. Something you need to see.”

“Did you know?” Klay said.

“Did I know?”

Don’t tell him you suspect anything. Too risky.

“Barrow didn’t send me to help Hungry. He sent me to discredit her.”

Eady lowered his umbrella. His eyes narrowed. Raindrops hurried along his face and dripped off his chin. “Why on earth would he do that?”

Klay wiped the rain from his own face. “Barrow’s got something going with Terry Krieger.”

Eady was fully alert now. “Barrow does?”

Klay nodded. “He’s got to be stopped.”

A DEATH IN CAMELOT

Fauquier County, Virginia

Klay drove his Land Cruiser west toward Eady’s Virginia horse farm. The Toyota was more than thirty years old with two hundred thousand miles on it, but it was in good condition. He took the Warrenton exit and headed south on 29, then west again, horse farms of Virginia’s wealthy galloping up beside him. He wound his way through the narrowing country roads, wondering as he always did if he’d missed his turn, when a white three-board fence appeared, the Eadys’ front pasture.

Klay’s most recent visit had been Fourth of July. Eady and his guests had shot skeet from the back hill. Vance, not surprisingly, an excellent shot.