It took twenty days for the VK motorcycle club to hit back in revenge for Tim and me killing their members, and what they did was something I had not imagined in my most horrific nightmares. What they did proved John Kaiser’s classification of the Double Eagle group as a domestic terror organization completely justified. What they did was obscene.

And it happened only yards from my front door.

I spent the twenty days between those two violent episodes doing what my father asked me to do—visiting Double Eagles, their wives, their children, and where possible their ex-wives and known associates—and I hated every minute of it. Of course I told myself I was picking up the torch Caitlin had dropped, not fulfilling the charge that my father had laid upon me at the federal prison. But whatever I was really doing, it didn’t work.

Nearly everywhere I went, I was walking in the footsteps of John Kaiser’s FBI agents, and not one of them had gleaned even a seed of valuable information from those sources. This was probably because all those agents had been walking in the footsteps of Henry Sexton, and Henry had died in a ball of fire in Brody Royal’s basement. Everyone I visited knew that. They knew, too, about Glenn Morehouse and Sonny Thornfield. And Silas Groom. And every person I talked to had fully absorbed the object lesson: if you go against Snake Knox’s Double Eagle group, you die.

My quest through Concordia Parish and the outlying neighborhoods of Adams County was like a journey through my distant childhood. I’d played Dixie Youth baseball with kids from those neighborhoods: freckle-faced, pale-skinned, buck-toothed, bruised-and-scabbed-over kids who could have sprung fully formed from a Norman Rockwell painting. Most had lived the first decade of their lives with big grins; too many had lived the remainder with a confused scowl and a diminishing sense of control over their futures.

Those kids were in their midforties now, and I hardly got a sympathetic echo at a single house. Children of Double Eagle members had picked up the code of silence by osmosis, and they observed it faithfully. Suspicion was the order of the day. A couple threatened me, but most were simply uncomfortable or resentful—uncertain how to behave when torn between the southern compulsion to be hospitable and the instinct to push away all inquiry about their families. I took someone along on every visit, even to see the women. Usually Tim Weathers, but sometimes Kirk Boisseau. Kirk didn’t have the training the Vulcan guys did, but my old school buddy had an asset they did not—intimate knowledge of the local population. As a former marine working in the landscaping business, Kirk had become familiar with this segment of society that I hardly knew anymore, if I ever really had.