Lincoln says: “I’m gonna enjoy straightening you out—” but I cut him off and say, “We’re on tape, everybody. Let’s say what needs saying.”

Lincoln cuts his eyes at me, but he doesn’t finish his sentence.

“Keep your mouth shut, Junior,” Snake says. Then he looks at me again. “Your father pleaded guilty to killing Viola. That’s the end of it, so far as the law’s concerned.”

“We’re not concerned with the law right now. We’re concerned with the truth. I know when my father walked out of Cora Revels’s house, Viola was alive. Somebody went in and injected her with enough adrenaline to blow up her heart. I think it was you. All I need is a yes or no.”

Snake’s eyes move from me to Lincoln, then back again. Despite the dire straits in which he finds himself, the glint of humor never leaves his eyes. I can almost feel Lincoln’s hunger to snuff out that light.

“So that’s what this is about,” Snake muses. “What do I get, if I tell you? You’re gonna let me walk out of here?”

“No. But I’ll call the FBI.”

“Why haven’t you called them already?”

“He’s stalling,” Lincoln says, glancing at one of the windows.

“No, he’s talking for the tape. He’s making sure that anything he says will be inadmissible in court.”

“So what’s the point in going on?”

I never had much chance of using my tape as evidence. But looking into Snake’s eyes—eyes that watched Jimmy Revels bleed as he cut the navy tattoo from the boy’s arm, that watched Viola scream as Klansman after Klansman climbed on top of her and raped her, that watched Glenn Morehouse and Sonny Thornfield and countless others choke out their last breath—I realize that I am truly not concerned with the law. All I want is the certainty that only Snake can give me—that he, and not my father, murdered Viola Turner.

“You were in Viola’s sickroom that night,” I say softly. “Tell me what happened.”

“I was there, all right,” Snake says, and I feel Lincoln go absolutely still beside me. “But I don’t think you want to know what happened.”

“Are you talking to me or him?” I ask.

“Both. But you more than him, Cage. You think you want the truth, but you don’t. It’s like Jack Nicholson says in that movie. You can’t handle the truth. My daddy was a preacher, did you know that?”

“You know I do.”

“He used to quote scripture all the time. You know what scripture says about the truth?”

“What?”