Morehouse’s eyes went cold. “Strap, my ass. We used two-by-fours with nails hammered through ’em. When it was over, you could see Earl’s teeth through the back of his skull.” A look of pain entered the old man’s face. “Frank had no mercy on informants. Which is what I am now, I reckon.”

Henry felt a strange numbness creeping through him, as though he’d been bitten by some venomous creature. He’d thought he’d been prepared for this interview, but he was wrong. Morehouse had just confessed to first-degree murder, yet the detachment with which he spoke of human butchery was beyond Henry’s experience. The men who’d debriefed Death’s-Head SS men after World War II must have felt a similar horror.

Morehouse gave him a disturbingly direct look. “And Earl wasn’t even an Eagle, you know? I need to know whether you can keep a secret, Henry, like you promised. At least until I’m gone. Frank always said, ‘A man’s biggest enemy is his mouth.’ And God knows he was right.”

“I can keep a secret.”

“Well, get on with it, then.”

Henry consulted the notes he’d made prior to the interview. “I know the Double Eagle group was founded by Frank Knox. Twenty men, organized into wrecking crews. I’m curious about Frank Knox’s younger brother, the one they call Snake. He seems to have been the most violent of all the Eagles, and he’s made some pretty fantastic claims in the past three years. About Martin Luther King’s assassination, for example.”

Morehouse bit his lower lip, and his pale face lost some color. “We won’t be talking about Snake Knox today. Move on.”

Henry didn’t like this, but he decided to go with the flow and return to Snake later. “As best I can tell, the Eagles killed between eleven and fifteen people over the years.”

“I don’t honestly know. I know about my squad, plus some of the bigger operations by the others.”

“Who did your squad kill?” Henry asked in a neutral voice.

Morehouse closed his eyes and breathed in and out several times. “The first hit I was in charge of was an FBI informant who worked with us at Triton Battery.”

Henry felt the thrill he’d felt as a boy in a freezing duck blind when the first mallards came in over the tree line. “Are you talking about Jerry Dugan?”

Morehouse’s left cheek twitched. “That’s right. Dropped him in a tank of sulfuric acid. The foreman wrote ‘accidental fall’ on the incident report, but that guardrail was four feet high. Jerry needed a little help getting over it.”