“You know Randall wasn’t no real husband to Brody’s daughter. He’s a watchdog, bought and paid for. He married her less than a year after Pooky Wilson disappeared, after she got back from the sanitarium in Texas. Randall’s job was to look after Katy, but he also ran the crooked side of Royal Insurance. About three years back, Randall and Brody were working a sweet deal to rig a state contract—the same kind of deal Governor Edwards went to jail for. The only problem was, Randall was dicking two gals who worked in the office. One was an accountant, married with kids—the other a divorced secretary with a kid. After a while, these two gals figured out Randall was screwing ’em both. So the accountant decided they’d not only get even with him, but get rich doing it. She called some federal whistle-blower line, something the government set up after the Enron mess. You get huge rewards for ratting out corrupt companies now. So, the feds met these gals, but instead of busting Royal Insurance outright, they left the gals in place and ordered them to steal computer files and such. They even wired them up some days, trying to record conversations.”

“Go on,” Henry said, wishing to God he could tape the cell conversation.

“Around this time, Forrest Knox got wind that Ed Schott was being investigated on the sly.”

“Frank Knox’s son?”

“That’s right. Forrest is a CIB officer in the state police. So Forrest looks into it, finds out about the girls, and passes the word to Brody.”

“Oh, God. What did Brody do?”

Morehouse took several wheezing breaths. “One day those gals left work for lunch and didn’t come back. Snake and Sonny hogtied ’em, hustled ’em into a Cessna, and flew ’em down to a hunting camp in South Louisiana, close to where Frank used to train Cubans in sixty-one. Brody and Randall were waiting. Claude Devereux was down there, too, for the legal end of things. Those gals started screaming and sobbing the second they saw Randall and the old man, because they thought they knew what was coming. But they didn’t have a clue, son.”

Henry felt his stomach clench, but he had to know. “What happened?”