“You need to tell it, man. Let go of this thing. That’s why you brought me here.”

The old man clung to his silence like a shield.

“Viola wouldn’t admit the rape to me,” Henry said softly, “but I saw the pain in her eyes. You took a turn, didn’t you?”

Morehouse’s face had gone bone white, and his eyes looked wild.

Henry forced down his disgust and laid a hand on the old man’s arm, hoping to appeal to his Baptist fundamentalism. “It’s God’s judgment you need to worry about, not Snake Knox. God already knows what you did. He wants to hear you own up to what you did, Glenn. That’s what matters to Him.”

Morehouse jerked his arm away and pulled the crocheted comforter over the lower half of his face. Only his eyes and nose showed, like those of a terrified child after a nightmare. To imagine this pathetic shell of a man brutalizing a proud young woman like Viola Turner sickened Henry; yet he knew now that it had happened.

“You just do what I asked you to do,” Morehouse said through the crocheted yarn. “Tell Nurse Viola I never meant her no harm, and tell her to get back to Chicago. Quick. I’ll pay her airfare if she needs it. She don’t deserve what Snake and the others will do to her.”

Present tense again. “I’m afraid I can’t do that for you, Glenn.”

“Why not?”

All Henry’s senses kicked wide open, preparing to read the old man’s reaction. “Because Viola’s dead. Somebody killed her this morning.”

The shock in the old man’s eyes was so profound that Henry acquitted him of murder on the spot. Morehouse worked his jaw, trying to gum up some spit, but he couldn’t seem to do it. The implications of his ignorance spun out in Henry’s mind. If the Eagles had fulfilled their threat against Viola—and kept Morehouse out of it—then that meant they no longer trusted him. Had the old man realized this yet? Was he gauging the odds of his survival even now? Henry didn’t think so. Casting his gaze desperately about the room, Morehouse looked like a man with a terrible sin lashed to his back, one that Viola’s death had cursed him to carry into the afterlife.

Henry gently shook his arm. “The Eagles killed Jimmy and Luther back in sixty-eight, didn’t they?”

Morehouse nodded like a man struck dumb.

Triumph surged through Henry’s chest. He’d toiled for more than a decade to prove this. “Where are their bodies, Glenn? Tell me, man. For the sake of the families.”