Billy stayed on his feet and watched them go. He hoped to hell Brody Royal wasn’t under the delusion that he was free to whack people on his own anymore. That era had come and gone, only some men refused to see it. And the more power they had, the longer it seemed to take them. When the main door banged shut, Billy sat down and pulled up the Web page of Jimmy Buffett’s agent. But his mind was no longer on his birthday party. It was on Viola Turner, and all the men who might have had a motive to kill her.

CHAPTER 14

THOUGH MOST OF the staff had left the Beacon office, Henry had stayed at his desk, working patiently at his computer. The Morehouse interview had forced him to rethink his entire view of the Double Eagle cases, and also to rejigger his priorities. The old Klansman had confessed to or described at least ten murders, and he’d hinted at others, but one confession had left Henry in a dilemma. He needed to inform the FBI that Jerry Dugan, a Bureau informant, had been murdered at Triton Battery in 1964. But doing so would instantly create problems. The Bureau would want to know Henry’s source, and that he could not reveal. Also, he usually published new information within a day of talking to the FBI, yet he’d promised Morehouse that he wouldn’t publish anything until death took him. Who could predict when that would occur? Morehouse appeared to be at death’s door, yet Henry had known many cancer patients to far outlive even the most optimistic prognoses.

Then there was the question of missing corpses. Of the dozen-odd murders Henry was investigating, four involved missing men, and without a corpus delicti, a murder case was stillborn, almost without exception. He’d never doubted that Pooky Wilson, Joe Louis Lewis, Jimmy Revels, and Luther Davis were dead, and today Morehouse had confirmed his instincts (with the exception of Lewis, whom Henry had forgotten to ask about before time ran out). Yet Henry still had no clue to the location of the bodies. The Jericho Hole and the Bone Tree had always been rumored dump sites, yet Morehouse had discounted both. Dragging the Jericho Hole was beyond Henry’s resources, and while he had a fresh lead on the Bone Tree, finding this near-mythical totem had eluded everyone who’d tried it since the 1960s.