“I wish I didn’t have to. Even though most of the FBI’s attention was on Neshoba County, searching for the missing civil rights workers, the Bureau started working the Norris case. But on August fourth, the Neshoba bodies were discovered in that dam. All the FBI’s focus shifted north. Five days later, Frank Knox formed the Double Eagle group on a sandbar south of the Triton Battery plant. Within a year, the fledgling Eagles had murdered several people, among them an FBI Klan informant named Jerry Dugan—something no one ever confirmed was murder until today. Your father was the company doctor for Triton, and he signed Dugan’s death certificate.”

“That sounds like pure chance. Nothing you’ve said ties Dad to the Norris case.”

“Just wait. Let’s jump ahead five years. On November first, 1969, Leland Robb climbed into the airplane you saw in that photo to travel to Arkansas for a fishing trip. At least that was the story put out afterward. With him were a charter pilot and two young ladies of what used to be called easy moral disposition.”

“Hookers?”

“No. Sorority girls who liked to party. Sisters from Tennessee. Twenty-one and twenty-seven. Dr. Robb was forty-two and married. He could fly, but he liked to drink on his fishing trips, so he hired a local charter pilot. According to the sole witness, shortly after takeoff in heavy fog, Dr. Robb’s plane unexpectedly returned to land and collided with a second plane that was attempting to take off from the same strip. Everyone on board Robb’s plane perished. But the pilot of the other plane, a crop duster, walked away without injury. Do you know who that pilot was?”

I shrug my shoulders. “No idea.”

“Snake Knox, Frank’s brother.”

“No.”

“Yes. He’d taken over leadership of the Double Eagles on the day of his brother’s death.”

While I ponder this, Henry says, “Do you know where Frank Knox died?”

“No.”

“In the surgery room of your father’s office.”

“What?”

“Industrial accident. A pallet of batteries fell on him in the spring of sixty-eight. But that’s part of the Revels-Davis case. Let’s stick to the crash for now.”

Henry’s revelations have left me speechless. This is the kind of thing you can never put into a novel, because it stretches credibility too far. Yet history is filled with such unbelievable coincidences. “Who was the sole witness to the crash?”

“Snake Knox’s nephew, Forrest. Forrest was Frank Knox’s son, sixteen at the time. Frank had been dead for a year. Forrest’s and Snake’s statements were accepted at face value, and that was the end of Dr. Robb and his friends.”

“I see where you’re going. Before Albert Norris died, he revealed the identities of his killers to Dr. Robb. And you think the Double Eagles murdered Robb to keep him quiet.”