Henry slid the original photo of the four men in the stern of the fishing boat out of the envelope. He’d studied this image for countless hours, and he’d gleaned a lot from it. What most struck him was how profoundly Brody Royal dominated the group. Dr. Cage and Claude Devereux were highly intelligent men, even brilliant, while Presley possessed animal cleverness. Yet Royal’s eyes held an awareness of the other men, and of the camera, that the others’ eyes did not. And while Ray Presley was feared by all who knew him (and was known to be a killer), it was Royal who exuded the aura of a predator. The hawklike face with its gray eyes and proud beak of a nose made a statement, but there was more to his charisma than this. An invisible field seemed to surround the older man, creating a buffer zone that the others would not enter. This deference might have been due to Royal’s wealth, of course, but on balance Henry didn’t assign much weight to that. It was more that in any group of men, a natural hierarchy always established itself, and in this one—despite the presence of some very strong personalities—Brody Royal sat atop the ziggurat.

Henry slid the photo aside and rubbed his forehead. He’d revealed far more to Penn tonight than he’d originally intended, but he hadn’t told him everything. The rifle scope photo was one omission. Another was the story of Brody Royal’s daughter, Katy, the girl who’d triggered the deaths of Pooky Wilson and Albert Norris, by inviting Pooky to cross a line that meant death to him but not to her. Not to imply that the girl didn’t suffer, Henry thought. Because she had—terribly. After Pooky vanished, Katy Royal had gone a little crazy, by all reports, so crazy that her father had forcibly committed her to a private sanitarium in Texas. The Borgen Institute no longer existed, but after dozens of phone calls, Henry had managed to track down a nurse who’d worked there during the sixties and seventies.

He soon learned that electroshock therapy had been a staple of treatment for Dr. Wilhelm Borgen, who’d founded the hospital. Five minutes’ research told Henry that “electroshock therapy” could mean a lot of different things, so he’d called the nurse back with specific questions. All her answers were discouraging. By the 1960s ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, had begun to move away from the bilateral sine-wave method that caused so many terrible side effects, but when Katy Royal resided at the Borgen Institute, they had yet to embrace any of those advances. And while informed consent was today a prerequisite of ECT, at the Borgen Institute prior to 1971, patients were routinely administered electroshock therapy against their will. The side effects of such treatment ran the gamut from broken bones to long-term cognitive degradation and even amnesia.