A fearful ache went through him as he thought of his impending arrest. He had already laid out his clothes on a chair, in case the sheriff came early. Peggy had helped, never once questioning him about anything deeper than his choice of shirt and tie. Rebuffing Penn all day had been more difficult than dealing with his wife. It was a tempting proposition to simply put himself in his son’s hands. Penn had the legal talent and experience to do as good a job as anyone alive defending him. But to do that, Penn would need the truth, and Tom was not prepared to burden him with that. Not yet. He might never be.

For now, Walt Garrity would be his ally. The old Texas Ranger wasn’t a lawyer, but he had other talents. More to the point, Walt had shared horrific trials with Tom. Together they had endured things that young men should never be asked to witness, much less take part in, and they had survived them together. They had literally saved each other’s lives. If Tom was going to be confined in jail, he couldn’t ask for a better second pair of eyes and ears than those of Walt Garrity. At least that had been the reasoning that prompted his earlier call to Walt.

Yet tonight Penn had unknowingly brought Tom a glimmer of hope. For the death of Glenn Morehouse offered Tom a chance he hadn’t dared hope for: a chance at true deliverance. As Peggy snored beside him, Tom pondered the Greek and Hebrew legends of the scapegoat. Pharmakos to the Greeks, Azazel to the Hebrews. A shameful human practice, he’d always thought, one born from guilt and superstition. But most human behavior had grown out of necessity, and he now understood the empirical value of the rituals for which he had felt only contempt before.

He thought about Morehouse, the hypertensive battery assembler who’d committed unspeakable atrocities as a young man. Like so many guilty souls, Morehouse had desperately sought redemption through confession before the end. Had cancer claimed him? Or had his fellow Eagles finally stepped out of the shadows to stop his mouth forever, before he could unburden his conscience? Tom didn’t care one way or the other. All he knew for sure was that if he walked down the path that had opened to him now, Viola would surely forgive him.

CHAPTER 32

“MR. ROYAL, SNAKE Knox is at the gate.”

Brody Royal looked up from a set of aerial photos he’d commissioned of the flooded Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. “I’ll see him, Hargrove.”

“Yes, sir.”