He’d been working to set up a meeting with Toby Rambin, the poacher in Lusahatcha County who claimed to know the location of the Bone Tree. Henry had held back that information from Penn both last night and today. (You couldn’t give a man everything you had right off, even if you did like him.) He’d also made another phone call to Katy Royal Regan, after confirming that her husband was at the Royal Insurance office. This time the courtesy that Katy had shown during Henry’s previous visit was nowhere in evidence. His call had plainly terrified her, and she screamed that he should never contact her again. Her last words still echoed in Henry’s ears: Pooky’s dead! I’m not! What do you expect me to DO? However upset the woman was, her words certainly seemed to confirm that she remembered something about Pooky Wilson.

This tantalizing development had brought Henry more anxiety than satisfaction. Until that call, he’d pretty much convinced himself that the smartest thing to do was run a front-page story on Thursday that would cover his theories about all the murders he’d been working, even if he couldn’t cite all his sources. Once he did that—if he wrote it right—the Double Eagles would stand to gain nothing by hurting him or his loved ones, and the FBI couldn’t accuse him of holding back evidence. Better still, printing a comprehensive story in the Beacon would assuage his guilt about moving over to the Examiner to cover the more recent developments. Mr. Fraser would have the pleasure and pride of publishing the story that would cap Henry’s years of investigation, and Henry felt he owed the man that. But the idea that Katy Royal might remember enough about the events surrounding Albert’s and Pooky’s deaths in 1964 to convict her father and the Double Eagles made Henry reluctant to jump the gun.

“It’s always something,” he muttered. “Damn.”

He stared at his old Compaq computer with dread. Moving boxes of files was easy compared to trying to copy all the data on his hard drive. But he needed it. He had never used a notebook computer, and now he was going to pay the price for being behind the times.

“Dang,” he muttered, realizing he’d left the external hard drive he’d bought at Walmart in the front seat of his Explorer.

He sighed, then got up and walked past the front desk to the door.

“Did you get finished?” Lou Ann Whittington asked from the desk.

“Not even close. I’ve still got to copy my hard drive.”

Lou Ann was only ten years older than Henry, but she smiled like a proud mother. “Well, don’t sound like that. You’re moving up to the big time.”

Henry grinned. “I don’t know about that. I feel pretty guilty about it, actually.”