TOM AND WALT sat in the rear cabin of Walt’s RV, drinking chicory coffee and waiting for Sonny Thornfield and Snake Knox to leave their hunting camp in Lusahatcha County. It was tight quarters inside the Roadtrek, which was more a customized van than a conventional RV. Fitted out in Canada, its high-tech interior held a gas cooktop, a microwave oven, a marine toilet, a pullout shower with hot-water heater, a refrigerator, a flat-screen TV, and beds enough to sleep four, if you folded down the two captain’s chairs. Later Walt would stow the table and convert the U-shaped couch on which they sat into a six-foot-long bed, but for now they hunched over the table as they’d once hunched over campfires in the snow of Korea.

Walt had parked in a KOA campground near the old entrance to the Natchez Trace, on Highway 61 North. There were about thirty other RVs in the park, so it was a good place to avoid police attention. RV-owning tourists weren’t generally the perpetrators of crimes in the Natchez area, or any other. Every few minutes Walt would walk forward and check the screen that monitored the GPS position of the trackers he’d placed on the Double Eagles’ vehicles. After leaving Knox’s vehicle in a Natchez parking lot, both Snake and Sonny had traveled southward out of town in Thornfield’s pickup. At first Tom had been confused about their destination, but then he recalled Ray Presley telling him about a hunting camp that the Knox family maintained in Lusahatcha County, which they called Fort Knox, predictably. Soon enough, the GPS tracker confirmed his theory.

While waiting for the Eagles to move again, Tom had been telling Walt the story of his relationship with Viola, which the Ranger had known nothing about before tonight. Despite their close bond, the two men had rarely seen each other face-to-face after Korea—probably only seven or eight times in the past fifty years. A chance meeting between Penn and Walt in Houston had rekindled their friendship, but despite some good conversations since that time, Tom had never felt the need to confide what had happened between him and his nurse so long ago. But now he had no choice. If Walt didn’t know enough background, he wouldn’t be able to make good judgments during the present crisis.

Walt remained silent throughout the tale, and had even turned off his police scanner so as not to be distracted from Tom’s soft words. He occasionally raised his eyebrows, as when Viola stood over the dying Frank Knox in Tom’s office. But Walt had seen and heard most everything during his years as a Texas Ranger, and now, nursing his coffee, he prompted Tom for the end of the story.

“Is that when she left town?” he asked. “After Knox was dead and the two of you had talked it out?”