After two or three minutes of searching, she was ready to give up. But just then, something glinted in the soot. Sweeping her gaze in a semicircle, and seeing no one nearby, she reached down and pulled up what appeared to be a small notebook. She brushed off the soot and saw that it was a Moleskine. The cover looked slightly charred, but inside it, between the cover and the first notebook page, she found two photographs. One showed four men in the stern of a fishing boat. The other showed Henry Sexton’s face. It had obviously been shot from a distance with a telephoto lens. Caitlin blinked and turned the photo toward the taillights of a nearby truck that had been left idling. Then she froze.

Someone had superimposed a rifle scope over Henry’s face.

Sliding that photo aside, she peered at the men in the fishing boat. After a few seconds, her pulse began to race. One of the men in the boat was Tom Cage. Another looked a lot like … Ray Presley. Had Caitlin not spent all day researching the names Penn gave her last night, she wouldn’t have recognized the other two men. But now she placed them as easily as she might have a schoolmate from years ago. The man who appeared to be talking in the photograph was a local attorney, Claude Devereux. The man who looked like Charlton Heston was Brody Royal.

“Jamie!” she called, hurrying to the car and dropping into the passenger seat. “Get this thing in gear!”

“I thought you wanted to search the place.”

“I just did,” she said, slamming her door. “Get us back to the paper.”

WEDNESDAY

CHAPTER 59

CAITLIN ROLLED OVER and shut off her phone alarm, then sat up on the side of the bed. The back of her head pounded dully, probably from too much or too little caffeine. Her body clock had been scrambled over the past two nights. The first edition of today’s Examiner lay on her bedside table, where she’d dropped it three hours ago, after driving home from the office to grab some sleep in her own bed. Atop the paper lay Henry Sexton’s charred Moleskine notebook, and beside that the shocking snapshots she’d discovered inside it. She still couldn’t believe the fishing boat photo. The idea that her future father-in-law had been a friend of Brody Royal during the 1960s seemed impossible. She hoped Henry had improved enough overnight for her to question him about the photos (if she could somehow circumvent his girlfriend). But where Henry’s notebook was concerned, the photos had been only been the tip of the iceberg.