Caitlin turns back to me and squeezes my arm, her eyes imploring. “But Henry had years to digest this stuff. He had it all in his head. I’m starting from zero! If I had his rough draft of the story, maybe I could pull this off. But that was destroyed in the fire last night.”

“I’m sorry. But you have a handpicked staff, most of them way overqualified. If you push your deadline till two or three A.M., you’ve got plenty of time to put a great story together. Caitlin … all you have to do is make the Eagles believe the FBI already has everything you do, even if they don’t. I’ll be glad to help you sift through Henry’s stuff—but I have to track down Dad first.”

“I don’t need your help,” she says sharply. “And I sure can’t wait for you to track Tom down. You don’t even know where to start looking.”

“I suspect Quentin might know where he is.”

“I’d start with your mother, if I were you.”

“She already lied to me about Dad once.”

“Well, you can’t blame her for that. What woman wouldn’t lie to protect her husband?”

“To her own son?”

Caitlin squeezes her knees in frustration. “We’re getting off subject. I just don’t like the way this thing has gone down. I’m still not sure you’re telling me everything.”

“Are you telling me everything you know?”

She blows out a rush of air, then says something unintelligible under her breath.

“Look!” I cry, pointing over the steering wheel as we come to a hard left turn on the levee. “What is that?”

Two hundred yards north of our car—and twenty feet below it—I see two huge tractor trailers with massive blue and white machines like blocky Transformers mounted behind them. Four black SUVs surround the trucks, and even from this distance, I hear a low, powerful rumble through my window glass. Some sort of workboat lies anchored about thirty yards out in the Jericho Hole.

“What the hell’s going on over there?” Caitlin asks.

“I have no idea. I figured we’d find an SUV filled with sonar equipment and a couple of FBI divers.”

A deeply rutted dirt road leads from the levee down to the Jericho Hole, and I’ve taken great care not to bottom out or get high-centered on it. Caitlin’s impatience is tangible in the car. The Jericho Hole is surrounded by trees except in a few places, but with the branches bare, you can clearly see the great loess bluff of Mississippi a mile across the river. As we draw nearer the semi trucks, I see Kirk Boisseau’s Nissan Titan parked at the water’s edge.

“How the hell did they find Kirk?” I wonder aloud.

“Look!” says Caitlin, pointing to her right. “That’s Jordan Glass.”