When the connection dies, a smothering solitude closes around me. In five minutes I’ll be sitting in a room watching six yellow-dog Democrats and six Fox News–addicted Republicans argue about the prospect of rebuilding the second-largest slave market in America. This notion is almost unbearable, yet I must bear it, for I set the process in motion. The best thing I can do now is make use of my last minutes of freedom.

While I can’t prove or disprove Lincoln’s paternity on my own, I can try to find out whether he was in Natchez at the time of his mother’s death. Chief Logan has access to all kinds of digital records, and what he can’t find out, John Kaiser can. As my Audi skids onto Highway 61, I call up Chief Logan on my cell phone.

“How’d it go at CC’s?” he asks by way of greeting. “You’re still breathing, obviously. Is Turner?”

“You sound nervous, Don.”

“You could say that.”

“Billy Byrd paid us a visit, and he almost got stomped for his trouble. Everything’s cool now, but I need another favor.”

“Your wish is my command,” he says sourly.

CHAPTER 74

CAITLIN PUT DOWN her office telephone and sat motionless, save for her finger rubbing her upper lip. Penn had just called her with a new theory of Viola Turner’s murder, this one generated by a face-to-face meeting with Lincoln Turner. She’d been so shocked to learn that Penn had met with Lincoln that she’d had difficulty concentrating on what he was saying. But after a couple of minutes, she got it. While the logic of the theory made sense, she disagreed with the assumption upon which the whole concept rested: that Tom was Lincoln Turner’s father. She’d begun offering objections, but Penn hadn’t wanted to hear them. He was late for a joint meeting that he claimed he couldn’t afford to miss. Caitlin had hung up with a sour taste in her mouth and resentment in her heart.

Turning away from the phone, she picked up one of Henry Sexton’s old Moleskines and thought over all she had read in the past hour. Getting these notebooks was like being given the key to a hidden library, one in which the secret histories of Natchez and Concordia Parish had been recorded by a monk working in fanatical solitude. They weren’t merely a record of Henry’s work, but quasi-journalistic diaries containing sketches, theories, meditations on life, guitar tablature, even snatches of poetry and song lyrics. And out of all the tales Henry had so meticulously documented, one shone like a beacon: the reporter’s personal stake in the solution of the crimes he sought to solve.