“Let me give you the female perspective. Viola was terminally ill. She’d had a hard life, and Lincoln’s probably wasn’t much better. At some point, somebody probably told him he was someone else’s kid. Maybe the stepfather. Lincoln would have confronted Viola, asked who his real father was. What’s she going to say? Your father was a Klan rapist from Mississippi? The math is the same as a pregnancy by your father, you know. And a black woman impregnated by a Klansman has a lot better reason to keep a boy’s paternity secret than one pregnant by a white physician she loved.” Caitlin shakes her head with conviction. “No, she lied. She blamed a one-night stand, a long-gone boyfriend from Chicago, something. Because if she’d told Lincoln his father was a rich white doctor, Tom would have heard from the boy long before now. But he didn’t.”

Before I can interject anything, she says, “But later—after she got cancer—she was overwhelmed by guilt. She’s facing an early death and failure as a mother. Her son’s a disbarred lawyer, no prospects. She wants to leave him some security, give him the best life she can.”

“So she tells him Dad is his father?”

“Yep. But it’s not what she told Lincoln that’s important. It’s what she told Tom that matters.”

The heat of recognition flushes my skin.

“You know your father. Atticus Finch with a stethoscope. If Viola told him they’d had a son that she’d kept secret for forty years to protect your family—what would he do?”

“Whatever Viola asked him to.”

“Exactly! Tom probably called an attorney the next day to start setting up a trust fund for Lincoln.”

I have the feeling Caitlin’s scenario may be close to the truth. “None of that weakens my theory about Lincoln killing his mother. Both he and Dad would be acting in the belief that they were father and son.”

“I don’t pretend to know exactly how Viola died,” she says. Then she holds up her Treo. “But my money’s on the Double Eagles, under orders from Brody Royal.”

Caitlin seizes my wrist and looks hard into my eyes. “Penn, you’ve got to forget all this Gothic crap. We’ve got a recording of Brody’s daughter saying he committed murder, and Viola’s included in that. The only question is, what are we going to do with it?”

I do my best to suppress my personal issues and analyze the evidence. “The recording is problematic. If Katy doesn’t come out of that coma, she can’t be cross-examined, and she’s clearly got mental issues, as evidenced on the tape. Plus she’s under the influence of a potentially suicidal dose of narcotics. The recording would be a lot more effective with her alive on the stand to verify and elaborate on it.