“What other guy?”

“The black guy.”

Caitlin looked around the room as though she might actually find an unexpected visitor. “Who was he?”

“He wouldn’t say.” Henry’s eyes looked dreamy with narcotics. “Just one of Albert’s boys, he said.”

“One of Albert’s boys?” Caitlin had read that phrase in Henry’s journals. “Like Pooky and Jimmy?”

“Yeah.”

“How old was he?” she asked, figuring Henry had hallucinated a teenager from his youth in Albert’s store.

“’Bout sixty.”

Caitlin blinked in puzzlement. “Was he here just now?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said groggily. “Maybe it was earlier. Maybe when Sherry stepped out.”

“What did he look like?”

“Just a black guy, you know. Had on a black baseball cap. An old one with a white D on it. For Detroit maybe? Yeah. The Detroit Tigers.”

“What did he want here?”

“He thanked me for all the good work I’ve done. That’s all. He said it didn’t matter who he was. It made sense to me.”

I’ll bet, with all the Dilaudid in your system. Caitlin made a mental note to check the deputy’s book for visitors.

“Hey,” Henry said. “Do you think he could have been the one who went to see Pooky’s mama before she died? ‘Huggy Bear’?”

Caitlin recalled Penn telling her about the anonymous caller who’d contacted Sheriff Dennis about the burning of the Beacon building. But the whole idea of that man sneaking in here with a guard outside seemed far-fetched.

“Maybe it was,” she said, deciding not to get Henry too excited with that story. “Henry, do you remember the photograph I showed you before you fell asleep?”

“What?”

“The one of Tom and Brody Royal in the boat. It has writing on the back. It reads ‘BT,’ and then ‘T. Rambin.’ It looks like your writing to me.”

At first Henry said nothing. Then in a reluctant tone, he said, “It is.”

His eyes looked wary, almost hunted. Caitlin said, “I was wondering if ‘BT’ might stand for ‘Bone Tree’?”

The reporter avoided her gaze.

“You see, I read all about the Bone Tree in your journals, and the more I read, the more I started thinking Pooky’s bones might be out there. Maybe Jimmy Revels’s, too. The FBI only brought Luther’s up out of the Jericho Hole.”

“Could be,” Henry said vaguely. “But I looked for that tree … and I never found it. So did the FBI.”

Katy Royal talked about a tree like this, too, Caitlin wanted to say, but she stifled herself. “Who’s T. Rambin, Henry?”

Still the reporter refused to meet her eye.