“If things are really that dangerous, what are we doing standing out here? A sniper could shoot us from across the highway, couldn’t he?”

“Not at this moment. I’ve had a sniper on the hospital roof sweeping that field with a thermal imaging scope for the past four minutes.”

This silences us all.

“The Double Eagles probably don’t know you have those files yet,” Kaiser goes on. “But they will. Henry’s girlfriend was no fan of yours. She’s bound to have talked to somebody.”

“You think you’re going to scare me into cooperating with you?” Caitlin challenges.

“No. But I don’t understand your reluctance. Are you hoping to solve these murders yourself? Henry tried that, and look at the result.”

“At least he didn’t sit on his ass for forty years, like the FBI.”

I step between them, silently warning the Bureau man to back off.

“Look,” says Kaiser, trying to stay calm, “we all have different pieces of this puzzle, and we all want the same result. Don’t we?”

“Do we?” asks Caitlin.

“You can’t blame her, John,” I interject. “The Bureau has got a pretty bad record in the sharing department. Henry wasn’t the Bureau’s biggest fan, either.”

“I’m not the Bureau,” he says angrily. “Not on this case. I’m Dwight Stone. Dwight and every other agent who bucked Hoover and the system to try to do the right thing, all the way back to 1963, when Medgar Evers was shot. This won’t be a one-way flow of information. I’m not keeping things from you guys.”

He turns on his heel, walks to the Suburban, and knocks on the driver’s window. The glass slides down and someone hands him a bag. When he returns, he takes his flashlight from his pocket, unzips the bag, and removes a large clear Ziploc containing a badly rusted hunk of metal with a strangely familiar shape. That shape hurls me back to every World War II movie I’ve ever seen.

“That looks like a Luger,” I comment.

“Doesn’t it?” says Kaiser. “This was rusted to the inner wall of Luther Davis’s trunk. The agent who found it said he thought about The Rat Patrol the second he saw it.”

“Is it a Luger?”

“No.” Kaiser opens the Ziploc and takes out the heavily oxidized but still graceful weapon and examines it from several angles in the beam of the flashlight.

“What is it?” asks Caitlin.

“A Nambu.”

“A what?”

“N-A-M-B-U. It’s a Japanese pistol widely used by their officers during both world wars. It was designed by General Kijiro Nambu, the Japanese John Browning. Takes an eight-millimeter cartridge. It looks like a Luger, but the works are completely different. Quite a few Pacific vets brought them home as trophies.”

“Like Frank Knox?” I guess.