“In July of 1964, you ordered the deaths of Pooky Wilson and Albert Norris. You threatened Norris in his shop the afternoon of the night he died, and you went back later that night to help kill him with a flamethrower. I know that because there was a witness. A witness who’s still alive, healthy, and willing to testify against you.”

Royal shows no reaction to this.

“The day after Norris’s store was burned, the Brookhaven klavern of the Ku Klux Klan kidnapped Pooky Wilson from a train station and delivered him to the Double Eagles for punishment. One of those men is ready to testify as to how and where Pooky died, and about your involvement in it.”

“Bullshit,” he says calmly.

Royal is right. That last part was a lie, but he can’t know for sure. And part of my purpose is to sow seeds of paranoia in the enemy camp. The predatory eyes narrow, the mind behind them judging odds based on variables unknown to me.

“You ordered the deaths of Dr. Leland Robb and everyone else on his plane. You told Snake Knox to sabotage it, and after Robb was dead, you married his wife. Killed two birds with one stone there. Nice trick. Only before Dr. Robb died, he told my father what Albert Norris had told him. And my father will testify to that in court.”

“You’re a book writer, aren’t you?” Royal says in a conversational tone. “I can see you’d be good at it. Because every bit of this sounds like hearsay to me.”

Reaching into my back pocket, I take out Caitlin’s tape recorder. “Let’s see if this sounds like hearsay. You might want to take a shot of that whiskey before I press play.”

The falcon’s eyes settle on the tiny Sony. “What’s that you got there?”

“You’ll understand soon enough. Listen up.”

Before Kirk and I entered the hospital, I cued the recorder to the point where Katy begins to implicate her father. As her slurred voice repeats the damning words, the old man’s face goes gray, then white.

By the way Brody is staring at the recorder, I’m betting that Randall Regan already told him about the tape recorder Caitlin left behind—which contained no incriminating information. Brody probably doesn’t know enough about cell phones to know they can also record memos.