She was confident that the six stories on Henry’s murder investigations had been well written; she trusted Jamie to make sure of that. But without her master story to provide historical context, readers would have no way to place the dramatic events that her reporters had dealt with elsewhere. And her master story had one major problem. If Brody Royal agreed to Penn’s demand, and Penn asked her to leave Royal out of her story—even for one day—the resulting gaps would be like antitank trenches dug in the highway of her narrative. She didn’t know if she could bear to butcher her story that way. Reality was fast overtaking Penn’s concerns anyway. The rumor mill had already spread the news of Katy Royal’s attempted suicide to every corner of Adams County and Concordia Parish. Speculation about her motive was rampant, and right now Caitlin was the only journalist in the world who knew the truth. Better still, she understood how that motive fit into the forty-year-old matrix of rape and murder that had divided the community and triggered two assassination attempts on one of the South’s best journalists.

Bottom line: the Katy Royal tape had changed everything.

The revelation that a man of Brody Royal’s wealth and position had ordered (and possibly taken part in) the murders of Albert Norris, Pooky Wilson, Dr. Leland Robb, Jimmy Revels, Luther Davis, Viola Turner, and other collateral victims dwarfed Caitlin’s 1998 story of the murder of black Korean war vet Delano Payton, and that story had won her a Pulitzer. If she wrote tonight’s story as she wanted to—as it demanded to be written—a second Pulitzer was a lock, a prize she would happily share with Henry Sexton.

To write that story, though, she might have to break faith with Penn. With him still closeted somewhere with Royal, she saw no way to finish her story before the other Masters papers closed out their editions—not if she waited to find out Royal’s answer about the APB. Caitlin had never felt so strangled by conflicting loyalties. She loved Tom as she loved her own father. But how could she abandon her duty to Henry Sexton, Katy Royal, and all the families of the victims of the Double Eagle group to save a man who had refused to try to save himself?

Taking a Mountain Dew from the mini-fridge in the corner, she poured several ounces into her mouth and swished it around so that the caffeine would be absorbed more quickly. Then she called up iTunes, selected David Gray’s “Please Forgive Me,” and opened a clean page in her word processor. The text of the toolbar swam before her eyes for several seconds, then resolved into black letters on a field of taupe, her preferred color scheme. Thus prepared, in a single sustained burst of clarity she wrote a nine-hundred-word lead story titled LOCAL JOURNALIST SURVIVES SNIPER ATTACK.