He shakes his head in amazement. “Don’t you see it yet? Viola would have died forty years ago if it was up to me. Or Snake. We all wanted her silenced. It was your daddy who kept her alive. St. Thomas Cage, M.D.”

“I know that. But how did he save her?”

Royal shrugs as if the answer is self-evident. “The same way I was going to get that APB canceled, or blame Morehouse for her murder. Power. The crazy irony of this whole goat rope is that, after giving up so much to keep that colored nurse alive back then, Doc killed her himself forty years later.”

My blood pressure plummets so fast that I feel I might faint. But Royal only mutters, “It defies understanding, I tell you.”

I don’t want to believe a word he’s saying, but I see only truth in the old man’s eyes.

“Tom thinks that damn son of hers is his,” Brody goes on. “And I suppose he could be. But like as not, he’s mine—or Snake’s, or Frank’s, or God-knows-who-else’s.” Royal pokes me in the chest. “That’s why you’re down in this hole, son. That’s why you and yours are going to die. You’re paying for the sins of the father, just like the Bible says.” He shrugs philosophically. “It’ll kill your daddy to hear you died this way, but he’s got no one to blame but himself.”

Royal takes a long last look at me, then turns away as though I’m already dead and says, “All right, Randall.”

“You won’t get my mother and daughter,” I promise his back. “My father, either. You don’t know where they are.”

Royal nods, then smiles sadly. “I’ll know in about thirty seconds, when your fiancée is screaming like a heretic at the stake.”

Caitlin closes her eyes.

“I don’t know myself,” I tell him.

“Yes, you do. You hid your mother and daughter. Had to have. And as for your father … you may not know where he is, but you know how to reach him. As soon as I had Forrest cancel that APB, you were going to call him and Garrity and tell them it was okay to come in.”

I’ll never be able to convince Royal otherwise.

Regan braces the firing pipe on his hip and aims it at Caitlin’s helpless body.

“Oh,” Brody says, as though he’s just remembered something. He takes a small derringer from his pocket, breaks it open, and removes one of its two rounds, which he slips into his pocket. “I’ve always been a student of human behavior, and I’m curious about something.”

He bends over and slides the pistol across the concrete to me.