But the price of freedom would be high. In order to keep his family together, he would have to make a deal with the devil, or that incarnation which had prospered in this country for the past fifty years. Tom was intimately acquainted with evil in its many forms, and in a way that Penn was not. Penn had seen some of the horrific things that humans did to one another, but almost always from the safe perspective of the government prosecutor. As young men, Tom and Walt had entered that transformative zone where the border between “moral” and “amoral” blurred into something not distinguishable by the human mind. In that existential arena, the soul could be seared and scarred or lifted into radiant ecstasy, but none who entered it emerged unchanged.

Most of the Knox family had spent decades in that zone. After leaving sanctioned combat, they hadn’t weaned themselves from the extreme emotions experienced there, but instead found ways to continue living in that realm where violence held ultimate sway. Inevitably, this involved crime, for only in life-and-death struggle could the most primitive and intense emotions be experienced. Normal men brushed up against those feelings by hunting animals or participating in dangerous sports, but men who had known combat—and thrived in it—achieved no rush from substitutes. And such men, Tom knew, were capable of any act. Even normal men and women would kill to protect their families or themselves. What, then, would monsters like the Knoxes do to preserve their freedom?

Tom had never forgotten something Leland Robb told him back in 1965, four years before he died in that plane crash. Lee had been home eating supper with his family when an FBI agent called with a medical question. The agent wanted to know whether it was possible for a human being to survive being skinned alive. He hadn’t given the reason for his inquiry, but Dr. Robb had known that it must concern the fate of one of the young black men who had recently disappeared. Strange to think that the FBI had so little forensic knowledge at that time, since now they were considered the experts. Dr. Robb had been unable to answer the agent’s question. But Tom, as an amateur historian, would have referred the agent to any detailed history of the medieval period, when flayings were quite commonplace. To think of such things in academic terms was one thing; to contemplate dealing with men who had actually performed such horrors was another. Yet Tom now found himself in exactly this position.