As the orange and blue geyser rises into the night sky, I realize I’m witnessing the cremation of a man who three days ago meant little more to me than a byline under a newspaper article. But without him, Caitlin and I would now be charred flesh and ligaments over scorched bone. In this moment, it comes to me that my father is somewhere out in this same darkness, lost in a maze of his own making. Yet he’s never seemed farther from me in my life. The question of who really killed Viola Turner seems like some mystery from another age, like the death of Amelia Earhart.

What happened tonight? Caitlin asked me.

For my part, only this: to save my father, I tried to make a deal with the devil, and I almost lost everything because of it. My father is going to have to save himself.

And the rest of it? What was the point? For most of his life, Henry Sexton fought to gain justice for nameless victims and for families who had no voice. Did he accomplish that? Will anyone care? I don’t know. But Henry did something that police detectives, FBI agents, and attorneys with a lot more training and resources than he possessed had failed to do for forty years.

Henry got his man.

AFTERWORD

WHILE THIS NOVEL is entirely fictional, many of the background cases were inspired by unsolved race murders that occurred in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, and southwest Mississippi during the 1960s. To date, only one conviction has resulted from these horrific crimes. Stanley Nelson of the Concordia Sentinel has been working to solve those cases for many years, and he’s made remarkable progress. This is an often thankless job that angers many, but with limited resources Stanley has persisted in the face of both apathy and obstruction. In some cases he has solved murders, but the killers were already dead. In others, the outcome has yet to be decided.

Despite the FBI’s cold cases initiative, which began in 2007, the behavior of the FBI and the Justice Department regarding these cases is puzzling and sometimes inexplicable. Where official progress has been made, it has been due to the commitment of dedicated family members, reporters, and individual prosecutors or U.S. attorneys, rather than the sustained efforts of the FBI and the Justice Department. Today’s FBI agents are as dedicated as those of the 1960s, but they have been given neither the time nor the resources required to mount an effort comparable to that of their fellow agents from the earlier era.