The Double Eagle group was a textbook example. Founded in 1964, the Eagles were an ultrasecret splinter cell of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. By Henry’s reckoning, they had murdered more than a dozen people, yet they’d evaded capture by the Justice Department at a time when the FBI had saturated the entire Mississippi Klan structure with informants. In forty-one years, only a few members’ names had been discovered, and none had been confirmed. No Double Eagle had ever been convicted of a race-related crime, and some had even worked as law enforcement officers. Henry had repeatedly tried to interview reputed members, but they’d always answered with silence or defiance. When he doggedly persisted in his investigations, Henry found himself ostracized by all kinds of people—some racists, others regular citizens who resented him “stirring up the past for no good reason.”

One burly redneck had sucker-punched him in the local Winn-Dixie and had to be pulled off Henry by a brave stock boy. But now—after years of painstaking work to separate truth from legend—Henry had finally done the impossible: he had persuaded a Double Eagle to go on the record. At eleven o’clock this morning, he would meet a seventy-seven-year-old man named Glenn Morehouse. And if Morehouse lived up to his promise—made in the shadow of terminal cancer—he would become the first Double Eagle to break his vow of silence and confess to hate crimes that included assault, arson, rape, kidnapping, torture, and murder.

Like most of his violent brethren, Glenn Morehouse had been raised in a hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist church. Branded on his heart was the certainty that when you died, your soul either flew up to heaven or sank into hell. And by that reckoning, no man could get into heaven without first confessing his sins and honestly repenting them. Henry didn’t care what had prompted Morehouse to open up; he only wanted to be there when the truth poured out. For if a Double Eagle ever really told the truth, a dozen murders might be solved in a single hour, a dozen families granted peace after decades of misery.

Since confirming the secret interview at dawn, Henry had been unable to contain himself. Sitting at his desk this morning, the slightest noise in the newspaper office had made him jump. The shocking call about Viola Turner had been the last straw. Before he could even begin to grasp the implications of the old nurse’s death, Henry found himself parking before an empty lot that was the barren touchstone of his past, and also of the Albert Norris case.