“I can probably hold him off until tomorrow morning. If you plan to pull a miracle out of your hat, do it tonight. Life’s going to get embarrassing after that.”

Shad meets my eye and offers his hand. The guy has balls, I’ll grant him that. For him to utter the word embarrassing in connection with my father takes unimaginable gall. If Caitlin were to publish the dogfighting photo, Shad would be hounded out of the city by nightfall, no pun intended. Disbarment would follow, and possibly even prison. Yet in spite of all this, I take Shad’s hand. My old nemesis has told me more than he should have during this meeting, and even if he only did it out of fear, I owe him something.

“Don’t try to see Lincoln Turner,” he says in a warning tone. “And don’t let your father try, either. You’ll only make things worse.”

“Where’s Turner now?”

“Leave it alone, Penn. Your father is the man you need to find.”

CHAPTER 10

AS HIS WRISTWATCH ticked over to eleven, Henry Sexton sat down beside the only admitted member of the Double Eagle group ever to agree to speak for the record. Glenn Morehouse had once been a giant of a man; pictures on the walls of the little den testified to that. One framed snapshot showed him in hunting camouflage beside a dead ten-point buck that looked more like a fawn next to the man who’d killed it. In another he sat behind the wheel of a glittering bass boat that looked like a toy that might not bear his weight. In a third he held two hefty toddlers, one in each huge hand, extended before him like dolls on display. But today, thirteen months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Morehouse had been reduced to a skeletal figure in a La-Z-Boy recliner, a crocheted comforter on his lap and a bifurcated oxygen hose running from his nose back over his ears and down to a steadily humming machine on the floor. Beside the oxygen machine, a white bucket half covered with a lid read CHEMOTHERAPY WASTE, and a plastic urinal stood beside that. The urine in the wide-mouthed vessel looked like strong tea. Henry could hardly imagine this man beating someone to death with a leather strap with roofing nails stuck through it. But that was the kind of thing Morehouse and his buddies had done in their heyday.