“She saw that in a card, selected at random. ‘As above, so below.’”

Odessa was sick and tired of his haughty manner. “Playing these kinds of games with people is an ugly trait. It’s sadistic. That old lady was terrified of you for some reason.”

“I believe it was you who insisted I sit for her.”

“I didn’t want a psychic reading in the first place,” she told him. “And by the way—you don’t know me. I don’t know you. How dare you sit me down for something like that without consulting me first?”

“I didn’t think it would matter to an obvious skeptic.”

“It’s rude. And I’ll be damned if I know what it got us, except some old card reader having a dizzy spell. What does it matter? I asked you for help figuring out what happened to Walt Leppo and the two rampage shooters.”

“The owner of this botanica may be able to answer some of those questions. Now she is on notice that there is someone looking for her.”

Odessa took a breath. It had been an alarming day, and she regretted ever dropping that envelope in the mail slot. “So it seems you are some kind of confidence man or hypnotist. You somehow got inside the head of an elderly FBI agent, and that’s okay. But I am not going to let you inside mine.”

Odessa turned and walked off toward Market Street, which would take her back to her home. She expected Hugo Blackwood to call after her or try to catch up, and she was all fired up to rebuff him. But she turned the corner without a word from him, and when she finally looked back two blocks farther on, he was not following her.

The only pang she felt was for all the unanswered questions about him…but she could live with that. For the moment, she believed that she was free of Hugo Blackwood.

Chapter

1962. The Mississippi Delta.

Agent Earl Solomon sat alone at the serving counter of a black-owned roadhouse named Pigmeat’s. His hat sat on the counter to his left, next to the first-draft report he was writing longhand, in pencil, on a pad of yellow legal paper with only a few sheets left. He set down his short pencil and broke off another hunk of bread, swiping it through thick, hot soup, softening the crust, tasting of salted pork and carrots.

It was midafternoon, between lunch and dinner. Solomon had the kitchen’s full attention. There was no server working at that hour, just the paper-hatted cook and the newspaper-reading owner. The counter was metal, cool to the touch. The stools didn’t swivel. A jukebox and a cigarette machine sat near the door.

“Klansmen arrived,” said the owner, scanning his newspaper through thick eyeglasses at the booth nearest the door.

Solomon turned toward him. “It says that in the paper?”