“I need a favor. It’s right up your alley, historical stuff.”

“Save the Vaseline. What is it?”

“I’m looking into a thirty-year-old murder case in my old hometown. A civil rights murder. I know the Bureau worked the case. Somebody took a shot at a couple of your agents on Highway 61 during the same time frame.”

“You’ve sure got piss-poor timing.”

“Why?”

“Since the opening of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files, we’ve been deluged with requests for records from that period. I’m talking about requests by law enforcement, i.e., legitimate requests.”

“I really need this, Peter. It’s personal.”

Lutjens doesn’t reply. There’s no reason for him to bend any rules on my account—other than the goodwill resulting from a few enjoyable lunches, the easy rapport of kindred spirits—and all the reason in the world for him not to. “I know a guy who’s processing those requests,” he says in a cautious voice. “We worked together on the internal history of the Bureau.”

“Peter—”

“Give me the victim’s name.”

“Delano Payton. Killed Natchez, Mississippi, fourteen May 1968.”

“Was anyone convicted of the crime?”

“No one even arrested.”

Lutjens clucks his tongue in admonishment. “You’ll never get a file on a case that’s technically open. Not under the Freedom of Information Act.”

“I just want names. The agents who originally worked the case.”

“These guys worked for J. Edgar Hoover, Penn. They’re not the talkative type.”

“Somebody always wants to talk. Nobody’ll ever know how I found them.”

“Portman would boil my balls for this.” He hesitates a moment longer. “Stay by your phone. I’ll know all I’m ever going to know within five minutes.”

“I’m at—”

“I’ve got the number.”

I hang up and hit the accelerator, feeling a burst of adrenaline as I eat up the miles between Emerald Mound and the city limits. Lutjens’s willingness to help me says a lot about the success—or lack of it—that John Portman has had since taking over the Bureau. When he was appointed to the directorship seven months ago, great things were expected from the former field agent, both within the Bureau and without. But according to the reports I’ve heard, Portman has displayed the same traits in the Hoover Building that brought him into conflict with me when he was a U.S. attorney. He masks coldness as competence, manipulation as management, and megalomania as superachievement. The simple fact that he still carries a grudge against an ex-assistant district attorney from Houston tells me that he is a pygmy in his soul.

Lutjens calls back as I pull into the drive-through line at Hardee’s Hamburgers for some breakfast.

“Call me back from a land line,” he says.

Two pay phones stand at the edge of the gas station lot next to Hardee’s. “Give me thirty seconds.”