I pull back onto the highway, heading toward my parents’ house. I suddenly have a lot to do today, but I can’t do it with a murder weapon in my car. Accelerating through the bypass traffic, I punch in my office number and get Cilla, who tells me Lutjens’s fax is already coming through.

“No cover page. It looks like a list of some kind. Sixty or seventy names. Social Security numbers too.”

I say a silent thank-you to Peter Lutjens.

“There’s a handwritten note at the bottom. It says, ‘If you telephone anyone on this list, you’ve announced your interest to Washington.’ Penn, what’s going on?”

“You don’t want to know. Those names belong to FBI agents, probably all retired. Find phone numbers for every one you can. Then start calling them. Give them the usual line: you’re working for me, researching a novel. I need to know which agents worked in Natchez, Mississippi, in the summer of 1968. Particularly on the Delano Payton case. Okay?”

“Delano Payton. No problem.”

“Fax a copy of the list to my father’s medical office.”

“Right.”

“And, Cil?”

“Yes?”

“Use a fake name on these calls.”

“I will. I’ll— My God, a KHOU truck just pulled into the driveway. Got to be about the Hanratty execution.”

“You can handle them.”

“You got that right. I’ll call you.”

She rings off.

As I punch End on the cell phone, I see my hand shaking. I am crossing a line I have crossed only a few times previously, and always with a sense of euphoria mingled with dread. In the great train of cases that crossed my desk as a prosecutor, a few engaged not merely my mind or my talents or even my heart. A few penetrated the deepest springs of my being: my fears, my prejudices, and my desires. When that happened, I became more than a lawyer. I became a personification of justice. And not justice as the law defined it, but as I did.

That is how I feel now.

Last night, when Ike Ransom told me Leo Marston was involved in a thirty-year-old capital murder, I wanted to believe it, but some part of me refused. I could see no possible connection between Marston and his supposed victim. But when Peter Lutjens said the words “J. Edgar Hoover” and “national security,” a circuit closed somewhere in my brain, sparking the faintest glimmer of understanding. Leo Marston is a political man from a political family, and if the Delano Payton murder had a political angle sensitive enough for the file to be hidden from public view, then a connection to Leo Marston no longer seems impossible.