“Why do you assume Payton’s death was a civil rights murder?”

At this echo of Ike Ransom, my heart twitches in my chest. “You’re saying it wasn’t?”

“I’m just thinking aloud.”

“Have you ever met Portman?” I ask, my pulse racing.

“I met him.” Stone’s distaste is plain. “He joined the Bureau a few years before I got out.”

“What did you think of him as an FBI agent?”

“He was a brown-nosing, manipulative, Ivy League rich boy with the moral sense of a cat. A good little German with obsessive ambition. After seven years in the field they promoted him to the Puzzle Palace.”

“The Puzzle Palace?” Caitlin asks.

“The Hoover Building. FBI Headquarters. The guys who work there call it SOG. For ‘Seat of Government.’ It’s the perfect environment for devious, back-stabbing sons of bitches. I apologize for the profanity. I forgot about your little girl.”

Annie didn’t hear him. She’s busy examining a rock collection displayed in a glass-box end table. If she had heard him, she would have yelled, Mr. Stone said a bad word!

“Did you keep any personal notes from the Payton investigation?” I ask, recalling the habits of that cop Stone brought to mind a moment ago. “Something you didn’t turn in to your superiors, maybe?”

His gaze wanders to the rear window, where the stream rushes along the rocks. “You want to learn what I learned back in 1968?” He looks back at me, his eyes burning into mine as though striving to communicate something he cannot say aloud. “Do what I did. Talk to the eyewitnesses. Have you done that? Have you talked to the eyewitnesses?”

I admit that I haven’t.

“You didn’t convict Arthur Lee Hanratty by sitting in your office, did you? Pound the bricks. Talk to everybody who’ll talk and pressure those who won’t. That’s what we did back then. And we learned the truth.”

This statement hangs in the air like a volatile gas.

“Then why didn’t anyone go to jail?” Caitlin asks softly.

Stone’s jaw muscles clench in an effort to control his rage. “For the same reason this country is going to hell in a handbasket. And don’t ask me that again.”

“What was your partner’s name?”

“We didn’t have partners,” he says, his eyes still on me. “Not like municipal police. I worked a lot with Henry Bookbinder. He died of cirrhosis back in seventy-four.”

“I know you’re fond of quotes. Have you heard this one? ‘You yourself are guilty of a crime when you do not punish crime.’ ”

Stone’s right hand squeezes into a fist. “I think your half hour’s up, pardner.”

“May I ask you one more question?”

He stands and stretches his back muscles. “What is it?”

“Do you remember a cop named Ray Presley?”