“Yes. She and Frank Jones were having sex in his car when the bomb went off, if you can believe it. She saw Payton walk out to his car. She actually saw the damned thing explode.”

“Christ. What else did she see?”

“When the bomb went off, Jones panicked. He started to take off, but Betty Lou reminded him that he was supposed to be working inside the plant. She was off that day, so she got into her VW to leave. When she was almost out of the lot, she looked up and saw somebody watching her from a pickup truck.”

“Who?”

“Ray Presley.”

A fist closes around my heart. “Presley was there when the bomb went off?”

Dad nods once, very slowly.

“So . . . he was involved in the actual murder.”

“It looks that way.”

“Did Betty Lou tell anybody she’d seen him there?”

“Not at first. Presley came to see her and explained that might not be good for her health.”

This scene is all too easy to imagine.

“Then Frank Jones’s wife found Betty Lou’s stockings in his car and kicked Jones out of the house. I gather that Mrs. Jones then told the police her husband had lied about why he was in the parking lot, because Presley came to see Betty Lou again. Gave her a harsher warning.”

“But she told the FBI, didn’t she? Special Agent Dwight Stone.”

“Not at first. When Agent Stone found out Jones’s wife had kicked him out the morning after the murder, he talked to the wife, and she led him to Betty Lou. Stone offered her money, but Betty Lou wouldn’t talk. She was too scared of Ray. Then somebody shot at those FBI agents on the highway. Stone came back and told Betty that if she withheld evidence, he’d make sure she did time in federal prison. He convinced her. She’s basically a good girl. She wanted to tell the truth all along.”

“She gave up Presley to Stone.”

“Yes.”

“Then what happened?”

“Nothing. Betty Lou kept waiting for Presley to be arrested, but he never was. Then the FBI pulled Stone out of town. Presley showed up again, beat the hell out of her, forced her to give him oral sex . . . she was a basket case. She was about to skip town when Presley was arrested on the drug-trafficking charges that sent him to Parchman.”

I sit back on the sofa, trying to process it all.

“She’s still scared to death of Ray. She’s been working herself toward a nervous breakdown since Caitlin Masters’s article came out. When you called this afternoon, she lost it. I gave her a shot of Ativan and drove her home.”