She grins. “I paid him. I told him what I wanted, then wired five hundred dollars to a Western Union office in New Orleans. I told him I’d wire him another five hundred if he told me what I wanted to know. He would have talked all day for that money.”

Dad gives Caitlin an admiring look.

“Forget that,” she says. “How did you put Presley at the scene?”

“You were right about what Stone was trying to tell us. There was another witness to the murder. One who never made it into the police report.”

“Who?”

“Her identity isn’t important right now. What matters—”

“Not important!”

Caitlin isn’t going to like this. “This witness can only implicate Ray Presley. Presley probably killed Payton, but he almost certainly did it for someone else. That’s how he worked. And I don’t want to move on Presley until we have the man who ordered the crime.”

Caitlin is shaking her head. “But that’s how you get to the top guy, isn’t it? You squeeze the little fish until they talk.”

“Usually, yes. But Presley’s a special case. He’s never scared easy, and now he has terminal cancer. He doesn’t have a lot of fear of earthly punishment. So, he bought some plastic explosive in 1968. The statute ran out on that long ago. The witness who saw him in the Triton parking lot is a terrified woman who’s now married and respectable, but who happened to be committing adultery in a car when the bomb exploded. I seriously doubt she would make a statement to the police, much less testify in open court.”

“Penn, I can’t believe I’m hearing this. We now have means and opportunity for Presley to have committed homicide. The motive could be racial prejudice. He’s a lock for it. If we don’t squeeze Presley, how can we get any further?”

“We’ve just been discussing that.”

She looks from one to the other of us, her green eyes probing. “You guys know something I don’t. Right? Something about Presley. Something that’s keeping you from going after him.”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you. Not at this point.”

The familiar pink moons appear high on her cheeks. “What kind of bullshit answer is that? Are we partners or not?”

I trust Caitlin implicitly, but I cannot trust her with my father’s secret. “If I could tell you, I would. But I have to ask you to trust me for now.”

“You ask me to trust you, but you don’t trust me.” She looks at my father, who is staring pointedly at the floor, then back at me. “You think Leo Marston hired Presley?”

“Don’t you?”

“There’s no evidence of that.”

“Ike Ransom says it’s Marston, and Dwight Stone said the same thing in so many words.”

“But neither of them will go public.”