The hair on my forearms is standing up. “Do you still have that copy?”

He shakes his head. “Portman saw what I was doing. He started spying on me, reporting to Hoover as the case progressed. I can just imagine his reports. May be ideologically unsound, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, everything was stolen out of my apartment two days before I was fired. That was Portman, I guarantee it. On Hoover’s orders.”

My heart sinks.

“You don’t want me as a witness. They’d make me look pathetic on cross. Too many sins of my own.”

“What’s Portman so afraid of now? From the story you told, his involvement was peripheral.”

“The Bureau’s been under siege for ten years, in the public-relations sense. Its big Achilles’ heel is racism. The FBI has been sued by black agents, Hispanics, women, all claiming systematic discrimination. And these groups have won. Portman was appointed to correct these problems, to polish the image, and he was appointed by a Democratic president. If it was to come out that his ‘heroic civil rights work’ in Mississippi consisted of helping to cover up a race murder, he’d be out on his ass in an hour. The President would have no choice.”

“So, let’s make it known. Do the Bureau and the country a favor.”

Stone sets the poker in its rack and sits on the hearth, his face weary. “I wish I could. Every trial decision Portman ever made as a federal judge would come into question, every decision as a U.S. attorney. He’d never work in the public sector again. And once the media got its nose into his past, God knows what they’d find. A guy like Portman doesn’t cross the line once or twice. It’s a management style with him.”

“Why didn’t the media discover anything during his confirmation hearings?”

“The Bureau is a closed culture. It outlives presidential administrations, judges, even Supreme Court justices. If the leadership of that culture wants to keep Portman’s secrets so he can be appointed FBI director, that’s the way it’ll be.”

Stone takes out his phone and checks the line again. “I’d like to help you, Cage. But they’ve held my daughter over me for a long time. Since she was a kid.”

“What?”

“Oh, yeah. After he fired me, Hoover sent me a message. Portman delivered it. If I tried to air any dirty Bureau laundry, my kid wouldn’t live to watch me on Meet the Press.”

“That’s pretty hard to believe.”

He laughs bitterly. “This was 1972. Worse things were happening every day, and the government was right in the middle of it.”