Unwritten Laws 01(32)

“Wait! That timing’s a problem for me. I’ve got a critical meeting in two hours. Surely we can talk later this afternoon? I can’t see how I can possibly help you, anyway.”

“Sheriff’s detectives discovered a camcorder at the murder scene, Mr. Sexton. It’s marked ‘Property of the Concordia Beacon.’ Did you leave that in Mrs. Turner’s sickroom?”

“Uh … yes, sir.”

“That’s one of several things we need to speak about. Should there have been a tape in that camcorder?”

“I would think so, yes.”

“Well, there wasn’t. Nor anywhere else in the house. The camcorder was lying on the floor, and someone had knocked over the tripod. The remote control was found in the dead woman’s bed, however.”

Henry looked at his watch. Natchez was twelve miles away, just over the Mississippi River. “How long will I need to be there?”

“We should be able to finish in half an hour.”

Henry blew out a rush of air and rubbed his graying goatee. “Okay. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. But I’m leaving a half hour after that. That’s nonnegotiable.”

“Don’t be late. And don’t speak to anyone about this. It’s a very sensitive case.”

Henry cursed and hung up, wishing he’d never answered in the first place. Why today, of all days? In two hours, the first Double Eagle in history to grant an interview to a reporter was going to go on the record about the group’s crimes. It had taken Henry weeks to set up the conversation, which would be held in secret. He couldn’t risk losing this chance. If Viola Turner had indeed been murdered, then today’s interview was even more critical than before.

“What’s the matter, Henry?” asked Dwayne Dillard, the sports editor. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“It’s nothing,” he lied, his mind only half under conscious direction.

Glancing around the small newsroom, Henry stood, grabbed his coat off the back of his chair, then hurried out to his Ford Explorer. He couldn’t possibly sit waiting in this building for half an hour with so much happening. Having no idea where he was going, he backed into First Street, then headed into Ferriday proper. Little Walter was blowing blues harp on the CD player, wailing with a passion born just fifty miles from Ferriday, in Rapides Parish. Henry sang a couple of lines with the song. He wasn’t even thinking, really, just following the half-shuttered streets of his decaying town.

One way or another, Henry had been hunting the Double Eagle group for more than thirty years. His ex-wife claimed that his obsession had cost him their marriage, and she was probably right, yet Henry had refused to abandon his quest. For the past five years, in the pages of the little weekly newspaper he’d once delivered from a bicycle as a boy, he had been publishing stories about the group he considered the deadliest domestic terror cell in American history. And people were starting to pay attention. Henry’s successes had embarrassed certain government agencies—the FBI, for example—and they had let him know it. Along with Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Henry had pushed the Bureau into belatedly forming a cold case squad to revisit unsolved murders from the civil rights era. But though the FBI had infinitely more investigative resources than he, Henry always seemed to stay ahead of them.

The Double Eagle group was a textbook example. Founded in 1964, the Eagles were an ultrasecret splinter cell of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. By Henry’s reckoning, they had murdered more than a dozen people, yet they’d evaded capture by the Justice Department at a time when the FBI had saturated the entire Mississippi Klan structure with informants. In forty-one years, only a few members’ names had been discovered, and none had been confirmed. No Double Eagle had ever been convicted of a race-related crime, and some had even worked as law enforcement officers. Henry had repeatedly tried to interview reputed members, but they’d always answered with silence or defiance. When he doggedly persisted in his investigations, Henry found himself ostracized by all kinds of people—some racists, others regular citizens who resented him “stirring up the past for no good reason.”

One burly redneck had sucker-punched him in the local Winn-Dixie and had to be pulled off Henry by a brave stock boy. But now—after years of painstaking work to separate truth from legend—Henry had finally done the impossible: he had persuaded a Double Eagle to go on the record. At eleven o’clock this morning, he would meet a seventy-seven-year-old man named Glenn Morehouse. And if Morehouse lived up to his promise—made in the shadow of terminal cancer—he would become the first Double Eagle to break his vow of silence and confess to hate crimes that included assault, arson, rape, kidnapping, torture, and murder.