“She is getting a little loose in the joints, all right.”
“Have the mechanic put her on his schedule. On my tab.”
“I appreciate it, sir.”
“An ounce of prevention’s worth a pound of cure.”
“You said it.”
Royal signaled to the men with the rifles, then made his way toward a blue Range Rover parked in the general aviation lot.
CHAPTER 8
HENRY SEXTON DROVE toward the twin bridges that crossed the Mississippi River at Natchez, a sense of dread perched like a crow on his shoulder. For so many years he’d been investigating on his own, a solitary fisherman dropping his lines into backwaters long abandoned by others. But all the while, time and mortality had been working like rust at the bottom of his boat, eating away at the craft that supported his quest for justice. Witnesses died or fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease; hidden evidence sank deeper into the mud below the dark water. Viola Turner was only the latest to die without revealing what she knew.
A month ago, the retired nurse had appeared to Henry like an angel, returning from Chicago after decades away, knowing death was close and struggling with some secret she’d held inside since she left. Henry’s most precious hope was that Viola knew the fates of her brother, Jimmy Revels, and Luther Davis. He’d interviewed her twice, and though she hadn’t yet built up enough trust in him to speak with complete candor, he’d sensed that Viola was approaching a major revelation. That was why he’d left a voice recorder with her after his first visit, and a camcorder on a tripod after the second. If the mood to talk struck her at 4 A.M., Henry wanted whatever Viola said preserved for the record. Now she was dead, and if the tape from that camcorder was missing, then he had to wonder whether the old nurse had actually used the machine and paid for that act with her life. A wave of nausea hit Henry as he realized that meeting with him might have caused Viola’s death.
Her sudden passing was like a replay of another death just five days ago. The two murder cases that most obsessed Henry were those of Albert Norris, the music store owner, and Pooky Wilson, a young musician who’d worked for Albert. Henry had always believed Pooky was murdered for sleeping with the daughter of one of the richest men in Louisiana, a white girl named Katy Royal. Albert had almost certainly died for trying to protect his young employee. Quite a few people in the know had accepted this scenario, even at the time, but Henry had never been able to prove it.
Then seven days ago, Pooky’s aged mother had sent word for Henry to come to her hospital bed. Barely able to speak, the desperately ill woman had told him that, after forty-one years of frightened silence, one of her son’s boyhood friends had appeared at her bedside and revealed something he’d kept locked in his heart since he was sixteen. Pooky had not only been sleeping with Katy Royal, this friend confirmed, but he had been hiding in Albert’s store on the afternoon that Brody Royal and Frank Knox came in and threatened the shop owner’s life. Later that night, drawn by the sound of an explosion, this same friend had seen three men leap from the window of Norris’s burning store. Two had joined another man, then jumped into a pickup and fled the scene. But the third man had calmly walked to a shiny new car driven by a man the boy recognized as Randall Regan, a brutal roughneck who worked for Brody Royal. At that moment the boy had realized that the third man was Brody Royal himself.
Henry had waited all his life for a source like this. But while Mrs. Wilson had freely given him this information, she’d refused to give up the name of the mysterious witness who’d supplied it. She had wept upon learning the reason for her son’s death, and the boy witness—now grown—had hugged her and begged her forgiveness. Then he’d begged her to keep his name secret until he found the courage to tell his story to the FBI. Mrs. Wilson had agreed, and she would not break a sacred promise, especially when she lay on St. Peter’s doorstep. Less than twenty-four hours later, she was dead. Cardiac arrest secondary to renal failure, her doctor said. Henry hadn’t suspected foul play—not then. But the deaths sure seemed to be piling up. And despite spending much of every day since then hunting for the mystery witness he’d dubbed “Huggy Bear,” Henry had so far failed to find him.
He looked down and realized his hands were shaking. If Viola had truly been murdered, then the cases he’d worked alone for so long were about to explode into the spotlight. The FBI agents who always pestered him to share his hard-earned knowledge would seize control of the investigation and subpoena everything he had. No longer would he be the lone crusader for justice, battling federal apathy as well as evil. Of course, he’d always claimed that he wanted help. He’d pounded on a hundred bureaucratic desks and begged for it. But while he appreciated dedicated college interns and priority treatment for his Freedom of Information Act requests, in reality he had no desire to deal with ego-driven DAs and career-driven FBI agents. Not yet, anyway. Truth be told, Henry wanted to break these cases on his own terms. He wanted to piece together the missing facts like a jigsaw puzzle, then lay out the sequence of crimes like God looking at history, and only then turn the final picture over to the FBI and the public. He hadn’t felt that way in the beginning, but the Bureau had treated him shabbily, and their lack of respect had stung him.