Unwritten Laws 01(69)

“Forrest isn’t dead,” Billy said more firmly. “You want to take this up with him?” Billy slid his chair to the right, opening their line of sight to the big razorback. “’Cause I can tell you exactly how he feels about it.”

Sonny swallowed audibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his wrinkled throat.

“This ain’t right,” Snake said, but the defiance had gone out of him.

“Are we clear on what’s going to happen and not happen?” Billy asked.

Sonny nodded. Snake took longer, but he eventually nodded his assent, as Billy had known he would. These men had had their time in power, but that time was long gone. Mentioning Forrest to them was like a Wehrmacht officer mentioning the Gestapo to a German line soldier.

Billy pushed back from the table with a frustrated sigh. “We’re done here, boys. Let me know how it goes.”

Snake slid his half dollar off the table, slipped it back over his head, then gave his son a sullen glare. “You figure Brody feels the same way about this as you and Forrest?”

Anger flashed through Billy like a stroke of lightning. He stood and looked down at his father. “What the hell does Brody Royal have to do with any of this?”

Snake said nothing, but Billy saw more smugness in the curl of his father’s lip.

“Not a damn thing,” Sonny said, grabbing Snake’s arm and pulling him to the study door.

Billy stayed on his feet and watched them go. He hoped to hell Brody Royal wasn’t under the delusion that he was free to whack people on his own anymore. That era had come and gone, only some men refused to see it. And the more power they had, the longer it seemed to take them. When the main door banged shut, Billy sat down and pulled up the Web page of Jimmy Buffett’s agent. But his mind was no longer on his birthday party. It was on Viola Turner, and all the men who might have had a motive to kill her.





CHAPTER 14




THOUGH MOST OF the staff had left the Beacon office, Henry had stayed at his desk, working patiently at his computer. The Morehouse interview had forced him to rethink his entire view of the Double Eagle cases, and also to rejigger his priorities. The old Klansman had confessed to or described at least ten murders, and he’d hinted at others, but one confession had left Henry in a dilemma. He needed to inform the FBI that Jerry Dugan, a Bureau informant, had been murdered at Triton Battery in 1964. But doing so would instantly create problems. The Bureau would want to know Henry’s source, and that he could not reveal. Also, he usually published new information within a day of talking to the FBI, yet he’d promised Morehouse that he wouldn’t publish anything until death took him. Who could predict when that would occur? Morehouse appeared to be at death’s door, yet Henry had known many cancer patients to far outlive even the most optimistic prognoses.

Then there was the question of missing corpses. Of the dozen-odd murders Henry was investigating, four involved missing men, and without a corpus delicti, a murder case was stillborn, almost without exception. He’d never doubted that Pooky Wilson, Joe Louis Lewis, Jimmy Revels, and Luther Davis were dead, and today Morehouse had confirmed his instincts (with the exception of Lewis, whom Henry had forgotten to ask about before time ran out). Yet Henry still had no clue to the location of the bodies. The Jericho Hole and the Bone Tree had always been rumored dump sites, yet Morehouse had discounted both. Dragging the Jericho Hole was beyond Henry’s resources, and while he had a fresh lead on the Bone Tree, finding this near-mythical totem had eluded everyone who’d tried it since the 1960s.

Something about the murders of Revels and Davis haunted Glenn Morehouse in a way that the other killings did not, Henry was sure. He suspected it was the gang rape of Jimmy’s sister Viola, in which Morehouse had almost surely participated. The old Eagle had exposed the depraved brutality of the Revels-Davis murders by revealing that the boys’ military tattoos had been cut from their bodies (after death, Henry hoped) and might even have been kept as trophies. More disturbing still, Morehouse had mumbled half coherently about witnessing deaths by flaying, burning, drowning, and crucifixion. Yet he hadn’t specified who had suffered these fates. Henry had always heard that Pooky Wilson and Joe Louis Lewis had suffered the most cruel treatment, but now he wondered whether Revels and Davis had endured equally horrific deaths.

More germane to the present, Glenn Morehouse seemed absolutely sure that Snake Knox had murdered Viola Turner to fulfill their decades-old threat, or else had ordered it done. But as for why this threat had originally been made, the old Eagle had refused to speak. It might simply be that she could identify the men who’d raped her, but Henry suspected that Viola had specific knowledge about her brother’s death. Most puzzling was Morehouse’s assertion that Viola never would have made it to Chicago alive had it not been for Ray Presley and Dr. Tom Cage. How had a dirty cop (and inveterate racist) teamed up with a beloved physician to save Viola Turner from the vengeance of the Double Eagles?