The Bone Tree (2 page)

SPECIAL AGENT JOHN
Kaiser stood at the window of the FBI’s “tactical room” in the River Bend Hotel and stared at the lights of Natchez twinkling high over the dark tide of the Mississippi. After struggling silently with his convictions for more than an hour, he had decided to use the authority granted him under the Patriot Act to take a step that under any other circumstances would have been a violation of the Constitution—the unauthorized invasion of computers belonging to a public newspaper. He had not done this lightly, and Kaiser knew that his wife—an award-winning journalist and combat photographer—would condemn him if she ever learned what he’d done. But by his lights, the deteriorating situation demanded that he cross the Rubicon. And so he’d quietly risen from bed and, without disturbing his wife, slipped down the hall to where two FBI technicians sat behind computers connected by secure satellite to a high-speed data link in Washington.

This is the Deep South,
Kaiser reflected, watching the bow lights of a string of barges round the river bend to the north, from Vicksburg, and push slowly southward toward Baton Rouge.
The real South.
After being stationed in New Orleans for seven years, he’d realized that the Big Easy, while technically a southern city, was in fact an island with a unique identity: a former French possession, deeply Catholic, multiracial, bursting at the seams with joy and pain, corrupt to its decaying marrow. But the farther north you drove out of New Orleans, the deeper you penetrated into the true South, a Protestant land of moral absolutes, Baptist blue laws, tent revivals, fire and brimstone, heaven and hell, good and evil, black and white, and damn little room between.

Natchez on its bluff was a
soeurette,
a little sister, to New Orleans—not quite as cosmopolitan in this century as it once was, but still an enclave of license and liberality in the hard-shell hinterlands of cotton and soybeans. Yet Natchez had once been the capital of this cotton
kingdom, and a hundred years after the Civil War the hatred that simmered in her outlying fields had infected the city, and murder had roamed her streets like a scourge. If you drew a thirty-mile circle around Natchez, it would encompass more than a dozen unsolved murders from the 1960s alone, and twice that number that were officially solved, but begged for deeper investigation.

Kaiser pressed the palm of his hand against the cold windowpane and watched the barge lights through the fog of his breath on the glass. Two days ago, when he’d mobilized a massive FBI corpse-recovery effort here in Concordia Parish, his goals had been to solve some cold case murders and to save the life of a heroic journalist—not to unravel the darkest thread of the Kennedy assassination. But twenty-four hours after his arrival in this embattled parish, that was exactly the position in which he found himself.

Was it possible that a group of long-unsolved race murders in this neglected corner of the South held the key to the biggest cold case in American history? Given what he’d learned in the past twelve hours, it just might be. Texas bordered Louisiana, after all, and in 1963 Dallas had been a fundamentalist redoubt of reactionary political conservatism, seething with rabid Kennedy hatred. More unsettling still, in that era Dallas had been a feudal possession of New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. For decades, finding a link between Marcello and Dealey Plaza had proved maddeningly elusive. But today new evidence had emerged, revealing a credible plan by the Double Eagle group to assassinate Robert Kennedy in April of 1968 as well as actions by the group’s founder that suggested complicity in the 1963 assassination. Kaiser had long known of a connection between certain Double Eagles and Carlos Marcello. And while he could not explain his certainty, he sensed that the missing links that would tie Marcello to the dead president would soon be within his reach.

Now that Kaiser had authorized an invasion into the computer servers of the
Natchez Examiner,
his dilemma was how much information to pass up the chain to Washington. In the three months since Hurricane Katrina struck, he had been operating with near-complete autonomy, and he liked it. The breakdown of basic human services in New Orleans—most notably the evaporation of the NOPD—had created a situation of unprecedented chaos on American soil. A veteran of the final phase of
the Vietnam War, Kaiser had pushed into that vacuum and deployed Bureau resources with the independence and assertiveness of a military officer, and Washington had allowed him all the rope he desired. The fact that New Orleans lay in a part of the country that the D.C. nabobs never thought much about had been useful in this regard. But Kaiser knew all too well that once he started passing explosive information up the chain, those same bureaucrats would instantly go into ass-covering mode and force his operation to a grinding halt. And almost nothing was more explosive than evidence tying the New Orleans Mafia and a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan to Dealey Plaza.

What Kaiser most wanted was time and freedom to follow the leads he’d unearthed—to wherever they led, unhampered by oversight and regardless of consequences. J. Edgar Hoover might be long dead, but his paranoid ghost still haunted the halls of FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Already two men had died since Kaiser and his team had driven north from New Orleans to Vidalia, and more had died in the days before that. These deaths had not gone unnoticed in Washington, and by early this evening a few reporters at national newspapers had picked up on the violent doings in the backcountry of Louisiana. None had yet learned that Kaiser had designated the Double Eagle group a terrorist entity under the Patriot Act (which gave him unprecedented power to combat the survivors of the Klan offshoot), but someone soon would, and that would only increase the political pressure to quickly resolve events.

The problem was, Kaiser saw no hope for a quick resolution. The Double Eagle group was tied to at least a dozen unsolved rape, kidnapping, and murder cases in and around Concordia Parish and Natchez, Mississippi. And while Kaiser had made remarkable progress during the past twenty-four hours, it might take weeks or even months to solve them all. The surviving Double Eagles were tough men who had never been compromised, much less infiltrated. Breaking them would be difficult. The one Eagle who had shown signs of wanting to wash his conscience clean—a terminal cancer patient named Glenn Morehouse—had been ruthlessly murdered by his old comrades two days ago, before the FBI even became aware that he’d opened talks with a crusading journalist named Henry Sexton. Sexton himself had nearly perished in a subsequent attack by unknown assailants, and he now lay
in a heavily protected room in the nearby Concordia Parish hospital.

It was Sexton’s working files and notes that Kaiser hoped to access by breaching the computers of the
Natchez Examiner
. Early that morning, Kaiser had learned from Sexton’s girlfriend that the injured reporter had given a bundle of Moleskine notebooks containing the results of years of Double Eagle investigations to Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the
Examiner
. Kaiser had tried both bribes and threats to persuade Masters to allow him access to those notebooks, but so far she had refused. Just before going to bed, his wife had told him that she’d spoken to Masters (who was a great admirer of her work) about them all being on the same side, and Jordan believed the publisher would allow Kaiser access to the notebooks tomorrow. He’d made up his mind to subpoena Sexton’s records under the Patriot Act in any case. But as he’d lain awake in the dark beside his wife, he’d begun to believe that waiting even eight hours for that information would be a mistake.

Though few knew it, Kaiser had twice today visited Henry Sexton in the hospital, and during the second meeting he’d heard a story that had stunned him. According to Sexton, the 1968 kidnapping of two young black men—Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis—had been anything but a simple racist attack by the Ku Klux Klan. Glenn Morehouse, a founding member of the Double Eagles, had told Sexton that Revels and Davis had been kidnapped as part of a plan to lure Robert Kennedy to Mississippi to be assassinated. This plan had come into being after RFK announced his intention to enter the 1968 presidential race, a decision that had enraged Carlos Marcello, who’d been targeted for deportation multiple times by Kennedy, both as a senator and as attorney general. According to Morehouse, Marcello believed that if Robert Kennedy was elected president, he would be permanently deported and lose his criminal empire, which stretched from Dallas, Texas, to Mobile, Alabama. Through case work of his own, Kaiser knew this to be true.

He did not, however, know anything about the rest of Morehouse’s Kennedy revelation, which was: first, that Marcello had gone through local millionaire and power broker Brody Royal to recruit his assassin; and second, that the assassin was Frank Knox, the founder of the Double Eagle group. Morehouse claimed that Knox had chosen Jimmy Revels as his victim because Revels had worked tirelessly to register black voters for a Kennedy presidential run, and also because Revels
was personally known to Bobby Kennedy. The boy had even spoken to the senator by telephone only days earlier. Frank Knox believed that if Revels were brutally murdered, Kennedy would be unable to resist the temptation to travel to Mississippi to attend his funeral. Only the accidental death of Knox during this operation had prevented the assassination plan from coming to fruition. Despite Knox’s death, Revels and his friend Davis had still perished, and horribly. Earlier today, Kaiser’s team had brought up Davis’s bones from a deep pond after thirty-seven years of submersion, proving that at least one of the young men had been handcuffed to the wheel of his Pontiac convertible and driven into the water after being both shot and tortured. Revels’s body remained undiscovered, but Kaiser hoped to find it next—and soon.

The aborted plot to kill Robert Kennedy was not what had triggered Kaiser’s present fears. No, it was something Henry Sexton had told him during their first hospital visit, something Sexton himself had learned from Morehouse only eighteen hours earlier. On the day Frank Knox founded the Double Eagles—during the summer of 1964—Knox had drawn three groups of letters in the sand beside the Mississippi River. “The three
K’
s,” he’d called them:
JFK, RFK, MLK
. Then Knox had crossed out the
JFK
and said, “One down, two to go.” To his stunned followers, Knox had then shown a photo of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. standing in a group in the White House Rose Garden, with red circles drawn around their heads.

After Kaiser heard this, every instinct told him that Carlos Marcello’s approach to Frank Knox about killing RFK in 1968 was not the first time the mobster had gone to the former marine for that kind of help. In 1961 and ’62, Frank Knox had been training Cuban expatriates in a South Louisiana camp funded by Marcello. And in 1963 Marcello had even more reason to believe Robert Kennedy meant to destroy him than he would have in 1968. Given all these factors, Kaiser had come to believe that he was working the most important FBI investigation outside the war on Al Qaeda. In historical terms—given the FBI’s abysmal failure on so many civil rights murders, and Hoover’s sabotaging of the Warren Commission investigation—it might be the most important case of all.

What complicated Kaiser’s effort to redeem the Bureau’s record—and honor—was the fact that the Louisiana State Police were working
against him. In a uniquely southern twist, the chief of the LSP’s Criminal Investigations Bureau was the son of Frank Knox. Forrest Knox had worked hard to distance himself from his family’s racist past, and he’d been so successful that many Louisiana politicians supported him as the next superintendent of the state police. For Kaiser, this possibility represented a nightmare. If his suspicions were correct, Forrest Knox was the architect of a statewide criminal organization that used corrupt police officers and ex–Double Eagles to facilitate drug smuggling, gambling, and prostitution—the rackets once ruled by the Marcello organization of old. Whispered rumors that Knox had used a state police SWAT team to wipe out drug competitors during the chaos of Katrina were starting to seem more like fact than fantasy. Worse still, Kaiser had begun to uncover connections between Forrest Knox and the ruthless developers and bankers intent on rebuilding New Orleans as a whiter and more marketable version of itself in the wake of the storm.

“I’m almost through,” said one of the technicians behind Kaiser. “They have better security than I expected. It’s run out of the home office in South Carolina.”

“John Masters owns twenty-seven newspapers,” Kaiser said, the fog of his breath blanking out the glass again. “I’d expect him to spend at least some money on information security.”

“Two minutes, tops,” said the tech, tapping rapidly at his keyboard.

Kaiser checked his watch, wondering where Caitlin Masters was at this moment. Almost certainly in her office at the
Examiner,
working on the next day’s stories, chasing her second Pulitzer. “Will she be able to see that we’re inside her system?” he asked.

“No. No worries there.”

Kaiser grunted. He liked Caitlin Masters. Earlier tonight, when a state police captain named Ozan had shown up at the Concordia hospital to take over the Sexton case, the slightly built newspaper publisher had gotten right up into his face to challenge his authority and reaffirm federal jurisdiction. You had to admire spunk like that.

The paternal warmth Kaiser felt toward Masters reflected the conflicts he felt about the overall case, and none was more complex than that he felt about the Cage family. Penn and Tom Cage represented a unique problem for him. Penn Cage was not only Caitlin Masters’s fiancé, but also the mayor of Natchez, a successful novelist, and a
former prosecutor from Houston. Even more impressive to Kaiser, Cage had been the primary mover behind the scandal that resulted in the resignation of FBI director John Portman in 1998. While working a cold civil rights murder, Cage had uncovered criminal actions on the part of the young Portman that could not bear modern scrutiny. By any standard, Kaiser saw Cage as a modern-day hero. And yet, in the present circumstance, the mayor was more a pain in the ass than anything else.