The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  “How? Just what did Henry tell you, exactly?”

  “That Jimmy Revels was murdered to lure Robert Kennedy to Mississippi to be assassinated by the Knoxes. Or that was the plan anyway, until Frank Knox was killed in an industrial accident.”

  “You don’t doubt that story?”

  “Not at all. Carlos Marcello had hated Robert Kennedy since the McClellan hearings in ’59, and he’d wanted him dead since Bobby deported him while attorney general in ’61. If JFK’s death hadn’t neutralized Bobby in ’63, Marcello would probably have killed Bobby then. And five years later, when Bobby announced his presidential run, he put himself right back in Marcello’s sights. If Frank Knox hadn’t died in your father’s office in March of ’68, Robert Kennedy might have been assassinated in Natchez or Ferriday in April, rather than Los Angeles in June. Carlos could not allow RFK to become president, Penn. If he had, he would have been immediately deported, and lost his empire.”

  “Empire?” I mutter in frustration.

  “You think I’m exaggerating? In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that Marcello’s combined operations—both criminal and legitimate—comprised the largest industry in the State of Louisiana. Bigger than the oil business, bigger than agriculture. Carlos wasn’t just a Mafia kingpin. He was a king, every bit as powerful as Huey Long in his day.”

  Kaiser has raised his voice, and I’m starting to hear the obsessive passion of a conspiracy nut. “I still don’t understand what we’re doing here, John.”

  The FBI agent looks at me like I’m playing a game with him. “You’re holding back on me, Penn.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When you called me Tuesday night, after Henry’s stabbing, you told me you thought Brody Royal might be involved in the major assassinations of the 1960s. You also said your father might know something about them. You used the plural both times. It’s time to tell me what you were talking about.”

  I don’t want to answer, but my memory of Dwight Stone and all he did for me seven years ago is pushing me to speak. After some deliberation, I decide to break my father’s confidence.

  “My dad told me a story the other night,” I say, not mentioning the incriminating photo that Henry Sexton passed to me earlier that same night—the photo that prompted our conversation. “Back in the midsixties, Dad and Dr. Leland Robb were down on the Gulf Coast at a gun show, and Dr. Robb set up a fishing cruise with Brody Royal. Dad didn’t know about it until the last minute, so he couldn’t get out of going. Claude Devereux and Ray Presley were also on the boat.”

  “That’s a pretty motley crew.”

  “I know. Anyway, the one other guy on this boat was some kind of paramilitary CIA type. A contractor, probably. He spoke French. Or cursed in French, anyway.”

  Kaiser’s gaze has turned intense. “What year was this?”

  “In ’65, I think. No, ’66. Dr. Robb was killed in ’69, so it was three years before that. Anyway, the CIA guy got trashed during this little voyage, and he and Royal got to talking about Cuba. The Bay of Pigs. They also talked about some coup d’état operations in South America. Then at some point the guy started bitching about ‘Dallas’ and how the whole thing had been screwed up, like a botched military operation. Dad didn’t know what he meant, but it scared the shit out of him, and he made a point never to see Royal again after that. And that’s all. That’s my story.”

  “Why would that scare your father unless he thought ‘Dallas’ referred to the JFK assassination?”

  “I know, I know. You’re probably right.”

  “Dr. Cage didn’t think this guy was just talking out of his ass?”

  “No. Dad was a combat medic in Korea, and he told me he’d seen a certain type of guy over there. The hard type, you know? Professional. He said this guy was like that. No bullshit. A killer.”

  Kaiser nods slowly and motions for me to go on.

  “That’s all I know, John. Seriously. “

  “No, it’s not. You saw those rifles in Brody’s basement.”

  “That’s meaningless, man. A gullible old man’s fantasy. You’ll have the rifles themselves soon anyway. The barrels and works, at least. You don’t need me for that.”

  “Earlier you told me you thought the JFK rifle might be real. What made you say that?”

  “The fishing story, I guess. I figured there might possibly be some connection between Royal and the kind of guy who’d be involved in an assassination.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Maybe after all I’ve heard about Frank Knox . . . it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that he was in Dallas on the day John Kennedy died.”

  “No shit,” says Kaiser. “And he might not have been alone, either. His brother Snake served as a sniper in Korea. I told you that over the past couple of years Snake has bragged to a few people that he shot Martin Luther King.”

  I groan in protest. “James Earl Ray killed King, John. I don’t think there’s any serious dispute about that. In any case, I honestly don’t care right now. I killed someone myself tonight. I need to sleep.”

  “Just one more minute. Tell me about the rifles. What kind of guns were they?”

  I close my eyes and think back to the awful few seconds between Royal and Regan pushing us toward the indoor firing range and Caitlin going after Royal with the straight razor. “Hunting rifles,” I say softly.

  “Not military?”

  “No. Wooden stocks, hunting scopes.”

  “What make?”

  “I don’t know. My father’s the gun expert, not me. The rifle on the bottom might have been a Winchester. Yeah . . . and the top one was bolt-action.”

  “Do you remember which rifle was dated for which assassination?”

  “The bolt-action was Dallas. The Winchester-style gun was April fourth. Memphis.”

  “That’s good detail for a quick glimpse. I guess former prosecutors make good witnesses. We’ll have to see what comes out of the ashes after the wreckage of Royal’s house cools.”

  “Good luck with that.” I reach for the door handle. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Hold up,” Kaiser says, betraying some tension. “We’re not quite done.”

  “Damn it, John. Yes, we are. I’m exhausted.”

  “You didn’t think the story about the founding of the Double Eagles was relevant to all this? To the rifles, even?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The sandbar south of Natchez? Nineteen sixty-four? Henry didn’t tell you that story?”

  I think back to the long conversation in Henry’s “war room,” but nothing rings a bell. “I don’t think so.”

  Kaiser purses his lips like he’s surprised. “Frank Knox founded the Double Eagles on a sandbar south of the International Paper Company in the summer of ’64, five days after the FBI found the three civil rights workers in that dam in Neshoba County. That’s the first day Frank handed out the Double Eagle gold pieces.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of that.”

  “Snake Knox was there, and Sonny Thornfield, and Glenn Morehouse. They were having a family campout and practicing with plastic explosives. Just good ol’ all-American fun.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “On that day, Frank told the others they were splitting off from the Ku Klux Klan. Then he drew three K’s in the sand.” Kaiser takes a small notepad from his coat and draws three capital K’s as the points of a triangle. “Morehouse and Thornfield were confused until Frank took out a magazine photo of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Junior, standing with President Johnson in the White House Rose Garden.”

  “Go on.”

  “Frank had drawn red circles around the heads of Kennedy and King.”

  “Shit, that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You don’t think so? When Sonny and Morehouse still didn’t get it, Frank drew more letters in the sand—two before each K.”

  As I watch, Kaiser adds le
tters to his notepad. Now the points of his triangle read:

  JFK

  MLK RFK

  To my surprise, the sight of these letters starts a low buzzing in my head. “But it’s what Frank said,” Kaiser goes on, “that makes me take all this seriously. He scratched an X through the JFK with a barbecue fork and said, ‘One down, two to go.’”

  A wave of sweat breaks through my skin inside my coat. “Henry didn’t tell me anything about that.”

  “I guess he was too busy telling you other things.”

  I don’t bite on this bait, but Kaiser’s probably right. Since the founding of the Double Eagles had nothing to do with my father, Henry didn’t waste time telling me about it. I’ll bet he didn’t tell me half of what he knew that night. He’d been working for twenty years on those cases. Thirty, maybe.

  “John, are you seriously working the JFK assassination?”

  This time, when Kaiser’s eyes meet mine, it’s as if I’m truly seeing the man for the first time. The intensity in his gaze is not that of a fanatic, but of a soldier committed to his cause. “Like I said, I’m helping Dwight and his buddies. But you still don’t understand. We know who ordered John Kennedy’s murder. We’ve been certain for more than two years. We just haven’t been able to prove who fired the kill shot.”

  Now we’ve come full circle, back to cuckooland. “That’s great, John. But I’ve got no time for conspiracy theories.”

  I reach for the door handle again, but Kaiser catches hold of my arm. “Yes, you do. Because your father knows the same thing we do. He’s known it for forty-two years.”

  Kaiser’s words don’t quite seem real. “If you believe that, you don’t know my father at all.”

  He concedes this with a small nod. “Are you sure you do?”

  This freezes me in my seat. I want to argue, yet everything that’s happened over the past three days has happened because my father has refused to speak about the past—a past that it’s becoming increasingly clear is very different from the one I believed in only days ago.

  “Penn, your father’s being hunted for killing a state trooper. I need very much to talk to him. And ultimately, his only chance to survive is to turn himself in to me.”

  My heart leaps at this new tack. “Are you saying you’ll take him into protective custody?”

  “I don’t know yet. I was trying to set it up with the director, but after all the deaths tonight, it’ll be a hard sell. However—if Dr. Cage can link the Double Eagles to the Kennedy or King assassinations, I will make the case and spirit him out of harm’s way before the Louisiana State Police even know what happened.”

  Why does Kennedy’s death mean more than all the civil rights martyrs put together? “What about Dad’s fishing boat story? The Frenchman talking about Dallas? Is that enough?”

  “Too thin. We need more.”

  “I’ve got a photograph taken on that trip. Henry gave it to me. It shows Dad, Presley, Royal, and Devereux in the stern of the boat.”

  Kaiser’s eyes widen. “Is the Frenchman in the shot?”

  I shake my head.

  “Damn. Where is this picture?”

  “Caitlin has it. It’s probably at the Examiner.”

  “Okay. I’m going to be grilled by the director once more tonight, and I’ll do what I can to push protective custody for your father. For now, let’s hope I’m right about him and Garrity lying low somewhere safe. But between now and tomorrow morning, I want you to wrack your brain, talk to your mother, do anything you can think of to locate your father and Garrity. And if you do, tell Dr. Cage that information about Carlos Marcello and the Kennedy assassination is his salvation.”

  “Honestly, John, there’s no way he’s sat on that kind of information for forty years.”

  “He kept quiet about Brody Royal and the murders of Albert Norris and Dr. Robb, didn’t he? Why should the Kennedy stuff be any different?”

  I’m not sure I can articulate my feelings about this. “Because that’s not . . . personal. Not local. It’s history. And history is almost like a religion to my dad.”

  “All history is personal,” Kaiser replies. “I’m betting Dr. Cage knows that.” For the first time tonight, the FBI agent’s voice sounds almost kind. “Your father was close to Ray Presley for most of his life. Before Presley moved to Natchez, he was a New Orleans cop on the pad for Carlos Marcello.”

  “I know that.”

  “Henry told me he told you about the Bureau surveillance reports that mention your father. On at least four occasions, Marcello soldiers drove north to Natchez to get medical treatment from your father in the late sixties and early seventies. Why would they drive a hundred eighty miles for treatment?”

  I start to repeat my father’s explanation for this, but another answer comes to me—the one Brody Royal supplied. “Whatever Dad did, John, he did it to protect Viola. After her rape, and the murder of her brother, he made some kind of a deal to save her. He must have. The Eagles would have killed her otherwise. Maybe that deal was with Marcello.”

  “I think you’re right,” Kaiser concedes. “But we need to know for sure.”

  After several seconds of silence, he leans across me and reaches into his glove box for a folded sheet of paper. This he patiently unfolds, then hands to me and switches on the Crown Victoria’s interior light.

  I’m holding a low-resolution grayscale photograph printed on copy paper. It looks like a telephoto image of a man in profile, driving a light-colored sedan that dates to the 1960s. Something about the car is familiar, or maybe the man, but the photo is too blurry for me to figure it out.

  “That was taken outside the entrance of Churchill Farms,” Kaiser informs me, “a sixty-four-hundred-acre tract of Louisiana swampland owned by Carlos Marcello. Churchill Farms was Marcello’s most secluded hideaway.”

  “Okay. Who’s driving the car?”

  “You don’t recognize him?” Kaiser asks softly. “Or the vehicle?”

  “The car looks familiar. The man, too. But it’s too blurry.”

  “That’s your father, Penn. He’s thirty-six years old in that photo. Nine years younger than you are now.”

  My heart lurches in my chest.

  “And the car,” Kaiser goes on, “is—”

  “A 1966 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight,” I finish, as a rush of scents and feelings from my childhood pass through me. “Our old family car.”

  Kaiser nods. “That’s right. Your father visited Churchill Farms for sixty-two minutes on April eleventh, 1968. The Bureau’s organized-crime unit had routine surveillance set up out there at the time. Also, you can’t see him in this photo because of the angle and the graininess, but Ray Presley was sitting in the passenger seat. He went down there with your dad. And Carlos was definitely in residence at the time.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “What the hell does this mean?”

  “I don’t know. But we need to find out.”

  “How long have you had this? Henry never saw this, did he?”

  “No. I saw it myself for the first time today. It came in a big transmission of the Bureau file on Carlos Marcello, which is a massive collection.”

  I’m trying to focus on the micro, not macro. “April of ’68 was the month Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis were killed.”

  “Close enough. They probably died on March thirty-first.”

  “That’s right. And Viola had been raped in March, as well. She was abused again when they were tortured, but Presley saved her. So my father must have made some kind of deal with Marcello shortly afterward, to protect Viola.”

  “That’s why I need to talk to him. He knows a lot more than you think he does about all this.”

  I close my eyes before I ask the next question. “John, what the hell’s going on? Seriously. How did we get from Viola Turner and euthanasia to the assassination of John Kennedy?”

  “You know how. Through the Double Eagles. Specifically, the Knox fami
ly. Remember what I said about history? It’s all personal. In 1963, Carlos Marcello ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It wasn’t the CIA, or Castro, or Cuban exiles. It wasn’t the Russians or the military-industrial complex. It was Carlos Marcello. The Little Man used the Knox family to carry out the hit, and he did it for the oldest motive in the world.”

  “Money?”

  “No. Survival.”

  Another question was forming in my mind when the sight of a white pickup truck parked down the block drove it from my head. A few seconds of watching shows me an exhaust plume coming from the tailpipe.

  “What’s the matter?” asks Kaiser. “Are you looking at that truck?”

  I nod. “That’s Lincoln Turner’s truck. The son of a bitch has been following me again.”

  “Again?”

  “He’s been stalking my house.”

  Kaiser cocks his head, his eyes on the truck. “I tell you what. I’ve given you a lot to absorb. You go on up to your office and get your keys. I’ll take care of Mr. Turner for you. He won’t be here when you come back out.”

  “Really?”

  “No problem. You just think about what I said. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Should I just go?”

  Kaiser smiles. “Yep. Take off. I’m going to abuse my authority for a minute.”

  He opens his door and begins marching down the block like a military officer on a mission. Though I’m tempted to watch the confrontation, I exit the car and trot up to the door of City Hall. Lincoln Turner has a big chip on his shoulder and a lot of nerve, but something tells me Kaiser can handle him. For the first time since arriving at the sheriff’s office, I think about Annie and my mother hiding out at Edelweiss. They’re probably mad with worry by now, and as much as I’d like to check on Caitlin at the newspaper, I know she can take care of herself. I need to hug my daughter, and I need sleep. Tomorrow’s battles will be here all too soon.

  CHAPTER 12