The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  A strange silence has fallen on us. Though I fight the urge, I glance at my watch again. Three-quarters of an hour has already slipped by. “Guys, we’re still a long way from Dealey Plaza, and I haven’t heard one thing about my father.”

  Stone holds up his right hand. “You’re about to. But do you accept the premise that Marcello had sufficient motive to kill John Kennedy?”

  I shift on my chair, a little reluctant to say anything that might upset my old friend. “I can see why he would hate the Kennedys. I’m not sure that takes us to the assassination of a president as a means of stopping his little brother.”

  “Tell him the dog story,” Kaiser says again.

  “I know the fucking dog story!” I snap. “Carlos was supposedly ranting about Bobby Kennedy once, and some goombah said he ought to kill him. Carlos said, ‘If a dog is biting you, you don’t cut off its tail. You cut off the head. Then he don’t bite you no more.’”

  “Who told you that story?” Kaiser asks.

  “Half the prosecutors in Texas know it! Jesus. Just like the one where Marcello supposedly said in Sicilian, ‘Will someone take this stone from my shoe?’ The problem is, I heard he didn’t know any Sicilian.”

  “He knew it,” Stone says with authority. “He was raised by Sicilian parents. He just didn’t speak it.”

  “Whatever. Look, I didn’t come here to listen to a radio version of the History Channel. If you guys have any evidence of contact between my father and Marcello, it’s time to tell me about it.”

  Stone takes a deep, labored breath, then turns and looks at Kaiser. “He’s right.”

  “We haven’t even started on Oswald and Ferrie,” Kaiser objects.

  “Oswald?” I cry, getting to my feet. “Are you kidding? I don’t care about that little rat.”

  When Stone looks to Kaiser again, as though for permission, I finally lose my patience. “Goddamn it, guys. That call I took earlier? Before I came in here? That was Sheriff Dennis. Claude Devereux had just told him the Double Eagles will be in his office at seven A.M. tomorrow for voluntary questioning.”

  Both men stare at me as though I’ve just announced the Second Coming.

  “Bullshit,” says Kaiser. “I don’t believe that.”

  “They’re coming. Devereux claims they’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Kaiser is angrily shaking his head. “Nothing to fear, more like. They wouldn’t be coming if they had anything to worry about. Something’s wrong, Penn. Forrest has put in the fix somehow. You and Dennis are walking into a trap.”

  “What kind of trap?”

  “I don’t know. But I know Forrest Knox.”

  “John’s right,” says Stone. “This is trouble. The Knoxes have more to hide than you can possibly imagine.”

  After staring at both men in stony silence for a few seconds, I sit back on the edge of my chair. “Tell me what you know about my father and Marcello. Then I’ll decide how to handle tomorrow’s meeting. Otherwise I walk out now. I’m sorry, Dwight, more than you know. But that’s the way it is.”

  Kaiser starts to argue, but Stone raises his hand to silence him. Then he lifts the top page of his legal pad, picks up a white sheet of paper, and passes it to me. It appears to be a photocopy of a small rectangular business form. The image quality is poor, but at the top of the rectangle a logo reads “TBC.” That means nothing to me, but at the bottom I see a cursive signature I instantly recognize.

  Thomas J. Cage, M.D.

  “What’s this?” I ask, my face tingling with heat.

  “An excuse form,” Stone informs me, almost sadly. “From the Triton Battery Corporation in Natchez, Mississippi.”

  “Notice the dates?” asks Kaiser.

  Despite my father’s scrawled handwriting, I can just make them out: Nov. 18–22, 1963. Below this line are the words Chronic Hepatitis.

  “What does this mean?” I ask.

  “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” says Kaiser.

  “John,” Stone says sharply. “We don’t know what it means, Penn. What we do know is that your father signed a medical excuse for Frank Knox to be absent from work at the Triton Battery plant from the Monday prior to John Kennedy’s assassination through the Friday he was killed in Dealey Plaza.”

  “A full week,” says Kaiser. “Plenty of time to reconnoiter Dealey Plaza and settle on the Dal-Tex Building as his sniper’s nest. You see? Frank Knox wasn’t the primary shooter. Oswald was already set up to use the School Book Depository, and Frank was his backup.”

  “No, I don’t see. Not at all.”

  “Slow down, John,” says Stone. “Penn, we obviously need to know whether your father had any idea what Knox was actually doing on those dates.”

  My ears roar as I shake my head in denial. “Can you prove Frank Knox was in Dealey Plaza on that day?”

  “No.”

  My head snaps up. “Can you prove he was even in Dallas?”

  Stone slowly shakes his head. “We can’t even prove Frank Knox was in Texas. Not yet, anyway. Of course we just got on this track. All we know for sure is that he wasn’t at work, and he almost certainly wasn’t at home.”

  “That’s not all we know,” says Kaiser.

  I look back at the paper in my hand. “How did you even get hold of this? There’s no way Triton Battery saved this kind of crap from 1963.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Stone concedes. “Your father’s written excuse form was in Knox’s personnel record. It turns out I requisitioned a copy of that back in 1965, while working some other cases. Knox was still pretending to be part of the mainstream KKK at that time, and for some reason I decided to keep his file along with a few others. If I hadn’t done that, we might have solved the Kennedy assassination years ago.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that the concerted efforts of our team—some of the best investigators in the world—were stymied by the kind of clerical accident that often sways history, without anyone being the wiser. When I was fired from the Bureau in 1972, that record I’d requested in 1965 was still in the Jackson, Mississippi, field office. The murders I had investigated were still open cases. When the Working Group came together in the mideighties and began investigating cold cases, its members couldn’t request Bureau files. They had to rely on what files they’d kept—illegally—or whatever active agents would photocopy or smuggle out for them. We did send an agent into the Mississippi field office to locate all the old civil rights records he could—which included Double Eagle files—and he got quite a few. But he was told that some had been shipped back to Central Records in Maryland. He took a quiet look around the building for them, but he found nothing. That excuse remained lost.”

  “Then how did you locate it?”

  Kaiser leans forward and says, “This morning, after I convinced the director that Stone’s group is onto something, I sent two agents up to the Jackson field office in a pickup truck. By this afternoon, I had six crates of files dating back to the 1960s. They found them in the basement. One of those crates contained Frank’s Triton Battery file. It had been sitting there since 1965, with that medical excuse inside it.”

  The irony is obvious, but something else is tickling my brain. “Is this excuse form all you have on Frank Knox that relates to Dallas?”

  Stone shakes his head. “We put Frank and Snake Knox through the wringer years ago. They became suspects in the Kennedy investigation the moment we learned that Frank was listed on the CIA payroll of JMWAVE/Operation Mongoose.”

  I faintly remember Henry Sexton telling me this. “Frank Knox worked for the CIA?”

  “It wasn’t as cloak-and-dagger as it sounds. The agency ran its own anti-Castro training camps prior to the Bay of Pigs. As for the private camps, the agency didn’t want to have to rely on what the bosses like Marcello and Trafficante told them. So they paid some vets to hire on as instructors. To Frank Knox, that just meant two paychecks instead of one. All he had to do was give his CIA contact a call now and
then and update him on progress in the camp.”

  “Would Marcello have known Knox was doing that?”

  “No. Frank wasn’t stupid. The point is, we discounted Frank and Snake Knox as suspects in the JFK assassination years ago. We figured them for racist rednecks who’d killed a lot of black people, but not much more. Even after we came to suspect Marcello, we didn’t see Frank as a soldier or employee of his, because in theory he’d been informing on Marcello to the CIA.”

  “They didn’t know about the Brody Royal connection,” Kaiser explains. “Royal was the cutout between Marcello and the Knoxes in later years. But once Glenn Morehouse exposed that connection, everything clicked into place. Marcello’s plan to lure RFK here in ’68 and use the Eagles to kill him was like a billboard pointing back at 1963.”

  “When I saw that medical excuse,” Stone intones, “I knew Frank had done it.”

  “This is bullshit,” I insist. “There’s no way my father knowingly took part in a criminal conspiracy, much less a presidential assassination. No way in hell.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Stone says softly.

  Everyone in this room knows my father probably withheld critical knowledge about the murders of Albert Norris and Dr. Leland Robb for nearly forty years. But that doesn’t change my conviction.

  “Is this all you’ve got?”

  Kaiser starts to say something, but Stone stops him. “The thing is, Penn, even if Tom didn’t knowingly assist Frank Knox in wrongdoing, he may know things of critical importance. He just might not know he knows them.”

  This is slightly more palatable, but I can’t tell whether Stone really believes it.

  “In any case,” says the old agent, “I’m certain that one or more surviving Double Eagles know what Frank Knox did in 1963—most likely his brother, Snake. Snake might even have helped Frank bring off the assassination. Even if he didn’t, he may well know the truth about your father and that medical excuse.”

  “Where was Snake on November twenty-second?”

  “We don’t know. Some people have told us he was at work, but we can’t verify that. Nevertheless,” Stone says, his voice wearing away my resistance like a steady flow of water, “now you can see why all the Double Eagles must be handled with the utmost care.”

  In my mind’s eye I see Walker Dennis, the ex–baseball player and newly appointed sheriff, clumsily trying to break Snake Knox in a CPSO interrogation room. The prospect makes me light-headed.

  “Now you’re getting it?” says Kaiser.

  Shit.

  CHAPTER 35

  AS CAITLIN COASTED along the great concrete crescent before Quentin’s Tudor mansion, she saw faint light glowing at the edges of one of the window blinds on the side of the house. She wished she had some way to warn Tom that she was no threat to him, but honking the horn might alert neighbors she couldn’t see. As she got out of her car, she realized that it had been four days since she’d seen Penn’s father. Last Sunday, she and Penn had taken Annie over to eat a late dinner. Peggy had pulled out all the stops and cooked one of her classic southern feasts, including “Ruby’s Fried Chicken.” Now, only four days later, the world in which such a simple domestic scene could occur had been blown apart by the actions of the family patriarch, whom she would confront in less than a minute. Trying to stay calm, she walked around the house to a side door and knocked three times, as normally as she could.

  Nothing happened.

  She knocked again, this time giving the child’s version of a “secret knock.”

  Putting her ear to the door, she was surprised to hear a shuffling sound behind it. Then a woman’s voice said, “Who is it?”

  “Melba, it’s Caitlin Masters,” she said loudly. “I’m alone.”

  Several seconds of silence followed. Then she heard a dead bolt slide back, and the door opened to reveal Tom Cage standing in the crack with a pistol pointed through it. Caitlin could see Melba’s tall form in the foyer behind him.

  “Jesus Christ!” Tom gasped. “How did you find me?”

  He looked back at Melba to see whether she had betrayed him.

  “I had an employee following Melba. Shouldn’t we get inside before some FBI helicopter sees the light?”

  Tom grunted and backed out of the gap so she could pass through. When she had, he closed the door and led her into a contemporary kitchen area she recognized from a party photograph she had seen at Tom and Peggy’s house. Melba stood by the counter, looking wary.

  “Is Penn with you?” Tom asked anxiously.

  “No.”

  “Where is he?”

  Caitlin saw nothing to be gained by mentioning Dwight Stone and the FBI at this point. “He’s with Peggy and Annie, somewhere safe. He’s sleeping.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know myself. For safety’s sake.”

  Tom processed this, then nodded. “Good thinking.” He set the pistol on the counter. “Why didn’t you tell him you’d found me?”

  “At first I wasn’t positive that I had.”

  “And now?”

  “I want to hear what you have to say. I guess Melba and I have a lot in common.”

  The nurse gave Caitlin a sidelong look.

  “Tom, if I can find you, the bad guys can, too.”

  “You’re right,” he said, looking preoccupied. “I need to move as soon as Walt gets back.”

  “Have you heard anything from him? Has he made any progress?”

  Tom glanced at Melba again. “He’s made some, but he can’t move right now.”

  “Well, I don’t think Colonel Griffith Mackiever can do much to help you. He’ll be lucky to save himself. He’s about to be forced to resign over a scandal that was probably manufactured by Forrest Knox.”

  In the silence that followed this statement, she realized that the towel over Tom’s left shoulder concealed a broad wrapping of gauze bandages. “How bad is your wound?”

  “He ought to be in the hospital,” Melba said. “Or at the very least home in bed.”

  “I’m fine,” Tom insisted, taking a seat on one of the heavy leather bar stools. “It’s a through-and-through, and Melba and Drew gave me better treatment than I’d have gotten at the hospital.”

  “Did this happen anywhere in the vicinity of that dead state trooper?”

  Tom met her gaze but did not answer.

  Caitlin wanted to get Melba out of the room before asking certain questions, but she didn’t want to be rude. She decided to edge toward the difficult questions. “Will you answer one question?” she asked. “Off the record?”

  “That depends.”

  “Why in God’s name did you jump bail? It seems completely counterproductive for your case.”

  Tom sighed and braced his elbows on the dark granite counter. “It was my best option at the time.”

  “Were you afraid you would have died in Sheriff Byrd’s jail?”

  “That’s certainly possible.”

  “But that wasn’t your reason?”

  “Let’s just say that . . . at that time I had options I no longer have.”

  “Because of the dead state trooper?”

  “Mostly. Once he was killed, there was no clean way out for Walt and me.”

  Caitlin laid her hand on his back. “Forrest Knox’s police obviously hope to kill you before you can get into custody. Why are you making it easier for them?”

  “I don’t have a choice. Walt wouldn’t be in this fix if he hadn’t tried to help me. There’s no way I’m letting him go to trial for that.”

  “But there’s no other way out of this. Griffith Mackiever can’t wave a magic wand and make that murder charge go away.”

  Tom looked back at Melba and said, “Mel, is there any chance you could make some tea?”

  The nurse looked glad to have something to do.

  “I don’t have a lot of time,” Caitlin said, as Melba held a kettle under the tap. “There are FBI agents at the Examiner, and the longer I’m gone, the more sus
picious they’ll get. Plus, Penn could decide to come looking for me.”

  “Then get back to work. There’s nothing to be learned here.”

  Caitlin felt a stab of anger. “Tom . . . it was Viola’s death that started all this. If you didn’t kill her, nobody can prove you did.”

  “Centuries of history would beg to differ.”

  “Oh, Christ. Yes, people get wrongly convicted. But not with the kind of lawyers you’d have in your corner. Penn? And Quentin Avery?”

  With obvious effort Tom turned the stool toward her. “Even if I were to fight the murder charge on Viola—or plead guilty to a reduced charge—that dead trooper would still be dead, and Walt’s life would be at risk.”

  The idea that Tom might plead guilty to a lesser charge made her curious. “Will you tell me what really happened at Viola’s that night?”

  “No offense, Cait, but if I wouldn’t discuss it with Penn, I’m not going to tell you.”

  Caitlin glanced at Melba, who was gazing at Tom like a worried wife. She wondered then if there was more between the doctor and nurse than friendship. It seemed odd that in this time of crisis Tom would repeatedly call upon his black nurse; yet somehow Caitlin had known to have Melba watched. Was Melba Price the new Viola Turner?

  “I need to ask you some personal questions,” Caitlin said. “Very personal. I have to. And you might prefer to be alone. Sorry, Melba. It’s up to Tom.”

  Tom shifted on the stool as though his shoulder had sent a bolt of pain through his body. Then he looked over at his nurse, who was watching the kettle on the gas stove.

  “Mel, do you mind watching TV in the bedroom for a few minutes?”

  “I’ve got a glass of wine over on the coffee table,” the nurse replied. “I’ll finish it on the back patio.”

  “It’s pretty chilly,” Caitlin said.

  “I could use some air,” Melba said, a little curtly. “Can you finish making the tea?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d rather you stay inside, Mel,” Tom said. “This house is huge, and we don’t know who might be outside. Caitlin found us, after all.”