Natchez Burning (103 page)

“Don’t you sit here studyin’ ’bout Viola and that boy of hers,” Melba said in his ear. “You don’t know for sure he’s yours. And even if he is, you never knew about him. Viola made that choice. And if that boy hates you now, well … if you let him know you, he’ll come around.”

“He’s not a boy anymore.”

Melba drew far enough back to look into his eyes. “Yes, he is. Down deep, he is. And a black boy is a hard thing to be, especially without a daddy. Take it from me.”

“I believe you, Mel.”

The nurse hugged him tight again. “I feel like I’m never going to see you again.”

“You will. I promise.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “I feel it. And I want to say something to you.”

“What?”

She finally released him and stepped back, but she kept hold of his arthritic hands. “Don’t give up. Please. Don’t let them take you without a fight. Nobody’s perfect. Not even you. You deserve all the time you’ve got left.”

Tom felt his eyes getting wet. “Thank you, Mel. You go now.”

“I will. But I’m only going because I know you’re not alone here.”

As his nurse turned and walked to the door, Tom felt the familiar and terrible weight he had borne all his life, the faith of simple people who had believed too much in him.

AS SOON AS
Caitlin got back to the
Examiner
building, she’d found herself in the eye of a hurricane. Not only was her full staff working frantically to finish the stories they planned to run on various threads of Henry Sexton’s murder investigations, but the editors of her father’s satellite papers were screaming for the stories they’d been promised by a deadline that had passed an hour ago. After passing a taped copy of her phone recording to Penn, Caitlin had deflected her staff by issuing a quick barrage of orders, then told Jamie to call his counterparts at the satellites and tell them thirty minutes of overtime had been authorized. It was a lie, but one she was banking no one would test by waking her father in Charlotte. As everyone left to implement her instructions, she’d retreated to her private office and locked the door.

She was confident that the six stories on Henry’s murder investigations had been well written; she trusted Jamie to make sure of that. But without her master story to provide historical context, readers would have no way to place the dramatic events that her reporters had dealt with elsewhere. And her master story had one major problem. If Brody Royal agreed to Penn’s demand, and Penn asked her to leave Royal out of her story—even for one day—the resulting gaps would be like antitank trenches dug in the highway of her narrative. She didn’t know if she could bear to butcher her story that way. Reality was fast overtaking Penn’s concerns anyway. The rumor mill had already spread the news of Katy Royal’s attempted suicide to every corner of Adams County and Concordia Parish. Speculation about her motive was rampant, and right now Caitlin was the only journalist in the world who knew the truth. Better still, she understood how that motive fit into the forty-year-old matrix of rape and murder that had divided the community and triggered two assassination attempts on one of the South’s best journalists.

Bottom line: the Katy Royal tape had changed everything.

The revelation that a man of Brody Royal’s wealth and position had ordered (and possibly taken part in) the murders of Albert Norris, Pooky Wilson, Dr. Leland Robb, Jimmy Revels, Luther Davis, Viola Turner, and other collateral victims dwarfed Caitlin’s 1998 story of the murder of black Korean war vet Delano Payton, and
that
story had won her a Pulitzer. If she wrote tonight’s story as she wanted to—as it demanded to be written—a second Pulitzer was a lock, a prize she would happily share with Henry Sexton.

To write that story, though, she might have to break faith with Penn. With him still closeted somewhere with Royal, she saw no way to finish her story before the other Masters papers closed out their editions—not if she waited to find out Royal’s answer about the APB. Caitlin had never felt so strangled by conflicting loyalties. She loved Tom as she loved her own father. But how could she abandon her duty to Henry Sexton, Katy Royal, and all the families of the victims of the Double Eagle group to save a man who had refused to try to save himself?

Taking a Mountain Dew from the mini-fridge in the corner, she poured several ounces into her mouth and swished it around so that the caffeine would be absorbed more quickly. Then she called up iTunes, selected David Gray’s “Please Forgive Me,” and opened a clean page in her word processor. The text of the toolbar swam before her eyes for several seconds, then resolved into black letters on a field of taupe, her preferred color scheme. Thus prepared, in a single sustained burst of clarity she wrote a nine-hundred-word lead story titled
LOCAL JOURNALIST SURVIVES SNIPER ATTACK
.

She led off with a firsthand account of the attack on Henry Sexton and Sherry Harden, and concluded with the contents of the Katy Royal interview. She spared Brody Royal nothing. The only person she treated with kid gloves was Tom Cage. As she corrected the last typo, she knew in her gut that this was the story to print tomorrow. Penn might hate her for it, but he would be judging her by inverted priorities. He was so deep inside the nightmare that he could no longer tell right from wrong. She was preparing to send the story to Jamie for a read-through when someone knocked at her door.

“
Working!
” she shouted.

“It’s Penn,” said a male voice, muffled by the wood.

Was that a male staffer telling her Penn was out front? she wondered. Or was Penn actually at the door?

“
Caitlin!
” Penn shouted.
“Open up!”

A ripple of irrational fear crossed her skin. She sat frozen for three seconds, then got up and opened the door. Penn stood there, looking as tired as she’d ever seen him.

“You talked to Royal?” she asked.

He nodded.

She took his hand and pulled him into her office, then closed the door. “And?”

Penn’s other hand held a leather holster with his .357 inside. He laid the pistol on the credenza to his right. Caitlin stared at it for a couple of seconds, realizing how seriously he was taking the danger. “So? What did he say?”

“He’s going to do it. He’s going to get the APB canceled. He didn’t have any choice, really. He’s going to fix everything.”

“
Fix
everything?” she echoed, unable to conceal her disappointment. “What does that mean?”

“The APB, the dead trooper, even Viola’s murder case.”

“And you believed him?”

“I did. I do. The whole conversation was anticlimactic. More surreal than confrontational, like a weird business deal. I think Royal has dealt with this kind of crap his whole life, though not with quite so much at stake. He realizes that his freedom and wealth are in danger, so he’ll do whatever’s necessary to preserve them.”

Caitlin shook her head in disbelief. “
How
can he do those things? Magic?”

Penn ran his hands through his hair, then collapsed into the chair opposite her desk. “By calling the right people, apparently. It’s not what you know, right? It’s who.”

She knew her disgust showed on her face. “There’s got to be more to it than that. How can he muzzle Shad Johnson? And Sheriff Byrd?”

Penn laughed with bitter amusement. “I don’t think Shad or Billy would even
flirt
with the idea of crossing Brody Royal.”

A sudden wave of nausea nearly made Caitlin double over. Grabbing her lukewarm Mountain Dew, she drank what was left to try to settle her stomach. “I don’t understand. This is exactly the kind of backroom deal you’ve despised all your life.”

“You’re right. But I had no choice. Why are you so upset? I told you what I was going to do.”

“You told me you were going to try to get the APB revoked, and Tom into federal custody. But from what you described, Brody’s giving your father a world-class get-out-of-jail-free card. A free pass on everything.”

“Well, I figured as long as I had him over a barrel, I’d push for everything I could.”

Caitlin felt her bottom lip shaking. She was usually good at hiding her emotions, but now it was impossible. “Royal’s obviously not going to move heaven and earth for free. What did you promise him in return?” A sickening thought struck her. “Did you tell him you’d give him the tape I made of his daughter?”

“Of course I did.”

Stunned by his casual tone, she walked around her desk and sat down, then fixed him with a level stare. “Did you promise that I would keep his name out of the
Examiner
?”

Penn didn’t answer immediately. Then he looked off to the side and said, “I had to, babe.”

She closed her eyes, and a sensation of falling in slow motion enveloped her. “You had no right to do that,” she said softly. Then she opened her eyes, her voice rising. “You can’t make a promise for me. You can’t make a deal with the devil in my name. You can’t
sell my soul
for me. Only I can do that!”

“Sell your soul? You’re blowing this out of proportion. This is my father’s life we’re talking about.”

Galvanized by righteous anger, Caitlin leaned forward and snapped, “Brody Royal’s a fucking murderer. Do you really think your father would want a man who’s killed innocent people to go free to protect him?”

“I don’t know,” Penn replied in a maddeningly mild voice. “I think Dad’s known some pretty bad things about Brody Royal for thirty-five years, and he kept them quiet to protect our family.”

Caitlin felt paralyzed; she wished Tom were here to argue for her. “For all you know, Royal is just stalling you. He could be packing his bags for Brazil right now.”

“Brazil isn’t a nonextradition country.”

“Oh, stop talking like a fucking
lawyer.
”

Penn rubbed the back of his neck, looking more haggard by the minute. “What do you think I’m trying to do here? Sabotage your career?”

“What
are
you doing? In the past, your motto was ‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall.’ And I loved you for it. But now that your father’s in trouble, suddenly Albert and Pooky and the others are just regrettable deaths. What about Henry and Sherry, for God’s sake?”

Penn took his time answering. “Caitlin, throughout my career, I had to compromise. Every single case eventually came down to that. Perfect justice does not exist in this world.”

“
Perfect
justice? This is the
opposite
of justice! It’s a black hole sucking in everything good that comes near it. It’s a singularity of shit!”

Penn’s nostrils flared, and she almost welcomed the prospect that he’d stand up and fight—but he didn’t. She sensed that he was seeing himself in a new light, and not enjoying what he saw. When he spoke again, it was in a tone of infinite regret. “If justice for those victims and families was truly your goal, you wouldn’t be trying to keep Henry’s files from the FBI. You’d have given Kaiser copies as soon as you got them.”

She stiffened, feeling her face go red. “I am giving them to him. Jordan and I talked about it tonight. I’m giving Kaiser copies of everything tomorrow morning.”

Penn was staring at her as though at a stranger. “Everything?”

God, how well he knows me
. “That’s right.”

He didn’t bother to challenge this. “Maybe I’m not being clear. I’m not asking you to live up to this deal with Royal. I’m asking you to hold off on the man for one or two days.”

“One day in my business is like a month in yours. You know that. If we’re not first with a story, we’re irrelevant.”

Penn turned up his palms. “If Royal doesn’t do what he promised by tomorrow afternoon, you’re welcome to tear him to pieces. You can start posting in your online edition right after lunch.”

“But what if he
does
cooperate? You want me to bury the story forever? I can’t do that. I
won’t
. And what if he just strings you along some more? You’ll be back in here pleading with me to protect him.”

“No, I won’t. But this is Royal’s only way out, other than running. And if he runs, you can rip him to shreds. But for God’s sake—for
Dad’s
sake—let Royal pull these strings and remove the immediate threat.”

“You can’t trust a man like Royal, Penn. Some way or other, he’s going to screw you. You
and
Tom. Remember what he did to his wife? To his own daughter?”

Penn let her words hang in the air. Then he said, “You know something? You’re right. My father’s life means more to me than Albert Norris’s. Or Pooky Wilson’s, or even Henry’s.
After
Dad is safe, I’ll do everything in my power to send their killers to prison. But
until then,
I can’t worry about them. My father, my mother, Annie, you—all of you mean more to me than anyone else on this planet. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect you, and I’m not ashamed of that.”

A smothering wave of emotion swept through her, for she knew that he meant every word. “I understand,” she said. “But I don’t want to mean that much to somebody. I don’t want a travesty of justice committed in my name. We can’t compound this evil. We have to fight it.”

“By publishing everything about Brody tomorrow morning?”

She nodded, her breaths coming shallow. “I’ve already written the story. I would have called and told you, but I assumed you were with Royal.”

“And you couldn’t wait a few extra minutes to see how that went?”

She felt her cheeks heat up again. “Not and make my deadline. But truthfully … maybe I was afraid I knew how it would go.”

He leaned back in his chair. “I see. And I suppose it’s just a coincidence that this decision gives you the biggest scoop of your career? On the same morning that a flock of vultures will land here to cover the same story?”

Her temper finally flared beyond her control. “I’m not going to apologize for doing my job! You think some other media outlet might not get to Katy Royal in the hospital? What if she tells
them
about her father’s crime?”

“She’s in a coma! Please tell me this isn’t about hanging another Pulitzer on your wall.”