The Bone Tree (Penn Cage #5) - Greg Iles Page 0,2

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