The Bone Tree (Penn Cage #5) - Greg Iles Page 0,3

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.

The reason for that was his father.

Tom Cage was almost a relic of a bygone era. A former combat medic in Korea, Cage had gone on to practice medicine for nearly fifty years in Natchez, where he’d worked tirelessly for decades to treat the black community with no thought of recognition or reward. Yet paradoxically, this beloved physician’s irrational actions had directly or indirectly triggered every tragedy that had happened over the past three days.

In the wee hours of Monday morning, Viola Turner, Dr. Cage’s sixty-five-year-old former nurse, had died in her sister’s home in Natchez. After living in Chicago for thirty-seven years, the Natchez native had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and returned home to die in the care of her old employer. Few people had known that Dr. Cage was treating Turner, and even if they had, no one would have expected the explosion that followed her death. That only occurred because Turner’s son, a Chicago lawyer, had shown up at the Natchez DA’s office and demanded that Dr. Cage be charged not with euthanasia, but with murder. And because the black district attorney, Shadrach Johnson, had a long history of antipathy for Penn Cage, he had obliged the angry son.

Things might have progressed with some semblance of order had not Dr. Cage jumped bail after being indicted by a grand jury with lightning speed. From what Kaiser could ascertain, the doctor had been aided in this task by an old war buddy, a former Texas Ranger named Walt Garrity. Worst of all, within hours of making their escape, either Cage or Garrity had killed a Louisiana state trooper who’d cornered them near the Mississippi River. Kaiser strongly suspected that the dead trooper had been working for Forrest Knox, not the State of Louisiana, when he’d caught up with the two fugitives, but sadly Kaiser could not prove that.

“I’m in!” crowed the tech. “I’m looking at the front page of tomorrow’s Examiner.”

“Let me see,” Kaiser said, turning from the window.

“Give him your screen, Pete,” ordered the tech.

The second tech got up and went over to the coffeemaker. As Kaiser took the warm seat, the first tech said, “I routed the front page to you. I’ll keep looking for any mention of Henry Sexton’s notebooks.”

With his aging eyes, Kaiser had to tilt his head at exactly the right angle to read what was on the screen, and he could barely make out what the tech was saying on his left. Kaiser had lost nearly all the hearing in that ear two years ago, when a drug dealer holding him hostage on Royal Street in New Orleans had fired off a 9 mm pistol only inches from his ear.

From what Kaiser could see on the screen, Caitlin Masters had led off her story with the true events at the Concordia hospital. Kaiser had hoped to lull the Double Eagles into making a mistake by putting out the story that the Eagles had succeeded in killing Henry Sexton rather than merely wounding him, but the appearance of Captain Ozan at the hospital had seriously lowered the odds of success. He couldn’t blame Masters for printing the truth.

“I’ve got a folder!” cried the tech. “‘Henrys Moleskines’ is the name. Jesus, do you think—?”

“She digitized his notebooks!” Kaiser cried, his pulse racing. “Put the folder on my screen.”

“Doing it now.”

“Can we copy