longingly after Kirk as he went out the front door.
ALOIS ENGEL BRAKED AT the stop sign at the corner of Auburn and Duncan Avenues and depressed the electric cigarette lighter. The hippie who’d been guarding the front of the house was still nowhere to be seen. There were no cars behind Alois, and none on the intersecting streets. Duncan Avenue felt like it had been transplanted from the Garden District in New Orleans. Facing a golf course dotted with black and white men in their seventies, this sleepy lane was due for some excitement.
The cigarette light popped out, ready to go.
Alois removed the little metal plunger with its red-hot eye, then picked up the Molotov cocktail and carefully ignited the windproof match taped to the bottle’s side. Then he wedged the bottle between the passenger seat and the console of his pickup. The match burned with a snakelike hiss.
Alois scanned 360 degrees around the intersection. Still no traffic. Picking up his cell phone, he texted a question mark to Wilma Deen, whom he’d dropped off on Ratcliff Place, near a home whose yard abutted the yard of the mayor’s safe house. Ten seconds later, his phone pinged.
Wilma’s text read: Still in position. Ready 2 rock.
Alois picked up the Spider-Man mask from the passenger seat and pulled it over his head. Then he let his foot off the brake and rolled forward.
The mayor’s house was fifty yards away.
Alois had rolled only ten yards when the blond hippie walked out the front door and surveyed the street.
“Goddamn it,” Alois muttered. “I’m gonna blow your shit away.”
But he didn’t. He snapped off the head of the sizzling match and grabbed for his cell phone.
CHAPTER 63
I’M ABOUT TO observe the most surreal interrogation of my legal career, and I’m not even sure it’s legal. John Kaiser hasn’t set up this session to gather evidence for a court case. He wants to uncover a long-buried truth, one he believes to be bigger than any single case, and more important than the fate of my father. For this reason, Kaiser has allowed things I’ve only rarely seen in a sheriff’s office, and never during an FBI interrogation.
First, the video camcorder is unplugged. This occasionally happens, and for a variety of reasons (but not usually to help the suspect). Second, the bedsheet is still hanging over the observation window (a sensible precaution). But strangest of all, Kaiser has submitted to a physical search by his prisoner, so the Double Eagle can be sure the FBI agent isn’t wearing any recording device. I had to endure the same treatment in order to be present, and since I hold out some hope that Sonny might recant what he wrote about my father on the puzzle I created, I consented.
Sonny Thornfield has relaxed considerably since I was last in this room. The reason is simple. Kaiser’s agents have already tracked down his grandson, the one preparing to depart for his second tour in Iraq. Kaiser actually brought in an encrypted FBI phone and allowed Sonny to speak to the kid on it. By then I knew the backstory: the boy saw his best friend maimed during his first tour, and he has no interest in sharing the same fate. Kaiser promised Sonny that if his grandson agreed to go into federal witness protection, he would not have to return to Iraq. I have no idea whether this is true, but Kaiser’s confidently delivered answer—combined with the fact that he’s already arranged to fly three of Sonny’s family members here on FBI aircraft—told me that the FBI agent is pulling out all the stops for this case.
So . . . here we sit, watching a former Ku Klux Klansman and Double Eagle prepare to reveal a secret he’s carried for forty years, on pain of death, in order to save himself and his family. Among my regrets—and they are many—is that Henry Sexton did not live to sit beside me in this moment. Whatever Sonny Thornfield knows, it might mean more to Henry than even to Dwight Stone.
“I want to make one thing clear,” Sonny begins, licking his lips and glancing over at the bedsheet to make sure it’s still taped over the one-way mirror. “I’m not going to talk about any other case but the big one. Dallas. And when I say the name Frank, I’m referring to Frank Sinatra. Nobody else, got it? Frank Sinatra.”
“Got it,” says Kaiser. “Let’s hear what Old Blue Eyes did in Dallas in 1963.