The Bone Tree (Penn Cage #5) - Greg Iles Page 0,318

but the thing he feared most he did not find. Frank Knox’s health file was not among his records.

Tom didn’t sleep much after that night. He worried constantly about Viola in Chicago, and also about the favor he’d done for Frank back in ’63. He lost weight, hair, and his peace of mind. Peggy begged him to have one of his partners check his health, but Tom knew the source of his problem. What he didn’t know was what to do about it. Eventually, he crafted a request based on fabricated medical grounds, which he sent to the Triton Battery Corporation. Tom claimed to need information on Frank Knox’s medical history, in order to better treat one of his descendants. Though the Triton company had recently been sold, a clerk responded to Tom a month later, telling him that he’d been unable to locate Knox’s medical record. Tom initially felt relief, but then a second missive from the helpful clerk arrived, informing him that the bulk of Knox’s personnel file had been transferred to the FBI in 1965 and had never been returned to the company. The clerk forwarded a few photocopied sheets covering Frank’s employment from 1965 until his death in ’68, but this chronicle of suicidal alcoholism held no interest for Tom. The relevant year’s record was in the hands of the FBI, and this sent his paranoia into overdrive.

The first Saturday after receiving this letter, he drove down to the clinic’s rented storeroom, rolled up his sleeves, and began tearing through every box of extant medical records. It took him six hours, but he finally found the answer he had both sought and feared. It waited in a bellied old box containing the medical records of deceased patients from 1968. There, in the file of Frank Knox, was a notation in Tom’s scrawled hand recording a visit by Frank on November 18, 1963, during which Tom had ordered Knox to stay home from work for five days. The medical reason: chronic hepatitis. Tom sat alone in the storeroom, his heart pounding, his blurred eyes skimming the final page of Knox’s file, where he’d recorded Frank’s “accidental” death by industrial mishap. As terrible as that lie had always seemed, it paled in comparison to the implication of freeing Frank Knox from work during the week of the Kennedy assassination.

Tom returned home that evening a changed man. He had satisfied his curiosity, but the price had been a piece of his soul. He told no one about his discovery. After all, Carlos Marcello was still alive, and the FBI already had its own copy of Frank Knox’s absentee record. Though Tom lived in constant dread of being contacted by the Bureau about Frank, he never was. And while he half expected to receive tragic news about Viola any day, he never did. Eventually, the demands of his practice and the passage of time drove his anxiety into the background, and three years passed before he was forced to confront his fears once more.

On March 3, 1993, Carlos Marcello finally died.

Naturally, the first Tom heard of it was when his nurse ushered Ray Presley into his office at the end of a workday. The rawboned former detective held a brown paper bag in his hands. In that bag was a bottle of expensive bourbon, which Ray took out, set on Tom’s desk, and said, “The king is dead. Long live the king.”

“What are you talking about?” Tom asked.

“The Little Man passed.”

A cold shudder went through Tom: it was fear that Viola’s days were now numbered—possibly in single digits.

Ray opened the bourbon and poured shots, and Tom drank three in a row. After Ray waxed poetic for a few minutes about the old days in New Orleans, he fell silent and looked into Tom’s eyes. Then he asked whether Tom was still confused about who’d killed JFK.

Tom shook his head and said, “Frank, right?”

“Good old Frank,” Ray confirmed, nodding.

“So what happens now?” Tom asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well . . . Frank’s been dead for a quarter century. Now Marcello’s dead. Kennedy’s been dead thirty years. Are you going to carry the secret to the grave? Or are you going to do something else with it?”

Presley’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Like what?”

“You know what. You’re a history buff, like me. We’re talking about the biggest murder case in American history. You can set the record straight, let the world know what really happened. Hell, that story’s probably worth millions of dollars.”

Ray thought