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 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.