“This is getting out of hand, Sonny,” he says in a cold voice. “Let me tell you something. My superiors badly want to talk to Dr. Cage. If he turns out to be dead, it’s going to be tough for me to make any kind of deal for you. My bosses won’t approve it. I can’t believe Snake wouldn’t tell you what he was going to do with him.”

“That’s the whole ever-lovin’ point!” Sonny cries. “He didn’t trust the rest of us not to break under pressure. Not after what Glenn done. And I reckon he was right not to, wasn’t he?”

“If I sent you back to the cellblock, could you get it out of Snake?”

“Shit. I do that, I might as well tell him I’m in here trying to cut a deal with you.”

“If Snake Knox doesn’t trust you anymore,” Kaiser muses, “I can’t believe Frank Knox ever did. If you want your family brought here on a government plane, you’ve got to give me something to justify your deal.”

Thornfield grimaces so hard he bares his teeth, which makes him look like a possum cornered between two garbage cans.

“Look, I know,” he insists. “I know all there is to know—twice as much as Glenn ever did. But how can I prove it without giving away the store?”

While Kaiser wrestles with this dilemma, my mind fills with an image of Caitlin rolling over a bloated white body in the black water of the Lusahatcha Swamp. I’ve seen many floaters in my career, rotted and half eaten by turtles, snake, and fish. I can’t bear thinking about my mother having to view my father’s body in such a state. I’m not sure I could bear it myself.

“Turn off the camera, John,” I say sharply.

“What?”

“Just do it. And find us a bedsheet to cover the observation mirror.”

“What exactly do you have in mind?” he asks, getting up and walking to the camcorder.

“A way for Sonny to let us know what he knows without implicating himself or giving away the store.”

Sonny looks worried now. “I ain’t saying nothing you guys can record. I know you got all kinds of fancy hidden microphones and shit.”

“It’s nothing like that,” I assure him.

“Then what is it?”

“Have you ever worked a jigsaw puzzle, Sonny?”

He gives me the cornered possum look again, but finally he nods.

“This is just like that.” I sit down in Kaiser’s chair and start writing in his notebook. “Get the bedsheet for the mirror, John. You’ll need some duct tape to hold it up.”

“All right, hell. But I’m not leaving you in here alone with him. I’ll send one of my men.”

As he goes to the door, I begin writing words across the top of a page.

VICTIM

KILLER(S)

WEAPON/METHOD

DUMP SITE

“And bring some scissors, too.”

Kaiser pauses at the door. “You can’t bring scissors into an interrogation room.”

I look up angrily. “You want to break these cases? Bring me some goddamn scissors!”

FORREST HAD FINALLY TIRED of fighting the wind out on the deck. He’d moved into the great room of the Bouchard lake house, and Ozan had built a fire in the stone fireplace. A hidden gas jet made it easy work, and Forrest had moved forward to warm his hands when his cracked StarTac rang.

“I’m waiting,” he said.

“Bad news,” said Spanky Ford. “I think one of your guys may be talking.”

A shiver ran the length of Forrest’s body. “Who?”

“Thornfield.”

Sonny? he thought skeptically. But after a few seconds, it made sense. Sonny was probably the smartest of the Eagles. He would sense that things were spinning out of control. And Sonny had family that didn’t actually hate him outright.

“They’ve got him locked in the main interrogation room,” Ford said. “Snake and Will Devine are locked in questioning rooms, too, but there’s nobody in with them. I think Kaiser stuck them in there so they wouldn’t know what was going on.”

“Have you told Snake about this?”

“I just managed to before an FBI agent took up station in front of his door.”

“What did he say?”

“He said tell you that Dr. Cage is alive but he’s where he can’t hurt anybody. Don’t waste effort looking for him, Snake said.”

Relief washed through Forrest. If Tom Cage was alive, then he still had some flexibility in dealing with Penn Cage and his fiancée. Of course, if Sonny Thornfield turned state’s evidence, everybody was going down. Then a new possibility came to him.

“Deputy . . . do you think Snake was telling the truth about Dr. Cage?”

Ford didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, “I didn’t know he might have a reason to lie, Colonel. I really couldn’t say, sir.”

“Okay. But you believe Sonny’s really flipping?”

“All I know is, Cage and Kaiser are the only ones in there with him, and they’ve taped a sheet over the observation window.”

“Okay.” Forrest thought furiously. “Here’s what I want you to do. The first chance you get to pass a message to Snake, tell him I said to get ready to shut down any talk, and for good. Tell him I’ll get him his chance. Snake will know when to move. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll have a job, too, but I’ll get back to you with it.”

“I’m ready.”

“Last thing . . . you tell Snake he’d better bring Dr. Cage to me on a silver platter after I get him out of there.”

“Will do, Colonel. Is there—”

“Boss!” Ozan called, walking into the room with an armload of firewood. “I got news! Good and bad. What you want first?”

“Gimme the bad. Is Dr. Cage dead?”

“I don’t know, but the Black Team found the guys they left to guard the doc tied up in the Roadtrek at the back of that oil field. They said Snake and his crew took the doc, all right. They’re ready to rip his lungs out.”

Forrest nodded slowly. He’d never really doubted that Snake had taken Dr. Cage. The question was, what had he done with him?

“What’s the good news?”

“One of our highway units stopped Claude Devereux on the causeway outside Lafayette.”

Forrest pumped a fist in the air. “I’ve got to go,” he told Ford. “You tell Snake what I said.”

“I will if I can.”

“And call me in fifteen minutes if they’re still talking to Thornfield.”

“Will do. Out.”

Forrest clicked off and pocketed his phone, then turned to Ozan. “You tell whoever stopped Claude to escort him all the way back to his office in Vidalia. And if Claude raises a fuss, arrest him.”

Ozan nodded. “So Dr. Cage is alive?”

Forrest blew out a lungful of air. “I don’t know. Snake sent word that he is, but that doesn’t mean a thing now. He’s just trying to get out from under those meth charges. For all I know, the doc has been dead since last night.”

CHAPTER 61

TO SPARE MYSELF the torture of waiting to hear whether or not the body in the swamp belongs to my father, I’ve designed a puzzle that will allow Sonny Thornfield to tell us what he knows without it being recorded in any way. I did this by drawing a grid on a piece of notebook paper, then listing the known murder victims vertically on the left side of the page. Across the top I created columns for the killers, the murder weapons or torture methods, the dump sites. Then I gridded a second page and filled it with names, murder weapons, torture methods, and dump sites (multiple copies of each place name). Finally, using Kaiser’s scissors, I cut that page into small rectangles with one word on each. As I did this, an FBI agent helped Kaiser tape a bedsheet over the one-way observation mirror. And though he did it quietly, I also heard Kaiser post an FBI guard at the cellblock door with orders not to let me inside under any circumstances. After what he witnessed in the utility closet, he isn’t going to let me near Snake Knox again.

With the interrogation room’s two doors shut and the camcorder unplugged, I spread the columned page on the table in front of Sonny Thornfield and pile the rectangular “puzzle pieces” beside it. Then Kaiser and I take up stations on either side of the old man so that we can watch his progress, like parents watching a toddler work a puzzle.