“I understand,” Peggy said, thinking of all the widows and widowers Tom had been forced to sedate over the years in the first hours after a death.

“Obviously the question of telling Penn’s daughter the news is going to come up. I don’t know how you feel about that. But given what I’ve heard tonight, you might want to handle that job yourself. Penn may not be in a condition to do it.”

“Of course,” Peggy said automatically, though dread had begun to fill her heart. Annie had lost her biological mother at the age of four, and she hadn’t handled it well. Now—on the verge of gaining a new one—she too had been snatched away?

“I didn’t want Penn driving a car,” Kaiser was saying. “That’s why he’s returning by helicopter. He left his Audi on a highway in Wilkinson County, so I sent agents to retrieve it and bring it back to the house. Don’t be alarmed if you see his car pull up outside. I’ve alerted my men there.”

“Thank you, Agent Kaiser,” she mumbled, even as her ears picked up the news announcer in the next room saying: “We’re getting news of a breaking story in Lusahatcha County, Mississippi, one that involves yet another death and possibly a break in the unsolved civil rights murders being investigated in the Natchez–Concordia Parish area. . . .”

“Oh, I’ve got to go,” she said.

“Wait, please,” said Kaiser. “There’s a good chance your husband will try to contact you. It’s time to bring this circus to an end, Mrs. Cage. I’m doing everything I can to arrange protective custody for Dr. Cage. If he should contact you, please try to persuade him to call me. Any FBI office can patch him through to me. Tell him to identify himself as Dr. McCrae. Which I believe is your maiden name.”

“It is, and I’ll try. I’ve really got to go now.”

Peggy hung up and rushed into the den, meaning to grab the remote and shut it off. Annie was holding it, of course. The child whipped her head around, then froze as she saw Peggy’s face.

“What’s the matter, Gram? What happened?”

Peggy’s throat had sealed shut.

Annie’s eyes widened. “Gram . . . ?”

“Your father’s on his way home, sweetie.”

“Then why don’t you look happy?”

Peggy glanced at the television. The newscast had cut to a commercial, but it would return any second with the story that John Kaiser had already relayed to her.

“Annie, let’s turn off the TV.”

“How come?”

Peggy stepped forward and held out her hand. “Let me have that, sweetheart.”

Annie looked down at the remote control. Then she began to cry.

CHAPTER 75

AS THE LUSAHATCHA County Sheriff’s Department helicopter storms northwest through gray towers of cloud, I huddle in its belly, my back pressed against the chopper’s metal skin. From across the cabin, Carl Sims stares at me like he’s been assigned to a suicide watch. Carl cares about me, I know, and at some level he loved Caitlin, but right now he might as well be a stranger. The only thing that really joins us is that once he was paid to protect Caitlin and failed in his duty. So Carl knows that pain, at least to some extent. But in the last analysis, Caitlin’s death is a tragic but transient event for him, whereas I have suffered a physical and spiritual amputation. Caitlin is gone forever, and from bitter experience I know I will feel her loss every day (as I did that of my first wife), for at least several years. The effect on Annie I cannot even begin to contemplate; I must spare myself that pain for now.

Between my legs rests a small cardboard box containing what the duty nurse at Our Lady called Caitlin’s “personal effects.” I only glanced inside the box, half hoping for some clue to what happened to her. But all I saw was her cell phone (which Carl had instinctively saved during our attempted rescue), her engagement ring (the very modest one she’d asked for), one plain gold earring (the other had somehow been lost), a navy blue hair scrunchie, and a scarred Gerber multi-tool with clotted blood still on it. The nurse seemed torn about the multi-tool, wondering aloud whether the police might want it as evidence; but the trauma surgeon believed that Caitlin herself had bloodied the tool in a failed effort to save her life.

Again and again I hear that surgeon marveling at how Dad had contrived to drain the blood from Caitlin’s pericardium with a ballpoint pen, but even more that Caitlin had carried out the painful procedure herself. Once I left the hospital, I couldn’t shut out the image of Caitlin steeling herself against the fire of that naked blade, then cutting her own flesh in a desperate attempt to save herself. God knows she didn’t lack nerve. Caitlin once put four stitches in my lacerated foot under my father’s watchful eyes, after I’d ripped it open walking through a creek on the Natchez Trace. I did similar things as a boy, when Dad tried to instill in me a love for medicine. But despite his effort, that love never developed, and instead I followed my talents for reading people, for seeing through the fog of lies, and for persuading people of certain realities. How odd that I would ultimately turn to writing fiction: telling lies to persuade people of things that never happened. Of course, the secret that all good novelists know is that the “lies” they tell are truer than any factual history could ever be.

I wish I had a good lie now. If I did, I would tell it to myself and then, before I saw through it, call Caitlin’s father and tell it to him. Because . . . how do you tell a man that his daughter has been murdered? What do you say when he asks you whether his little girl suffered before she died? And how do you answer when he asks you what you intend to do about what happened to her? In that father’s ideal world, you would say, I promise you this, sir, the son of a bitch who killed her won’t see another sunrise.

For that is one thing about the South: it’s still a place where, if a man catches someone molesting his child and beats that man to death, he can reasonably expect a jury of his peers to conclude that the pervert fell down twenty-six times on his way to the morgue. Not guilty, Judge, and by the way could we shake the defendant’s hand? The same principle would hold true for a killer of women, at least in some circumstances.

But in reality, most times the man in my position does nothing. I saw this soul-deadening dilemma too many times as a prosecutor. The desire for revenge is primal, bred deep in our species. But the fear of losing everything is greater still. Most times, a man who contemplates revenge realizes that he must throw away not only his freedom but his family in order to get it, and in the end, he turns his anger inward. There it mixes with guilt and poisons him until, with luck, the passing years eventually dilute the toxins to a tolerable level. Sometimes, though—particularly with the parents of missing or murdered children—that dilution never happens.

Sometimes the poison kills them.

I may not turn to murder for revenge, but neither will I be one of those poisoned men. Whatever responsibility Caitlin bears for her fate, I have failed in my duty to protect her. What can I do now? Killing her killer for revenge would go against everything I’ve stood for all my life. It would go against everything my father taught me. But as this thought flashes through my brain, I realize that in the past week, my father has broken every precept he ever tried to instill in me. So why do I still jump to the false tune of his teaching?

Danny McDavitt’s voice crackles in my headset: “I just heard on the radio that somebody set that Bone Tree on fire.”

This brings me out of my fog. “Set it on fire?”

“That’s what I heard. Trying to destroy evidence, looks like.”