The Bone Tree

“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. Pe

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 Pe

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.

“Give him your screen, Pete,” ordered the tech.

The second tech got up and went over to the coffeemaker. As Kaiser took the warm seat, the first tech said, “I routed the front page to you. I’ll keep looking for any mention of Henry Sexton’s notebooks.”

With his aging eyes, Kaiser had to tilt his head at exactly the right angle to read what was on the screen, and he could barely make out what the tech was saying on his left. Kaiser had lost nearly all the hearing in that ear two years ago, when a drug dealer holding him hostage on Royal Street in New Orleans had fired off a 9 mm pistol only inches from his ear.

From what Kaiser could see on the screen, Caitlin Masters had led off her story with the true events at the Concordia hospital. Kaiser had hoped to lull the Double Eagles into making a mistake by putting out the story that the Eagles had succeeded in killing Henry Sexton rather than merely wounding him, but the appearance of Captain Ozan at the hospital had seriously lowered the odds of success. He couldn’t blame Masters for printing the truth.

“I’ve got a folder!” cried the tech. “‘Henrys Moleskines’ is the name. Jesus, do you think—?”

“She digitized his notebooks!” Kaiser cried, his pulse racing. “Put the folder on my screen.”

“Doing it now.”

“Can we copy the files?”

“Sure.”

“Will they know we did it?”

“If they hire a forensic firm down the road, yes. But not anytime soon. Do you have it?”

A cluster of typical Windows folders appeared on Kaiser’s screen. “Just click on it?” he asked, his right hand tingling as it hung over the mouse.

“Sure. Just like your computer.”

Kaiser clicked on the folder, but no files opened. “I’ve got nothing. Is the folder password protected or something?”

“Not that I could see.”

Kaiser tried twice more, then clicked on Properties. “The folder appears to be empty on this screen. Are you sure I have access to the file from here?”

“You should have access to everything I do. Hang on.”

Kaiser waited, fingers twitching. If he could get immediate access to every note that Henry Sexton had taken over decades of investigation, there was no telling what deductive leaps he might make. Plus, despite Sexton’s apparent candor in the hospital, the reporter might have held back critical information, hoping to follow it up himself after he recovered. Kaiser suspected, for example, that Sexton might have some notion of the location of the Bone Tree, a long-rumored dump site for Double Eagle corpses and a killing ground that dated to the pre-Columbian years of the Natchez Indians.

“Oh, no,” groaned the tech, his voice taut.

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Somebody erased the files in that folder.”

“Just now?”

“Yep. I can see their tracks. Somebody just deleted the file containing what must have been digital scans of Sexton’s notebooks. There was thirty gigabytes of data in that folder. Now it’s empty. And I think they’re still deleting stuff.”

“Who the hell would do that?” Kaiser demanded, a bubble of panic in his chest.

“User 23. That’s all I can tell you.”

“You can’t tell who User 23 is?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

“Shit!”

“What do you want me to do, boss?”

“Can you copy their whole server drives? Everything they have?”

The tech’s eyes went wide. “That’s a lot of data.”

“That’s not an answer, goddamn it.”

“It would take a long time. And it would definitely increase the odds of their IT people in Charleston noticing something.”

“Do it anyway.”

Kaiser was trying to think outside the box when his cell phone rang. He expected it to be his wife, asking where he’d gone, but it was one of the agents guarding Henry Sexton at the Concordia hospital.

“What is it?” he snapped. “Is Sexton still stable?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sexton’s not in his hospital bed. I just walked in and found his seventy-eight-year-old mother lying in his place. She’s hooked up to the heart monitors and everything.”

“What?”

“She used to be a nurse, apparently. When you gave permission for Henry’s mother to visit him, he got hold of a cell phone and asked her to bring him a few things to help him sneak out. She did, and Henry pulled it off. He walked out of here wearing his mother’s coat and hat. Right past our guards.”