Natchez Burning, Part 5 by Greg Iles

Author:Greg Iles [Greg Iles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 58

LESS THAN FIVE miles from Brody Royal’s lake house, Caitlin Masters stood outside the smoking ruin of the Concordia Beacon and watched a fire inspector work his way through the building with a high-powered flashlight. Jamie Lewis was sitting in his car, talking on the phone to one of their reporters back at the Examiner. She and Jamie had already interviewed every cop and fireman on the scene, and everyone agreed it was arson. Several firemen had reported the smell of tar, which none recalled having encountered in a long time, except at buildings with tarred roofs, which the Beacon had not had.

While waiting for the fire crew to leave (so that she could search the building), Caitlin had been discreetly searching the area outside, particularly the ground near where Henry had been attacked. Now that Jamie was occupied in the car, she bent over the soot-covered parking lot and switched on her Palm Treo, using it as a flashlight. The glow of the screen was dim, but she didn’t want to risk using the penlight in her purse.

After two or three minutes of searching, she was ready to give up. But just then, something glinted in the soot. Sweeping her gaze in a semicircle, and seeing no one nearby, she reached down and pulled up what appeared to be a small notebook. She brushed off the soot and saw that it was a Moleskine. The cover looked slightly charred, but inside it, between the cover and the first notebook page, she found two photographs. One showed four men in the stern of a fishing boat. The other showed Henry Sexton’s face. It had obviously been shot from a distance with a telephoto lens. Caitlin blinked and turned the photo toward the taillights of a nearby truck that had been left idling. Then she froze.

Someone had superimposed a rifle scope over Henry’s face.

Sliding that photo aside, she peered at the men in the fishing boat. After a few seconds, her pulse began to race. One of the men in the boat was Tom Cage. Another looked a lot like … Ray Presley. Had Caitlin not spent all day researching the names Penn gave her last night, she wouldn’t have recognized the other two men. But now she placed them as easily as she might have a schoolmate from years ago. The man who appeared to be talking in the photograph was a local attorney, Claude Devereux. The man who looked like Charlton Heston was Brody Royal.

“Jamie!” she called, hurrying to the car and dropping into the passenger seat. “Get this thing in gear!”

“I thought you wanted to search the place.”

“I just did,” she said, slamming her door. “Get us back to the paper.”

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