"Dad, if you'll listen to me for one minute, I think you'll understand why I have to do this."

"Nothing to do out here but listen."

"Do you know a deputy named Ike Ransom?"

"Sure. Ike the Spike. I treated his mother for years."

"He followed me home last night after the party. He wants Payton's killer punished. And he knows who it is."

"Why doesn't he do something about it, then? He was a cop for twenty years."

"He's scared."

Dad shakes his head wearily. "Over the years at least three men I know of have claimed they killed Delano Payton. Drunk rednecks like to take credit for that kind of thing. Ransom probably overheard something like that and believed it. Who does he say did it?"

"Leo Marston."

Dad's mouth drops open. "Leo Marston? That's crazy. Marston's a lot of things, but he's no racist."

"That's what I thought too. But how do you know he's not?"

"Well… I've seen pictures of him with Bobby Kennedy, for one thing. With Charles and Medgar Evers too. I think I even saw a shot of him with Martin Luther King."

"How do you know that wasn't just public relations?"

"In the sixties? A white man posing with the Evers boys and King?" Dad shakes his head again. "Is Livy Marston a racist?"

"No. But that doesn't prove anything."

"Sure it does. Apples don't fall far from the tree." He draws thoughtfully on his cigar. "Ike Ransom's a bad alcoholic, son. Has been for years. I think he's playing you. He knows Marston hurt our family, so that makes Marston the best way to suck you into the Payton case. He figures once you're into it, you'll go for the throat of whoever turns out to be guilty. That's what the blacks in this town want, and I don't blame them."

"I don't think blacks want that at all. Shad Johnson sure doesn't. They want that new chemical plant in here as much as anybody. I can't believe you're defending Marston."

He slaps himself like a madman as a horsefly the size of a small fighter plane attacks him, refusing to give quarter. Fearing that this battle will overturn the boat, I scramble forward and smash the insect against his shoulder.

"Thanks," he mutters. "I'm not defending that bastard. But Leo Marston destroys people. He doesn't murder them."

"You're thinking in a business context. What if it was personal? Maybe Payton and Marston had business dealings of some kind. Or maybe Payton was in a position to know something about Marston's personal affairs."

He dismisses this with a flip of his hand. "No way, no how. Different universes."

"Ike's anger felt personal to me. He hates Marston."

"That's a big club. Look, for all we know, Marston sent Ike Ransom's brother to jail. He could have any kind of grudge against Marston, and we wouldn't know it."

"But if Marston's not involved in the Payton case, how would putting me on it hurt Marston? You see? You can't have it both ways."

He groans in exasperation.

"You're looking for logic," I continue. "But Marston went after you for malpractice in 1979, and we never learned why. Motives aren't always obvious."

Now he's listening.

"Leo Marston was D.A. when Payton was killed. I think that's how he's tied into it. When Willie Pinder became police chief, he started looking into Payton's murder. Very quietly, using only black officers. But before he got far, somebody warned him off the case."

"Who?"

"Ray Presley."

Dad tosses his cigar into the water, where it hisses and sputters out. "Why am I not surprised?"

"Ray told Willie that he'd tried to solve the case in sixty-eight, but that he'd been warned off too. He wouldn't say by whom, but it was enough to scare him off."

"That would take some doing."

"That's what Willie said. He dropped it. Didn't Presley do a lot of work for Marston in the seventies?"

"I believe he did."

"Think about it. We've got Ray Presley, a blatant racist, investigating a politically sensitive race murder while Leo Marston is D.A. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that Marston could have committed criminal acts under those circumstances."

"But why? That's what I can't see."

"I don't know."

"Wouldn't the statute of limitations have run out on anything short of murder?"

"That's right. Anything short of murder."

He looks like a sculpture in the bow of the boat, frozen in contemplation. We're two hundred yards from shore now, far enough that even a severe drought would be unlikely to uncover the swamp bottom. Even if it did, there would only be the cement-filled pail lying in the baking mud among the dead fish and loggerhead turtles. A lost anchor. Nothing else.

I lift the long pole out of the water and lay it along the gunwale of the boat. Dad starts to get up, but I motion for him to stay seated. The last thing we need is to capsize in water teeming with water moccasins, and perhaps even alligators.

I drag the heavy bucket toward the stern and lift it onto my seat, then sit beside it, flex my arms, and roll it over between my legs. After a deep breath, I slip my hands under it and stand up, using my legs for power. In seconds my arms are quivering from the weight.

"Throw it!" Dad cries.

I heave the bucket to my left and into the black water, heeling the boat hard to starboard and almost losing my balance. The splash sounds like a cannonball and showers both of us with slimy water.

"God almighty!" Dad exults. "I thought we were going over!"

"That gun is history," I say quietly. "Let's go to the house."

I pick up the pole, plunge it to the muddy bottom, and work the bow back around until it points to the dirt road where we parked Dad's pickup. High above us, a hawk circles over unseen prey. As it sails through the falling dusk, Dad says: "Could it have been the feds who warned Ray off the Payton case?"

Despite the heat, I feel a shiver deep in my chest. Willie Pinder's remarks are playing in my head. "What makes you ask that?"

"I remember a picture from somewhere. It showed Marston and J. Edgar Hoover together. Both of them glaring into the camera like junior G-men. Marston always claimed to be a personal friend of Hoover's. That's not fashionable now, of course. But thirty years ago it was quite a coup."

I had thought I might be able to keep my father on the periphery of this case, but that's simply not practical. The fact is, I need his help. "Dad, the guy who sent me that list of FBI agents is Bureau himself. He told me a couple of disturbing things."

"Like?"

"This morning Austin Mackey requested the FBI file on Del Payton, and he was turned down. The Payton file was sealed by J. Edgar Hoover in 1968 on grounds of national security."

His eyes narrow in disbelief. "What? "

"Now you tell me Marston was a personal friend of Hoover's. I've already determined that Presley probably lied about the bomb that blew up Payton's car. The FBI had to know that. I don't know how it all adds up, but as district attorney, Marston had to be right in the middle of all this."

He looks toward the shore, as though trying to spot his truck against the darkness of the trees. When he answers, his voice is so soft it seems to drift out of the lap of water against the bow.

"Leo Marston put our family through hell for a year and a half. The stress damn near killed me, and it changed your mother forever."

I say nothing, wondering if he's talking to me or himself.

"The things he's done to other people… compromised them, bullied them. You don't know half of what he's done. I'm not a vindictive man. But to make that bastard pay for some of that… God, that would be justice."

He is taking himself where I wanted to take him all along.

"We'd have to find a way to protect Annie and Peggy," he says. "Around the clock."

"We can do that."

He looks back at me. "You're not in Houston anymore. You have no authority here. You can't investigate secretly. Half the town already knows what you're doing."