"That's true. Most people who stay are very different from me. Zealots, moralists. Jesuits, I call them. Military types who like to punish criminals. My boss was a lot like that."

"So, why did you stay?"

"I was accomplishing something. I felt I was a moral counterweight to those people. Some liberals even said I had an overdeveloped sense of justice. And that may be true. I convicted a lot of killers, and I don't apologize for it. I believe evil should be held accountable."

"Whoa, that was Evil with a capital E."

"It's out there. Take my word for it."

"An overdeveloped sense of justice. Is that why you're investigating the Payton case?"

"No. I'm doing that because of Livy Marston."

Caitlin looks like I hit her in the head with a hammer. "What the hell are you talking about?"

I lean into the aisle and signal the flight attendant; it's time for a Scotch. "Twenty years ago Livy's father used very bit of his power to try to destroy my father. He didn't succeed, but he separated Livy and me forever. And I never knew why."

"And you think Marston is involved in the Payton murder?"

"Yes."

"God, I'm trapped in a Southern gothic novel."

"You asked for it."

She finishes off her martini in a gulp. "I hope nobody's going to ask me to squeal like a pig."

I laugh as she orders another martini, amazed by how quickly the age difference between us has become irrelevant. I wonder how far apart we really are. Does she know that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were the greatest songwriters who ever lived? That the pseudo-nihilism of Generation X was merely frustrated narcissism? That I, at thirty-eight years old, am as trapped in my own era as a septuagenarian humming "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me" and dreaming of the agony of Anzio is trapped in his?

"Back up," Caitlin says. "You and Livy were high school sweethearts?"

"No. For most of high school we were competitors. She only dated older guys, and no one steadily. She was her own person. She never wore a boy's letter jacket or class ring. She needed nothing external to define her or make her feel accepted. But at some point we both realized we were destined for bigger futures than most people we knew. We were going to leave that town far behind. That awareness inevitably pulled us together. We both loved literature and music, both excelled in all our classes. We dated for four months at the end of our senior year. We were both going to Ole Miss in the fall, but she was going to Radcliffe for the summer-"

"Oh, my God," Caitlin exclaims. "That magnolia blossom actually darkened the door of Radcliffe?"

"Aced every class, I'm sure. She wouldn't let Yankees feel superior to her for a second."

Caitlin makes a wry face, then sips her martini and looks out her window. "Was she good in bed?"

"A gentleman never tells."

She turns and punches my shoulder. "Jerk."

"What would you guess?"

"Probably. She has the intensity for it."

Yes…

"How did her father split you up?"

"He took a malpractice case against my father and pressed it to the wall. My dad was exonerated, but the trial was so brutal it nearly broke him. There was no way Livy and I could work through that."

Caitlin is watching me intently. "You're leaving a lot out, aren't you?"

Of course I am. How do we explain the abiding mysteries of our lives? "Livy never showed up at Ole Miss," I say softly. "She disappeared. Fell off the face of the planet. Her parents told people she'd gone to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, but I called to check, and they had no record of her. A year later word filtered out that she'd just entered the University of Virginia as a freshman. I have no idea where she spent the previous year, and neither does anyone else."

"Maybe she got pregnant. Went off and had the baby somewhere."

"I thought about that. But this was the late seventies, not the fifties. Her older sister had gotten pregnant a few years before, and she had an abortion, even though they were Catholic. Livy would have done the same thing. She wouldn't have let anything slow down her career." There's another reason I'm sure pregnancy is not the answer, but there's no point in getting clinical about it.

"Why did she go to the University of Virginia?"

"I think because it was far from Mississippi but still the South. She got an unlisted number, cut herself off from her old friends. By the time my father's trial got going, I didn't care anymore."

"You didn't ask her why her father was going after yours?"

This memory is one of my worst. "I flew up to Charlottesville a week before the trial, to try to get her to make Leo drop the case. My dad had already had a heart attack from the stress. She said she thought it was just a normal case, and that her father wouldn't listen to her opinion anyway. She was back in her high school queen mode, winning hearts and minds at UVA. It was like talking to a stranger." I take a burning sip of Scotch. "I wanted to kill her."

"Yes, but you loved her. You're still in love with her."

"No."

Caitlin smiles, not without empathy. "You are. You always will be."

"That's a depressing thought."

"No. Just recognize it and move on. Livy's not the person you think she is. Nobody could be. And you'd better be careful. She just separated from her husband, and you're still grieving over your wife. She could really mess you up."

"I'm no babe in the woods, Caitlin."

Her smile is timeless. All men are babes in the woods, it says. "You're trying to destroy her father now. How do you think she'll react to that?"

"I don't know. She has a love-hate relationship with him. It's like something out of Aeschylus. She knows he's done terrible things, but in some ways she's just like him."

"You should try very hard to keep that in mind."

"Why?"

She takes a pair of headphones from her lap, plugs them into the seat jack, and starts flipping through her channel guide. "How long has it been since you've seen her?"

"She came to my wife's funeral. We only spoke for a moment, though."

"Before that."

"A long time. Maybe seventeen years."

"You pull the lid off something that might get her father charged with capital murder, and suddenly she shows up like magic?"

"What are you saying? That her father called her to Natchez to… to influence me somehow? Because of your newspaper story?"

Caitlin shrugs. "I don't want to upset you, but that's what I'm saying."

She gives me a sad smile and puts on the headphones.

CHAPTER 20

I thought I was the last person to arrive in the witness room at Huntsville Prison until FBI Director John Portman walked in, flanked by two field agents who shadowed him like centurions guarding an emperor. Up to that point the preparations for the execution had proceeded with the tense banality that characterizes them all.

I had arrived to find the room nearly full. My old boss, Joe Cantor, motioned me to the empty chair beside Mrs. Givens, the closest relative of the victims. The curtain was drawn over the window of the extermination chamber, but I knew Arthur Lee Hanratty was already strapped to the gurney behind it, while a technician searched for veins good enough to take large-bore IV lines.

I hadn't seen Mrs. Givens for eight years, but the smell of cigarettes on her clothes brought back everything, a nervous woman who chain-smoked through every pretrial meeting and rushed for the courthouse door at every recess. She had a Bible in her lap tonight, open to Job. When I touched her hand, she clenched my wrist and asked if I'd seen many executions before, and if they were difficult to watch. In a quiet voice, I explained the procedure: sodium thiopental to shut down Hanratty's brain; Pavulon to paralyze him and stop his breathing; potassium chloride to stop his heart.