1983

Twenty years ago this November, John Kennedy was killed in Dallas. The Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He did not.

The fatal round came from a different rifle, in different hands, at a different angle. The man who fired it walked out of Dealey Plaza, drove out of Texas, and slept that night under a name his mother never gave him.

His name is John Marshall. He is 47. He flies a twin-engine Cessna for a charter outfit out of Baltimore and lives a quiet married life in Virginia. For 20 years a handler called Ellie has paid him, in cash that never touched a tax return, to do the work the government cannot admit it needs done.

The man who arranged Dallas is Harold Miller. From a corner office in Boston, Miller has spent two decades erasing the men who knew what happened in 1963. The list is nearly finished. Marshall is the last name on it.

When a contract comes through Ellie for a killing in Boston, Marshall takes it the way he has taken a hundred others. Then he begins to see the shape of it. The job is the cover. He is the cleanup. The man who paid him to keep the secret has decided the cheapest way to keep it is to bury the last man alive who can tell it.

What Marshall does not know is that Ellie has been watching Miller for 20 years too, and that the job may be running on terms no one has shown him.

Three lives close on the same week of November 1983. Marshall, working a Boston residence hotel with a payphone, a paper map, and a Colt that fires a round he files himself. Megan, a young photographer carrying a six-year-old picture of the man her dead father told her to find. And Beth, Marshall's wife of 19 years, a tax attorney who opens the wrong file at her firm and finds her own name sitting beside her husband's secret.

The Second Rifle is a thriller built on the oldest wound in the country, set in a year when a man worked from microfiche and instinct, with nothing between him and the ground but a yoke and a radio. It is a story about the long arithmetic of murder, and what it costs to be the last entry in another man's ledger.

For 20 years, the man who fired the kill shot in Dallas has been hiding. The man who paid him just opened the file.