gone home too early to be the third man.
It seemed as if the agents had once more been duped. But they
continued to work on Pike, to pressure him, and over time he
began to reveal, little by little, a hidden dimension to the case. He
disclosed that he’d never really been hired to solve the murder of
Anna Brown; in fact, he’d been asked to conceal Bryan’s
whereabouts on the night of the crime.
Pike told agents that he was supposed to manufacture evidence
and to generate false witnesses—to “shape an alibi,” as he put it.
What’s more, he claimed that his orders had come directly from
William Hale.
Pike explained that Hale took pains never to say explicitly that
Bryan had been involved in Anna’s murder, but this was evident
from what Hale was asking him to do. If Pike was telling the truth,
it meant that Hale—a seeming paragon of law and order who had
held himself up as Mollie Burkhart’s most staunch protector—had
been lying all these years about Anna’s murder. Pike could not
answer what White wanted to know most: Was Hale merely
protecting Bryan, or was he part of a more intricate, nefarious
design?
Pike, though, told agents one more thing that was startling.
When he met with Hale and Bryan, Pike said, there was
sometimes another person present: Ernest Burkhart. Pike added
that Ernest was careful never to “discuss this case or talk it over
with him in the presence of Mollie Burkhart.”