Dead Watch Page 5

  “Why us?” she asked, with exasperation. “We don’t do murders, and we’ve got a full plate.”

  “Because you can talk privately to the director and tell him that the president is serious about this and that he’s pissed. Tell him that bureaucratic asses are going to be hanged, that careers are going to end. Okay?”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And because you’re the smartest people I know over here. And because, even though you don’t do murders, you do work counterterrorism, and this has got the flavor of a conspiracy. That’s what we need to penetrate: the ring of guys who picked up Lincoln Bowe. And finally, you’ve got guys who might possibly keep their mouths shut. We don’t want this to become a bigger deal than it already is. We want it to end.”

  Her mouth turned down and she said, “It can’t get much bigger. Did you see Madison Bowe on television?”

  “Yes. I talked to her last night.”

  She looked at him for a moment, sighed, and said, “All right. I’ll talk to the director.”

  “And he’ll go along.”

  “Yeah. If you stand him in a half-mile-an-hour wind, he can tell you which way it’s blowing.”

  “And we get Novatny.”

  “Something can be worked,” she agreed.

  “Terrific,” Jake said. He pushed himself out of the chair. “I won’t bother you any longer.”

  “You’ll mention my name to the guy?”

  “Absolutely,” Jake said. “You’ll be an ambassador in two weeks. What country do you want?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Thanks, Mavis. Who do I talk to about the files?”

  She found an empty conference room for him, and a clerk brought him a short stack of paper, computer printouts. Too short, he thought, when he saw it. The federal investigation was being run out of the FBI’s Richmond office, but the feds hadn’t actually taken control of it. Most of the work was being done by the Virginia Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which was treating Bowe’s disappearance as a missing-persons incident.

  But not a routine one.

  From paperwork copied from the state cops to the FBI, Jake understood that the cops thought they were on a murder hunt, or possibly some kind of fraud. The police had interviewed the last few friends who’d spoken to Bowe, the people who’d attended the speech he’d given at the law school, and had collected a half dozen interviews done by the NYPD, including the maid who’d found that the cats had gone hungry.

  One comment had been repeated a couple of times: Bowe had been drunk in public on at least two occasions before he disappeared. Personal problems? Another woman he was hiding from Madison? But would that have him drinking during the day, on the way to public appearances? He’d have to be a far-gone alky to do that.

  And a close friend of his, asked by the FBI if Bowe drank, said that he’d never seen Bowe take more than two drinks in an evening.

  Maybe he’d just started? Something had just happened?

  Besides, Jake thought, speculations on alcoholism were pointless. Whatever had happened to Bowe had happened in the presence of a number of short-haired men with ear-bugs. He hadn’t gotten blind drunk and put the car in the river; he’d disappeared during the middle of the day.

  Jake was still going through the paper when Chuck Novatny stuck his head in the door. He was trailed by his partner, George Parker.

  “Man, you’re gonna get us in trouble,” Novatny said, without preamble.

  “Ah, you enjoy your access to us elite guys,” Jake said. He stood up and shook hands with Novatny, then reached past him to shake with Parker. “Look what it’s done for your career.”

  “Yeah. Fifteen minutes ago, I was in the canteen eating a salmonella-infected chicken salad on a three-day-old hamburger bun,” Parker said. “I can barely stand the eliteness.”

  Novatny was wiry, sandy haired, fifteen years into his FBI career, a maker of model airplanes that he flew with his sons. Parker was tall, thick, and dark, with a lantern jaw and fifteen-inch-long shoes; a golfer. They both wore blue suits, and Jake had a feeling that the suits reflected a shared sense of humor, rather than the FBI culture. They were competent, and even better than that.

  “Lincoln Bowe,” Novatny said.

  “Yes. This is what you’ve got,” Jake said, waving at the paper on the conference table. “Mostly secondhand crap from the Virginia cops.”

  “You need us to . . . ?”

  “Kick ass. Take names. Threaten people. Push anybody who might know anything. Starting . . .” Jake looked up at the wall clock. “Now.”

  “We’ve got some things to clean up,” Novatny said. “Send the paper down to us when you’re through, we’ll be on it in a couple of hours. We’ve been wondering when somebody would start to push.”

  “When Madison Bowe went on the noon news,” Jake said.

  “What a coincidence. That’s when we started wondering,” Novatny said.

  They left, and Jake went back to the paper, typing notes into his laptop.

  The witnesses who’d seen Lincoln Bowe get in the car with the men with ear-bugs said he hadn’t seemed under duress. He’d seemed to expect the ride, and he had no other ride waiting. The men were described as large, white, with business haircuts, wearing suits. One witness said Bowe had been smiling when he got in the car.

  The abandoned cats argued for duress. The smile argued for cooperation.

  On the one hand, he had only Madison Bowe’s word that he cared about the cats. On the other, if Bowe had been picked up by somebody who’d stuck a gun in his ribs and said, “Smile, or I’ll blow your heart out,” he might have smiled despite duress.

  “Huh.” No way to make a decision yet. He needed more information.

  One thing was clear from the interviews by the Virginia cops: Bowe’s speech to the law students had been wicked, and more than one person said that he seemed to be emotionally overwrought, and at the same time, physically loose. He’d been so angry that he seemed, at times, to be groping for words, and at other times, had used inappropriate words, words that simply didn’t fit his sentences.

  Again, one witness thought he might have been drunk.

  Jake looked at his watch, gathered and stacked the paper, called the clerk, told her to send digital copies of everything to his secure e-mail address, and to take the paper to Novatny’s office.

  Time to see Arlo Goodman.

  Jake grabbed a cab back home, made and ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, then headed south in his own car, a two-year-old E-class Mercedes. Washington to Richmond was two hours, depending on traffic, south through the most haunted country in America, some of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the Civil War.

  Jake had walked all of them, on the anniversaries of the battles. Civil War soldiers, he’d concluded, had been tough nuts.

  As was Arlo Goodman.

  Four years earlier, Goodman had been the popular commonwealth’s attorney for Norfolk, a veteran of Iraq, and politically disgruntled.

  His political unhappiness stretched in several directions—and he could do something about one of them. Norfolk was at the center of a series of military complexes; convinced that a terror attack was possible, he put together a team of five investigators, including his brother, a former special forces trooper. The team had set up an intelligence net in the port areas, extending to a couple of other independent cities; later, they recruited volunteer watchmen, all veterans.

  Lightning struck.

  A group of dissident Saudi students began planning some kind of attack, although exactly what kind was never determined. One of the watchmen picked up on it and talked to the investigators. The apartment of one of the Saudis was bugged, and Goodman got tapes of five students talking about weapons possibilities, and targets, including atomic submarines. The investigators followed them as they bought maps and took photographs.

  At one point, three of the students went out to a state park and spent the afternoon throwing Molotov cocktails—gasoline and oil mixed in wine
bottles—into a ravine, to see what would happen. The investigators filmed the explosions. They had the motive, the planning, the means. The Saudis were arrested in a flashy bust at their apartment, and the conviction was a slam dunk.

  The next day, Goodman announced the formation of a veterans group called the Watchmen, to keep watch over the streets of Norfolk, in an effort to control street crime, prostitution, drugs, and to keep an eye out for “suspicious activities.”

  As a popular prosecutor, he had a base. With the Watchmen being replicated in other counties, he had a spreading influence.

  Although he was technically a Democrat, he admitted that he had little time for either the Republican or Democratic parties. When the Democratic Party decided to back a liberal candidate for governor, he launched a maverick campaign for the nomination.

  He was, he said, a social conservative—he’d never met a Commandment he didn’t like—but an economic liberal. He wanted more help for the elderly, more for veterans, a higher minimum wage for beginning workers. He pushed for a state income tax that would apply only to the well-to-do, progressive license fees for automobiles that rose dramatically for cars that cost more than forty thousand dollars.

  He took 45 percent of the Democratic vote in a three-way primary, and 59 percent of the vote in the final.

  People who liked Goodman said that he was charming, down-to-earth, intelligent. People who disliked him said that he was a rabble-rouser and a demagogue, a Kingfish, a little Hitler—the last accusation pointed at the Watchmen.

  Asked about the Hitler comparison, the governor said, “These same people, on both sides, have had this state mired in a political bog for fifty years. Now we’re moving again. Now we’re getting things done. So we create a volunteer force, to help keep an eye on possible terror targets, to help elderly people get their meals, to help mobilize in case of natural disaster, and they call them Nazis. Isn’t that just typical? Isn’t that just what you’d expect? I have two words for them: ‘Fuck ’em.’ ”

  He’d actually said “Fuck ’em,” scandalizing the press corps, but nobody else, and his popularity moved up a half dozen points in the polls.

  Two years earlier, with Goodman then only a year in the statehouse, Lincoln Bowe was running for a second term in the Senate. He was widely assumed to be an easy winner.

  With encouragement from the White House, Goodman had supported a lightweight Democrat named Don Murray, and had been the local force behind the Murray campaign. The president had done a half dozen fund-raisers. The campaign went dirty, and Murray beat Bowe by four thousand votes, with an independent candidate trailing far behind. Goodman and the Watchmen had been either credited or blamed for Murray’s win, depending on which party you were from.

  The bitterness that flowed from the campaign had never stopped.

  Jake made Richmond in two hours and fifteen minutes, including a frustrating six minutes behind a fifty-mile-per-hour, boat-towing SUV that precisely straddled the highway’s center line; and an accident in which a blue Chevy had plowed into the rear of another blue Chevy. A highway patrolman was talking to the Chevy drivers, both women in suits, while ignoring the traffic jam they were creating.

  By the time he got to Richmond, he was pissed, and Richmond was not the easiest place to get around, a knotted welter of old streets cut by expressways. Goodman’s office was in the Patrick Henry Building on the southeast corner of the Capitol complex.

  Jake found the building, and after ten minutes of looking, spotted an empty parking space four blocks away, parked, and plugged the meter. He got his cane and briefcase out of the backseat, walked over to Broad Street, across Broad past the old city hall, and left along a brick walkway.

  The walkway and the capitol grounds were separated by a green-painted wrought-iron fence; the fence was supported by posts decorated as fasces, which made Jake smile. As he approached the Patrick Henry Building, he saw two Watchmen sitting on a bench outside the door, taking in the sun. They were in the Watchman uniform of khaki slacks, blue oxford-cloth shirts, and bomber jackets.

  When Jake came up with his cane, they stood, two tall, slender men, friendly, and one asked, “Do you have an appointment, sir?”

  “Yes, I do, with the governor.”

  “And your name?”

  “Jake Winter.”

  One of the men checked a clipboard, then smiled and nodded. “Go right ahead.”

  As Jake started past, the other man asked, “Were you in the military?”

  Jake stopped. “Yes. The army.”

  “Iraq? Syria?”

  “Afghanistan,” Jake said.

  “Ah, one of the snake eaters,” the man said. “Have you thought about joining the Watchmen?”

  “I don’t live in Virginia,” Jake said.

  “Okay,” the man said. “We’ll be coming to your neighborhood soon. Think it over when we get there.”

  “You were in the army?” Jake asked.

  “He was a fuckin’ squid,” the other man said. “Excuse the language.”

  Jake laughed and said, “See you,” and went inside.

  Inside he found an airport-style security check. Goines showed up, apparently alerted by the Watchmen, as Jake was processing through the X-ray and metal detectors.

  “Mister Winter?” Jake nodded, and as he retrieved his briefcase and cane, Goines said, “This way.”

  Goines was annoyed. A small blond man with a dimpled chin, a ten-cent knockoff of his boss, he carried a petulant look. His eyes were like a chicken’s, and like a chicken, he cocked his head to the side to look at Jake as they rode up a couple of floors in the elevator. He led the way to his office, past a secretary in an outer cubicle, and said, “This better be important,” and pointed at a chair as he settled behind his desk.

  “There are some indications that the Watchmen may be involved in the detention of Lincoln Bowe,” Jake said, crossing his legs. “The president wants me to find Bowe. He wants me to find him now.”

  “What indications?”

  “Rumors, mostly,” Jake said. “The FBI investigation is picking up vibrations that the Watchmen are involved, or, at least, that a lot of people think so.”

  “That’s a bunch of crap.” Goines stood up again, walked over to his window, hands in his pants pockets, looked out his office window. He had a view of an aggressively blank-walled building on the other side of the street, part of a medical center. “People seem to be lining up to shoot at us. If it turns out that a Watchman is involved, he’s on his own, he’s an outlaw. We sure as hell don’t condone it.”

  Jake said, “Just before he disappeared, Bowe called the governor a cocksucker.”

  Blood drained away from Goines’s face, and a quick tic of fear passed across it. He shook his finger at Jake but said, casually enough, “That was unforgivable. Governor Goodman is a sophisticated gentleman, a successful lawyer before he entered public service. He understands the likes of Lincoln Bowe. He would never go after Bowe, but you can’t blame him for not liking a man who could be so vulgar. He won’t be pleased with the prospect of tearing up the Watchmen on Bowe’s behalf.”

  Jake thought, Jesus, I haven’t seen a tap dance like this in years. Is this place bugged?

  “I can absolutely understand that and so does the president,” Jake said. Bureaucratic-speak: he could do it as well as anyone, or even better. “The president said, ‘I trust Governor Goodman implicitly, but that doesn’t mean that there might not be some rotten apples at the bottom of the barrel.’ And that’s all I’m asking: that you check for rotten apples.”

  “The governor can speak to that. But you must have heard that some of us think that Bowe has gone on a little vacation, and is letting us twist in the wind.”

  “We’re looking into that, too,” Jake said.

  “Good.” Goines looked at his watch: “One minute: let’s go see the governor.”

  4

  The governor’s outer office was a large, cool room with gray fabric chairs and mahogany tab
les, decorated with bald eagles—wildlife paintings of the kind seen on postage stamps, eagles with talons extended, about to land on weathered branches, or soaring over lakes with white-capped mountains in the background. A two-foot-long bronze eagle launched itself off a stand in the center of the room; a bronze scroll of the U.S. Constitution was draped over the stand.

  An elderly secretary and a blond college intern worked behind a double desk. The elderly woman called into the governor’s office, and the intern smiled at Jake and didn’t stop smiling.

  “I’ll tell the governor you’re waiting,” the older woman said.

  Arlo Goodman was a friendly guy, big white teeth, blond hair falling over his forehead, flyaway, as though he’d been running his fingers through it. He was in shirtsleeves, the sleeves rolled up. He stuck his head out of his office door, something Danzig would never have done with a subordinate, and said, “Hey, Jake, come on in. You want some coffee or water?”

  “Coffee would be good,” Jake said. They did the Arlo Goodman left-handed shake—Goodman had taken a Syrian bullet in the right hand, and the bones had been shattered, leaving a knot of shrunken fingers.

  To his secretary: “Jean, could you get that?”

  She went off to get it and Goines said, “I’ll let you guys talk.”

  Goodman nodded and led Jake into his office, asked, “What’ve you been doing about the limp, you gimpy fucker? You working the leg?”

  “It’s about as worked as it’s going to get,” Jake said. Goodman had done research on him; he pretended not to notice. “I keep stretching it, but it’s maintenance. How’s the hand?”

  Goodman grimaced: “Same as with your leg. Not much point. Too much nerve damage. I can poke a pen through, to sign my name, so that’s a benefit.”

  A minute more of physical-rehab chatter, then Jean arrived with the coffee—plain, heavy earthenware cups—and when she’d shut the door behind her, Goodman said, “I’m scared to death about Lincoln Bowe, Jake. He’s a fool, but I wouldn’t want any harm to come to him—for my own sake, if nothing else. I’ve got all these rumors bubbling around me . . . I mean, Jesus.”