Dead Watch Read online

  The house had two bedrooms, a small living room, a kitchen with a breakfast nook, a bathroom, and a basement that smelled of dirt and propane. One of the bedrooms had four Browning gun-safes lined up against a wall. There was no chance that he could have opened them, if he’d had to; but he didn’t have to, since the safe doors were standing open, and all four were empty.

  He started looking for paper, or blood, or anything that would tie Schmidt to anything relevant. He went through the kitchen, checked the area around the telephone, the kitchen counter drawers, the stove drawer. He found paper, all right, but all of it was routine. Four phone bills, all old, all checked off with an ink scrawl, which probably indicated that they’d been paid. He stuck them in his pocket.

  The kitchen cupboards were bare: they’d been completely cleared out. The refrigerator was empty and unplugged.

  He went into the bedroom, found a three-inch stack of porno magazines under the bed, with maybe fifty gun magazines. Nothing under the mattress. There were still a few shirts hanging in the closets, some shoes on the closet floor, a few T-shirts and golf shirts in the bureau. He patted through them, found nothing. He did a tap dance on the floorboards, looking for a hidey-hole.

  Noticed that there was no suitcase in the house; there were no bags at all.

  The living room was spare. He gave it a minute, rolling an old couch up to look at the lining, rapped the floorboards and moldings, then gave up. A hallway showed a hatch that led up into the eaves. He pulled out a chair, pushed on the hatch, pushed harder. Dust began to fall out, and he let it go.

  Into the basement, feeling the pressure of time. Damp. A jumble of cheap tools, rusting pliers, a five-dollar socket set, a broken coping saw, were strewn on a chest of drawers used as a workbench. A reloading bench sat in a corner, with a rack of brass and powders above it. A furnace and a water heater. Nothing much. He was about to head back up the stairs when he noticed a circular mark on the concrete floor: one end of the workbench had been rotated away from the wall. He listened for a moment, tension building—he’d been inside too long—then grabbed a corner of the bench and pulled it out from the wall.

  Nothing behind it. Then he looked up: an aluminum heating duct was fastened between two joists. There was a space between the duct and the first floor’s subfloor. If you stood on the workbench . . .

  He climbed up on it, slipped his hand up and down the top of the vent. At the far left side, he touched something, pulled his hand back. Couldn’t see. Tentatively touched it again. Felt like . . . rags. He gripped it. Heavy. Pulled it out.

  A bundle of rags. He knew without looking what was inside: a gun. He carefully unwrapped the bundle and found a Colt .45. One of Jake’s personal favorites . . .

  All right. The guy had four gun safes upstairs, once presumably full of guns, now all gone—and he’d hidden a .45 in the basement? What was that about? He weighed the options for a moment, then put the gun back, jumped down, pushed the bench back against the wall.

  He’d have to think about all this, but first, he had to get out. The burglar/instructor suggested that you never stay inside a house more than four or five minutes: even if nobody comes, you begin to screw up, you leave behind prints, you give people a chance to see your car.

  Jake hurried upstairs, peered through the windows. Nobody there, nobody coming. He slipped out, let the door latch behind him, put the key back in the washing machine. Picked it up again, wiped it, and still holding it in his shirtsleeve, dropped it back in place.

  Walked back to his car, feeling self-righteous: Nope, I wasn’t in there, just knocked on the door. . . .

  Got in the car and let out a breath. Damn: he hadn’t been that tense since Afghanistan. But he was smiling when he backed out of the driveway. He could feel the rush coming on. Feel the rush . . .

  Schmidt was running. He might have expected to come back, but not anytime soon. All the perishable stuff was gone, the clothes left behind were all older, worn out, or showing wear. No suitcases, no guns. Had he sold the guns? Maybe the ATF could check; sixty-four guns would be worth at least twenty thousand.

  If he’d sold all his guns, he probably was digging a deep hole. If he hadn’t, if he’d stored them someplace, then they’d have a lead on Schmidt’s best friend . . .

  Jake was ten minutes in the car, already north of Scottsville, heading in to Charlottesville, heading home, when Novatny called.

  Novatny was running, out of breath, shouting. “Where are you? Jake? Where are you?”

  5

  “We’re moving!” Novatny shouted.

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “Sorry, I’ve been running up some stairs . . .” Novatny took a deep breath. “We’re getting a helicopter, heading out to Virginia. Are you still in Richmond?”

  “I’m down south of Charlottesville.”

  “Then you’re a hell of a lot closer than we are,” Novatny said.

  “What happened?”

  “The Buckingham County sheriff’s office has a body out in a rural area, a state forest, all burned up,” Novatny said. “They found a charred ID near the body. The ID belongs to Lincoln Bowe.”

  “Ah, man.”

  A moment of confused shouting at the other end, then, “We’ve got a chopper coming, oughta be off the ground in five, ten minutes. There’s a place down there, called, let me see, on my map it’s called Sliders, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything there. Here. Head south on Twenty . . .”

  “Hang on, hang on, let me pull over.” Jake pulled into a driveway, got a notebook from his briefcase, and jotted down Novatny’s instructions. “. . . take a left on 636. You go in there a way, couple of miles, and you’ll come to the Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest headquarters. They’re telling us that’s the best place to put down a chopper.”

  “Have you talked to Danzig?”

  “No. I can’t get to him direct, I’d have to go through some routing. If you can call him direct . . .”

  “I’ll call him. See you at the park.”

  Jake backed out of the driveway, floored it, and the Mercedes took off like a scalded rabbit. He was forty miles away. He had to slow down going through Scottsville, but he didn’t slow much and turned heads as he went through. No cops, he thought, no cops, please no cops . . .

  Over the bridge and out on Highway 20, past Schmidt’s place again, he swerved around a log truck, pushed it to eighty. The countryside was rolling, the road was curvy: perfect for a high-speed run in a German car if you didn’t mind killing the occasional housewife out to get her mail from the roadside mailbox.

  He worried about that, a little, but didn’t slow. Instead he compounded the sin by punching Gina’s number on his cell phone. She came up and he said, “I need Danzig right now.”

  “He’s talking to the president,” she said.

  “Go get him.”

  “Really?”

  “Go in and get him. Get him!” Jake shouted.

  “I’m going to put you on hold . . . hang on.”

  Danzig came up, a worried cut in his voice: “What?”

  “The FBI has a burned body down south in Virginia. There’s a possibility that it’s Lincoln Bowe.”

  “A good possibility?”

  “A charred ID was found nearby and it’s his. The FBI’s moving on it. I’m forty miles away in a car, heading down there fast as I can. We might need somebody to sit on the sheriff’s department, if it’s not too late. You gotta tell the press office, get them working.”

  “Charred?”

  “I don’t know what that means. But apparently, the body’s pretty badly burned.”

  “Why are you only forty miles away?”

  “I’ll tell you about it later. It might not be a coincidence,” Jake said.

  “All right, all right. You go, I’ll take care of it at this end,” Danzig said. “Call me back for anything significant. Anything, even if you think I might already know about it. Call me.”

  He kept the car at eighty,
screamed through Dyllwyn, a fast right, then another right onto Highway 60 at Sprouse’s Corner, seventy miles an hour past the county courthouse at Buckingham—hell, none of the cops would be there, he thought—a left on 24, six miles, a helicopter overhead the last mile of it, rolling through the intersection of 636 and coming up on the forest headquarters complex as the black helicopter put down in a graveled parking area.

  Three Buckingham County sheriff’s cars waited on the edge of the parking area, their light racks turning. As Jake pulled in, Novatny and Parker did the weird getting-out-of-a-helicopter hunched-over high step that everybody did. They were trailed by a senior citizen who clutched a hard plastic briefcase. A sheriff’s deputy got out of one of the cars and jogged toward Jake, who parked just inside the turnoff.

  “Sir, this is a restricted area.”

  “I’m with them,” Jake said, pointing at the chopper.

  Novatny and Parker were talking to another uniform, Novatny waving Jake over. He and the cop walked over and Novatny nodded at the senior citizen and said, “Jake, this is Clancy, he’s with our crime-scene unit, and this is Sheriff Bill Winsome, his people are working the scene right now.” Then Novatny asked, “What the heck did you do? You start talking to people and we get a burning body the next day.”

  Jake said, “Hey, I just put out the word.”

  Parker said, “Somebody sure as shit got it. We’ll want to know who you talked to.”

  All the cops looked at Jake for a beat, then Novatny turned back to Winsome. “You were saying . . .”

  “Somebody tried to burn the body with brush and gasoline. You can still smell a little gas,” Winsome said. He was an elderly man, with a round pink face and white hair growing out of his ears. He had the sad liquid eyes of a bloodhound. “The wood is still damp from all the rain and didn’t burn. They had it stacked around the body like one of them pyres.”

  “What about the head?” Parker asked.

  “Still no head,” the sheriff said.

  “What about the head?” Jake asked.

  “The head’s missing,” Winsome said. “It’s hard to tell what happened, exactly, because . . . well, if you’ve ever seen a burned body, they sorta melt. This one’s pretty bad, the hands are gone, most of the feet . . . but there should be a skull, or indications of a head, and there isn’t one. A head. Of course, we haven’t been all the way through the ashes, but I don’t think there’s gonna be anything there.”

  “Who found the body?” Jake asked.

  “Guy who lives down there—Glenn Anderson—saw a fire last night. Where there shouldn’t be one—”

  “He didn’t go over and check it?” Parker interrupted.

  “No, that happens from time to time, you get people out on them hiking trails. Anderson was out working in his shop, changing the oil in his brush cutter, and he heard this whoosh, and he looked, and here’s a fire as big as a house. It died down pretty quick, and wasn’t any threat because it’s been so wet. He figured some camper poured white gas on his campfire and got more than he bargained for. But then he got to talking to a neighbor this morning—they could smell something bad—and they went over for a look.”

  “Roast pig,” Novatny said.

  “Where’s the scene?” Jake asked.

  “Mile or so up the road, there’s a trail head, a hiking trail goes back into the woods,” the sheriff said. “It’s pretty narrow up there, lots of trees, thought it’d be better to put the chopper down here.”

  “Who knows about this?” Parker asked.

  “Nobody, except the people out here,” the sheriff said. “Won’t nobody find out about it until I say so, either, or somebody’ll wind up with their ass kicked up around their ears.”

  Jake drove, trailed by the two cop cars, Novatny, Parker, and the sheriff riding with him. Clancy rode in one of the sheriff’s cars. The sheriff, in the backseat, said, “I think maybe they got more of a fire than they expected, panicked, and ran. People think you sprinkle a gallon of gas on a bunch of wood and you get a campfire. What you get is more like an explosion. You can burn your ass off if you’re not careful.”

  The road was narrow, snaking through the woods, past a clear-cut the size of a couple of football fields, then over a hump and down a barely noticeable incline to the trailhead.

  A half dozen cop cars with LED racks, a couple of unmarked cars, and a van were pulled into the trailhead parking area. A farmhouse stood on the other side of the road, most of a half mile away, Jake guessed. Maybe a couple of city slickers thought they could get away with a fire, that far from anything. Maybe . . . But why didn’t they just bury the body?

  Two uniformed deputies and two men in civilian clothes were leaning on car fenders; when Jake pulled in, they straightened up and looked toward the newcomers. Jake got out with his cane, followed by Novatny, Parker, and Winsome. Clancy got out of the sheriff’s car and joined them. The odor of roast pig was thin, but definitely in the air. They all turned their noses toward it, looking back into the trees.

  Winsome introduced them as FBI investigators, and one of the plainclothesmen, an investigator with the Virginia BCI out of Appomattox, whose name was Kline, said, “Better come on back.”

  The body was fifty yards into the woods, a small end-of-the-trail clearing, clumps of old toilet paper in the brush, a few bottles and cans, a collapsed plastic trash barrel. The odor of burned pig was thicker here, with the smudgy underscent of petroleum. Though he’d seen people incinerated by napalm, Jake didn’t immediately recognize the body when they stepped into the clearing. It looked more like a rotting tree stump, with a new tree growing up out of the old roots.

  “Jeez,” Novatny said. They all sidled toward it. The closer they got, the more the body looked like a stump, until the last few feet, when they could see bloody raw fissures in the blackened flesh. It still didn’t look human, until Jake went a bit sideways and saw the shoes. The shoes were badly burned, but still recognizable. The victim had been bound with wire to the tree, in a kneeling position, one foot on each side of the tree.

  No head.

  “Not just wire,” Novatny said. “Barbed wire. Wonder if we could trace that? Where they got it.”

  “Could’ve just clipped it out of a fence in the night,” the sheriff said. “That’s what I would’ve done—if I was going to do this.”

  “Was he alive? Were they torturing him?” Jake asked.

  “Have to wait for the autopsy,” the sheriff said. “But nobody heard anything. No screaming, or shouting. No commotion. I don’t know why you’d wire him up if he was dead—why not just lay him down on a big stack of wood, and pile some more up around him?”

  “Nobody saw a car?”

  “No. After the fire died down, Anderson went back to changing his oil, he never saw a car leave. They must’ve come in here with a car, though. Didn’t see much in the way of tracks, it’s all gravel and bark in the parking area.”

  “You done with the photos?” Clancy asked, looking at the sheriff.

  “Yeah . . . got video and stills both. We were waiting for you before we did any more.”

  Clancy walked once around the body, then stepped close, knelt on a bare patch of ground, took a short metal rod out of his case, and began pushing a shoe off the remains of a foot. The shoe fell apart, exposing a patch of reddened flesh. Clancy took another instrument from his case, a nine-inch-long polished steel tube that looked a bit like a syringe, cocked it by sliding the barrel, as if it were a tiny shotgun, pressed the tip against the red flesh, and squeezed. The instrument snapped, they all jumped, and Clancy pulled it back and stood up.

  “How long?” Novatny asked.

  “Pretty good sample. Ten minutes,” Clancy said. He put the sampler in his case and snapped the case. “I’ll go back to the car and do it.”

  “Ten minutes?” The sheriff’s eyebrows were up. “How reliable?”

  “With a good sample, ninety percent,” Clancy said. “I’ve got a digital DNA record in my laptop.”
r />   “How come that doesn’t get down to us?” the sheriff asked. “On-scene DNA could be handy.”

  Clancy shrugged. “You could have it if you wanted it—but the machine costs seventy grand, and it’s about two grand per test, counting amortization on the equipment. Regular’s what, a hundred and fifty bucks, for a two-day wait?”

  “No head,” Jake said, as Clancy disappeared back down the track. “No blood? Any sign of a struggle, any . . .”

  “What you see is what we got, other than the ID,” Winsome said. “We’ve already bagged the ID. We could do some soil tests, but we wouldn’t learn much. The autopsy ought to tell us if he was alive.”

  Jake looked at Novatny: “Christ, I hope it’s not him.”

  Parker said, “Chuck, it’s him. You know it, I know it. The media is gonna go exactly berserk. This is gonna be worse than a Hollywood murder. This is gonna be worse than anything we’ve ever seen.”

  They all looked glumly at the body for another ten seconds, and Novatny said, “Well, at least we’re not gonna be bored.”

  “Don’t usually smell the gas afterward,” Jake commented.

  “What?” The sheriff looked at him.

  “The gas usually burns up and the smell of the fire cloaks whatever is left. This smells like they either spilled some that didn’t burn, or they deliberately sprinkled it around where it wouldn’t burn.”

  “Why?”

  Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just telling you that you usually can’t smell gas afterwards. At least, you can’t smell jellied gas—napalm. Not the day afterwards.”

  “Well . . .” The sheriff looked for a moment at Jake, then turned to the state investigator and said, “Make a note, I guess.”

  Jake said, “When the Klan was big, a hundred years ago, they’d lynch black guys they thought had raped or killed or smart-assed a white woman.” He nodded at the body. “Sometimes they’d use barbed wire and wire the victims to trees, or light posts, and set them on fire. They often castrated them. I never heard about them taking a head, though.”