Dead Watch Read online

  Jake blew a soft note across the top of the beer bottle. “But why? Governor, I don’t want to seem insulting, but you’re in the last year of your term. You can’t succeed yourself. You’re about to leave politics, at least temporarily. So why should they bother? A guy is dead—is somebody gonna murder a former senator in a weird conspiracy to get you out of office? I mean, even if they found Lincoln Bowe’s head in your bedroom, you’d probably be out of office before they could get you to trial. Or is there something else going on? Something I’m missing?”

  Goines jumped in, jabbed a finger at Jake: “That’s what we can’t figure out. That’s exactly it.”

  “Maybe just pure revenge,” Robertson suggested to Goodman. “After your showdown with Bowe. I mean, you really hurt him, there.”

  “So they kill Bowe to get revenge for what I did to Bowe?” Goodman shook his head. “You need to spend more time thinking about that, Troy.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if that body in the woods isn’t Lincoln Bowe at all,” Patricia said.

  “They did DNA,” Jake said.

  “For DNA, you have to have two good samples,” Patricia said. “Where’d they get the first one? Who was the guy who did the test, and what are his politics like? Did they do backup tests?”

  “Forget that, forget that,” Rice said to Patricia. “It’s Bowe. It’d be too crazy not to be Bowe. Asking those questions makes us sound like we are nuts.”

  “Yeah, but the head’s missing,” Patricia said. “Why’s the head missing? I’ll tell you why—they couldn’t match the dental.”

  Jake said, “I hadn’t thought of that. That might be something.”

  Goodman raised a hand, shutting down the argument. “I personally believe it’s Bowe. When they finish with the postmortem, we should know. I understand that they are taking hair samples off his pillows, out of his car, and so on. Maybe from his mother. They will know.”

  Jake broke in: “I have to ask the hard question, Governor. Who’s Schmidt, and why have you been tearing up the state looking for him?”

  There was a quick interlocking exchange of glances around the room, then Robertson said, “We haven’t been tearing up the state.”

  “There’s a letter on the door . . .”

  “I’d like you to prove . . . ,” Robertson started.

  “We looked around for him,” said Goodman, closing Robertson down with a finger. “He used to hang around with some Watchmen in Charlottesville. He was never inducted, never trained, never accepted. Our people up there always thought he was a little questionable. Then . . .”

  Goodman shrugged and looked at Patricia.

  “He mentioned a couple of times to our guys that something should be done about Lincoln Bowe,” Patricia said.

  “Ah, Jesus,” Jake said.

  “Yeah. The thing is, he was not one of our guys,” Patricia said. “But when we heard about this, we knew we could take the fall for it. So we were trying to find him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell somebody?” Jake asked. “Why didn’t you tell me, this morning?”

  “Because at that point, it was all politics,” Goodman said. Jake nodded: they all swam in a sea of politics, and the tide never went out, not even for murder. “Nobody knew where Bowe was. He might have been skiing in Aspen for all we knew. There was no evidence of a kidnapping, there was no evidence of anything. But we were nervous, and so we looked. Now this. We feel like we were . . . sucked into looking for him. Like somebody’s been working hard to set us up.”

  Jake nodded, and thought about the gun in Schmidt’s house. That did have the feel of a setup. Why would he empty his gun safes, and leave one gun stuck away in the rafters, where an amateur burglar quickly found it?

  “Look at the Bowes,” Goodman said, urgency riding in his voice. “Madison and Lincoln. Look at their friends. Look to see if you can see anything. Hypothesize something. Suspect something. Try to figure out what happened. What happened?”

  They all sat and looked at each other, and then Jake said, “I need everything you’ve got on Schmidt.”

  “You’ll get it,” Goodman said. “So will the FBI, for that matter. They’ve already asked. They’re at his house.”

  “When can I get it?”

  “Give us an e-mail address and we’ll get it to you tonight or tomorrow morning. So—you’re going to do this?”

  “I’ll talk to Danzig,” Jake said.

  “Talk to him and get back to us. Ralph will be your liaison.” He flipped a finger at his assistant. “He’ll be available twenty-four hours a day. If you need anything—anything—call him. Research help, legal advice . . .”

  “Muscle . . . ,” Patricia said with a grin.

  “Muscle won’t help,” Jake said.

  Patricia: “Bowe got his head cut off and then his body was burned. Think about it.”

  Goines said, “I wonder if this Schmidt guy was the same size and weight as Bowe?”

  “That is goofy,” Robertson said.

  “Hey, nobody has any ideas,” Goines said. He sorted some M&M’s from the silver bowl, tossed them into his mouth. “The way things are, nothing is too far-fetched.”

  “There’s one thing that worries me; one line,” Jake said. “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

  “That’s what worries all of us,” Goodman said. “If some goof thought he was doing it on my behalf, the murder’ll stink like a mackerel in the sunshine and screw up our lives forever.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, then Jake stood up and said, “I’m going to take off. I need to get back tonight. I’ve got lines out everywhere, and I’m waiting for people to call.”

  On the drive back, Jake thought about the group gathered at the governor’s mansion: all male, all veterans, all had been in a combat zone. He liked that kind of company, as a general thing.

  But there was something not right about Goodman’s group. They sparred with one another, like any group of vets; but with Goodman, they behaved as though they were still in the military, and they were subordinate officers. They deferred to him. More than that, they were obedient, subservient. Not like the usual political relationship—not the same relationship of the president to his staff—but a kind of abjectness, concealed beneath a hail-veteran-well-met bonhomie.

  But they also projected a genuine air of confusion. They didn’t know what was going on, he thought. Bowe’s death had them panicked.

  Darrell and Arlo Goodman talked in the first-floor kitchen. “We went through the security tapes. He talked to your intern, the blond chick.”

  “Cathy . . .”

  “Yeah. She stopped him in the hallway when he was coming out of the elevator. He seemed surprised, I don’t think he knew her. She gave him a piece of paper. We’re up and running on his cell phone, and he made a call from a cell in Scottsville, right by Schmidt’s house. He went straight there when he left here.”

  “So it had to be her.”

  Darrell nodded. “Unless he talked to somebody in the elevator, and . . . that didn’t happen. It’s her.”

  “I sometimes thought . . .” Goodman shook his head. “I wonder what else she’s been selling?”

  “No way to tell,” Darrell said. “What else you got?”

  “It’d all be political stuff. Nothing that’d be trouble.”

  “She doesn’t have access to your computer?”

  “Not unless she’s broken the password,” Arlo said. “Besides, she doesn’t have a key to the office, and there’s always somebody around, even when I’m not. She wouldn’t have much time with it.”

  “Wouldn’t need much, if she knew what she was doing,” Darrell said. “Slip in a piece of software . . . a keystroke register.”

  “You want to look?”

  “Yeah, I better. I’ll get a guy, I’ll do it tonight,” Darrell said. “Even if it’s clean, it’d be better if she were out of your office.”

  “Can’t fire her,” Goodman said. “She works hard, she’s pretty goo
d. Her old man helped with fund-raising during the campaign.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” the man said. “Maybe she gets robbed.”

  Goodman’s eyes narrowed. “Not robbed dead.”

  “No, no. Dinged up a little.”

  Jake called Danzig from the car, filled him in on the meeting.

  “Goodman wants me to look around on this thing. He says he talked to you.”

  “Yeah, he did. When I told you to find Bowe, I didn’t think you’d find him quite that fast. Or that way. We’re all sorta freaked out.”

  “I hope I didn’t trigger an execution. I’d put out word that we’d be looking for him.”

  “We don’t even speculate in that direction,” Danzig said. “Goodman is right about one thing, though—we don’t know what’s going on. We need to know. Right now. If it’s something that we can pin on Goodman, something that doesn’t impinge on national politics, then we can do that and forget about it. Let Goodman deal with it. If there’s more, we need to know about it.”

  “I’ve got lines out.”

  “Keep working them. This is out of control now. It’s wall-to-wall on CNN. It’s like that hurricane, Katrina, or Katinka, or whatever it was, and nine/eleven.”

  Jake was tired when he got home, a little hungry, fighting the illusion that he could still smell Lincoln Bowe’s roasted body, that the odor hung in his clothes, in his hair. He took a shower, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, padded barefoot down to the kitchen, and poured a bowl of cereal. Two minutes until eleven o’clock. He carried the cereal bowl into the den, turned on the television to catch the beginning of the news cycle; at the same time, he brought up his laptop and linked into the Net.

  The television news was all Lincoln Bowe. There were shots of Madison Bowe with a group of senators, standing on the front porch of her town house, swearing for the cameras that the government would hunt down her husband’s killers. There was a helicopter shot of Bowe’s body being carried out of the woods in a black bag on a stretcher, and of cops working the site.

  Madison Bowe said she had no idea why her husband had been killed, other than his ongoing clash with the Virginia Watchmen. “He saw in them a revival of the Ku Klux Klan,” she said to the cameras. “A group supposedly of volunteers, whose real purpose is to intimidate the public. He hated that, and he challenged it . . .”

  She looked terrific in black, Jake thought.

  With one eye on the television, he checked his e-mail. He had a dozen messages, all routine. He hadn’t checked his phone since Novatny called, and got him running toward the crime scene: he did it now, found a message from Madison Bowe: “Call me. Please. Anytime before midnight.”

  He also had a dozen hang-ups. He frowned at that: a dozen was too many. He checked the missed-calls register, and they’d all come from the same cell phone. He dialed the number, but the phone had been turned off.

  He thought about calling Madison. He and Danzig were shuffling between pools of quicksand, and everything they did had to be considered in the light of possible criminal proceedings. On the other hand, he was coordinating with the FBI. . . .

  She picked up quickly: “Yes?”

  “Jake Winter returning your call.”

  “You live someplace near me, right? Could I come over to talk to you?”

  “Mrs. Bowe, things are getting complicated,” Jake said.

  “I know that. I talked to Novatny,” she said. “I need to talk to you. This whole thing may be more in your area than Novatny’s.”

  “The two areas have become somewhat the same,” Jake said.

  “Listen, can I come over and talk, or what?” she asked.

  While he waited for her, he clicked around the cable news channels. They had hardly any real news—aerial tapes of the crime scene, with FBI vehicles clogging the narrow road, Madison Bowe’s accusations from Washington Insider, taped interviews with the last persons to have seen Bowe alive—but they ran them in an endless loop, interspersed with interviews with prominent politicians and a couple of conservative movie stars.

  Madison Bowe arrived at ten o’clock. He’d left the back gate open, and she nosed up to his garage. He let her in the back door, and she walked slowly through the house, appraising the kitchen, touching a table in the hallway that led to the living room, stopping to examine a watercolor, and peered at the newsreader on Fox, on the television in his den.

  “She’s barely got any clothes on,” she said.

  “She won’t have, if CNN’s ratings keep going up,” Jake said. “I’m looking forward to the day.”

  In the living room, Madison settled into an easy chair next to the fireplace.

  “This day . . .”

  “I can imagine.”

  “A nightmare. I’ve got people I don’t like all over the place. I’ve got the media, I’ve got the FBI . . .”

  “It’s the only thing on the news,” Jake said.

  “Yes.” She shuddered. “Somewhere, though, Lincoln is laughing. He would have hated to go as an old man with tubes dripping into his veins. He’d have wanted something spectacular. He once told me that if he lived to be eighty-five, he’d buy the fastest Porsche he could find, wind it up to two hundred miles an hour, and aim it at a bridge abutment. The only thing he wouldn’t like about this is that Goodman lived longer than he did. He would have hated the thought that he hadn’t managed to take Goodman down.”

  “You don’t sound . . . mmm.”

  “As upset as I might? Dead is dead. I was expecting it, to tell you the truth. I knew he hadn’t just wandered off.” She exhaled, slumped another inch; her eyes looked tired, with undisguised crow’s-feet at the corners. “Do you think this Schmidt person killed my husband?”

  He said nothing for a moment, considering her, then said, “I don’t know. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I just don’t know.”

  “Are the Watchmen involved?”

  He thought about the five men in Goodman’s parlor. “I don’t know that, either. My inclination, at this moment, is to think they are not.”

  Now it was her turn to consider him. Finally she said, “They are. Somewhere along the way, somehow, they’re involved.”

  “I don’t know that,” he said. “I do know that they are running around like chickens over there. Between you and me, I can tell you that Goodman and all of his top people are personally involved in trying to figure out what happened.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Tonight, at the governor’s mansion. They’re worried. They believe there’s a conspiracy against them. They believe that your husband was part of it, and that you may be.”

  She shook her head, then asked, “Is it safe to walk here? The streets?”

  “Sure.”

  “So let’s take a walk around the block. I mean . . .” She flushed. “If your leg . . .”

  “My leg’s okay,” he said. “Let me get my stick.”

  They walked down the back stoop, past her car, out the alley to the sidewalk. She said, “Something happened today. Maybe. Everything was moving so fast, everything is so foggy.”

  “What happened?”

  “Let me think about it for a minute . . .”

  They’d gone to the left, out of the alley. The corner house had an old-fashioned front porch, and a couple was sitting in a porch swing. Jake tapped along with his stick, and the man called, “Is that you, Jake?”

  “Yeah, going for a walk. How’re things?”

  “Very quiet, when they aren’t ripping up the street on your block. You can hear the jackhammers all over the goddamned neighborhood.”

  “Ought to be done in a week,” Jake said. “Then my house will be worth a lot more money.”

  “But not mine,” the man said.

  “Suck it up, Harley,” Jake said. The woman laughed, and Jake and Madison continued down the sidewalk.

  When they were out of earshot of the couple on the porch, Madison said, “I’m telling this to you, and not the FBI. The FBI would preten
d to hold the information, but there’d be leaks, it’d all be the most cheesy kind of thing . . . I’m telling you because you’re political, but you’re still in a position where maybe you could get justice for Linc.”

  “Okay.”

  They walked along, and then she said, “Lincoln is not—was not—one hundred percent oriented toward women. Sexually.”

  “Ah, jeez,” Jake said, and stopped in his tracks.

  “It’s not unheard of, even for U.S. senators,” Madison said.

  “It could have a bearing on the murder,” Jake said. “It could be a purely personal matter. In fact, if he was romantically active, then there’s better than a fifty-fifty chance . . .”

  They were facing each other and she reached out and put a hand on his chest. “Gay doesn’t mean violent.”

  “Of course not. But given any kind of secret sex life, and then a disappearance, there’s usually a connection. That’s just the way it is,” he said.

  “What, you’re the big crime historian now?”

  “No. But I read the papers, for Christ’s sake.”

  “If that’s what it is, then it will come out. But that really isn’t the way it is—I know some of his friends, and they’re a good bunch. They’re also very, very private, and very sophisticated. They would not murder anybody over an infidelity.”

  “You can’t know that for sure,” Jake argued. “All it takes is one crazy guy.”

  “That’s not it,” she said. She sounded positive.

  “Ah, boy . . .” They turned together and started walking again. Then, “If he was gay, why . . .” He waved his hand, taking her in.

  “Did he marry a woman? Because he wanted a political career. All of his family is involved in politics, one way or another, and a conservative Republican gay was not going to get elected in the state of Virginia.”

  “That’s not what I was going to ask. Why did you marry him?”