Dead Watch

by John Sandford

He could see her turn her face away from him, one hand going to her cheek. After a moment, “I wasn’t entirely aware of his . . . preferred orientation . . . when we got married. Also, I was tired of bullshit. Especially from men. I’d been in a long relationship that didn’t work out, and then I did some running around, and finally . . . I was tired of being chased by men who were more interested in my ass than they were in me. And here came Lincoln. He was smart, good-looking, powerful, he was rich, he was commanding. My mother picked up the gay thing, hinted at it before we got married, but there really wasn’t a performance issue on his part. We got together okay in bed.”

  “And . . .”

  “After we got married, the sex just drifted away,” she said. “Then I became aware that he had other attachments. There was usually an assistant or a political associate whom he was a little too fond of, whom he spent too much time with. Maybe that’s why I’m not as out of control as I should be. Linc was more like a favorite uncle. He hadn’t been a lover for years. There wasn’t that tie.”

  “Where are we going with this?” Jake asked.

  “Well, if it’s going to break, we’d like it to break in some civilized way. Not to leak. Not drizzle out. Not with all kinds of denials . . . Maybe, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you just announce . . . I was hoping you could help.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Years ago, the French president had a longtime mistress. Everybody knew, including his wife. They invited the mistress to his funeral, the public pretty much thought that was cool . . . maybe something like that would work with Linc.”

  “No. Because Linc was murdered. His body was burned in the most spectacular way. If this comes out . . . ah, man.”

  “Linc had a lover, for a year or so, a few years back. Then they stopped being lovers and got to be close friends, almost like brothers. His name is Howard Barber. He’s a tough guy, one of you ex-servicemen, Iraq, and he’s very successful. He started a company that sells electronics to the military. He came over this afternoon, after I got the news about Linc. He said it was going to come out. He said there was no way to contain it. He was hoping to find some way to . . . You know.”

  “Be civilized about it.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is not a very civilized country when it comes to stuff like that,” Jake said. Then he revised himself: “Actually, the country is civilized, it’s the media that’re not.”

  She walked along a little farther, and then she asked, “Can you do something?”

  “Let me think about it. I need to talk to Barber.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you trust him.”

  She hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

  Jake picked up the hesitation: “You don’t trust him. I could hear it.”

  “I do trust him . . . or I did trust him.” She paused, then added, “When he came over today, he was looking at me. He was checking me out. He kept talking about the Watchmen, and then he was watching me, watching how I reacted.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “I had the feeling—just a feeling—that he knows more than I do, maybe knows what happened. He was checking me to see what I’d been told about it. To see where the investigation was going. And somehow, he was priming me to be angry. To point me at the Watchmen.”

  “That’s not good,” Jake said.

  “I might be misreading him. He’s got to be freaked out—as I said, he and Linc were really close. When this gay thing comes out, people are going to look at Howard. Big, good-looking guy, always single . . . he hangs out with all the important colonels at the Pentagon, plays poker with them, goes on fishing trips down the bay. You know, the people who buy his products. They’re probably not what you’d call gay-centric.”

  “Probably not,” Jake agreed.

  They’d turned two corners, and now walked across a street, Jake’s street, but went ahead, down another block. Nice walking in the night, humid, cooling, quiet.

  “What do you want me to do?” Jake asked.

  “Talk to him, talk to Howard. Not as a policeman, but as somebody who knows what the FBI knows . . . and who also knows about this. See if there’s anything.”

  “I can talk to him. But if anything serious comes out of it, I’d have to tell the FBI.”

  “Of course—if it looks like there’s reason to believe that Howard had something to do with it. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He and Linc really were like brothers. He’s the last person in the world who’d hurt Linc.”

  “That makes me suspicious. If somebody told Miss Marple that so-and-so couldn’t possibly have done it . . .”

  “You’d know who the killer was. I’m not Miss Marple, and Howard didn’t kill Linc.”

  Twenty yards in silence; he could smell her, the scent of flowers, with some spice. Chanel, maybe? Had she put it on just before she came over? He pushed the question away and instead asked, “When did you last see Lincoln?”

  “Two weeks before he disappeared. Sometimes I saw him every couple of days, sometimes I didn’t see him for weeks at a time. Besides the farm, and the town house here, we have an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Santa Fe,” she said. “He was always running around. He missed being in the Senate. He missed it desperately. That’s why he hates Goodman, and hates this administration, because he feels that they assassinated him. Though, the last couple of weeks before he disappeared, he finally seemed as if he was a little happier. I don’t know if something was going on, but it was as though he’d turned a corner.”

  “Huh.”

  They walked along for a while without talking, turning a corner and another one, finally ending back up at Jake’s house. They walked down the alley to the backyard, and at her car, she said, “I’ve got to go. But let me ask you one more thing. Or two things. Personal things, if you don’t mind. I talked to Johnnie Black about you . . .”

  “Remember, he’s on the other side. An evil Republican.”

  “Like me,” she said. He could see her upturned face in the light from his back window. “He said you were in Afghanistan. He said that’s where you got your disability. Is that right?”

  “I was in the special forces for a few years,” Jake said. “What’s the second thing?”

  “He said you were married to Nikki Lange.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The Queen of Push.”

  “I try not to think about it. You know her?”

  “I know her. We overlapped a year on the Smithsonian board. I heard a comment about sex and violence.” She sounded amused, peered at him in the dark. “That her husband provided the sex and she provided the violence.”

  He tipped his head back and laughed. “I heard the same comment. It’s generally accurate. Looking back, I would have preferred an Afghani prison.”

  “How could you have done that? Married her?”

  “Well, she’s an attractive woman,” Jake said.

  “Big tits, small ass . . .”

  “Come on, be nice.” Jake said. “Anyway, our politics are generally the same, and like you and Lincoln, we got along pretty well in bed. I just didn’t understand that she was the queen and I was the equerry.”

  “The what?”

  “The equerry,” he said.

  “My, you have a large vocabulary.”

  “You ought to check out my conjunctions.”

  “Some other time, maybe,” she said. “Do you ride? Johnnie said something about a ranch.”

  “I probably rode every day of my life from the time I was three until I was fourteen. Until my grandpa died and the ranch got sold. I’ve still got friends out there, I go out and ride when I can.”

  “You’ll have to come out to my farm sometime,” she said. “Of course, we ride the right way.”

  “We don’t have that luxury. Our horses work for a living.”

  She laughed quickly, quietly, popped open her car door, and looked at him across the window. “Stay in tou
ch with me. Talk to Howard. Help me.”

  “Mrs. Bowe, I work for Bill Danzig. I’ll help you if I can, but my loyalty runs to Bill. And the president.”

  She nodded: “Then help me if you can.”

  She got in the car, backed carefully out of the drive. He made sure the gate locked behind her, then went into the house, dropped into the living-room chair, and over a couple of hours, had a couple of beers.

  He didn’t drink much, and he didn’t drink often, and the beer left him a bit loopy.

  He thought, I could end it right now.

  If he called CNN anonymously, or Fox, or any of the large newspaper chains, and simply said the word gay, they’d find out the truth in a matter of hours. And once that word was out there, the investigation would go in an entirely different direction. Politics would be out of it: the press would be hunting for a former lover, or a gay-hater, or somebody trying to cover up something else. . . .

  But Madison wanted something “civilized,” if that was possible. He could feel the request twisting in him.

  He owed a certain loyalty to Danzig, and through him to the president. But they wouldn’t care about civilized. If they found out that Lincoln Bowe was gay, their immediate instinct would be to get the word out, to create the greatest possible spectacle. The investigation of Lincoln Bowe’s death would lurch into a ditch—a gay thing, a sex killing—and both Goodman and the president would be off the hook.

  It would no longer matter if Goodman or his friends were guilty of the killing, because nobody would be looking anymore . . .

  He thought about Madison.

  As they’d walked along through the evening, he’d felt the beginning of an intimacy. Not only had they told each other a few truths, he could remember the feel of her arm brushing along his, and the smell of her. He wished he’d kissed her good night; wished he had that kind of relationship with her.

  Since his grandparents had died almost twenty years before, he’d been alone. Alone even in his marriage. He sensed a similar loneliness in Madison Bowe.

  He was caught; torn. Decided that he didn’t have to release the information immediately, in either a civilized way or an uncivilized way. He could hold it for a while. Talk to Barber. See where the FBI investigation went.

  Think about Madison some more.

  7

  The call came in two minutes after he’d gotten in bed. A male voice: “Mr. Winter? I understand you’re trying to find out what happened to Senator Bowe.”

  “Yes, I am. Who is this?” He checked his caller ID, found the same number he’d seen on the hang-ups, but no name.

  “I really can’t tell you that. I’m sure you understand.” Jake did understand—a whistle-blower, a backstabber, a do-gooder. The voice was soft, well modulated. A bureaucrat somewhere, or maybe a politician, somebody with a little authority. “I apologize for calling so late, I tried to call a few times earlier, but there was no answer. If you want to know about Senator Bowe, talk to Barbara Packer. She’s staff with the Republican National Committee. Ask her what she and Tony Patterson discussed three weeks ago in their meeting at the Watergate.”

  “What’d they discuss?”

  “They talked about nonconventional means of destabilizing the administration. By nonconventional, I mean criminal.”

  “Give me one specific,” Jake said. “Give me a can opener.”

  The man laughed. “You mean, for the can of worms? Okay. Tell her, ‘We know all about the Wisconsin thing.’ See what she says.”

  “You’ve got to . . .”

  “What I’ve got to do is, I’ve got to go. Don’t bother to trace the call. Or, for that matter, go ahead. I’m calling from a prepay cell phone. There’s no name on it.”

  The man was gone.

  Jake thought about calling Novatny to see if a trace might be possible. Maybe there’d be some weird way of figuring out who it was—security cameras over the cash register when the man bought the phone. Something tricky . . . and he thought, Later. Better to find Barbara Packer first, see what she had to say. Whatever it was, it’d be political, and usually it was a good idea to keep politics away from the FBI.

  First thing in the morning . . .

  He went back to bed, thought about his walk with Madison, and then drifted way.

  His eyes snapped open four and a half hours later, and he was up. One benefit of a short night—short nights all his life—was that Jake got in a half day’s work before anybody else was moving. He was in his office by five-thirty, NPR’s Sunrise Classical running in the background, searching the federal databases for Packer, the Republican National Committee staff member, Tony Patterson, who apparently worked for ALERT!, a conservative political action committee, and Howard Barber, Lincoln Bowe’s onetime lover.

  Packer and Patterson had spent their lives in political jobs, everything from grassroots organizing to campaign strategy. They were both backroom types, never out front.

  Barber was more interesting. He’d been in Iraq, a platoon leader with the Rangers, and had taken home a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He hadn’t been badly wounded—he’d had light duty for two weeks, and then was back on the job. The Bronze Star sounded legitimate, won during an attack on a dissident strongpoint after an ambush.

  Back in the States, he’d gotten start-up money from an American Express program, and had put together software that integrated digital radio receivers with mapping programs for low-level infantrymen. The receiver was worn on the wrist, like a large watch, and, among other things, could provide real-time aerial views of combat scenes at the platoon and squad level, as well as linked graphic displays to coordinate maneuvers at the company, platoon, and squad levels. Just like a video game, Jake thought, if you didn’t mind a really bloody “Game Over.”

  By seven o’clock, he had everything that was nonclassified. If he needed more, he could go to Novatny, but he was reluctant to do that until he saw where things were headed. Satisfied with the morning’s research, he went to his newspapers, journals, and mail.

  The Times had a two-column right-corner headline on Bowe, while the Post stripped the story across the top of the front page. Neither story had anything he didn’t know, except that an autopsy had been scheduled for last night.

  At eight o’clock, he got Novatny on the phone: “What happened with the autopsy?”

  “This is confidential,” the FBI man said. He crunched, as though he were chewing a carrot.

  “I’m a confidential guy,” Jake said.

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah . . .”

  “For one thing, the chemistry will take a while. But: he was dead when they set him on fire, though recently dead. He’d been shot right dead in the heart. In the heart at least. We don’t know about the head, of course.”

  “Did they recover any of the slug?”

  “Yes, they did. Deformed, but useful,” Novatny said. “A copper-jacketed .45-caliber hollow point. As it happens, we recovered a .45-caliber pistol in Carl Schmidt’s house yesterday evening, hidden in the basement. It was full of copper-jacketed .45-cal hollow points with Schmidt’s fingerprints on them. I would bet my mother’s virtue that we’re gonna get a match on the slug.”

  “Whoa.”

  “My thought exactly,” Novatny said.

  “When will you know?” Jake asked.

  “A while. But today. Don’t want to screw this up.”

  “I’m surprised that you didn’t get a through-and-through.”

  “Well, you know, .45s aren’t exactly speed demons. With hollow points, they’re throwing a slug that looks like an ashtray, ballistically, and this one hit a vertebra after passing through the heart, and stuck. It’s hard to tell because of the burning, but the autopsy showed some kind of unusual debris in the wound canal, so it might have gone through something else before it hit him.”

  “Weird debris? Like what?”

  “Gotta wait for the chemistry,” Novatny said. “But it wasn’t a shirt, there were no fabr
ic fibers. They’re working it.”

  “Call me when you get it,” Jake said.

  “Could get some of it today. Won’t get all of it for a couple of days.”

  After he’d hung up, Jake leaned back in his desk chair, closed his eyes, and thought about it. If Schmidt was the killer, not only was he stupid, but he’d dumped Arlo Goodman in a political trash can. The media no longer dealt so much in facts, which had become unfashionable, as in speculation. And once they started speculating on Schmidt’s involvement with the Watchmen, and the Goodman-Bowe feud, combined with the sensational way Bowe had died . . .

  He thought again: Should he make the call? An anonymous call about Bowe’s gay lifestyle would stop the investigation short. The news media had always been thoroughly hypocritical about sex, publicly preaching tolerance for anything but child sex, while at the same time exploiting any sign of sexual irregularity by politicians or other celebrities.

  Still: he hesitated.

  Did he really want to stop the investigation? In terms of his job, it would certainly be expedient, even if it led to an incorrect conclusion. And he felt the pull of his loyalty to Danzig. He should tell Danzig.

  And he would, he decided: but just a little later. Maybe after he talked to Barber, after he’d looked into a few more things . . .

  Two phone calls, the first to Danzig, to bring him up-to-date on everything but the gay stuff. The second to Ralph Goines, Arlo Goodman’s assistant.

  Jake identified himself: “I need some information immediately, or as fast as you can put it together. I need to know when you first started putting out feelers about Schmidt and how you did that. Did anyone see or talk to him after you started putting out feelers? Is there any way to know whether or not Schmidt knew you were looking for him?”

  He expected Goines to get back. Instead, Goines said, “Hold on. I’m going to put this phone down, I could be a minute or two.”

  Jake held on, heard music in the background. Country-western, he thought. Then Goines picked up. “We began talking about him on the first, April Fools’ day. He was still around. We had a guy named Andy Duncan stop by and chat with him about Bowe’s disappearance. Duncan went as a Watchman, but he’s also an accident investigator for the highway patrol, and he knows what he’s doing. He got back to us and said Schmidt seemed to have missed the news stories that Bowe was gone. Remember, the stories weren’t that big, it was more like, ‘Where has the senator gone to?’ ”