Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  “Okay. The point being that somebody asked him specifically about Bowe after Bowe disappeared.”

  “Yes. Then he worked in a roadhouse down there, as a bartender. A couple of Watchmen talked to him the day after that, and probably the day after that, too, although we haven’t nailed that down. This was what, ten days ago. Anyway, when the newspaper stories started getting bigger, and we got a couple more guys wondering about Schmidt, we went down to see him again, and he was gone.”

  “So this would be a week ago.”

  “Don’t quote me, but it was about that. We can put a precise timeline together and e-mail it to you.”

  “Mmm. That’s okay. Listen, I can’t give you the precise information I have, because it’s classified. But—everybody will know this in a next few hours—the hunt for Carl Schmidt is about to go big-time.”

  “They found something.”

  “Yes. Tell your boss. Way the media works, they could be holding his feet to the fire.”

  Jake kicked back in the chair again, closed his eyes. Schmidt. He needed to know more about the guy. Because Schmidt had struck him as a loser, but not necessarily a moron.

  If he’d been warned that people were curious about Bowe’s disappearance and his possible involvement, would he still have hidden the gun in the house? If he really wanted to keep it that badly, he could have put it in a couple of Ziploc bags and ditched it out in the woods. He could recover it in two minutes, but nobody would have found it in a hundred years . . .

  And that scratched semicircle on the floor of the basement. He’d been pleased with himself for detecting the possibility that the bench had been moved so somebody could stand on it. But now that he thought about it, Schmidt might as well have painted an arrow pointing to the hiding place. Was he really that dumb?

  He dug around in his briefcase, found the note that had been given to him by Goodman’s treacherous intern, Cathy Ann Dorn. If he could catch her before she went to work, maybe he could get a little insight on the Goodman team’s reaction. He dialed the number on the paper, and a young woman answered: “Delta-Delta-Delta. How can I help you?”

  “What?”

  “TriDelts. How can I help you?”

  He was nonplussed. A sorority house? “Uh . . . do you have a Miss Cathy Ann Dorn?”

  There was a second of ominous silence, then, “Are you a friend of hers?” The voice had hushed.

  “I was supposed to call her back about a job,” Jake said.

  “Oh . . . God, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Suddenly, bad vibrations, thick as syrup. “Is she there?”

  “Actually, let me have you talk to somebody else.”

  “Could you . . .” But the woman was gone, replaced fifteen seconds later by a sharper voice. “You’re looking for Cathy Ann?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could I ask who’s calling?”

  “My name is Chuck Webster. I’m calling her back about a political internship she’d applied for, a White House internship. Is there something wrong?”

  The woman hesitated and then said, “Cathy Ann was injured last night. She’s in the hospital.”

  “Oh, my God. Is it serious?”

  “Pretty serious,” the woman said. She sounded grim. “They beat her up pretty bad. At least she wasn’t raped.”

  “Oh, my God,” he said. Again. “Could you give me her parents’ number, or at least their names? I really need to talk to somebody. This is awful.”

  He meant it, and the vibe got through to the woman on the other end of the line. “Of course. Sure.”

  “Could you tell me what hospital? I can promise you that this is official . . .”

  He got through to David Dorn in his daughter’s hospital room. Jake said, “I just talked to her about an internship and I was appalled . . . How serious is it?”

  “She won’t die, but she’s hurt pretty bad. They got her doped up pretty strong right now, she’s out of it. I’ll tell her you called when she wakes up.”

  “Please do that. Tell her to call me. The White House fellowship. She’ll know. Do the police have any idea who did it?”

  “None. Not a clue. Took her purse, took her computer and iPod. She was a target, I guess, young woman at night carrying a briefcase. I warned her so many times . . .” His voice caught; a crying jag. “I’ll tell you what, if I ever get my hands on these sonsofbitches . . .”

  Jake got off and thought: Goodman?

  A military unit doesn’t take kindly to traitors. Had they picked up on the fact that she’d talked to him? He thought about the security cameras in Goodman’s office building . . .

  Nothing to do about it, not yet.

  He picked up the phone again and called Thomas Merkin at the Republican National Committee offices. “Tom, Jake Winter here.”

  “Hey, Jake. I heard you were tangled up in the Lincoln Bowe thing.”

  “Yeah. Was. I’d like to come over and talk to one of your staffers,” Jake said. “Barbara Packer?”

  “Barbara? About what?”

  “About Senator Bowe,” Jake said. “What she’s heard, if anything. She’s a friend of his, I think.”

  “Well, hang on, will you? Let me see if she’s in.” He clicked away, and thirty seconds later, clicked back. “She’s in, but she doesn’t know anything about Senator Bowe.”

  “All I’d like to do is chat,” Jake said.

  “Hang on.” He was gone again, longer this time, then came back: “Should she have a lawyer?”

  “I’m not a prosecutor, Tom, I’m not an investigator.” But he put a little steel in his voice. “I’m just trying to tidy things up. If she wants a lawyer, that’s fine with me, but I haven’t even started a file on this thing.”

  “All right.” Merkin was wary. “Hour?”

  “See you then.”

  He called Howard Barber at his office. A secretary said that he was out for the morning but should be back after lunch. Jake left a message.

  To the RNC.

  He decided to take a cab down to the Tidal Basin, check out the cherry blossoms, then walk on over. And the cherry blossoms were excellent, a pink so pale that it was almost white. In fact, he thought, scratching his chin, they were white. Had anybody ever noticed before?

  The cherry blossom festival was starting, crowds of Japanese tourists with cameras, so he moved along, stopped at a café and got a bun and a cup of coffee, sat outside and watched the Washington women in their new spring ensembles blowing along the sidewalks. . . .

  He tapped his cane as he walked, and whistled a little Mozart. The ice was breaking up; lock tumblers were turning. He’d be done with Bowe in two days, he thought. Then maybe he could talk to Danzig about doing something with the conventions . . .

  There’d been a couple of unhappy events at the RNC, most recently a schoolteacher who claimed he had a dynamite belt and attempted to blow himself up on the committee’s front porch, in protest of Republican educational policies. A protest, in Jake’s view, that was fully justified.

  As it happened, the teacher himself was poorly educated. He didn’t have a dynamite belt, but a blasting-cap belt. He had confused the high-tech-looking caps, which he’d stolen from a quarry, with dynamite, and instead of blowing himself up, he’d blown off several hamburger-sized chunks of meat and fat, and had blinded himself in one eye.

  In any event, the RNC had installed heavy-duty security, and now was protected almost as well as the White House. Not that a passerby would know it. A glass wall showed off a plush lobby, with an unprotected woman sitting behind a wooden desk, friendly and open. The wall behind her, though, was a couple of feet thick—a blast wall—and between that wall and another inner, concrete wall was an airport-style scanner system.

  He walked through the security, the guard raised an eyebrow at the cane, X-rayed it, gave it back, and passed him through the inner wall to the real reception area, with a less expendable receptionist. She recognized him, though he’d never seen her before—she was
one of the smiling, chatty women who were always out front. She’d pulled his bio, of course.

  “Mr. Winter. Good to see you, sir. Tom and Barb and Jay are waiting for you.”

  Merkin and Barbara Packer and Jay Westinghouse were sitting in a conference room at the back of the building; Jake knocked and stepped inside. From their faces, he suspected that he might have interrupted a heated discussion. Merkin he’d met several times, and Merkin introduced Packer and Westinghouse: “Jay is our lawyer. We thought, what the heck, he might as well sit in.”

  Yeah, what the heck. “Fine with me,” Jake said.

  Merkin was thin but soft, a guy who didn’t eat much, but who never worked out. Westinghouse was polished, a little too heavy, a man who liked his martinis.

  Packer looked harried. She was in her late forties, dark complected, with an efficient hairdo. She wore an efficient blue suit, as close to a man’s suit as she could get without being obvious about it, and a cobalt-and-gold silk scarf for a tie. They spread around the rosewood conference table and Jake webbed his fingers and smiled at Packer and said, “Do you have any idea of why Senator Bowe might have been killed? Some kind of political or personal issue that might have resulted in violence?”

  The other two men looked at her and she said, “No, of course not.” She had a grim mouth, a thin line turned down at the ends. At the same time, she seemed genuinely puzzled.

  Westinghouse said, “Is this . . . What’s the status here?”

  Jake shrugged. “I’m asking Ms. Packer about Senator Bowe. If she has no idea of why he might have been murdered, then okay. If she does, she better say so, or she better be prepared to kiss the kids good-bye for a few years.”

  “I don’t want to hear that,” Westinghouse said.

  “Hear it from me, unofficially, or hear it from the FBI when they cart her out of her house,” Jake said, half to Packer, half to Westinghouse. “We’ve been hung out to dry on this Bowe thing and we’re not putting up with it. The only people who are benefiting are you guys. The press is gonna start whipping Goodman, and by implication us, with Judge Crater stories, with black helicopters, with conspiracy theories. When we’ve worked our way through it, somebody’s going to pay. If there’s some kind of political thing going on . . .”

  “Jake, that’s crazy talk,” Merkin said, pushing his chair back. “You’ve got to know that.”

  “No, I don’t know that,” Jake said. “What I’m afraid of is that somebody at a low level, an operator—Ms. Packer, for instance—knows that something’s going on, and they think they’re being smart. I don’t really believe that you guys know about it, because you really are smart.” He nodded at Merkin as he said it, the flattery principle, “. . . but somebody, somewhere does. And if it’s somebody who thinks he, or she, is being smart . . . well.” He shrugged.

  Merkin looked at Packer: “You don’t know?”

  “No, I don’t.” She looked at neither Merkin nor Jake, and Jake felt a tingle. She knew something.

  “What did you and Tony Patterson talk about, over at the Watergate three weeks ago?” Jake asked.

  Her face turned white. She looked at him for a moment, as though he’d turned into a viper, then shook her head and pushed her chair back. “Oh, no.” She turned to Westinghouse. “I won’t talk to this man anymore.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Merkin asked.

  Jake had pushed the situation to a breaking point: now he could back away. Now he had to back away, since he didn’t have anything else, other than the one cryptic suggestion.

  “The Wisconsin thing could blow up on you. There’s a murder now,” he said. “At this point, none of this has to go anywhere. It’s just a bureaucratic dance. But, Tom, I suggest that you and Jay sit down with Ms. Packer and have a talk. She’s been acting in your name and you’ve got enough problems already. This Bowe thing is a nightmare. There’s going to be serious trouble, and even if you’re on the very far fringe of it, it could still be the three-to-five at Marion, Illinois, kind of trouble.”

  “Ms. Packer hasn’t been acting in our name. If she’s been acting in any way, it’s on her own. The RNC has nothing to do with . . . anything.”

  Jake smiled: “I wish I could take a tape recording of that back to Bill Danzig. He’d put you on TV.”

  Merkin didn’t smile back: “We’ll have a chat about this, and I’ll get back to you. Soon.”

  “Do that.”

  On the way out the door, he gave Merkin his private phone number.

  “If you hear anything, call me anytime. I mean it: three A.M.” He said good-bye, nodded at Packer without smiling. They were already snarling at each other when the door closed behind him. He backed out through the building security, and figured that about the time he got to the bottom of the steps, they were putting the red-hot rebar on the soles of Packer’s feet.

  Maybe something would bleed out; and maybe not.

  But from the way Packer was acting, he thought it probably would.

  8

  Jake hadn’t expected to hear from Howard Barber until after lunch—but Barber called back as he was on his way home.

  “Can you tell me what exactly you want to talk about?” Barber asked.

  “Not on a cell phone,” Jake said. “Basically, I spoke to a friend of yours last night, and she said that I should get in touch with you. About her husband.”

  “Ah.” Pause. “I’m in Arlington. Where are you?”

  “Burleith, north of Georgetown.”

  “Why don’t I come there? One o’clock?”

  Jake would have preferred to see Barber at his office, to get a look at it, to make a judgment, but couldn’t turn the offer down. “That’d be great.”

  Jake had one egg left, so he fixed himself a last egg-salad sandwich, then went out to his stamp-sized backyard to swing a golf club, working on his hip release. Get ready for summer. He made fifty swings, struggling not to lose his bad leg on the follow-through, and was sweating when he finished. He’d just put the six-iron away when Barber arrived.

  Howard Barber was a tall black man wearing a steel gray suit, a black golf shirt, and opaque blue-glitter sunglasses with a phone bug dropping to one ear. Jake saw him clambering over the ditch in the front yard, and went to get the door. Barber had just rung the bell when Jake popped the door open.

  Jake said, “Mr. Barber? Come in. I should have told you about the construction. I should have had you come around back. . . .”

  Jake took him into the study, pointed him at a reading chair in the corner. Barber sat carefully, looking around the office, then crossed his legs and leaned back. “Nice place,” he said. “That new sidewalk ought to kick the value up.”

  “That’s what my neighbors tell me,” Jake said.

  They chatted about real estate values for a moment, then, “I talked to Maddy this morning after I called you back,” Barber said. “She filled me in on what you’re doing. I don’t understand how I can help.”

  “She said you were Lincoln Bowe’s closest friend. Bowe may have been kidnapped and murdered . . .”

  “What do you mean, may have been?” Barber said, frowning, and leaning forward. “The boy’s dead. Decapitated. Burned. I mean, Jesus Christ, what do you want?”

  “It’s not all that clear,” Jake said. “The FBI is chasing a suspect, but there are problems, quite frankly.”

  “What problems?” Barber asked, frowning.

  Jake shrugged. “Anomalies. Like the fact that he had a huge collection of guns, but left one where it would be found, and it may be the gun that ties him to Lincoln Bowe. Like the fact that he’s become invisible. Can’t find him, nobody’s seen him. In the opinion of a number of people, the suspect was set up and is probably dead himself.”

  Barber said, “Huh.” Then, “I could think of reasons for all of that. If I was trying. I mean, the guy obviously ain’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not trying to alibi him,” Jake said. “I’m noticing
anomalies.”

  “Okay.” Barber lifted his hands, slapped them down on his thighs. “All I can tell you is, Linc and I talked the day before he disappeared. We were going to play golf the next week, but by that time, he’d been gone for four days. I didn’t know he’d disappeared until I saw the first story in the papers. Then I called Maddy down at the farm, and she told me.”

  “Was he . . .” Jake hesitated. “Look, I’m trying to ask if he had any gay friends that you may know about, who were passionately involved with him. I’m trying to figure out if this could have been a relationship thing.”

  “Gay murder.” Barber settled back, shaking his head.

  “Yeah.”

  Barber exhaled, said, “Shit,” looked at the ceiling, then said, “I can’t tell you for sure. He was not, mmm, monogamous. But I don’t think . . . I think if he was involved in something really hot, really difficult, he would have told me. The sex cooled off for him the last few years. Gays get older, too, you know.”

  “Never thought about it,” Jake said.

  “Well, it’s true. Anyway, I could call a couple of people and ask.”

  Jake smiled. “I’d really prefer to do it myself.”

  Barber shook his head. “Linc moved in political circles. Political gay circles. Some of the people are already out, but some absolutely couldn’t afford to be outed. You’re doing staff work for some Bible-thumper from Alabama, you get outed, you lose your job.”

  “I wouldn’t out them.”

  “I might believe you, except . . . what would you do if it became expedient to out them? If it helped the cause?” Barber asked. “I don’t know you well enough to trust you on it.”