Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  “Okay. But you’ll ask around.”

  “I’ll ask, and I’ll get back to you.”

  “I’ll take it, if that’s the best I can do,” Jake said. “But if it’s a relationship thing . . .”

  “Then I’ll call the FBI. I’m not going to let somebody walk on Linc’s murder.”

  Jake: “So who do you think did it?”

  “The Watchmen,” Barber said, without hesitation. “One way or another. Linc had a lot of influence, both through his family and through his political contacts, and he couldn’t keep himself from going after Goodman. Couldn’t help himself. Looked at Goodman’s combat records, made some comments he shouldn’t have.”

  Jake broke in: “There’s a question about Goodman’s records?”

  Barber shook his head again. “No. That was one of the problems. Linc thought there was, and couldn’t keep himself from saying so. He believed there were problems with his Silver Star and with the Purple Heart. But there were twenty guys there when Goodman got hit, and several of them actually saw it happen. They were down in a road cut, some Iraqis were lobbing RPGs at them. Goodman was directing traffic, running on his feet, and whack! He gets it in the hand. A couple of guys actually got sprayed by his blood. And Goodman stayed on his feet and kept directing traffic until his guys got on top of it.”

  “So there was no doubt.”

  “None. Not only that, the guys in his unit say he was a pretty good officer. Took care of them. But you know how it is when a politician has a medal and a war wound—there are always people ready to piss on them. Linc bought into the stories, repeated them. Goodman proved they weren’t true, but Linc wouldn’t shut up.”

  “Really bad blood, then.”

  “They hated each other,” Barber said. “Goodman took Linc’s Senate seat away in a dirty campaign. Linc went out of his way to smear Goodman every chance he got, and with his family connections and old Virginia loyalties, he’s caused Goodman some problems. Social problems. Not getting the old-boy invitations he should get, not playing golf with the old money.”

  “Status.”

  “Yup. Status. Goodman thinks he’s terrifically important, and he wants to be treated that way.”

  “When Senator Bowe vanished, did you think he’d been kidnapped?” Jake asked. “Or did you think something else was going on?”

  “At first, I thought something else might be going on,” Barber said. “Then two, three days went by—that wasn’t Linc’s style. A week out, I thought he was probably dead.”

  So there it was: Barber had thought Bowe was dead, as Madison suspected . . . but the way Barber put it, the feeling was purely rational. Nothing to lie about.

  “So, shoot. I go back to my boss and tell him it’s a straight kidnapping case,” Jake said.

  “That’s what it looks like to me,” Barber said.

  Jake laced his fingers, rubbed his palms together, thinking, then, “What do you think of the Watchmen? Could somebody say that you’ve got a reason for pointing us in their direction? Is there something personal . . . ?”

  “I think two things. First, when we—the Bowes and I—say Watchmen, we’re not really talking about the guy on the corner in a jacket helping an old lady across the street. We’re not talking about the Boy Scouts. When Goodman was still a prosecutor, he put together a group to do intelligence work. Half dozen guys, maybe. John Patricia was the first guy . . .”

  “I’ve met him.”

  “Patricia was air force intelligence. He brought military interrogation to Norfolk. And Darrell Goodman joined up. He’s Arlo’s brother and he’s a crazy mother. He’d take a guy apart with a pair of wire cutters if he needed some information. There are stories down in Norfolk about Goodman’s boys fuckin’ up some people pretty bad. Of course, they cut way down on prostitution and street crime about disappeared, and drugs went away. Everybody was happy to look the other way, ’cept the druggies and the stickup men.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “The thing is, Arlo carried those same guys over to his campaign for governor. Dirty tricks, spies, disinformation, the whole works. Intelligence operations, in other words.”

  “I saw a guy outside the governor’s mansion,” Jake said. “He had a special forces look about him—he was wearing a raincoat and one of those floppy-brim tennis hats, black tennis shoes. Looks like he had some kind of complexion problem, like really bad acne . . . but then I thought, maybe a burn, maybe service-connected.”

  “That’s Darrell Goodman,” Barber said, snapping his fingers, then pointing his index finger at Jake. “Always that raincoat. You ought to look him up. Take a look at his military records. I mean, there’s nobody in the Pentagon who really wants to know what those guys did in Syria. They might think it needed to be done, but they don’t want to know about it.”

  “So. An asshole.” Jake made a note.

  “Yes. A major asshole.”

  “You said you thought two things about the Watchmen. What’s the other one?”

  Barber nodded. “Okay. From what Maddy told you, you know that I’m a gay black man. The Watchmen are a proto-fascist group, with their own little charismatic führer. What should I think about them? I’d like to see them run out of the country.”

  “They don’t seem to have a problem with blacks,” Jake said. “Or gays, for that matter. Not that I’ve read about.”

  “Give them a while,” Barber said. “Being antiblack or antigay or anti-Jew isn’t useful to them yet. But they’ll get to it. Right now, they’re against immigrants. That’s not going to be enough, not when Goodman runs for national office. You know that thing he says, about how he never met a Commandment he didn’t like? Well, do not fuck your brother is in there somewhere.”

  “You’re a pessimist, Mr. Barber.”

  Barber smiled and spread his hands: “Hey. I’m a gay black guy. Pessimism keeps me alive.”

  “Last question, then,” Jake said. “I don’t know if you’ll know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to come at it obliquely—because if you don’t know, I don’t want you to guess.”

  Barber studied him for a moment, then: “Okay.”

  “Did you know that your friend Lincoln Bowe was involved in an effort to . . .” Jake hesitated, hoping he’d leave the impression that he was groping for the right word, though he’d spit at Barber exactly what the unknown man had told him on the phone, “. . . that he was, uh, what shall we call it: examining nonconventional means of destabilizing this administration. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Barber’s eyes went opaque: “No. What the hell does it mean?”

  Jake thought: He knows. “All right. I really can’t tell you . . .”

  They talked for a few more minutes, and Barber, as he was leaving, promised to get back on the question of Bowe’s ongoing love affairs. At the door, Barber said, “When is the gay thing going to hit the streets?”

  Jake shrugged: “I haven’t told anybody yet. I’m afraid it’d derail the investigation. You want a call before I do it?”

  “I’d appreciate it . . . and if you could take it a little easy?”

  “I’ll try. But it’s going to be out of my hands at that point.”

  Jake let Barber out the back door, then spent an hour making notes of the conversation and listing questions. He’d noticed how Barber’s language switched easily back and forth from a street-flavored lingo to postgraduate sophistication. From Goodman’s boys fuckin’ up people at one moment to proto-fascist charismatic führer the next.

  And he’d been lying about Bowe and the destabilization thing. Bowe had been into something. Now Jake had to work through it. Whatever it was, how did it tie in to Goodman? Or did it?

  He made another call about Cathy Ann Dorn—he got the nursing desk and was told that she had been awake, had eaten some cottage cheese, and was asleep again.

  He talked to Novatny.

  “Bowe was alive when he was shot, but he was full of drugs. Enough painkiller to knock him on his ass. T
hey may have kept him sedated to control him. Shot him in the heart. The debris in the wound canal was newsprint. The thinking is, they may have tried to use a wad of paper to muffle the sound of the shot.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Shooting a drugged guy is weird,” Novatny said. “Cold, ice-cold, murder. Don’t get no colder than that.”

  Jake went online, into the federal records. He had only limited access as a consultant, but he found a file on Darrell Goodman. The file was informative in an uninformative way—parts of his military record had simply been removed from the unclassified files. And that meant, almost certainly, that he was a snoop-and-pooper. Goodman had himself a hit man.

  Jake was thinking about it when Merkin, the contact at the Republican National Committee, called back.

  “Jake, we gotta talk. Where are you?”

  “I’m home. Is this about Packer?”

  “About Packer and Tony Patterson.” Merkin sounded worried.

  “Okay. I can come there, or you could come here. . . .”

  “No, no. How about at the National Gallery? Like in the nineteenth-century French paintings?” Merkin suggested. “I could walk over. Meet you outside in an hour?”

  “I should be there by then. If not, pretty quick after that.” And he thought, Doesn’t want to talk to me at his office . . . doesn’t want to be seen with me.

  Barber called Madison Bowe on her cell phone, caught her on the way back from the funeral home. “I talked to Winter,” he said. “He says he hasn’t told anybody about the gay thing.”

  “Huh. I was all braced.”

  “He’s afraid it’d derail the investigation.”

  “Ah, jeez,” she said. “I feel like I’m . . . It makes me feel rotten. I’m not made for this.”

  “I know, I know. Maybe you oughta just get out of it, get away from Winter. The guy is pulling stuff out of the air. I didn’t even want to look at him. I was afraid he could read my eyes.”

  “He is that way . . . ,” Madison said.

  “I’ll tell you, it doesn’t really make sense. He should have told Danzig by now,” Barber said. “I’m wondering . . . Maybe Winter is trying to do right by you.”

  “He likes me,” Madison said.

  “I could tell. And you like him back.”

  “Mmm.” She realized it was true. She hastened on. “About the other issue . . .”

  “Not on the phone,” Barber said. “Tell you what. I’ll stop over and see you when we both have time. We can talk it all out.”

  The National Gallery looks like a WPA post office. Jake found Merkin on the main floor, morosely examining Cézanne’s House by the Marne.

  “In Cézanne’s day, the Marne wasn’t the Marne,” Jake said, taking in the painting.

  “Looks like a creek,” Merkin said. “Not like a million dead men, or whatever it was.”

  “I didn’t know you were an art fan, Tom.”

  “Ah, it calms me down, coming here,” Merkin said. “I never see anybody from work.”

  “Probably be better if you did,” Jake said. “I mean, for the Republic.”

  Merkin nodded. “Let’s walk.”

  They walked toward the American wing, talking in hushed voices, Whistler’s huge White Girl peering at them down the long hall. Merkin said, “As far as I know, nobody did anything illegal.”

  “Then what’re we talking about?”

  “Patterson had worked with Packer in North Carolina on the Jessup campaign, and out in New Mexico on Jerry Radzwill’s. They saw each other around. Patterson is with ALERT! right now. He was an advisor on the Bowe campaign. He was set for a decent job if Bowe won, but Bowe didn’t, so he wound up at ALERT!”

  “He’s a Bowe guy.”

  “Was. Anyway, he got in touch with Packer and said he had a hypothetical for her. If, hypothetically, somebody had a package that would dump Vice President Landers off the ticket, when would be the best time for the package to be delivered?”

  “What’s in the package?”

  “Don’t know. Neither does Packer. Here’s the thing, here’s what Patterson was saying. He was saying that somebody has a package that’s so specific, so criminal, so irrefutable, that as soon as somebody respectable gets it, he’s gonna have to turn it over to the FBI or face criminal charges himself. But until then, it’s a figment of the imagination, floating around out there.”

  “The implied question was, when did the Republicans want the package dumped to do the most damage?”

  “That’s about it,” Merkin said.

  “What was the answer?”

  Merkin’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. “Jake, you know how the talk goes on these hypotheticals. People talk about this stuff all the time. Dump it October first, there’s plenty of time for the scandal to blow up, not enough time to recover . . . but who knows, maybe it could be suppressed until it’s too close to the election. So maybe September fifteenth. And maybe . . . Hell, you pick a date.”

  “Sometime in the fall.”

  “I would say that.”

  “And you’re telling me this now because . . .”

  “Because now that it’s out there and somebody knows about Patterson and Packer, we don’t want to get caught in the obstructing-justice squeeze,” Merkin said. “We’re reporting this to you, as the president’s point man on the Bowe investigation. I’m going to make a record of our talk here, and date it, get it notarized, and stick it in a safe-deposit box. If I never need it, that’s great. If I wind up talking to a Senate panel or a grand jury . . .”

  “All right,” Jake said. “This information, whatever it is . . . Patterson got it from Senator Bowe?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Patterson.” He swung his sport coat off his shoulder, dug in a side pocket, and came up with a leaf torn from a desk calendar. A phone number and address were written in the memo block. “I happen to have his name and address with me.”

  Jake stuck the paper in his pocket. “I’ll probably have to tell the feds.”

  “We’ll do everything in the world to cooperate. Packer understands that. We don’t have anything to do with Patterson, so that’s not our problem. Remember: the whole thing was presented to Packer as a hypothetical. And it was all so vague, what was she going to report? Anything we did could be interpreted as an unsupported and scurrilous attack on the vice president.”

  They walked to the end of the wing and stood looking at White Girl. She looked back with a boldness that was disconcerting, as though she were personally interested in their conspiracy. After a moment, Jake said, “Well, shoot, Tom. I was planning to sit in the tub tonight. Nice soothing soak.”

  “It’s an election year, Jake.”

  “Yeah, it is. But let me tell you something, Tommy. If I were you, I wouldn’t go leaking this around. If it’s real, it’ll come out. But there are elements of a conspiracy here—a conspiracy with a murder, and you guys are in it. We’re not talking about six weeks in minimum security anymore.”

  “I know that.”

  “So don’t mess with it. Talk to your people, too. Sit on them. This is gonna be . . . this is gonna be difficult.”

  Danzig would still be in his office: Jake said good-bye to Merkin and called. Gina picked up the phone.

  “It’s Jake, Gina. I gotta see him.”

  “He’s done for the day. The president’s back and they’re talking.”

  “Get him out when you can. I’m down by the Mall, but I’m headed that way. Clear me through to the blue room.”

  “Can you give me a hint?”

  “You don’t want to know about it, Gina. Best if you asked the guy about it. I’m really telling you that for your own good, if we all wind up in front of a special prosecutor someday.”

  “Uh-oh. I’ll clear you through.”

  Jake flagged a cab. Five minutes later, he was checking through White House security, heading for the waiting room. The place was crowded, but nobody spoke, simply sat and stared, poked keys on
laptops, or browsed through week-old copies of the Economist.

  He’d waited twenty-five minutes before an escort touched his sleeve: “Mr. Winter?”

  Danzig’s two junior secretaries were gone, their desk lights out. Gina sat in a quiet glow, working with pen on paper. When Jake came in, she touched a desktop button and said, “I hope it’s not that bad.”

  “Bill can fill you in,” Jake said.

  The green diode came up, and she said, “Go on.”

  Danzig was standing behind his desk, frowning at a stack of paper. When Jake came in, he looked up and asked, “Is it bad?”

  “It could be,” Jake said. “Really bad.”

  Danzig pointed at a chair: “What?”

  Jake sat down and said, “A low-level operator for the RNC has been talking to another operator, a guy who worked a bunch of Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, including Bowe’s last campaign. He’s a Bowe guy, now with ALERT! His name is Tony Patterson. He was making tentative inquiries about dropping a scandal on you. On us. Supposedly, a rock-solid accusation against Vice President Landers that would dump him off the ticket. The question he was putting to the RNC was, when to drop the package on us. The timing.”

  “Why would he ask the RNC?” Danzig asked. “Why not Bowe? Bowe would know.”

  “I don’t know. I do know that he and this woman, the woman at the RNC, were old campaign buddies. So it was partially old-buddy stuff. And there was just a hint that the package might be coming from Bowe. That Bowe might be trying to distance himself from it.”

  “Goddamnit,” Danzig said. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then Danzig said, “If it’s true, one obvious conclusion would be that Bowe was killed to stop this package from coming out.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’d be a disaster.” Jake said nothing and Danzig spun his chair away, thinking. Then he said, coming back around, “On the other hand, if we push the investigation into this hypothetical package, and it turns out that Bowe was killed for some completely unrelated reason, we’re still in trouble. Because once anybody knows about the package, it’s gonna leak.”