Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  “We’ve got to be really careful,” Danzig said, without preamble.

  “I know. I talked to Patterson. We need to talk, tonight, if I can get a flight. Could be late.”

  “Call the travel office.”

  He called the White House travel office and found he was already being booked on a seven o’clock flight back. He’d had his phone turned off during the first flight and his talk with Patterson, and when he checked messages, he found a voice mail from Madison Bowe.

  “Please call me. It’s important.” She left both her home and cell-phone numbers. The cab came, and he put the phone away until he was at the airport. He got a ticket, walked through security, and called her from the gate.

  She answered on the first ring: “Hello?”

  “Madison, Mrs. Bowe—this is Jake Winter.”

  “Jacob. Jeez, I’ve been trying to get you everywhere,” she said. “Johnson Black heard that you were beaten up last night, and they took you to the hospital. Where are you?”

  Interesting. She seemed concerned. “Atlanta.”

  “Atlanta?” She seemed less concerned. “How did you get to Atlanta?”

  “By air,” he said.

  She laughed and said, “No, stupid, I didn’t mean, I meant—oh, fuck it, I don’t know what I meant. You’re not hurt?”

  “Bruised. Got some tape on my head.” He felt himself sucking for sympathy. “Are you . . . mmm, the funeral is tomorrow?”

  Somber now: “Yes. One o’clock. It’ll be a circus. Listen, does Danzig still have you looking around, or are you all done?”

  “We’d still like to know what happened,” Jake said.

  “Good. You’re still looking. I’ve got more problems.”

  “What happened?” He let the alarm show. “You don’t think, I mean, you haven’t seen anybody . . .”

  “No, no. I’m in New York, I’m about to head back to Washington. We better talk face-to-face. I’m getting really paranoid.”

  “Will you be up late?” he asked.

  “Probably. When do you get back?”

  “I’m scheduled in at nine o’clock,” he said. “I’ve got to stop to talk with Danzig. I don’t think I could be any earlier than ten or ten-thirty at the earliest.”

  The airport had universal wireless, and while he was waiting for the plane, he went online to the State of Wisconsin website, and then to federal DOT records, adding file information to what he’d been told by Patterson. The road project had been real enough, and the money was just what Patterson had said it was. Much of the money had come from the federal government—which meant that if the Landers package was legit, then Landers had committed federal felonies.

  The flight was called on time and the trip back was as quick and routine as the flight out: short, boring, noisy. When he got out of the seat in Washington, he had a little trouble standing up: his bruised muscles were cramping on him, and he stopped in the terminal to stretch a bit.

  Nothing helped much: he simply hurt. Outside, he grabbed a bag, took a cab to the White House, called ahead, and had an escort waiting at the Blue Room. Gina was in Danzig’s inner office, shoes off, twitching her toes in her nylons. The other two secretaries were gone. When Jake walked in, she asked, “How’s your head?”

  “Little ache. Could be hunger, though.” He had to explain exactly what had happened.

  Danzig: “So after you were down and before your friend fired the gun, they didn’t go after your wallet? They didn’t get your briefcase?”

  “No. That worries me.”

  Gina shivered: “I don’t like the sound of it.” Then she stood up. “You want coffee? I could get you a sandwich?”

  Jake said, “Yeah. Both. That’d be great.”

  “Ham and cheese? Tuna?”

  When she was gone, Danzig said, “She’s relentless . . . So?”

  Jake dropped into a chair across the desk from him, dug in his case, brought out a yellow legal pad, looked at his notes. “In Wisconsin, under the Landers administration, the state began work on a ninety-one-mile improvement of Federal Highway 65. The improvements began at I-94 east of the Twin Cities and ran up to a resort area called Hayward, in the Wisconsin north woods. There were about three hundred million federal dollars spent on it, plus about fifty-five million in state money. Landers and his friends allegedly stole about eight million dollars of it.”

  “Jeez, more’n two percent. That’s pretty good,” Danzig said. “How’d they do it?”

  “Don’t know. There’s this package . . .”

  Halfway through the briefing, they heard Gina come back, and Danzig put a finger to his lips, a “be quiet” signal. Gina came in with the sandwiches and coffee, and Danzig said, “Gina: take off.”

  “Oh, if you’ve still got things . . .”

  “Gina: go home. Say hello to your husband. I’m going to talk to Jake, get this whole project out of the way, then I’m going home myself. Tomorrow, I want to set up a daily report process for the convention, so get me a list of anyone critical that we need to bring into it.”

  “I could start that tonight.”

  “Gina: go home.”

  When she’d gone, reluctantly, Danzig turned back to Jake. “You were saying . . .”

  Jake finished the briefing, then Danzig asked, “How many people know about this package?”

  “Patterson thinks that quite a few have had a smell. If he’s right about Goodman . . .”

  Danzig was shaking his head. “That Goodman stuff sounds phony. Goodman’s way too smart to get mixed up in a kidnapping and murder. Or in beating you up, if you were thinking that.”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said, shaking his head. “They seem to have a thing going on down there. Goodman develops a wish and somebody does something about it.”

  “Like killing Lincoln Bowe?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “But if this package is out there, and Goodman knows about it . . . I can see why Patterson’s worried. Goodman likes power. He’s going to lose it. He’s got a year left. He might see this package as a way back.”

  “Yup.” Danzig twiddled his thumbs: elementary.

  “The question is, do I take all this to Novatny, or do I keep looking around, or do we just forget about it?”

  Danzig studied him for a minute, then said, “This is the thing, Jake. Patterson was right about Landers, for sure. If we need to dump him, we need to do it soon. And we need to do it. We don’t need the New York Times or the Washington Post to break this on us. We need to look proactive.”

  “We need the package.”

  “Yes. Landers won’t go if we don’t have it. He’ll just dig in.”

  “Maybe we could . . . Never mind.”

  “You were going to say?” Danzig asked.

  “I was going to say, maybe we could replicate it. Put it together independently. But that would take an investigation, the word would bleed out, and we’d be twisting in the wind.”

  Danzig nodded: “Exactly. If there’s a package, we need it now, and we need it all. If there isn’t a package, we need to know that. What we don’t need is a long investigation, a special prosecutor, a controversy. We don’t need a long-brewed scandal. We need either to get it over with, or buried for good.”

  “You want me to keep looking?”

  Danzig said, “Jake, I do want you to keep looking—but I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I’m going to tell Gina tomorrow morning that we’re all done, to tote up what we owe you on the consult. I want you to continue on your own hook, and if you find the package, I want you to deliver it.” Another moment of silence, then Danzig said, “You get my drift.”

  Jake said, “You want me to be deniable.”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth,” Danzig said. “I want the best of both worlds. I want you off the payroll, so we don’t have any backfires. I want you to keep looking, so that if there is something we need, you’ll find it and we’ll get it. Us, not anybody else. And I want it so if you get caught d
oing something unethical or criminal, we can throw you to the wolves.”

  Jake smiled: “Thanks, boss.”

  “You’re not a virgin.”

  “One part of me is. I wouldn’t want that changed in a federal prison.”

  “I can understand that,” Danzig said. “But believe me, there’s a terrific upside if you pull this off.”

  “What upside?”

  “What do you want?”

  The question hung there. Jake stared at him, then said, “You’re serious.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I might want a lot,” Jake said.

  “I can’t give you a billion dollars, but I can get you something good.”

  Jake thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “You’ll pay off this consult?”

  “As of tonight.”

  “Should I stay in touch?”

  “Call me if you get it,” Danzig said.

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then don’t call me. But Jake: you gotta get it.”

  Jake stood up, leaned on his cane for a moment, then took a slow turn around the office, looked at the Remington bronze that sat on the credenza, touched the buffalo head, turned back, and said, “The whole thing, the package thing, started with an anonymous tip. A guy calls in the middle of the night and says, ‘See what Packer and Patterson talked about at the Watergate.’ So—who was that, and what was the motive? There’s somebody else out there. I can’t see him. I can’t see what he wants.”

  Danzig tapped on his desk with a yellow pencil, staring at Jake but not focused on him, and finally sighed and said, “Shit, Jake, there’s always somebody out there. What he wants . . . he might want anything. The simple pleasure of knowing he took down Landers. Maybe there’s a better job in it for him. Maybe he figures they’ll make a movie about him, he’ll get to go to Hollywood and fuck Brittany West.”

  “Patterson suggested that Goodman could benefit. Take a big step up,” Jake said.

  Now Danzig’s eyes snapped. “Well. We’ll see how things work out. I know why he’d say that, though. God help us.”

  Jake headed for the door: “I’ll see you.”

  “You’re gonna do it?”

  Jake smiled. “You don’t want to know, right?”

  11

  Jake arrived at Madison’s town house at 10:30, wrestled his overnight bag out of the cab, hung it over his shoulder, carried his briefcase on the other side, tapped his way up the walk with his cane. He’d called Madison from the cab. Halfway up the walk, the porch light came on and she opened the door.

  “Mrs. Bowe . . .”

  “Did you have a good time at the White House?”

  “You hardly ever have a good time at the White House, unless you’re the president,” Jake said. He thought about Danzig, and the What do you want? “You can have interesting times.”

  “Gonna tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  She had a black dress hanging on a hook in the entryway, still in a plastic dry-cleaning bag, and a shoe bag sitting on the floor beneath it. Funeral clothes, Jake thought, as he went by into the living room. She had a gas fireplace. The fire was on, flickering behind a glass door. He dropped his bags, sat on the couch, and she asked, “A glass of wine?”

  “That would be great.”

  She was back in a minute, with two glasses. The wine was already open, and she held it up to the ceiling light and peered through it. “I started without you,” she said. She poured and handed him a glass. “I talked to Novatny. They have no ideas, other than this Schmidt man.”

  “But Schmidt’s a pretty good idea,” Jake said. “What happened in New York? You said something odd happened.”

  “First of all, tell me what happened the other night. When you got mugged.”

  He told her, succinctly, trying not to show his embarrassment, nipping at the wine while he talked. She listened intently, and then said, “Doesn’t sound like a robbery.”

  “I know,” he said. “And I know what you’re going to say. I don’t think the Watchmen are involved. Goodman thinks I’m out scouting around for him. I was actually thinking that your friend Barber might be a possibility—though I don’t see what beating me up would have gotten him.”

  She frowned: “He has a violent streak in him. I’ve seen that in the past. I think Linc was attracted to it. But remember when you told me about The Rule? Who benefits from your getting beaten up?”

  “The Rule doesn’t say that the benefit has to be obvious. In fact, it usually isn’t. We just don’t know enough yet . . . So: New York?”

  “Yes.” She poured a glass of wine for herself, set the bottle on the coffee table, and perched on an easy chair, folding her legs beneath herself as women do. “I took the shuttle up early this morning and went to the apartment. To check it, make sure everything was okay, to look for some papers, to pay the maid. I needed to get Linc’s will, for one thing, some insurance policies that Johnnie Black needs to see. I got everything I needed, but . . . his medical records were gone. There were two big folders, in the top drawer of the file cabinet, and they were gone. They aren’t here and I know they aren’t at the farm. I can’t see why they’d be in Santa Fe, his doctor is in New York.”

  Jake thought about it and shrugged. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Neither do I. Except that underneath the bed sham, I found a bottle of prescription medicine, Rinolat. I looked it up online, and it’s a painkiller. I didn’t understand it all, something about monoclonal antibodies. Anyway, he was taking a heavy dose. The stuff would put a horse to sleep.”

  “I know . . .” He slapped his leg. “I have some experience with it. Was it dated?”

  “Yes. A month before he disappeared.”

  “He was sick?”

  She shook her head: “Not as far as I know. I haven’t seen him for a while. The last time I saw him, he was a little cranky, but he wasn’t in pain. Not that I could see.”

  “Huh. The stuff isn’t of any use recreationally . . . Are you sure it was his?”

  “The prescription was in his name, from his doctor.”

  Jake sipped the wine, swirled it in his glass. He didn’t know much about wine, but it tasted fine; tasted like money. And he thought about the autopsy report. Novatny said that Bowe’s body had been suffused with painkiller, possibly to keep him helpless. But was that what happened? “You think somebody stole the medical file? Have you talked to the maid?”

  Madison nodded. “Yes. I did. This is the other funny thing. She saw his doctor. At the apartment. With medical equipment.”

  “What doctor?”

  “James Rosenquist. He’s an old friend of Linc’s. One of his special friends, or once was. I called him, and he said he hadn’t seen Linc for six months, since a physical. But James has a white streak in his hair—he’s a little vain about it—and the maid said the man she saw in the apartment, the doctor, had a stripe like a skunk.”

  “Ah, man.” Jake leaned back, rubbed his face, and yawned. Shook his head and admitted, “I still don’t know what it means.”

  “Neither do I. It’s just that there seems to be another mystery in New York and there shouldn’t be two mysteries at the same time. Not unrelated ones,” Madison said. “I was thinking about siccing Johnnie Black on James, but since James denies even seeing Linc . . .”

  “Rosenquist is in New York City?”

  “Yes. He has one of those practices on the bottom floor of a co-op, on the Upper East Side.”

  “One of the rich guys,” Jake said, “who’ll be all lawyered up.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jake sighed, gulped the wine, bent forward to pick up his case, winced at the pain. “Mrs. Bowe. Let me check around, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know what I can do.”

  “What if James, what if Rosenquist is hooked up with Goodman somehow? I mean . . .” She flapped at him.

  “There’s no reason to think that? That there’s a connection?”

 
“No, but it seems odd. Linc didn’t hide things from me. We no longer had a sexual relationship, but we were still married. We were certainly fond of each other. I didn’t know anything about an illness. I didn’t . . . I mean, what if Rosenquist drugged him somehow? Delivered him?” Her voice trailed away, and she frowned. “Am I being a dingbat?”

  “Not at all,” Jake said. “Nothing you said is crazy, I just don’t see where you’re going with it. Or where it can go.”

  She chewed her lip for a moment, looking at him, then said, “You don’t trust me.”

  “I do, as far as . . .” He stopped.

  “As far as what? You can throw a Toyota?”

  “No. I do trust you.” Another little lie. Or was it? She felt trustworthy. On the other hand, apparent trustworthiness was a quality that Washingtonians spent a lifetime perfecting.

  He’d thought of asking her about the Landers package, but decided not to: he had to do more checking. If she had it, or knew who did, he didn’t want to do something that might inadvertently pull a trigger, get the package dumped to the Times. Not until Danzig was ready for it, anyway.

  He stood up, said, “I’ll call you tomorrow. Let me think about all of this. I’ll call you.”

  She leaned back in the chair for the first time, took another sip of wine, looking at him over the top of the glass, and then said, “All right. This probably won’t help you learn to trust me, but I need to tell you something. I thought about it when we started talking about his sexual orientation.”

  “Okay.”

  “Linc had his outside relationships—but so did I. I’ve had two affairs in the last nine years. Both of them lasted about two years, with nice, discreet men, and then they stopped. They stopped basically because they weren’t going anywhere. Linc knew about both of them, and it was okay with him. I mean, he was a little wistful—but he understood.”

  Jake said, “Mrs. Bowe . . .”