Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  He hung up, stepped toward the door, caught the glaze on the secretary’s dead, half-open eyes. The rage surged: the same rage that he’d felt in Afghanistan when he’d encountered dismembered civilians, killed by dissidents to make some obscure point. The secretary had been a kid. Probably waiting to get married; probably looking forward to her life. All done now. All over.

  His hands were shaking as he turned away and stepped past her, out into the hallway.

  An agent from the Madison FBI office arrived one minute ahead of the Madison cops.

  14

  The FBI man took a look and backed away, pointed a finger at Jake and said, “Wait.”

  The first cops walked in and walked back out, shut the door on the PollCats office, faced Jake to a wall, checked for weapons, read him his rights, and sat him down in the hallway, on a chair they borrowed from one of the occupied offices.

  Jake told them that he didn’t want a lawyer, but he did want to talk to Novatny privately, and wouldn’t make any other statement. The FBI man went away for a while, then came back and said, “Agent Novatny will be here in three hours. He’s flying straight in from Washington.”

  The Madison homicide cops, who arrived ten minutes after the patrolmen, were pissed, though the lead investigator, whose name was Martin Wirth, allowed that Jake probably wasn’t the killer, since he’d reported the crime. “But he knows something about it and I want to know what it is,” Wirth told the FBI man. “This is my town, this is my homicide, and the entire FB fuckin’ I can kiss my ass. This guy’s going nowhere until I say so.”

  The FBI man put his sunglasses on, looked at the investigator, and said, “Uh-huh.”

  Wirth asked Jake, “Where’d you get that cut on your head?”

  “I was mugged, in Washington.”

  “Right.”

  “I have a copy of the police report in my briefcase,” Jake said.

  “You know, these guys are getting away . . .”

  Jake said, “Look: Nothing I know can get you to anyone. Everything I know is background. I didn’t see anything you haven’t seen. I don’t know who might have done this.”

  “Then how come you won’t make a statement?”

  “I can’t tell you why I won’t make a statement, because then you’d know something I’m not sure I should tell you,” Jake said. “Okay?”

  “Fuck no.”

  “I will make a statement to agent Novatny and then agent Novatny can either tell me to make a statement to you, and I will. Or he’ll tell me not to, for national security reasons, and I won’t,” Jake said. “I’m probably saving your life. If I told you what I know, the FBI might have to come in here and kill all of you.”

  “You’re being a wiseass,” Wirth said. “We don’t like wiseasses in Madison.”

  “Marty,” the FBI man said, “Madison is the national capital of wiseasses. What are you talking about?”

  The police kept Jake sitting outside Green’s office as their crime-scene people came and went; investigators talked to everyone in the building, but nobody had seen any strangers coming or going at the time of the murders. Nobody had heard any shots. The building, it seemed, was more than half empty, and the offices that were occupied were mostly sedentary businesses without much traffic: two bookkeepers, a State Farm agent, an insurance service bureau, the office for a medical waste-disposal service.

  In the end, to make the city cops happy, Jake had to go down to the police headquarters and sit in a conference room. He felt as if he should be sitting on a stool, with a pointed hat on his head, facing into a corner. On the other hand, the cops were exceptionally mellow, and gave him coffee, doughnuts, and magazines.

  Novatny showed up four hours after Jake called him, Parker trailing behind. Wirth was still working, bared his teeth at Jake when he showed the two Washington FBI men into the conference room, and said, “I’ll be waiting.”

  Parker nodded and pulled the door shut.

  “What happened?” Novatny asked. He took a seat across a conference table, while Parker braced his butt on a windowsill.

  “I was following up a possibility on Bowe,” Jake said. “Just cleaning up. I thought it was thin. Then this. Either it’s not related at all or somebody killed Alan Green to shut him up.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Bowe was gay,” Jake said. “He was also dying of brain cancer. That’s why he was full of drugs, for the pain. I think—but I don’t know—that Bowe and a group of his gay friends plotted a way to make his death look like a murder, and to blame Arlo Goodman for it.”

  They both stared at him for a moment, then Parker, his forehead wrinkling, asked, “Why?”

  “Because they think Goodman is the point man for a fascist political movement—or a populist movement, whatever. Profamily, prochurch, semisocialist, antigay, intolerant, authoritarian. They set up Schmidt for the fall, because he was linked to Goodman. Then, I think, they killed Schmidt. But I don’t know that. That’s just what I think.”

  “Green was in on it? I saw the pictures in his office . . .”

  “Green was gay, a former lover of Bowe’s. He might have been about to fold up. I mentioned Schmidt to him, how he disappeared. He sorta freaked. I got the feeling that he looked on the whole Bowe-death thing as a complicated political joke. Certainly didn’t think murder was involved . . . Anyway, I came out to talk to Green about it and scared the hell out of him. He said he had to talk to some friends about what to tell me, so I walked down to a bookstore, bought a novel, ate a bagel, and when I came back . . . there they were.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Parker said.

  “How long have you known this, Jake?” Novatny asked. “That Bowe was gay? That the whole thing might have been a setup? Why in the hell didn’t you tell us?”

  “I’ve known Bowe was gay for a couple of days. Madison Bowe told me, asked me not to pass it along if I didn’t have to, but left it to my discretion. She was afraid that it would leak—and it would have—and that would have ended the investigation. It would have become a gay thing. She still believes that her husband was murdered, and that Arlo Goodman was involved. And she had a point.”

  “But now . . .”

  “Now things have changed,” Jake said. “I didn’t think it was a gay thing. That was too far-fetched and that’s why I didn’t tell you about it. Nobody cares about gay anymore—and Bowe wasn’t even in office. Then I got Madison Bowe’s permission to go to New York and look at Bowe’s apartment. I found an empty pill bottle there—it’s still there—and tracked it back to Bowe’s doctor, who told me about the cancer.”

  “And then you thought . . .”

  “I thought it was all too much: Nobody can figure out where Bowe went. He was smiling when he disappeared. His body is found in this spectacular way with an arrow pointing straight at Schmidt. Why did Schmidt get rid of every gun in the house, except the one that could convict him of killing Bowe? That was goofy. I started thinking that the whole thing was faked. And I’ll bet you something: I bet if you look at Schmidt, that you’ll find some kind of tie to Arlo Goodman. One that Goodman might not even know about, but that would look suspicious if somebody got tipped off.”

  “So it’s all a fraud. The Bowe murder,” Parker said.

  “Yes. I started to think it was basically a suicide, and it occurred to me that, if that’s what happened, that his friends had to be involved. People he could trust absolutely—and that suggested it might be this group of gay lovers, people who’d kept the secret all those years. And who had reason to fear Goodman.”

  Novatny and Parker looked at each other, then Novatny rubbed his face with his hands and said, “On the way out here, I figured out twenty reasons why you were here and there were dead people, and how it might be related to Bowe. Nothing I thought of was this weird.”

  “Is Madison Bowe in on it?” Parker asked.

  “No.” Jake shook his head. “She and Lincoln Bowe haven’t been together for years. She’s just been a cover for him. And
she’s the one who’s been pushing the investigation. She got me started in this direction. She gave me Green’s name. She gave me the key to her apartment, pointed me at the doctor. I think that Lincoln Bowe deliberately kept her in the dark. Maybe because she wouldn’t have gone along; or maybe to protect her.”

  Novatny was skeptical. “You have no idea who the killers might be.”

  “Bowe’s gay friends. You could ask around, you’ll turn them up. Madison still thinks that Goodman is involved. She thinks the idea of a bunch of Bowe’s friends getting together to kill him is ludicrous. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Assuming that you’re telling us the truth—and I think you are, even if we’re not getting all of it—then the killer’s somebody from here in Madison,” Parker said. “Got to Green inside of an hour.”

  Jake scrubbed at his hair with the palms of his hands, then said, “That doesn’t seem right. That just doesn’t seem right. But that’s what happened.”

  “Have you figured out how it went down in Green’s office?” Jake asked.

  Novatny frowned. “We think the killers were professional—nobody heard any shots, but the shots were probably fired from a .22. Those are not so quiet, so it must have been silenced.”

  “How do you know it was a .22?”

  “Took a slug out of a wall,” Parker said. “The base was intact, looks like a .22.”

  “Could be a .22 mag. The damage was pretty big,” Novatny said.

  “They were executed, then,” Jake said.

  Novatny brightened: “Not exactly. We think that the secretary tried to resist, tried to fight them off, went after somebody with her nails. She got some skin and a little blood, so we’ve got DNA. If we can find the guy, we can nail him.”

  “And Green . . .”

  “He took it right in the back of the head. He was executed. We think the secretary tried to resist, that’s when she lost her shoes, got her hands on someone, and Green just stood there and boom.”

  “What now?” Jake asked.

  Novatny got a tape recorder, read Jake his rights, and got him to repeat the statement. Jake did, but insisted that most of what he said, other than the basics about Bowe’s sexuality and the cancer revelation, was speculation. “I just want out of this,” he said. “I’m a research guy, not a cop. I just want out.”

  Novatny talked to the Madison chief, but didn’t tell Jake the outcome. They did cut Jake loose, at seven o’clock. “Are you going back to D.C.?” Novatny asked.

  “Yes. But first, I’m going to check into a hotel and get some sleep,” Jake said. “I’m really screwed up.”

  “One thing,” Novatny said. “Do not go back to Madison Bowe. She’s going to be a critical witness. Don’t mess with her.”

  “Believe me. All I want is out,” Jake said.

  Jake walked down to State Street, through a couple of alleys, in and out the back of a pizza place, and found a phone near the restrooms in a sports bar and called Johnson Black, Madison’s lawyer. He got lucky, made the connection, talked to Black for a moment, then ordered a beer at the bar and stood next to the phone. Madison called him back twenty minutes later from a phone in an M Street lounge. “Listen to me,” he said. “There’s been a disaster.”

  He told her about it, then said, “So the feds are going to come to you. You confirm the homosexual angle and you tell them why you didn’t want that made public—that you were pushing the investigation into Goodman, and were afraid the homosexual angle would end it. You tell them that sexuality is a private matter, and you had no reason to think that it was involved in Lincoln’s death. You tell them that you had no idea that there was a setup . . .”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “But now you’re telling me . . . I caused this girl’s death somehow. If I hadn’t sent you there . . .”

  “You didn’t cause her death,” Jake said. “Somebody else did. You can’t anticipate the outcome of everything you do; you can go crazy trying. Somebody else killed them, not you.”

  “But if I hadn’t sent you . . .”

  “Madison, get a grip. It’s really critical right now. If you’re going to feel guilty, feel guilty about something you actually did.”

  “But you don’t know . . .”

  “Tell me later,” Jake said. “Not on the phone . . . Has anything happened there that I should know about? Is anybody pushing you?”

  “One thing, but . . . ah, jeez, I can’t keep the girl out of my head.”

  “Focus, goddamnit. What happened?”

  “I talked to Howard, I confronted him. He killed Linc, but it was essentially a suicide. Linc had already taken an overdose. He claims that Schmidt is in Thailand, working as a bartender. That Schmidt is obsessed by brown hookers. Those are Howard’s words. He says that they can bring him back anytime they need to.”

  “Ah, jeez. Listen, stay away from Barber. Stay away from him. He’s about to become the eye of a hurricane. He might be involved here . . .”

  “Jake . . .”

  “Tell the truth, but don’t tell them about the package,” Jake said. “Not yet. Just omit it. Don’t tell them what Barber said. And don’t tell them about this call. This never happened.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve got to think. Listen, call me tomorrow, on my cell phone, from a public phone. At noon. If anything’s happened, I’ll let you know then. I can’t call you, because if there’s an investigation, they’re going to pull the phone records to see who was talking to whom.”

  Off the line, Jake walked back to his car, found a Sheraton hotel, checked in, and began working Green’s cell phone. He’d been talking about a woman who had the package, and had automatically taken the cell phone out of his pocket, as though her number was there.

  The phone was unfamiliar, but it took him only a minute to figure out the menu system. The call log showed one outgoing call after Jake’s arrival, lasting twenty-four minutes. The call was to the 715 area code.

  Jake found a Yellow Pages in the closet, checked area codes. The 715 code covered most of the north half of Wisconsin. Now for the three-number prefix after the area code.

  He signed on to the hotel’s wireless service, went out on the Net, found a listing for Wisconsin prefixes. The three-number prefix was in Eau Claire. He checked an online map: Eau Claire was probably three hours away by car. If the killers had gotten a name, somebody in Eau Claire might already be dead. In fact, if the killers had gotten either the phone number or the name, that person almost surely was dead . . .

  He didn’t want to use the FBI search service to find the name behind the number; that could be tracked back to him.

  But . . .

  He lay on the bed, covered his eyes with his forearm, tried to think about it. If the killers had threatened Green and his secretary to get information on the package, did the killers get the information and then do the killing? Is that why the girl resisted, attacked a gun with her fingernails? Maybe she saw the bullet coming . . .

  But if they’d killed the secretary to force the information from Green, there wouldn’t have been any percentage in giving it to them, because Green would have known at that point that he was doomed.

  So maybe the killers didn’t have a name . . .

  He needed to know whom Green had called without leaving obvious tracks. A thought popped into his head: the public library. Could it be that easy? He went back online, looking for an address of the local public library. When he found it, on the library website, he also found a list of telephone references available online. He worked through the menu, tracking the number: and found it. The Eau Claire number went to a Sarah Levine. He checked another directory and had an address. He said her name aloud, tripping a memory: “Sarah Levine, Sarah Levine . . .”

  Lion Nerve. He picked up a pen, crossed out letters. He had Levine, plus o-n-r. Ron Levine.

  Back online, using his government access to Social Security records. Ran Ronald Levine against ITEM: Got an immediate hit. Ronald L
evine worked for ITEM for seventeen years. Retired, started collecting Social Security, then showed a change-in-status. He checked: Levine had died.

  Okay. He knew who had the package—Ron Levine’s widow, Sarah. If she was still alive.

  If whoever had killed Green had done it to get the package, and if they had gotten Sarah Levine’s name, then she was probably dead. They’d had more than eight hours to get to her. If they hadn’t, then what? Then, Jake thought, they didn’t get her name, and they could be watching me. Or coming for me.

  The Dane County airport had an all-night Hertz car rental service. He called, gave them the rental information on his car, told them that it sounded funny to him—the engine would hesitate when it downshifted, after it got warm. Wondered if he might trade it for another. No problem. He told them he’d be in early.

  Tried to sleep. He got his four and a half hours, but he was restless, waiting for something to happen. At two-thirty he was up and moving. He cleaned up, packed, did the on-screen check-out, and carried his overnight bag and case down to the car. Moving fast. If they were going to try to take him, they’d have to catch him in the hundred feet between the hotel and the car, and at three o’clock in the morning, they might be a little slow to react.

  He saw nobody in the parking lot, but felt the chill in his spine as he was backing the car out. He made it to the Dane County airport, did the paperwork, upgrading to a Ford SUV, saw nobody out of place. As he was waiting for the Hertz guy to finish the paper, another thought popped into his head. If the watchers were good, and trained, he wouldn’t see anybody.

  But now, at least, he wouldn’t be driving a car that he’d been seen in, that might even have a locator hidden on it; maybe a change of cars would throw them.