Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  Out on the interstate, he headed north, driving a little too slow, watching for headlights that stayed back. Got off at a rural highway intersection, watched for lights behind him, saw one car getting off. Took another left, and another quick one, waited, then headed back to the interstate. If they had a team, they could still be with him. If they were in the air, they could still be with him.

  But he could do more loops on country roads all the way up, and even, in the last few miles, maybe wrap up a trailing team in the streets of Eau Claire. Whatever: it’d have to be good enough.

  All the way north, whenever his headlights swept across the black backdrop of trees, like a projector’s light in a darkened theater, he could see the flickering face of the dead secretary. The face would stay with him for a while, he thought. Cruelly, he found himself wishing she’d fallen facedown, so he wouldn’t have to see it.

  Darrell Goodman, worn and scared, put a finger to his lips, hooked Arlo Goodman’s arm, and pulled him toward the staircase. Arlo Goodman followed him down and around to the concrete tunnel in the basement.

  “We had a big problem in Wisconsin,” Darrell whispered.

  “Not too big,” Arlo said.

  “Pretty big. The Green guy went after me, and George shot him. The secretary . . . we had no choice with the secretary. We had no choice.”

  Goodman peered at his brother as though he’d gone crazy. “Are you telling me you killed them?”

  “There was no choice,” Darrell protested.

  “Sweet bleedin’ Jesus.” Arlo stared for another few seconds, trying to grasp it. “I should have strangled you when you were a kid.”

  “Listen. Nobody knows,” Darrell said. “We rented the car in Chicago. We put a little mud on the plates, so they’re not on any camera. We went into a parking lot at the back of the building, and nothing faces the back except a brick wall and a door. We went up, nobody saw us. No cameras, we checked. We went in. We put the guns on them to scare them, I slapped Green a couple of times, and the next thing I know, he’s all over me. Then the chick . . . but we got out. Not a sign of anybody looking at us. Went right straight back to Chicago, fast as we could, dumped the weapons on the way, turned in the car and got out of there. I’m going to root the IDs out of the license bureau, nobody’ll ever know.”

  “You dumb sonofabitch,” Arlo groaned. “No guns, no guns. Why’d you take guns? You were supposed to blackmail him, for Christ’s sake.”

  “He came after me, man. And then George . . .”

  Arlo waved him silent. “Where’s George?”

  “Sitting in my office.”

  “George has to go away,” Arlo said.

  Darrell licked his lower lip. “That can happen.”

  “Make it happen soon. The next few days. I don’t want to see him anymore.”

  “Don’t worry about that . . .”

  Arlo slapped his brother on the side of the head with his good hand. “This might screw us for good, dummy. I take it you didn’t get even a sniff of the package?”

  “Not a sniff. But Green knew something, I think. We might’ve had a chance, until he came after me. Things just got out of control, you know?”

  Goodman said, “Ah, jeez . . .”

  “There’s something else—good news,” Darrell said. “We’ve been listening to the tapes again. Howard Barber told Madison Bowe that he was the one who shot Lincoln.”

  “What?”

  “I just found out. I don’t know what’s happening in Madison—maybe we can find some way to point the cops at Jake Winter. We know he was there in the morning. And then, if we leak the news about Bowe being gay, and if we leak Barber to the FBI . . .”

  “Fuck the FBI. You always want to stick a battery up somebody’s ass. Okay. Check around, find out who Barber’s three closest pals are. Pick one. If he confirms it, we’ll nail Barber ourselves. Nail him to a cross. Maybe we can find a way to get Bowe at the same time.”

  “I don’t think she knew.”

  “Who cares? She knows it now,” Arlo said. “She’s obstructing justice by not telling the FBI. You just get that going. Figure out who Barber’s pals are. When we pick him up, nobody’ll sweat a couple of dead people in Wisconsin—or they’ll figure Barber did it.”

  At a gas station just south of Eau Claire, Jake stopped for coffee and to plug Sarah Levine’s address into the car’s navigation system. After a few loops and dodges, seeing nothing unusual, he followed it to her house behind the Eau Claire Country Club. Still before seven o’clock. Prayed that she was home. Looked up in the sky, for airplanes.

  Paranoid, he thought.

  Sarah Levine was home. She came to the door in a housecoat, a short, square woman with a square face, blue-green eyes, pearly white hair, and worry lines on her forehead. Jake thought she was in her early sixties. She pushed open the glass storm door, peered at him nearsightedly, and said, “Yes?”

  Jake held up his White House ID. “Mrs. Levine, I’m a researcher with the White House. I’m here to talk to you about a package of evidence about possible corruption involving a state highway project. I’m very serious. There have been some terrible things happening, possibly because of the package.”

  Her mouth worked a few times, and she looked up and down the street, as if for help, and then she said, “What kind of terrible things?”

  “Did you hear about the murders in Madison?”

  “Omigod,” she said. “Who?”

  “Al Green and his secretary. They were shot to death, yesterday, possibly by men looking for this package. There’s no way to know for sure, but you might be in danger yourself. We need to talk. And I need to establish my identification with you. That I really do work with the White House.”

  He tried to look helpless. He saw her hesitate, then look at his walking stick. He leaned on it a little more heavily.

  She said, “Al was shot? I just talked to him yesterday.”

  “Yes, he was shot. The FBI is working the case now.”

  “Are they coming here?” she asked.

  “You’ll eventually have to talk to them, if they determine this package is relevant. But . . . Mrs. Levine, I really need to look at it, and talk to my superiors in Washington.”

  Alone inside the house, she seemed more nervous about him. Jake took out his cell phone, called Danzig’s office. Gina answered: “This is Jake. I need to talk to the guy.”

  “I thought you were all done?”

  “I am. But something came up, and this is pretty urgent.”

  Danzig came on the phone a minute later, his voice cautious. “Jake? I’ve been hearing some rumors about Madison . . .”

  “The city, or the woman?”

  “The city . . .”

  “Yeah. I was there. Things are rough. But: I’ve made contact with the package in question. I need you to establish my bona fides with a woman here . . . It’s important.” He glanced at Levine and smiled. “She doesn’t necessarily trust me, given the circumstances. I would like to have her call the White House, and have her switched up to your office so she could talk to you for a second.”

  “Is this absolutely necessary?” He didn’t want to do it.

  “I think so, sir. We’ll have to talk to the FBI, though. There’s another copy, somewhere in Madison.”

  Silence, then, “Tell her to call.”

  “You can call the White House?” Levine asked doubtfully.

  “Sure. It’s basically an office building with a big lawn,” Jake said. “This is the only way I could think to prove that I’m okay.”

  She called Washington directory assistance, got the main number for the White House, and at Jake’s instruction gave her full name: “This is Sarah MacLaughlin Levine, calling for Mr. Danzig.”

  She had to wait a minute, then said, “Yes . . . yes.” Another few seconds, then, “Yes. Yes I do.” She looked at Jake. “Okay, thank you. I’ll talk to him. Okay. Thank you.”

  “They said you’re official.” She was more confident now. �
�They said you were coordinating with the FBI.”

  “I am—but before we get too far down that road, we have to assess the contents of the package. We don’t want to get caught up in a fraud; we have to make sure that everything is legitimate; that they’re for real.”

  “One thing, though,” she said. “This is about your . . . vice president. How do I know you just won’t throw them in the river?”

  Jake tried to look as pious as he could: “Mrs. Levine, this package is going to come out, sooner or later. There are copies. Once I have it, there’s no way I can bury it. If I did, I’d go to prison. But we have to make sure that it’s real.”

  “It’s real,” she grunted. “Landers is crookeder than a hound dog’s leg. The whole bunch of them are crooked.”

  The package was almost exactly that: a cardboard box that said Xerox on the side, and that had once held ten reams of 92-bright white printer paper. Inside the box was a stack of notebooks, some files, and three DVD disks in a Ziploc freezer bag.

  “We hoped . . . ,” Levine said tentatively, as Jake began thumbing through the paper. “You know, my husband passed away three years ago. He had an infarction. I hoped that maybe because I helped out, you know, that I could get help getting a job. They took my husband’s pension away, those people at ITEM, those big shots, they said he elected to get more money early, or something like that.”

  “We can talk about your help,” Jake said. “I think you’ll be okay. If you tried to get to the authorities.”

  “I tried, Lord knows I tried,” she said. “I knew Al from when he was fund-raising, I knew he was well connected in Washington. I thought that was the best way to get this to the proper people.”

  She put Jake in the living room to read, brought a package of Oreos and glasses of orange juice as he worked.

  The package described a standard piece of corruption, notable only for the arrogance shown by the vice president and his friends, and the size of the return. The highway project involved reconstruction of about ninety miles of Wisconsin’s federal Highway 65, from its intersection with Interstate 94 a few miles east of the Minnesota line, to the town of Hayward in the north woods.

  “Highway Sixty-five is the main road from the Twin Cities up to the Hayward Lakes resorts,” Levine said. “My husband worked on the project for six years, it was a big deal, you bet.” She dug around in the kitchen cabinet, found a Wisconsin road map, and traced the line of the highway with a finger. “The project was on the up-and-up. The project saved lives . . . It was only later that the trouble started. My husband was a comptroller on the project, and there was trouble right away with equipment. That’s all on disk one, the books.”

  The general contractor, ITEM, subcontracted with several dozen smaller independent companies to do the planning, environmental studies, equipment and materials supply, earthmoving, and paving.

  The key was in the heavy equipment. One of the companies, Cor-Nine, leased twenty-odd pieces of heavy equipment, mostly heavy dump trucks, along with a few graders, to ITEM over four years, for a total package price of $7.3 million. They also paid Cor-Nine $210,000 for maintenance and repairs.

  “That’s what really made me laugh, when Ron told me about it,” Levine said. “The maintenance, that was hilarious.”

  “Too much, or not enough?” Jake asked.

  “I suppose you’d say too much, since the equipment didn’t exist,” Levine said.

  “Didn’t exist.”

  “Didn’t exist. Ron said you couldn’t see it, even at the time. The equipment could always be somewhere else . . . You’re only talking about one piece for every five miles or so of the road, and there were so many little contractors coming and going that nobody but ITEM knew who was doing what.”

  “They did the whole highway at the same time? They didn’t just do ten miles at a time?”

  “Normally, a project would be staged, maybe over fifteen years or so. To maximize the return, they had to do the whole thing while Governor Landers was in office,” she said. “They already had a two-lane highway going up, so they constructed another two lanes beside it, all at once. After that was done, they coordinated the old highway with the new highway in stages—essentially, cleanup work, building intersections. That was legitimate, too. It minimized the traffic and business disturbances in all these small towns along the way . . .” She tapped the small towns on the map.

  “And Cor-Nine was Landers and his pals.”

  “No, no. Cor-Nine was some people you never heard of, a bunch of Frenchmen.”

  “Frenchmen?”

  “Yeah. They were a French-based equipment-leasing corporation that, after you traced it to France, came back to the Bahamas and then disappeared,” she said. “If anybody asked, ITEM could say that all they knew was that they were leasing equipment at a good price. If the money disappeared, it was some kind of French tax-avoidance deal. Couldn’t blame ITEM for that.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Jake commented.

  “I was a bookkeeper before I got married,” she said. “I know about money.”

  “So how did the money get to Landers?”

  “Through his brother. Sam.”

  “The guy in Texas,” Jake said. The vice president’s colorful sibling, big hat and big boots, a lime green Cadillac with longhorns welded to the hood.

  “Right. Sam Landers goes down to Texas, a hot real-estate market for retirees—no state income tax, warm weather. He sets up a development company. The vice president and his friends own about seventy-five percent of it and Sam has the rest. The key thing, though, is the financing. The Landers family had no money—but Sam managed to get financing for his Padre Island apartments from . . .”

  “A Bahamas bank,” Jake said.

  “Yes. He builds the apartments—they are quite nice, I understand—repays his loans, and walks away with a nice profit. A very nice profit. The profit is nice because the Bahamas money is buried in the construction. For the money he supposedly puts into them, the apartments should sell for $450,000. But, because he’s not actually repaying the loans, he’s building $550,000 apartments. Nothing else can compare. And they’re snapped up by retirees who can see the deal they’re getting, but which is invisible on paper. He pays his taxes—no state income tax in Texas, remember—and the money is back in the United States, all legal and tax-paid.”

  “But they lose forty percent to the feds.”

  “Not really. They actually made some profit on the construction. They came out of it with probably five to six million. And then, with a perfectly good development company, and with some experience and a track record, they started doing real projects. They’ve been making money ever since. The vice president is probably worth fifteen million. Maybe twenty.”

  “How did your husband know about all the different parts of the deal?”

  “He watched the whole thing get set up. There’s a man named Carson, Ron’s boss, he told Ron to keep his nose out of it. That stuff goes on in any big state project. But Ron knew there’d be trouble sooner or later, and he didn’t want to be the one who went to jail, so he made copies of everything. On the sly. Carson’s still one of the big shots at ITEM. He held Sam Landers’s hand through the first couple of apartment projects. And he kept books, on the computer, you know, and Ron made copies. Those are the DVDs.”

  They spent an hour sitting on the front-room couch, looking at paper, loading the DVDs into Jake’s notebook, going through the notes, the records, the bank documents, the real estate titles, and tax documents. Altogether, the package was as devastating as advertised. If true.

  “If true,” Jake said.

  “Well, Al Green said that the thing is, everything here has a public record behind it. Records that the Landerses can’t dodge,” Levine said. “It’s all visible, but nobody could ever tie it together without inside knowledge.”

  Jake looked at his watch. “I gotta get you out of here.”

  Now she was nervous again. “What’s going
to happen?”

  “I think, because of what happened in Madison, that you should take a trip,” Jake said. “Do you have any place that you can go? A friend’s, or a sister’s, that’s away from here? Somebody who doesn’t have the same name?”

  “I have a sister in Waukesha.”

  “Would she put you up for a few days?”

  “I’m sure she would,” Levine said.

  “Then you should go. Right now—I’ll wait until you’re ready. Leave me a phone number and I’ll get back to you. I’ve got to talk to some people back in Washington.”

  “The president?’

  “I don’t actually talk to the president that much,” Jake said. “But I’ll talk to some people and see what can be done. If you’ve been straight with us.”

  “I’ve been straight,” Levine said. “I knew it was going to cause trouble, but . . . after they took Ron’s pension away, I have no money. I mean, we had some in Fidelity, but it’s mostly gone now. I need to get a job. I can’t work at Wal-Mart, that’s the only thing I can get here, there aren’t any jobs. I might have to sell my house . . .”

  Tears were running down her cheeks; Jake wanted to pat her on the shoulder, but he didn’t know quite how to do it. “Let me get you out of here, and get this package to Washington. We’ll figure something out. This is gonna work for you, one way or another.”

  She took forever to get dressed and pack: more than an hour, by Jake’s watch. Jake suggested that she call her sister from outside the house.

  “You think I’m bugged?”

  “I don’t want to take any chances with anything,” Jake said.

  When she was ready, she got her dog, a nervous gray whippet, and Jake helped wedge it into a carrying case and carried it down to the tuck-under garage and put it on the front seat of her car.

  He carried three more suitcases down, told Levine to give him a week.

  “You’ll hear from me, or from somebody with the federal government, in no more than a week. We have to get experts to evaluate the package—you can understand, this is really, really sensitive stuff.”