Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  “But why can’t they find . . . oh. You mean, Howard killed him, too? Killed Schmidt?”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “If Howard killed him, there had to be a plan, Linc would have to have known . . . I don’t think Linc . . . Linc wouldn’t go away without feeding the cats, he wouldn’t kill a man who was innocent.”

  “Your husband didn’t have to know the whole plan,” Jake said. “May have preferred not to.”

  “Another thing . . .” He fished the note out of his pocket. “I found a note in the second safe. It says, ‘All because of Lion Nerve.’ Do you have any idea what it means? It was right on top of the safe, with the pictures, like it was important.”

  She looked at it for a moment, and a thoughtful frown wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t know what it means, but I know what it is. It’s an anagram for something. Linc talked in anagrams—he could come up with an anagram for anything, off the top of his head. He used them as mnemonics.”

  Now Jake smiled: “You’re the first person I’ve ever heard pronounce mnemonics,” he said. He took the note back. “The ‘Lion Nerve’ is the anagram?”

  “I’d think so.”

  He tucked the note in his pocket. “One last thing . . .”

  He told her about the package, about the attempt to push Vice President Landers out of his job, about Patterson, about a Wisconsin connection. She listened carefully, then asked, “I know Tony Patterson from the campaign. He’s a smart man—so why couldn’t it be Goodman? How do you know Goodman didn’t take Linc, to get this package? You say that’s what Tony Patterson thinks. That makes perfect sense to me.”

  “Because then, Schmidt doesn’t make any sense,” Jake said. “What I think is this: I think we have two groups fighting it out in the dark. Goodman’s people have gotten a sniff of the package, and they are desperately trying to find it, to push it out early. Maybe even to make an explicit deal that would get Goodman into Landers’s job. Barber’s group has the package, or knows where it is, or who has it, and they don’t want it pushed out until the last minute, when it’ll do the most damage.”

  Madison thought about it for a minute, then said, “Wisconsin.”

  “That’s where the package is supposedly coming from.”

  “There’s a man there named Alan Green,” Madison said. “He runs a polling company called the PollCats, something like that.”

  “You think?”

  She nodded. “He was an aide to a congressman here for ten years or so, before his guy lost and Alan went back home to make some money. He’s gay. He and Linc had a relationship. They’ve always been tight politically. If the package is coming from Wisconsin, Al knows everybody in Wisconsin. He could be the tie between Wisconsin and Lincoln.”

  Jake thought about it for a few seconds, then, “I’ll go out there. Tomorrow.”

  “Can I come with you?” she asked. “I know Alan fairly well, he’d talk to me.”

  Jake was shaking his head. “You’re too visible. If there’s ever an investigation, you don’t want to have been anyplace around Wisconsin. You want to be able to claim that even if your husband was involved in the package deal, he didn’t tell you, specifically to protect you. If you’ve gone to Wisconsin . . .”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll go to a little trouble to cover my tracks, though nothing’s ever perfect. You have to hope that the tracks get lost in the clutter.”

  “All right.” She put her hands to her face and rubbed. “What will you do if you find the package?”

  “Break it out,” Jake said. “I’ll have no choice.”

  “You could just walk away,” she said. “Right now. Go back to the university. Write another book.”

  “I could. But there are two factors here. If the Republicans—you guys—have it, you’ll break it out anyway, and wreck someone I like. The president. He’s a pretty good guy. But the other thing is, as long as there’s a scramble going on, you’re going to be near the center of it. Everybody’s going to at least check you. Both sides, Barber and Goodman, have people who I suspect would kill for it. I don’t want you to become a target.”

  She shook her head. “Howard wouldn’t hurt me. We’ve always been sympathetic . . . simpatico.”

  “This isn’t a friendship thing anymore,” Jake said. “Listen, I’ve got to . . . mmm . . . I don’t want to think that you’re playing me. That Madison Bowe is playing Jake Winter. Because there are some real problems. They’ve got lethal injection in Virginia. Even if Barber could beat the charge of killing Lincoln, making it out to be assisted suicide, he’s got the Schmidt thing hanging over his head. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that Schmidt’s buried out in the woods. If you know about it, you could be in trouble with him. You could be part of a murder conspiracy. If you don’t, you could still be a serious danger to him, and he to you. Either way, you could be in trouble.”

  She stared at him for a second, then stood up and dusted the seat of her pants. “Maybe I should go to New York. Or Santa Fe. Tell a couple of people I can trust, and just split.”

  “That might not be a bad idea, going to New York,” Jake said. He looked at his watch, stepped back toward the door. “I’m going to try to work this through. You—don’t isolate yourself. The more people you keep around you, the safer you’ll be.”

  She walked him back to the door. “What you said a minute ago . . . whether I’m telling you the truth about Schmidt.”

  “Yeah?”

  He turned on the porch, his stick and briefcase in hand, hoping for a good-bye kiss, and she said, “You don’t trust me.”

  “Not yet, not entirely,” he confessed. “But I’m trying as hard as I can.”

  “Try harder.” She closed the door, and he walked down to the curb to wait for the taxi.

  The governor was asleep when Darrell walked through the front door, punched a code in the burglar alarm, flipped on a hall light, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He tripped another alarm, a silent alarm, on the way up, and a strobe began blinking at the governor’s bedside.

  Goodman woke and heard Darrell call, “It’s me, Arlo.” Goodman sat up, turned on the bedside lamp. “Come in. What happened?”

  Darrell pushed into the bedroom. “Sorry. It’s important. I want you to know what I’m doing.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got a lead on the package. Winter was in New York, he came back to talk to Madison Bowe, we got the whole conversation. They must’ve been sitting right under the bug.”

  “What’s the lead?”

  “Bowe thinks it might be with a guy named Alan Green, out in Madison. Should have thought of him, but I didn’t know he was from Wisconsin. He was a staffer on Bowe’s last campaign.”

  “Holy shit.” Goodman jumped out of bed, took a turn around the bedroom. “This is fuckin’ wonderful. Get the package, Darrell.”

  “We’re trying to get out to Madison, me ’n’ George. Winter’s going tomorrow morning, I don’t think we can beat him out there. We’ve lined up a state plane, we’re getting the paperwork done now, but we can’t take it right to Madison. Somebody might see it. So we’re flying into Chicago, we’ll drive from there. It’ll be close.”

  “Get the package, okay? That’s what you’re for. Get the package,” Arlo said. “You get it, I’ve got one foot in the White House.”

  Darrell smiled a thin dark smile. “If Winter gets it, do we take it away from him?”

  Goodman pondered for a moment, then said, “No. If you’re sure he’s got it, we can float a rumor that the administration has it, and that’d force their hand. But we’ve got to be sure they have it.”

  “There’s another thing,” Darrell said. “Bowe had brain cancer. He probably planned his own murder—it was probably carried out by Howard Barber.”

  Goodman whistled. “How sure?”

  “Ninety-five percent. That’s why the body was full of painkillers. If we do an analysis of the people around Barber, we could probably p
ick out the ones who helped pick up Bowe. We could grab one of them, stick a battery up his ass, and get enough detail to hang Barber.”

  Goodman said, “The package first. We can handle Barber later. Was Madison Bowe in on it? The killing?”

  The man shrugged. “We don’t know that yet.”

  “If we could find out . . .”

  “Grab a guy, stick a battery up his ass.”

  Goodman was irritated. “You’re a little too quick with that, Darrell. We’re not talking about cats. When people disappear, other people ask questions.”

  “If the guy disappears, we could probably hang that on Barber, too. A smear of blood in the trunk of his car . . .”

  “Get the package, Darrell.”

  13

  Jake was moving early. The fastest way from Washington to Madison was through Milwaukee, driving the last ninety miles into Madison. He got a car from Hertz and headed west, a drive of an hour and a half, including the time spent fighting traffic going out. He’d gone back into the end of winter—the trees were just opening up, the wind was from the south, warm and smooth, telling of spring.

  The car’s navigation system took him off I-94 down into the city, to Johnson Street, two or three blocks from the Wisconsin capitol. He must not be far, he thought, from the university—the sidewalks were full of buzz-cut students with book bags. Undoubtedly, he thought, full of that fuckin’ Ayn Rand and Newt Gingrich.

  The PollCats’ address was a shabby two-story brick-and-glass professional building left over from the 1970s. The narrow parking lot, in back, had only four cars in it, with grass and weeds growing through a jigsaw pattern of cracks in the blacktop. Jake got his cane and his case, walked in the back door through a long dim hallway smelling of microwave chicken-noodle soup, to a cramped lobby, and found a listing for PollCats on the second floor.

  He went up, stepped off the elevator: PollCats had an office at the end of another gloomy strip of carpet, one of eight doors off the hallway. The hall was silent. Two of the doors had signs next to them, six did not, and through the glass door-inserts, appeared empty.

  At PollCats, through the glass door panels, he could see a blond receptionist reading a Vanity Fair. Jake turned the knob and went inside. The receptionist dropped the magazine into a desk drawer when she heard the doorknob rattle, perked up, and smiled at him. He smiled back and said, “I’m here to see Alan Green.”

  She was pretty, peaches-and-cream complexion, blue eyes, hair done in a French twist. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m a government researcher, visiting from Washington. It’s quite important.”

  She picked up her phone. “What branch of the government?”

  “The executive,” he said. He took his White House pass from his wallet and handed it to her. She looked at it for a second, then put the phone down and said, “Just a moment.”

  She disappeared through a door into the interior. Jake waited, ten seconds, fifteen, she was back. “He just has to get off a phone call.”

  At that moment, they both heard, faintly, the flushing noise from a toilet, and she got a little pink: Jake said, “I would have told me the same thing.”

  “It seemed better than the alternative,” she said. Then, “When was the last time you were at the White House?”

  “Last night.”

  “Did you see the president?”

  “No. But once I did, and he nodded at me.”

  “Must give you a feeling of power,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.

  “I repeat the story whenever I can,” Jake said. “I’ve been to a half dozen dinner parties on it.”

  They were still chatting, the girl a little flirty, but way too young, Jake thought—twenty, maybe, twenty-two—when Alan Green popped through the interior door. Green was short, bald, and burly, wide shouldered and narrow waisted, like a former college wrestler or gymnast. He wore khaki slacks, a white dress shirt, and striped tie, the tie loose at his thick neck, and a corduroy jacket with leather patches at the elbows. He smiled and asked, “Mr. Winter? Can I help you?”

  “I need to speak to you privately,” Jake said.

  “Could you tell me the subject?”

  “Lincoln Bowe.”

  “I heard the news. The news was terrible,” Green said. “What is your involvement?”

  Jake glanced at the receptionist, then said, “I can tell you here, or privately. If I tell you here, you may pull this young lady into what’s about to happen.”

  Green’s smile faded. “What’s about to happen?”

  “You should know that as well as I do, Mr. Green. The, mmm, package is about to break into the open. A number of people think it may be the motive for this murder.”

  The blood drained from Green’s face, and Jake knew that he’d connected. He looked at the receptionist, who shook her head, confused, and Green said, “You better come in. Katie, stop all my calls. Call Terry and tell him I can’t make it. I’ll call him later. Tell him I had an emergency.”

  Green’s office was a twenty-by-twenty-foot cubicle furnished with a cheap Persian rug over the standard gray business carpet, leather chairs, and photographs: the faces of fifty politicians, ninety-nine predatory eyes and one black eye-patch worn by the former governor of Colorado, all signed. There were ten more of Green with two presidents and a selection of Washington politicians; and three personal photos, all of striking young men.

  “What about this package?” Green asked. He picked up a short stack of paper, squared it, put it in an in-box.

  “I have a general outline of what the package is, the highway deal,” Jake said. “I don’t yet have it. The package has apparently caused at least one and perhaps two murders. Very likely two. I’m coordinating with the lead investigator for the FBI on this, a man named Chuck Novatny. You can call him if you wish.”

  “I don’t know this package,” Green said.

  Jake let the annoyance show on his face: “Don’t bullshit me, Mr. Green. I got your name from one of the principals in this case. And if you really didn’t know, we’d still be talking out in the hallway.”

  Green blinked. He’d felt the trap snap. Jake continued: “We can handle it as a political issue or we can handle it as a criminal matter. Once this package gets out there, nobody’s going to much care about the route—but they will care about who tried to suppress it, who tried to keep it undercover, because those are the most likely motives for the murders.”

  “I don’t know . . . What murders? Lincoln Bowe, I’ve heard there’s some question . . .”

  Jake shook his head: “There’s no question. There are people who’d like you to believe it was a suicide, but he was alive and heavily drugged when he was shot through the heart, and that makes it murder. The killers tried to frame a second man, a Virginia man, for the murder—and the second man is missing and we believe he’s also dead. You are playing with fire, Mr. Green. You are in deep jeopardy, not only from the law, the FBI, but from people with guns . . . unless you’re one of the gunmen yourself, or are cooperating with them.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Green snapped. They stared at each other for a minute, then Green asked, “Another gentleman came to see me about this. I told him that I had no idea where this package might be.”

  “Who was that?”

  He shook his head: “I won’t tell you that, if you don’t already know.”

  “I probably know, but there are several possibilities,” Jake said.

  “A black gentleman.”

  “Yes. I know him. A good friend of Lincoln Bowe’s, and possibly of yours.” Jake’s eyes flicked toward the pictures of the young men, and then back to Green. “The black gentleman shares a cultural . . . choice . . . with you.”

  Green said nothing.

  “And he doesn’t have the package?” Jake asked.

  “Apparently not. He didn’t when he was here.”

  “Mr. Green, I’m sure you’ve done the calculations that we’ve all done. I know from your bac
kground that you’d like the package to be broken out later in the year. That’s not going to happen now. I don’t care how it comes out, only that it comes out soon. So that we can have a fair election, straight up. If I leave here without it, I am going to sit in my car and call my FBI contact on the telephone, and tell him about it. I think you’ll almost certainly be in jail tonight. I don’t think you’ll be getting out any time soon.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Green said. He pulled a Kleenex out of a box in his desk drawer and patted his sweating scalp. “You don’t mess around, do you?”

  “There’s no time. There’s just no time,” Jake said. “There are some violent people looking for this package, and I’m afraid more people will wind up dead if they keep struggling to find it.”

  “That goddamned woman,” he said. “If she hadn’t put that paper together . . .”

  “What woman?”

  Green took a cell phone out of his coat pocket and began working one of the buttons with his thumb. As he did, he said, “Mr. Winter. I don’t have the package. I know about it. I’ve actually been through it. I’ll probably tell you who has it, but I’ve got to talk to her first. I can’t just have you show up . . . I mean, what if you’re the guy with the gun? I’ve never seen you before. And maybe the best thing would be if she went to the FBI. I’ve gotta have some time. I’ve gotta think.”

  Jake looked at his watch. “How much time?”

  “I don’t know if I can get her. If she’s out . . . she doesn’t have a cell phone. Anyway, she didn’t the last time I talked to her.”

  “So try her,” Jake said.

  “Not with you sitting here. We may have to talk . . .”

  “I’ll come back in an hour,” Jake said. “Get in touch with her.”

  “I’ll tell you right up front that she was hoping to get a little something out of the package,” Green said. “Linc suggested that she could get a decent job, if the package came out at the right time. Maybe I could . . .”