Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  Jake also gave her a thousand dollars from his stash. “Personal loan,” he said. “Pay it back when you can.”

  He followed her out to the Wal-Mart that she didn’t want to work at, watched as she made the call to her sister, then waved good-bye.

  The package was in the back of the SUV. He called Gina again and said, “It’d be really helpful if you could get me a ticket back. From Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee, or the Twin Cities.”

  “Just sit right where you are,” she said. “We’ve got a plane on the way.”

  15

  On the way to the Eau Claire airport, Jake stopped at a Kinko’s, spent a half hour making a duplicate of the package, and FedExed it to himself in Washington. His next stop was at an OfficeMax, where he bought a cheap plastic briefcase and stuffed the original copy of the package inside. The plane was due at twelve-fifteen; Madison called promptly at noon.

  “I talked to the FBI this morning. Your friend Novatny. I didn’t tell them that Howard killed Linc. I was afraid to,” she said. “Although, I think they know. I gave them some names, including Howard Barber’s. I called Howard from a pay phone after I talked to you last night, and told him that the FBI doesn’t know about the package.”

  “Okay. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ve been thinking about it,” Jake said. “Can you come to my place tonight? Bring an overnight bag? I’ve got a guest room.”

  “Well . . . Why?”

  “I don’t want you staying at your house, alone, but I need you in Washington,” Jake said. “I’d rather explain it to you face-to-face. Try to settle this.”

  “Then I’ll do it. What time?”

  “I ought to be there by seven or eight. Say, eight o’clock. If I can’t make it, I’ll call you,” Jake said. “Madison: don’t talk about anything sensitive in your living room. Don’t use that phone in the hallway, by the kitchen. Just don’t.”

  “You think? I’m bugged?”

  “It’s a definite possibility. Keep people around you, don’t get isolated. If you call me, call from a pay phone. When you come tonight, just bump up to the back gate, the way you did last time, and I’ll let you in.”

  The jet was assigned to the Department of Homeland Security. It wasn’t fancy, but the turnaround was quick. Jake spent the air time reviewing the package, putting together a presentation. Every once in a while, he’d look out at the countryside below: most of the time, he saw the eyes of Green’s blond secretary.

  They flew into National at four o’clock in the afternoon and taxied down to a government hangar. Jake found a driver, from the White House motor pool, waiting on the tarmac, and followed him out to a nondescript Daimler station wagon that smelled of onions and motor oil. He walked into the Blue Room a half hour after the plane touched down.

  A navy lieutenant was waiting to escort him up to Danzig’s office. Inside, Gina waved him through.

  Danzig was standing beside his desk with his hands in his pockets. He looked like he’d been doing nothing but waiting.

  “Did you get it?” Danzig was usually intense; now he was actually vibrating.

  Jake nodded, dropped into a chair, his briefcase on his lap. Tired. Stress beginning to bite at him. “The only question is whether it’s real. I’m almost sure it is. I think research will prove it. But I’ve gotten tangled up in a murder investigation, and to tell you the truth, my statement to the FBI and the Madison cops wasn’t exactly complete.”

  “How not complete?”

  Jake patted the package. “This thing is involved in the killings. We’ve got to give it to the feds as soon as we can. We don’t have more than a few days. I can already feel an obstruction charge out there.”

  “If you deliver it to them, the most they can say is that you were late,” Danzig said.

  “Yeah, bullshit. If they want me, they can get me,” Jake said. “What I’m going to need is the silken breath of the president blowing down somebody’s back. Words like national security, Someone’s ass is grass, like that.”

  Danzig nodded, avoiding Jake’s eyes: “Anyway.”

  “Yeah.” Jake started unpacking the cheap briefcase. “Here’s the stuff. Here’s how it worked. . . .”

  Danzig wanted to review each piece of paper, to crawl through the books on the DVD disks, to find inconsistencies. They took two hours, the longest time Jake had ever spent in Danzig’s office. They found inconsistencies, but they appeared to be paperwork mistakes, rather than logical errors that would suggest a fraud. When they were done, Danzig stood up, walked around the room in his stocking feet, sighed, and said, “Shit.”

  “What do you think?” Jake asked.

  “They’re real. I’ve seen stuff like this before, and they have the feeling of reality about them. The grit. A few pieces are missing, but that’s what you’d expect if it was real. The inconsistencies are consistent with reality.”

  “I agree. You could get somebody else, maybe, to do some specific checks on the public records, to nail it down.”

  Danzig nodded. “Of course. We’ll start that tomorrow. Tonight, if we can, maybe some of the stuff is online.”

  “I’d want to see the actual paper, where it exists . . .”

  “So would I,” Danzig said. Then, “Okay. You wait here for a minute. I’m going to get the boss.”

  “There’s another thing, somewhat related,” Jake said. “And it’s about to pop. Lincoln Bowe was gay. His death was a conspiracy that Bowe set up himself, carried out by a close friend, or a few close friends, in an effort to embarrass Goodman.”

  Danzig’s face didn’t move for a moment, as though he hadn’t heard. Then he said, “Holy shit.”

  “I had to tell the feds. They’re now investigating Bowe’s gay friends. It’s gonna leak in the next day or two, and the whole investigation is going to lurch that way, away from the package. But it’ll come back.”

  Danzig ran one hand through his oily hair and then said, “You’re a hell of a researcher, Jake. I hope you never come after me.”

  Danzig padded out of the office, returned five minutes later, trailed by the president. The president was a tall, white-haired Indianan, a former governor and senator, a middle-of-the-roader chosen to lead the ticket when the Democrats decided to get serious. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt, without a tie, and like Danzig, was in his stocking feet. Jake stood up when he walked in.

  “Hey, Jake,” he said. They shook hands and the president asked, “What the heck did you drag in this time?”

  They spent another twenty minutes combing through the package, and finally the president said to Danzig, “I believe it. What do you think?”

  Danzig glanced at Jake, then back to the president, who said, “Go ahead. He’s in deeper than we are.”

  “We’ve got to do some verification and then we talk to Landers,” Danzig said. “He’s in town. We’ll get his ass over here, stick this thing up it. Come to some kind of agreement.”

  The president looked at Jake. “You say there’s another copy?”

  “At least one more—probably in the dead man’s safe-deposit box,” Jake said. “The FBI will get to it sooner or later. Probably sooner, since Novatny’s working the case.”

  “I don’t know him,” the president said.

  “He’s pretty good, sir. Also, there are quite a few other people who know about it, know enough details to cause trouble, even if they don’t have the package. It’s possible that the package could be replicated, at least a good part of it, from public records. If the Republicans talk to the L.A. Times, and they put a couple of investigators on it, they’ll hang the vice president; and maybe get us in passing.”

  “All right,” the president said. To Danzig: “Get Delong and Henricks here tonight. We want to get this taken care of, and I want to turn this over to the FBI by the end of the week. I want Jake to do it. We need to cover him.” Delong was Landers’s chief of staff; Henricks, the president’s legal counsel.

  “We’ve got a lot to talk
about,” Danzig said to the president. He was tense, but seemed happier than he usually was. He liked an outrageous problem, Jake decided. And this would make a hell of a scene in a what-really-happened book, five years after the president left office.

  “We do,” the president said. “We don’t need Jake to do that.”

  “Mr. President, I do have one thing to suggest,” Jake said. “When you’re talking about the other stuff, don’t spend too much time thinking about Arlo Goodman as a replacement for the vice president.”

  The president nodded, but asked, “Why not?”

  “Because there are strings floating all over this mess and I suspect some of them lead back to Goodman. Maybe even to the murders in Wisconsin.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” the president said.

  Jake went out the White House gate, stood in the street for a moment or two, then walked down a block, flagged a cab, and went home.

  He was home at seven-thirty. He took a shower, shaved again, just to feel fresh, brushed his teeth, put on clean jeans, a black T-shirt, and a sport coat. Then he went down to the study, pulled some books out of a shelf, found the green-fabric pistol case, took out the .45, slipped a clip into it, and dropped the gun in his jacket pocket.

  At ten minutes to eight, he went out and sat on the back stoop. At five after eight, a car turned down the alley. He recognized it as Madison’s, opened the back gate, and she drove into the yard. She got out of the car and asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Come on, let’s get you out of sight.”

  Inside the door, she asked, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

  She had a soft leather carry-on bag and a briefcase. Jake took the bag, led her into the house, up the stairs to the guest room. “Bathroom, first door down the hall,” he said. “Come on: I’ll get you a glass of wine or a beer and tell you the story.”

  She took a beer, settled into a chair in his living room, while he sat on the couch across from her. “Tell me about the gun,” she said.

  “The two people killed in Madison were executed. They were killed in an office building and nobody heard any shots,” Jake said. “The gun was probably silenced, and the killers are probably professional—at least, they’d done it before. The only reason there weren’t more dead people in the building is that nobody happened to bump into them in the hallway.”

  “Why didn’t they come after you?”

  “I was behaving unpredictably, maybe. Or maybe they didn’t know I’d been there already,” Jake said. “After I found the bodies, I called the cops, and then there were cops all over the place.”

  “That’s why you’re carrying a gun,” she said. “You’re afraid they might come here.”

  “Yeah. Or to your place.”

  “You think my house is bugged. Why wouldn’t you think this place is?” Madison asked.

  “Because somebody followed me out to Wisconsin, or maybe even tried to get there before me. We talked about it in your living room. That’s the only place I talked about it. The thing is, I was on the earliest plane to Milwaukee and there was no way to get into Madison faster than I did, unless they’d rented their own jet and flown directly to Madison. That would leave too much of a trail.”

  “If they come here, you plan to shoot it out?” She sounded skeptical.

  “I’ve got alarms. The woman who used to own the place thought she might be raped and murdered at any minute, and she covered everything,” Jake said. “If anybody comes, we’ll know it. The gun would give us a chance to call for help. A little time.”

  She pushed off her shoes, curled her feet beneath her, and said, “It’s not Howard Barber, Jake. I know him well enough to tell you that he wouldn’t have executed a secretary.”

  “How about Schmidt? I know what he told you, but I want to see the guy.”

  She looked away from him, her tongue touching her bottom lip, and then she said, “We’re coming up on that trust thing. I made you feel bad the other night, when I asked if you trusted me, and made you admit that you weren’t quite there yet.”

  “You did make me feel bad,” he admitted.

  “Well, you were right . . . I’ve been lying to you a little. I didn’t know about Linc. That was a shock. But I knew about the package. I didn’t know the details, but I knew it was out there, I knew that it might bring down this administration. I didn’t tell you about it when you really needed to know.”

  Jake watched her for a moment, suppressing reaction. The truth was, he’d known that something wasn’t quite right. He hadn’t trusted her. “Then why did you send me out to Madison?”

  “I thought I was sending you on a wild-goose chase. I’m sorry. Howard had already talked to Al Green, and Al denied knowing anything about the package. We wanted to get you out of the way for a few days, hoping the whole hunt for the package would die down, so we’d have more time to find it. We sort of expected the gay thing to get out . . .”

  “You expected me to put it out to the media?” She’d expected betrayal of what she’d portrayed as a personal confidence.

  “Well, yes. It would have solved some of your problems.”

  “Thanks,” he said, his voice dry. He felt as though he should be angry, but he wasn’t—not yet.

  “We just wanted . . . delay,” Madison said. She knotted up her hands, twisted them. “We wanted the package to come out in the fall. Or if not that, just before the convention, to ruin the convention. But Howard didn’t think Green had it. Green swore he didn’t.”

  Jake peered at her for a moment, then said, “Now you’re telling me the truth.”

  “I didn’t want to mislead you,” she said. “I really didn’t. But you were working for Danzig and we were working against him.”

  “Why tell me now?”

  “Because I’m tired of lying to you,” she said. “I just want this to stop. I want the girl in Madison to be alive again. And I don’t want to be . . . on the other side from you.”

  Jake thought about it, then said, “If Howard Barber didn’t do the killing, it must have been Goodman. Or somebody acting for him.”

  “That’s all I can figure out. Unless there’s a third party that nobody knows about. The CIA, the DIA.”

  “Ah, that’s not it. Outside of the movies, they don’t murder all that many people.”

  “I’ve got more bad news,” Madison said. “I didn’t know that Howard had been involved in Linc’s disappearance until you told me. I accused him of it, and he admitted it.”

  “So that’s clear.”

  “The problem is, I did it in my living room. Which you think is bugged.”

  “Ah, man.”

  They were working through the implications of her confrontation with Barber when the phone rang and Jake stepped into the hallway to pick it up.

  “Jake, this is Chuck Novatny. When did you get back?”

  “This afternoon. What’s going on?”

  “Have you seen, or spoken to, Madison Bowe since we talked yesterday?”

  “Yes. She’s here. I’m not plotting with her, I just don’t want her to be alone with these killers out there. You want to talk to her?”

  “Jake, goddamnit.”

  “Hey, pal, if you want to put a few FBI bodyguards in her house, I’ll send her back home. But I’m not going to have her sitting there like a big goddamn jacklighted antelope while the FBI tiptoes around, trying to get its protocols right.”

  “Fuck you,” Novatny snapped.

  “Yeah, well, fuck you, too.”

  Silence. Then, “All right. Let me talk to her.”

  Jake carried the phone into Madison, said, “Novatny.”

  Her eyebrows went up and she took it and said, “Hello? Yes. I can do that. Can I bring Johnson Black with me? Okay.”

  She handed the phone back to Jake. Novatny said, “We need her here tomorrow for another statement. We need to talk to her about who else is in this gay ring . . .”

  “I’m not sure it’s exact
ly a ring.”

  “You know what I mean,” Novatny said.

  “Yeah, I do, but I’ll tell you what, Chuck. ‘Ring’ sounds bad. It sounds like a supermarket tabloid. And if I were you, I’d start choosing my words carefully. This thing . . .”

  “I know. It’s run completely off the tracks. Officially, I don’t like the fact that you’ve got Madison Bowe at your place. Unofficially, keep an eye on her. You’ve got a gun?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay. She’s got an ocean of money, I could give her the name of a good security outfit if she needs it—all ex–Secret Service guys.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Jake said.

  “And, Jake—best of luck.”

  Jake had to think about it for a half second and said, “Yeah, fuck you again.”

  Novatny laughed and hung up.

  Jake told Madison about the security service and suggested that she might try it: she said she’d think about it. “It might be inconvenient to have those people underfoot,” she said. “What about the bug? If there is a bug.”

  “Leave it. I have an idea for a pageant.”

  “A pageant?”

  “You know, a play,” Jake said. “A drama. We’ll need the bug.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’d have to trust you to tell you,” he said.

  “I know . . . ah, God. Jake: you can trust me. Not before, but now you can. I don’t know how I can prove it.”

  They sat in silence for a while, and then another idea popped into his head. He said, “Hang on a minute,” went into the study, dug in his briefcase, and found a hospital room number for Cathy Ann Dorn.

  She picked up the phone and said “Hello” with a broken-tooth lisp. “My dad said you called,” Dorn said when he’d identified himself.

  “Are you okay? Are you getting back?”

  “No. I’m really, really messed up. Not hurt bad, but my nose is broken . . .” She started crying, caught herself, and then said, “And they broke my teeth so I look like some kind of fu-fu-fu-fucking hillbilly or something. . . .” And she started crying again.