Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  “Can I come and see you?”

  “Yes. I’m just sitting here, with this thing in my arm. I have to go to imaging tomorrow morning, but I’ll be back before noon. A dentist is coming tomorrow afternoon . . .”

  “I need to see you privately. Is there any possibility . . . ?”

  “Dad comes in the morning and then he goes to work, and he and Mom come for lunch about twelve-twenty. If you were here after ten, it should be private.”

  “I’ll be there,” Jake said.

  “Don’t look at me weird when you get here,” she said. “I’m ugly now, so don’t look at me weird.”

  “Cathy, I’ve got a friend who was hit in the face with a piece of shrapnel the size of a butcher knife and it almost took his face off. We folded it back over and got him to the hospital, and today he’s got this little white scar. You can’t even see it unless he’s got a tan. The docs can do anything. In a couple of months, you’ll be looking great, and I’ll introduce you to the president.”

  She hiccuped, then said, “Really?”

  “Count on it.”

  “Now I’m going to have to trust you,” he told Madison, back in the living room. “I have a possible source into Goodman.”

  He told her about Cathy Ann Dorn: “I’d love to get her into Goodman’s office, take the hard drives out of his computer.”

  “Jake: think,” Madison said. “She nearly gotten beaten to death. That’s not a coincidence. You’d send her back in there?”

  Jake frowned: Cathy Ann wasn’t exactly in the army. “Okay, that’s not the best idea. But she’s a resource. I’ll think of something.”

  “Interesting job you have . . .”

  Madison asked him how he came to work for the president. Jake filled her in, told her about his grandparents’ ranch, and the distance between himself and his parents. Then, “You want another beer?”

  “Sure. One more couldn’t hurt.”

  She came back to his grandparents, and he talked about working the ranch, about how his grandfather resisted the transition from horses to ATVs. “I used to envy those kids with the big Hondas and Polarises riding around in a cloud of smoke, tearing up the countryside. I’d be sitting up there on some mutt, take me fifteen minutes to get somewhere you could get in one minute on a Honda,” Jake said. “Now, I’m nothing but grateful. Would have been nice if the family had been a little tighter, you know, my parents, but hell. I had a pretty good childhood, all in all. Thought I’d die myself, though, when Grandma went . . .”

  She told him about her childhood, in Lexington and Richmond. Her father had been a lawyer, her mother a housewife. Her father committed suicide when he was fifty.

  “I hated him for it,” she said, getting out of her chair, wandering around the room with the bottle in her hand. “I was in college, and we’d had some growing-up troubles, and some arguments, and they got pretty hot and I did some screaming and I never had a chance to make it okay before he went out in the backyard and shot himself.”

  “Was there . . . ? Did you know why?”

  “Yes. He was depressed. Major depression of the medical sort. He wouldn’t go to a shrink, because he still thought he might run for a serious political office—he was on the Richmond City Council twice. He didn’t want a ‘mental illness’ brought up. So he had some pills from his M.D., but they weren’t working . . . And one day, a really nice day, he went out in the yard and sat in a swing for a while, and then blam. A neighbor heard it and came running . . . Maybe that’s why I married an older guy. Maybe I was trying to get back to Daddy.”

  She sat down again, but when she sat down, she sat on the couch with Jake. Feeling precisely like a teenager in a movie theater, Jake let his left arm fall along the top of the couch. He started thinking about his breath, and what he’d eaten. Beer should cover it, he hoped.

  She was talking about riding, and did a little butt-hop closer on the couch, and he thought, Man, she’s sending out semaphore signals, just go ahead and do it. And he thought about Novatny and his good luck. Amazed at his own boldness, he moved a little closer to her himself, reached a hand behind her far shoulder, and pulled her a bit closer and kissed her. She sank into it, leaning against him, said, mmm, and when he started to pull away, caught him, and they kissed again.

  The conversation grew confused.

  After a minute or two, Jake’s hand wandered down her body, and the conversation grew even more confused. And he realized that with the second beer in him, he was going to have to pee, and fairly soon. He also realized that he would cut his legs off before he’d leave the couch.

  He thought, What small heads women have, when his hand was behind her head, and at another moment, when his hand was wandering from one breast to another, she misinterpreted it as a fumble and said, “Here, wait a minute,” and helped him unbutton her blouse. He popped her brassiere one-handed and she mumbled, “I see you’ve had some training in brassieres,” and he said, “I was just lucky,” and she said, “Right . . .”

  After that, the conversation seriously languished until she laughed, a little breathlessly, and said, “Jake. Stop. Jake, I really, really have to pee. Let me up, you oaf.”

  She ran up the stairs to the bathroom. Jake hurried into the first-floor bathroom, flushed a few seconds before she did, washed and dried his hands, checked his hair in the mirror, gargled some water, just in case, and was standing in the living room with his hands in his pockets when she came back down the stairs.

  “Hi.” He took her hand and pulled her in and kissed her on the forehead and said, “This brings up the whole question of sleeping arrangements.”

  “My God, Jake. Do I have to do all the heavy lifting?”

  He slept his four and a half hours. He woke up and felt the weight and remembered she was beside him, listened to her breathe, and then thought about the evening. He should, he thought, quit trying to work the problem. He should take Madison on a trip to London, or Paris, and lie low until the whole thing was done. Then they could come back and go wherever the relationship took them.

  Ride horses.

  But that wasn’t what he was going to do.

  He could close his eyes and see the face of the dead girl in Madison. Cold, bloody, cruel murder.

  16

  They ate breakfast together, English muffins, marmalade, and coffee, and Jake said, “You can either come with me or I can ditch you with a friend. I know a retired professor at Georgetown, you’d be pretty secure at his place.”

  “Silly goose,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”

  He called Gina at the White House and asked, “What’s my schedule, if I have a schedule?”

  “Jake, it’s a nightmare here,” she said. For the first time since he began working for Danzig, Jake could hear excitement in her voice. “The guy wants to talk to you, but he hasn’t had time. Let me see if I can interrupt him.”

  He listened to electronic noise for a minute, then two, and then Danzig came up abruptly and said, “Stay in touch. I’ll want you on two hours’ notice. Not today or tomorrow, but maybe the day after . . . or the day after that. We’ll want you to talk to Novatny, give him a deposition on the retrieval of the package.”

  “Things are proceeding?”

  “Yes. We should have it wrapped up in forty-eight hours. Sixty at the outside.” And he was gone.

  They took Jake’s car, leaving hers behind in the garage, moving slowly with the congestion across the bridge into Virginia, fighting traffic every inch of the way, a full hour before they broke into a steady flow.

  They were in Richmond a little after ten, followed the navigation system to the hospital. As they came up to it, Jake said, “It might be better if she didn’t see you. If you want to shop for a few minutes or maybe talk to your mother.”

  She shook her head: “I couldn’t visit Mother for less than four hours. Give me the car, I’ll run over to a bookstore.”

  Jake had gotten a room number from Dorn, and went straight up to the surgical-ca
re center on the third floor. He’d spent a lot of time in hospitals, and the smell of the place brought it all back: everything from the scramble to get him to a med unit, to the flight out to Germany, to the hospital in Bethesda, and the small stuff—the sound of the overhead speakers, the beeping of monitors, the hollow sounds of voices in tile hallways, and all the drawers; drawers everywhere.

  Cathy Ann Dorn was being wheeled into her room as Jake came down the hall. She lifted a hand and said, “Mr. Winter, I think it’ll be a minute.”

  “We have to get her into bed,” the nurse said.

  “She’s afraid my ass’ll show,” Dorn said.

  Dorn and the nurse went into the room, and two minutes later the nurse came out and said, “She’s got a mouth.”

  “Yes, she does.”

  Dorn was propped up in bed, a bottle of water in her hand, with a bent straw sticking out of it, sunlight slanting through the window across the bed and her covered toes. Jake said, “Hi,” and checked her out, let her see it. Her face was a mottled black, blue, and yellow, with small healing cuts still showing black. Her upper teeth were ragged: broken or completely missing.

  She said, “The surgeon this morning said that they could fix my nose pretty much, but it might not be perfect.”

  “Mmm,” Jake said. “How about the rest of you?”

  “They kicked me pretty bad, they were afraid my liver might be lacerated, but they didn’t have to go in.” She’d started picking up the surgeon talk.

  “So you’ll heal,” Jake said, pulling a chair toward the bed. He sat down and said, “When the oral surgeon finishes with you, your teeth will look better than new. You can even pick your shade of white. You ought to tell them to take it easy with the nose. Keep a little bit of a bump.”

  “What?” She was amazed at the thought.

  “You’re a pretty girl, but prettiness—no offense—straight prettiness can be bland. I could see you with a little bump on your nose; you’d be gorgeous. You’d be network-quality.”

  A light popped up in her eyes. “You think so?”

  “I know so. And I wouldn’t have minded getting a look at your ass—from what I saw down in the hallway, the first time we met, it’s pretty terrific. Another network-quality asset.”

  “It is pretty terrific,” she said. “I work on it.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, and then Jake asked, “What do you think happened? A robbery?”

  She rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t a robbery, Jake. Arlo did it. His fuckin’ brother, Darrell. Somebody told him I talked to you, and then when you knew about Carl V. Schmidt, they knew I told you—so they caught me and beat me up. Arlo visited and patted my hand and said they miss me.”

  “Did you tell your father that? Did you tell Goodman?”

  “No . . . I’m still thinking about what to do.”

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Jake said. “I was just in Madison, Wisconsin. You’ll be hearing about this in a few days probably . . .” He told her about the killings in Madison. “Things are seriously screwed up, Cathy Ann. Right now, you’re okay. But I wouldn’t mess with Goodman and I wouldn’t have your father mess with him. I would not mention Darrell Goodman to anyone.”

  “They’re just going to get away with it?” She was horrified, in the plain-faced way that young people sometimes were.

  “They’ll get away with it because you can’t identify anyone, and the people in Madison are dead. Knowing he did it, and proving it, are two different things,” Jake said. “On the other hand, we can get the word around to the right people, and absolutely fuck them. They won’t be able to get Goodman nominated as dogcatcher.”

  She looked at him speculatively, and then said, “You’re here for something. Other than to cheer me up.”

  “You said you were smart,” Jake said.

  “I am smart.”

  Jake had decided that the best way to ask was to go straight ahead: “I’d like to get something out of Goodman’s office. I’d like to copy the hard drives on his computer. It’d probably take ten or fifteen minutes. I was hoping you might know somebody, or know some way we could do it.”

  She was shaking her head. “I’d do it, but they won’t take me back. Arlo said that I should take it easy and get back to school and concentrate on my studies. Even if I got back, Dixie—that’s his secretary—watches everything like a hawk.”

  “Shoot.” He scratched his head. What to do?

  “What do you think’s on the hard drives?” Dorn asked.

  “I don’t know. But there’d probably be a lot of e-mail in and out, and I’d dearly love to see it,” Jake said. “I’d like to see who he’s involved with, so that maybe we can catch a couple of them in the net, and get them to talk about Goodman.”

  “That’d be illegal, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t copy his computer and then use it as evidence.”

  “If you know something for sure, the details of it, then it makes it a lot easier to find evidence outside the original source,” Jake said. “If I can do that, I could give it to a friend of mine in the FBI.”

  She thought for a moment and then smiled and said, “There’s a tunnel between the governor’s mansion and the capitol. I used to go down there with a friend and smoke. But . . . that’s impossible. There are guards, and there’s an alarm system that even covers the inside of the house. We weren’t allowed to go in before a certain time, because the system had to go off.”

  “And his office is impossible.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. It really is. There are the outside guards, the Watchmen, and the inside guards, and alarms. I mean, he’s the governor. And since I left, his secretary is the only other person in there, and she’s in love with him.”

  “All right.”

  “Would you have a problem breaking into a police car?”

  “A police car?”

  “Arlo gets driven around by a highway patrolman. Several of them, actually. They have this big black Mercury. He goes to lunch at Westboro’s almost every day, a little after noon.” They both looked at a wall clock. Ten-thirty. “It’s where all the legislators hang out. He goes there and meets people and they have lunch and do politics. He takes his briefcase and his laptop with him and he usually leaves it on the floor of the backseat when he gets out. The cop leaves the car in a parking garage. It’s pretty dark in there.”

  “You’re saying . . .”

  “You might be able to grab the bag and run. You wouldn’t be able to copy it without him knowing.”

  “Where’s the cop?”

  “In the restaurant,” she said. “He’s also a bodyguard, he eats across the room from Goodman. I ate with him a couple of times. The cop.”

  Jake thought about it for fifteen seconds. “That’s pretty iffy.”

  “That’s all I can think of,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Jake slapped his legs, said, “Well. Time to go to Plan B.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t want to know. But I’ll tell you what: you keep quiet about this visit, get well, stay away from Arlo, go to school like a good girl, and when everything quiets down, give me a call. I’ll get you something you’ll like.”

  “You promise?” The light in the eye again, just like when he told her that she’d be gorgeous.

  “We take care of people,” Jake said.

  Back in the car, Madison asked, “Get what you needed?”

  “Maybe.” He thought about it for another moment, and then asked, “Do you know a place called Westboro’s? A restaurant?”

  “Sure. Everybody in Richmond does. Political hash house.”

  “Let’s go over there,” Jake said. “I’d like to look at a parking garage.”

  “Who’re you meeting?”

  “No one, I hope.”

  He told her about the laptop. She said, “That’s pretty iffy,” picking the word right out of his head.

  “We’re hurting pretty bad here,” Jake said. “We need a way to break something out.”


  “Jake, there’ll be alarms . . .”

  “It’s all in the timing,” Jake said. Thought about the package. “Everything’s in the timing.”

  “Well,” she said, “whatever happens, it’ll be a heck of a rush.”

  Westboro’s was a low red-brick building four blocks from the capitol, with an old-fashioned lightbulb marquee out front, and under that, a red neon script that said, THE CAPITAL’S BEST STEAKS, CHOPS, SEAFOOD. The parking structure was an ugly poured-concrete lump fifty yards farther down the block. Jake looked at his watch: almost eleven.

  He took the car into the garage, saw the entrance, but no gate. “How do you pay?” he asked.

  “Parking meters inside. The meter guy enforces the meters.”

  “Excellent.”

  He turned into the ramp. As Cathy Ann Dorn had said, it was dark inside. He could see no cameras. The ramps were two-way; you went out the same way you went in. The first upward-slanting ramp was full;the next, around the corner, was only half full. A man walked past them, down the ramp, and out. Jake went onto the next four ramps, then turned around and started down again. On both the back and front walls of the ramps, there were staircases going down.

  He pulled into a parking space, let the engine run, stepped into one of the back staircases, walked down two floors and out. The door opened on a sidewalk along another street, less busy than the front, but still with cars moving along it.

  Jake went back up, got in the car, and they drove back out. Madison asked, “What?”

  “We could do it,” he said.

  “If we get caught, Goodman’ll put us in jail,” she said. “If the cop hasn’t shot you.”

  “I might be able to blackmail my way out of it. If the cop hasn’t shot me.”

  “Tell me . . .”