Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  He outlined his idea, and she said, “If anyone sees you going in, they’ll tell the police that it was a man with a limp. They’ll know who it is.”

  “If I walk on a left tiptoe, I don’t limp. I can’t do it for long, but I can do it for a few hundred yards.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” she asked. “Wait at Mom’s house until I find out whether you’re dead?”

  “That would be the pessimistic version of it,” Jake said.

  “Bullshit. I’ll drive.”

  He smiled at her: “I was hoping you’d offer.”

  He got a ball-peen hammer at a Home Depot on Broad Street and a pair of cotton work gloves. They drove back to Westboro’s and parked a block away, where they could see the front of the parking garage.

  “There’ll be a lot of traffic, starting just before noon,” Madison said. “People grabbing the good seats that aren’t reserved.”

  Jake looked at his watch and yawned nervously. She picked it up and yawned back. “We could neck for a while,” he said.

  “I’m too scared.”

  “You don’t have to drive . . .”

  “No-no. I’ve been talking big,” she said. “I’ll do it. But I’m still scared.”

  “Good. Scared is realistic. Just don’t freeze and leave me on the street.”

  Now she nodded: “Maybe you’ll learn to trust me.”

  Tried to make conversation as they watched politicians and hustlers streaming into Westboro’s: “Was Howard Barber the guy who had me beaten up?”

  “I hope not,” she said.

  “I’m not asking what you hope,” Jake said. “I’m asking what you think. At that point, Goodman had no reason to go after me. You guys did.”

  “Kind of narrows the range, doesn’t it.” She pursed her lips, looking out the windows, and then said, “I asked him. He didn’t say ‘yes,’ but he never said ‘no.’ He avoided the question. And he definitely knows people who’d do it. You scared him. He wanted to slow you down.”

  “I’d like to get his people alone. One at a time. With my stick.”

  “I’d like you to stay over tonight,” Jake said. He yawned again, and she yawned back. Both nervous. The hands on the car clock seemed to be plowing through glue. “You know, mostly because . . . I’d like you to stay over.”

  “We could talk about the role of NATO in the new Europe,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah . . . but tomorrow, I want you to go home. Carry on as usual, don’t do anything cute, don’t play to the bug, if there is one. Just carry on. There’s gonna be a lot to talk about anyway. The shit is already headed for the fan.”

  “Where are you going to be?”

  “Running around,” he said.

  “You’re not going to get hurt?”

  “Certainly hope not.”

  “Maybe I ought to run with you.”

  “That won’t be . . . uh—here’s a Mercury.”

  Cathy Ann Dorn would have made a good spy, Jake thought. The Mercury was right on time, six minutes after twelve. The car disappeared into the parking garage, and four minutes later, Arlo Goodman walked out, trailed by a big man in a dark suit and sunglasses. Both were empty-handed.

  “The bottom of my stomach just dropped out,” Madison said. She started the car.

  “Don’t leave me on the street.”

  “You do it, and get out in a hurry,” she said. “What . . . what if there’s some kind of booby trap?”

  “There’s not even a booby trap in the president’s car,” Jake said.

  “What if there’s a camera or something?”

  “There won’t be a camera . . .” But he reached into the backseat and found the Atlanta Braves hat he’d bought in Atlanta. He put it on and popped the door.

  She said, “Wait. Wait for five minutes, so we know Goodman hasn’t sent the cop back to get something.”

  They sat for three minutes, then Jake popped the door again. “Gotta go. Don’t take any phone calls.”

  “Wait.” She was digging in her purse, pulled out a silk scarf, said, “Put this over your face. Like a bandanna. In case there’s a camera.”

  “Jesus.” But he took the scarf. “My biggest worry is that a car’ll turn in . . .”

  “There haven’t been too many . . . ,” she said anxiously.

  “I’m going.”

  This time he went, walking on one tiptoe. He was ten yards from the garage when another car pulled in. “Shoot.” He stopped and walked back down the block, past Madison, forty yards, fifty yards, then headed back toward the garage. Two men walked out into the sunshine, turned away from him, toward Westboro’s. He closed into the garage, was twenty yards away, his tiptoe foot getting tired, when they went into the restaurant.

  A minute later he was inside, walking up the ramp, feeling the hammer heavy in his pocket. Watching behind for another car. Hurrying now. Up the first ramp, around the corner. He thought about the scarf, thought fuck it, then got it out anyway, did a quick wrap around his lower face. Pulled on the gloves. Between that and the hat, nothing would be visible but his eyes. And it was dark.

  He got the cell phone out, pushed the button, heard it start to ring. Madison would be moving.

  He took a deep breath, listened for a car, heard nothing, started counting, “One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two . . .” stepped quickly over to the Mercury, pulled the hammer out of his pocket and hit the back window with it. The glass exploded inward, and the car alarm went. He knocked out the rest of the glass with the hammerhead, reached through the window into the screaming wail of the alarm, pulled open the back door, spotted the briefcase on the floor, grabbed it, and ran.

  Down to the back door. Nothing coming up the ramp at him. Down the stairs and around, counting, “One-thousand-nine, one-thousand-ten . . .”

  He stopped at the door, pulled down the mask, pushed it under his shirt collar, and stepped out. Madison was just cruising along the street, pulled over. Jake got in the car, still counting, but now, aloud. “One-thousand-fourteen, one-thousand-fifteen.”

  He looked out the back window.

  Nothing moved around the parking garage. They turned the corner and were gone.

  “I had a thought,” she said. She was cool, contained, but with a little pink in her cheeks. “If Arlo thinks about this and thinks, ‘Jake Winter,’ what if he has the Highway Patrol look for us? Stop us on some phony drug charge? Search the car.”

  “Huh.” He considered the idea for a minute, then said, “We can’t take a chance. Let’s go to the airport. We can rent another car, you can follow me back. If you see me get stopped, you can keep on going.”

  “I’m so scared I could pee my pants,” Madison said.

  “Those are obscenely expensive leather seats you’re sitting on,” Jake said. She started to laugh, and then he started, and he said, “I’m sweating like a horse myself. Let’s get the fuck out of Virginia.”

  17

  Russell Barnes was a double amputee with a mop of red hair tied in a ponytail with white string. A long, thin red beard straggled down the front of his green army T-shirt. He met them at the front door, took a long look at Madison, and said, “Jake, nice to see you. How’s the leg?”

  “Not bad. How’s the pain?”

  “I’m so hooked on the drugs that even if it goes away, I’m gonna have to deal with the drug problem. I don’t know if I can do that,” he said.

  As they talked, they followed him, in his wheelchair, back through the dimly lit tract house to what had once been a family room, now jammed with computer equipment. A ten-foot-long wooden workbench, littered with electronic testing equipment, three keyboards, and a half dozen monitors of different sizes, was pushed against one wall, under a photograph of a man in an army uniform posed as the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The workbench was low, made for a man in a wheelchair; the room smelled of Campbell’s tomato soup.

  “Whatcha got?” Barnes asked.

  “Laptop,” Jake said, taking it out of his bag. “Password
protected.”

  He handed Barnes the HP laptop. Barnes looked it over, plugged it into an electric strip on the top of the workbench, brought it up. “This might take a couple of minutes.”

  There was no place to go, no place to sit, so Jake and Madison stood and watched as Barnes played with the computer. He said, “Commercial password program. That’s not good.”

  “You can’t get around it?”

  “I can get around the password, but I suspect that a lot of the stuff on it is going to be encrypted. Encryption is part of the program.”

  “Can you beat the encryption?” Madison asked.

  “Sure, if I had a computer the size of the solar system, and five or six billion years to work it . . . Let’s look at the drives.”

  He flipped the laptop over and started pulling it apart, moved a black box from one part of the workbench to the laptop, connected a couple of wires into the guts of the laptop, pushed a switch. A monitor lit up, and a program started running down the screen. He stared at it for a while, tapped some keys on one of the keyboards, and unencrypted English began running down the screen.

  “Whatcha got is a small amount of encrypted stuff, looks like e-mail, and a fair amount of unencrypted stuff. The encrypted stuff is only accessible if you get me the key. The unencrypted stuff I can print out for you. Most of it looks like crap, though. Some of it’s part of programs he bought . . . you know, illustrations from Word, that kind of thing.”

  “The encrypted e-mail . . . are the addresses encrypted? The places they were sent from?”

  “No. I can tell you where incoming messages originated and where outgoing messages were sent to.”

  “That’d be good. What we need are e-mails, letters, any text that appears to be, you know, independently generated.”

  “Take a while,” Barnes said. “I got a fast printer, but there’s quite a bit of stuff in here. Probably, mmm, I don’t know, could run eight hundred or a thousand pages.”

  “We can wait,” Jake said.

  Madison took the car and went out for coffee and snacks, while Jake and Barnes watched the pile of paper grow in the printer tray, talked about Afghanistan and hospitals and drugs and old friends, including some who were no longer alive.

  “This chick you got with you, is this serious?” Barnes asked.

  “Hard to tell,” Jake said. “She lies to me sometimes.”

  “She’s Madison Bowe, right?”

  “No. Just looks like her,” Jake said.

  Madison came back and said to Jake, “CNN has the gay story. I saw it at the Starbucks.”

  “Oh, boy. I wonder where it leaked from?”

  “What’s that?” Barnes asked.

  Jake explained briefly, saying only that Lincoln Bowe had gay connections. Barnes shook his head and smiled at Madison and said, “They’ll be on you like fleas on a yellow dog. The media.”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “Doesn’t bother you?”

  “The possibility that people would find out, that there would be a story . . . it’s been out there for a long time. Lincoln and I talked about it, how to handle it. I’ll be okay.”

  They were out of Barnes’s house an hour later, carrying two reams of paper and the restored laptop, blinking in the sunlight; Barnes had kept a copy of the hard drives, and would continue working through it. “What next?” Madison asked.

  “Back to my place. Read this stuff. Figure out what you’re going to do.”

  “I’m going to call Kitty Machela at CBS. Next week, I think. We’ll arrange for one of her famous interviews.”

  “Woman-to-woman chat.”

  “Dark set, conservative clothes, sympathy,” Madison said. “She’d sympathize with Hitler if she could get him in an exclusive interview. It’ll kill the story. My part of it, anyway.”

  At Jake’s, they got comfortable in the study, flipping through the paper, while the television ran in the background, the gay story blossoming like a strange fungus. There were shots of the outside of Madison’s town house, pictures of reporters knocking on the door.

  “Every network has to show its guy knocking on the door, even when they just saw another guy knocking on the door,” Madison said.

  “Keep reading,” Jake said.

  In a thousand sheets of paper, they found one thing, and Madison found it.

  “The murders in Madison happened . . . there’s . . . mmm . . . there’s a note, a duplicate receipt for a private plane flying from Charlottesville to Chicago for two passengers, charged to a state account, early in the morning, five A.M., arriving back in Richmond at nine P.M. Charged to a state police account. I wonder why the cc would come back to Goodman?”

  Jake took it, read it, then looked up. “Because Goodman ordered the plane, or had it ordered. Had to approve something. Somebody flew into Chicago, which must be three or four hours from Madison by car, the morning Green and his secretary were killed. They were back that night.”

  “But why a state plane? There’d have to be a pilot, there’d be paperwork.”

  “Because you can’t carry weapons on a commercial flight, not without registering them,” Jake said. “And they’re not going to register weapons with silencers, huh?”

  “Why didn’t they fly into Madison?”

  “Because the name might come up in a search, if someone like the FBI looked for flights going into Madison or Milwaukee, or anywhere in Wisconsin. They had to take a risk, but they minimized it by going to Chicago. Without this note . . . digging this out of the woodwork would be impossible, believe me. This is in the bottom of a computer file somewhere, and nobody will ever look at it again, without somebody asking for it. But since we know about it, they can’t escape. Because the paperwork is there.”

  “But they’ll have some kind of story about what they were doing in Chicago,” Madison said.

  “Probably. But this is a piece of the puzzle. And it tells me something. It tells me that your pal Barber probably didn’t do it.”

  They locked eyes for a moment, but she didn’t say it: I already told you that Barber didn’t do it. Don’t you trust me?

  “I trust you enough to plan a murder with you,” Jake said. “I wouldn’t even do that with Russell Barnes.”

  She asked, “What murder?”

  He said, “Just a minute. I’ve got to call Russell.”

  Jake went to the phone and called. “Russell. Look at the encrypted stuff, the encrypted messages. See if you can find one for the day before yesterday, originating in Chicago or anywhere in Illinois or Wisconsin.”

  “Hold on. I’ll queue them up.”

  Barnes was back in four minutes: “There’s one from Chicago at eight A.M., very short. There’s another from Madison, Wisconsin, at two o’clock, even shorter.”

  “They did it,” Madison said. “You think his brother . . . ?”

  “Yeah. Darrell.”

  “Is that who we’re going to murder?”

  “Let me tell you about my idea for a play,” Jake said. “For a pageant . . .”

  “You mentioned that, but you didn’t tell me what you were talking about.”

  “That’s before I hired you as a wheelman,” Jake said.

  He told her about it, about the drama that he was planning for her living room. “If you do this, and I’m not telling you not to, you have to think it out like a chess game,” Madison said. “Right down to the last little move. You have to have a backup story in case anything goes wrong . . .”

  “But you’re not saying ‘no,’ ” Jake said. “You’re not arguing against it.”

  “No, I’m not,” she said. “Sometimes, justice isn’t enough. You need revenge.”

  “So. You’ll do it.”

  “Yes.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, then Jake said, “Call Johnson Black, have him come here to pick you up. You stand on your porch, make a brief statement about the gay stories. You go inside and talk to Black about whatever. When the TV people are gone, probably after
the evening news, you call me. I’ll come over and we’ll do the drama.”

  She nodded. “Now I’m scared again. That’s twice in a day.”

  “We’re all in trouble here, Maddy,” Jake said. “This whole thing has been so complicated. But if there’s a bug—and there’s gotta be a bug, I’d bet on it now—Goodman knows that you know what Barber did to your husband. If he can find a way to make the tape public, you could go to prison. Maybe for a long time. You know what judges do to celebrities, just to prove that they’re not above the law . . . And if I don’t get that package to the FBI, I’m in trouble for the Madison shootings, myself. The drama might settle it.”

  “But we’re going to kill somebody. We’re premeditating.”

  “Yeah.” Again, they stared at each other for a bit, then Jake said, “Look. We’ve got a huge problem: we’ve got a psycho on our asses—or on yours, anyway. I might still skate. Sooner or later, though, they’ll have to do something about you. The new vice president can’t have any vocal opposition that alleges any kind of scandal, any kind of problem. If they’re thinking about Goodman, and you’re out here screaming that Goodman is a killer and a Nazi . . . it’s easy enough to choose somebody else. Arlo Goodman needs for you to go away, or to be discredited, or humiliated. And they’ve got a psychotic killer willing to do the heavy work.”

  “But there’s a hole in your idea. The way you set it out.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. What are you going to do with the other car?”

  Jake blinked. Then, “God. I’m a moron.”

  “You’re not a moron. You just need somebody to go with you. You need a wheelman, again.”

  He blinked again. “Oh, no. No, no, no . . .”

  “Oh, yes. It’s the only way.”

  They argued, went around and around, and finally she said, “I’m going, and that’s it; I’m going, or you’re not.” Then she called Johnson Black. Black arrived an hour later, took her away.