Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  Ten minutes later, Jake watched CNN as Madison made her statement from the front porch. She said that there had been an assumption that sexuality was private, but that the FBI were apprised of the situation with Lincoln Bowe, and that it was part of their investigation. That she was distressed that people were pounding on her door, hounding her, and that one certain way of NOT getting any information was to pound on her door.

  She would refuse to answer anyone who came to the door, and the thrill-seeking reporters should be ashamed of themselves. More information would be made public at an early date.

  With a bunch of reporters yelling “When?” at her, she went inside. Then a ranking D.C. cop took the microphone and said that anyone who stepped on Mrs. Bowe’s yard or any of the other yards down the block, without permission, would be arrested for trespassing. That all the TV trucks were a hazard in case of emergency, and they would have to leave the street. That anyone not leaving would be ticketed and the trucks would be towed, and the bill would have to be paid before the trucks were released. That towing a big truck would cost upward of $2,000. He added that once the tow truck was there, as in all police tows, there would be no last-minute decision to leave—if the tow truck showed up, the TV trucks would be towed.

  After a flurry of cell-phone calls, the trucks began leaving. An hour after the porch statement, a reporter from the Post stood alone on the sidewalk, shifting from foot to foot.

  An hour after that, the sidewalk was empty.

  18

  Darrell Goodman stepped into the governor’s office, around the departing maids. The first maid was carrying a silver coffee service, the second a basket of scones, the remnants of an appropriations meeting with the leaders of the statehouse and senate. Darrell hooked one of the scones out of the basket and said to his brother, “Rank has its privileges. Free bakery.”

  Arlo Goodman made a flapping gesture at the door. Darrell closed it, and Arlo made a “What?” gesture with his open hands.

  Darrell held up a finger, said, “I’ve been talking to Patricia, the numbers of the Watchmen are up pretty strong this month. We’re starting a new chapter in D.C.”

  “That’s great,” Arlo said. “There’s a chapter out in California now, I just saw it on the Internet.”

  “Yeah. The leader over there, in D.C., may have been in Syria at the same time you were . . .” He rambled on about D.C. numbers as he opened his briefcase, took out a folded piece of paper, and pushed it at Arlo. Arlo took it, looked at it. A laser printout, a letter:

  I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was one of the four people who helped take Lincoln Bowe away. The other three are Howard Barber, Donald S. Creasey, and Roald M. Sands. I thought it was a complicated political joke on Arlo Goodman. We were supposed to look like Goodman’s hit men. I didn’t know that they were going to shoot Linc. Now I read in the newspapers that he was still alive when he was killed. I don’t know. He was supposed to commit suicide, not be shot. I don’t know what happened to his head. Howard Barber would know. Howard Barber organized this. He’s responsible. Roald and Don don’t know anything. Now everything is coming apart. I’m so sorry, but I can’t stand the thought of prison. I know what would happen in there.

  —Dan White

  Arlo read it and his eyebrows went up. Darrell bent over the desk and whispered in his brother’s ear, “He committed suicide with his own gun after writing the note. The original is signed with his own pen. The pen’s in his coat pocket. An anonymous call went to the Fairfax cops, and Clayton Bell got another anonymous call, supposedly from a Fairfax cop, and he’s there now. Bell will almost certainly call us. He’ll want some guidance.”

  Arlo nodded and pulled his brother’s head down, whispered back, “Nobody else knows anything?”

  “George was there with me—but next week, I’ll settle that.”

  “He can’t feel it coming,” Arlo whispered. “I don’t want him to leave an envelope somewhere.”

  “We’re okay,” Darrell whispered. “After I take him, I’ll go through everything he’s got, just to double-check. But there’s nothing. One thing he is, is loyal.”

  Arlo breathed, “Excellent.”

  Lt. Clayton Bell, a state police officer who’d been running the Bowe investigation, read the note through a plastic envelope put on by the crime-scene people; he was reading it for the third time.

  “I’ll need some advice on how to proceed,” he told the Annandale chief. “I think we pick up the three of them, handle them separately, see what their stories are. But I’m going to talk to the prosecutor’s office first. Maybe call . . . I don’t know, maybe the governor.”

  “That’s up to you, Clay. We don’t have a crime here, so there’s nothing for us. If you just want to handle it . . .”

  Bell nodded. “We’ll handle it. I’ll get a crime-scene crew here, just in case. If you guys can keep the scene sealed off, I’d appreciate it.”

  “We can do that.”

  Roald Sands called Howard Barber on his cell phone.

  “Yes—Barber.”

  Sands was screaming. “Howard, Howard. I just went by Dan’s place, there are cops everywhere. There’s a crime-scene truck there, the state police, the local police. Something’s happened.”

  “Whoa, whoa . . . take it easy.” But even as he said it, Barber’s heart sank. “Where are you?”

  “I’m headed home. I’m afraid the police will be there. I think they know.”

  “How far are you from home?”

  “Five minutes,” Sands said.

  “Call me just before you get there. Let me know if the police are there: I’ll be at this number, just hit redial. If they’re there, remember your story. That it was voluntary, you were just picking him up and dropping him with me. You were bodyguards . . . Bring it back to me. I’ll handle it.”

  “Okay, okay. Jesus Christ, Howard, I’m scared.”

  “Take it easy, man. Take it easy. Call me in five.”

  Barber ran through the list on his cell phone, picked out Don Creasey’s number, touched it. Creasey’s secretary answered, and Barber said, “This is Howard Barber. Let me talk to Don, if you could.”

  “Um, he’s indisposed at the moment . . .”

  “You mean, in the bathroom?”

  “No, I mean, I mean I just don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Barber. There’s just been some kind of trouble. I don’t think I’m supposed to talk to people about it.”

  “Well . . . okay, I guess. I’ll catch him later.”

  He kicked back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, thought it out. The cops had broken it down somehow. He’d known it could happen. He’d taken every possible precaution, and nevertheless, here they were. He laughed, then looked around his office. Been good for a long time.

  Sands called back, said, “There are cars across the street with people in them. I can see them from here, they’re looking down toward me.”

  “Remember your story, Roald. Just remember the story.”

  He hung up, thought about it some more, then opened the office blinds and looked down at the parking lot. Nothing yet. He ran through various permutations of the story: that Lincoln Bowe had been frightened of Arlo Goodman, and that he, Barber, had sent the other men to act as bodyguards, that they’d brought him north to Barber’s office, and that Barber had secretly driven him to New York, and he’d disappeared from there . . .

  But that wouldn’t hold, he thought. Too many things didn’t happen. He couldn’t answer questions—what car had he taken, where had he stopped for gas, had they stopped to eat anything . . . He flashed to the last time he’d been to Rapid Oil; they’d put a mileage sticker on the window of his car, with a date. Maybe he could run down . . .

  No. One way or another, they’d poke holes in it. They’d hang him. Huh.

  And they might hang Madison Bowe along with him. Somehow, the Goodmans were involved in this—and if they pushed the cops to play Madison against him, the two of them woul
d be stuck. Whatever else, Madison didn’t deserve to go to prison.

  Barber went back to the window and cranked the blinds fully up, walked to his office door. His secretary sat in a bay off the main room; in the main room, four women and two men sat in cloth cubicles talking on phones and poking at computers, like high-tech mice in a maze. To his secretary, he said, “Jean, I need you to run an errand. Could you drive over to Macy’s and pick me up a dress shirt, white or blue? I’ll give you cash . . .”

  “You mean, right now?”

  “If you could,” Barber said. “I’ve gotten my ass in a bind, I’m going to have to run out of town tonight . . .” He fumbled four hundred dollars out of his wallet and gave it to her.

  “But you’ve got the Thirty-first Project Managers at ten o’clock tomorrow.”

  “I should be back,” he said. “Just get the shirt, huh? If you’ve got stuff that has to be done here, I’ll pay overtime anytime you have to stay late.”

  “That’s not necessary . . .” She got her sweater and purse and went mumbling off, and Barber went back to his office windows just in time to see the cops arrive. There were two cars, both state police. Not FBI. The Goodmans, for sure.

  He could go with them, stick with the story. Another guy was going to pick up Lincoln Bowe, so he merely transferred him . . . but the other three, Creasy, Sands, and White, all knew bits and pieces of the story, and the cops would play them off against one another, and sooner or later, one of them would fold.

  Barber had always been an outside guy, a guy who liked to move around. A cell the size of a bathroom. He rubbed his face with his open hands and looked back into the parking lot. Had an idea, smiled at it. He wore a gold Rolex on his left wrist. He reached into his desk drawer, took out a paper clip, straightened it, and using the edge of the Rolex bracelet as a guide, scratched his wrist until it bled, in two small scratches both back and front. He changed the watch to the other wrist and did the same thing.

  He was putting the watch back on his left wrist when he heard the voices in the outer room: cops asking for his office. He walked around and sat behind his desk. Calm. More than calm: cold.

  A plainclothes cop stuck his head in the office door and asked, “Mr. Barber?”

  “Come in. Close the door, please.”

  Three cops. One of them pushed the door closed with his foot. The plainclothesman said, “Mr. Barber, I’m Lieutenant Clayton Bell, Virginia State Police . . .”

  Barber stood up.

  In the outer office, a saleswoman named Cheryl Pence was standing in her office pod when the screaming started: “No, no, don’t, don’t, help, help . . .”

  There was an impact like an explosion, and without thinking, Pence ran to Barber’s office door and yanked it open, the other five office employees all standing, staring. When the door came open they saw three Virginia state cops looking out through a broken window. Pence screamed at them, “What did you do, what did you do . . . ?”

  Bell, shocked, white-faced, turned and muttered, “We didn’t do anything. We didn’t do anything.”

  He was talking to air. Pence had backed away and then started to run for the outer door, the other five stampeding behind her. Bell said to the other two cops, “We didn’t do anything.”

  Outside, three television crews, tipped by what they believed to be local police, had been waiting to film the arrest. They hadn’t been ready for a man to come hurtling out through the wall of glass, five stories above them. One cameraman, saddled up and ready to roll, got a shot of the three cops at the window, looking down.

  The three reporters stood there openmouthed, and then one of them said, “Holy shit.” He turned toward his cameraman: “You get that? Tell me you got that?”

  “I got the cops,” the cameraman said.

  A hundred miles away, Arlo Goodman screamed, “What? What?”

  19

  Madison Bowe heard about Howard Barber’s death from Johnson Black, who heard about it from a television reporter who was calling Black to ask him to call Madison for a comment. She turned on the television, watched for a moment, then found the maid and said, “Harriet, I’m going shopping for a few minutes. I’ll just run down the hill, I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  Afraid reporters might already be lurking, she put on a hat, went out through the back door, cut through the yards of a half dozen neighbors, then out to the street, not quite running.

  Jake was working on the script for the evening’s drama when Madison called. “I’m down on M Street. Did you hear about Howard?”

  “What about Howard?”

  “He’s dead.” Her voice was hushed, nervous. “Three of Goodman’s cops went to arrest him, they supposedly got some information that he was involved in Linc’s disappearance. But something happened, and he crashed through his office window and fell five stories and he’s dead. Some of his office workers told the television that he was screaming for help and then they heard the crash . . .”

  Jake was astonished, groped for words. “Jesus. What do the cops say?”

  “All three claim he threw himself through the window. Right through the plate glass. I don’t know. I just don’t know. The FBI is there, I guess they’ve taken over.”

  “I’ll call Novatny, see what I can find out.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “It’s still on, unless the cops delay you . . . I’ll come in, we’ll talk about Barber, I’ll tell you everything I know, you tell me what you found out—you should start calling people about it, because that’s what you’d naturally do. Then we’ll go into our play. Just follow my lead.”

  “What if there’s no bug?”

  “Then nothing will happen,” Jake said.

  “Should I make a comment about Howard? For the media? They’re going to start calling. They were already calling Johnnie Black to see if I’d do one.”

  Jake scratched his forehead, thinking for a minute, then said, “I guess . . . That’s up to you. It won’t make any difference, one way or another, to the play tonight. But we can’t have anyone else in the living room when we talk. We have to be alone, or we wouldn’t do it.”

  “All right. Maybe . . . I’ll tell Johnnie that I could have a comment tomorrow, but I want to wait and see what happens.”

  “What do you think about Barber? Could it be suicide?”

  She hesitated, then, “Maybe. He’s depressive. He’s excitable. He could do it . . . I don’t know.”

  “All right. Hang on: manage it. See you at nine.”

  Jake called Novatny, but the FBI man wouldn’t talk. “You’re too deep in this, ol’ buddy.”

  “I’m not asking for a state secret—I just want to know if it was suicide.”

  “That’s what the Virginia State Police say.”

  “What do you say?”

  “Too early to tell.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Jake called Danzig’s office and talked to Gina. “Tell Bill that there’s a story on television about a guy who jumped, fell, or was thrown out a window over in Arlington. Virginia State Police were there and some of the witnesses say the guy was thrown. The thing is, this guy is mixed into the Lincoln Bowe disappearance. There’s going to be a stink around Goodman, at least for a while.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “You almost done over there?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t.”

  She knew everything, of course. They were building some distance between themselves and Jake, just in case. “Talk to you later.”

  They were getting into the endgame on Lincoln Bowe: Jake could feel it coming. In a week, there’d be nothing left to do but the cleanup. The cleanup, depending on who was doing the cleaning, could send a few people off to jail.

  For the moment, there was still room to maneuver.

  He climbed the stairs to his junk room, unlocked his gun safe, took out the Remington .243 and a semiautomatic Beretta 20 gauge with two boxes of shells. He’d last used the .24
3 six months earlier, on an antelope hunt in Wyoming. When he left Wyoming, he could keep three slugs inside three-quarters of an inch at a hundred yards, shooting off sandbags. It was sighted a half inch to an inch high at a hundred, so any shot he wanted to take, from muzzle-tip to two hundred yards, was point ’n’ shoot.

  Or back in Wyoming, had been. He’d traveled with the gun in a foam-padded case, but it generally wasn’t healthy to assume that a scope sighted-in six months earlier, and moved two thousand miles, was still on.

  He looked at his watch: he had just enough time to get to Merle’s and back to Madison’s at nine o’clock. He whistled a line from Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” took the rifle, shotgun, and hunting-gear bag down to his bedroom, packed an overnight bag, and carried it all down to the car.

  Made a mental note to stop at Wal-Mart.

  Endgame coming.

  Arlo Goodman was in the mansion’s front parlor, feet up on an antique table donated by the Virginia Preservation Society, talking to Darrell. “Can we wall ourselves off? That’s the only question that matters.”

  “Absolutely. Nothing points at us,” Darrell said. “Nothing. Bell and the others swear to God that Barber jumped. I think the feds believe them. For one thing, his office would have been wrecked if a guy Barber’s size was thrown out the window. He was like a goddamn weight lifter, and Bell’s fifty-five years old and is fifty pounds overweight. He threw Barber out the window? He’s lucky Barber didn’t throw him out.”

  “The problem is, eighty percent of the equation is image,” Arlo said. “They have an image they want. They want a guy who’s an economic liberal, but who’s in touch with the prayer people, who’s in touch with the gun people. Right now, I’m it; but with just a little twist, I become Hermann Göring. Then I’m not it. Then my fifteen minutes are up.” He stood up, took a lap around the room, gnawing at a thumbnail, tugging at it. He wrenched a sliver of it free, spit it into the carpet. “Look. We need a leak. We need to leak to the media that the feds think Barber killed Bowe. We need that out there right now. Everything’s right on a knife edge . . .”