Dead Watch (5 page)

As he got up and turned to go, Danzig asked, “Kill any turkeys?”

“Nope. Interrupted by a phone call.”

“Life in the big city, son,” Danzig grunted, already flipping through the paper in front of him. “Maybe you can squeeze a little blood out of this job.”

Out of Danzig’s office, Jake walked with an escort to the working door, then into the sunshine through the security fences to the street, where he caught a cab home. The magnolias were in full bloom, pink and white, beds of daffodils jumped up like yellow exclamation marks. Early April: the cherry trees would be gorgeous this week down at the Tidal Basin, if you could get to them through the tourists. He made a mental note to stroll by, if he found the time.

Several days of rain had washed the city clean. The Washington Monument needled into the sky, telling the world exactly who the studhorse was. The streets were lined with flowers, busy with bureaucrats with white ID tags strung around their necks, fat brown briefcases dangling from their hands. Good day in Washington when even the bureaucrats looked happy.

Jake lived in Burleith, north of Georgetown, in a brick-and-stone town house that might have been built in the early twentieth century, but was actually a careful replica only fifteen years old.

At the moment, his street was torn up. The owner of a town house three down from his, a stockbroker, had convinced the other residents to rip out the old concrete sidewalks and replace them with brick walkways. Bricks would enhance the value of the neighborhood, the broker said, and would increase the resale value of their houses by making the neighborhood more like Georgetown. Jake was indifferent to the idea, but went along because everybody else agreed to do it. Besides, the noisome little asshole was probably right.

Because of the street work, he had the cabbie drop him at the entrance to the alley at the back of the house, carded through the fence lock, and climbed the stoop to the back door.

He ran a bachelor house: a functional kitchen, a compact dining room, a living room with a wide-screen television, a den used as a library and office, and a half-bath; and on the second floor, a master bedroom suite, a guest bedroom, and a third bedroom where he hid all his junk—obsolete golf clubs, a never-used rowing machine, old computer terminals that were not good enough to use, but too good to throw away, three heavily used backpacks and two newer ones—he was a bag junkie. He also had a gun safe, a bow locker, and a pile of luggage.

The furnace, a washer and dryer, the telephone and electric service panels, and the master box for the alarm system were all tucked away in a small basement. A two-car garage had been added to the back of the house and occupied most of the backyard.

He kept the place neat with two hours of cleaning a week, usually done on Saturday morning. He wasn’t a freak about it, simply logical. Two hours a week was better than two straight days once a quarter.

By the time he got home, the workday was over. He went online with the Virginia State website, found a name for the governor’s chief of staff—Ralph Goines—and tracked him down through the FBI telephone database, then called him on his unlisted home phone. He identified himself and said, “I need to see Governor Goodman. Tomorrow if possible.”

“Could I tell the governor why you want to talk to him?”

“It’s about Lincoln Bowe. If you saw Randall James’s show . . .”

“We did see it. Absolutely irresponsible,” Goines said. “Mrs. Bowe has been carrying on a campaign of slander and innuendo.”

“So which one was the big guy in the videotape, the one with the leather jacket?” Jake asked. “Slander? Or Innuendo?”

Bitch-slapping bureaucrats was one way to wake them up. Pause, five seconds of silence: “We are looking into that. It’s possible that it was a setup.”

“Right,” Jake said. He let the skepticism show in his voice. “Maybe the governor could tell me about it.”

Back and forth, and eventually an appointment: “One o’clock, then. Be prompt. The governor’s a busy man.”

Jake nodded at the phone, said, “Sure,” and hung up, turned to his computer, and went back online.

Because of his work with Danzig, he had limited access to government reference files. He went into the FBI telephone database again. The Bowes had a place in Georgetown, not far from him, and were also listed at a place in the Blue Ridge, and in New York. He found an unlisted cell-phone number for Madison Bowe and called it.

She answered on the third ring.

Madison Bowe lived in a four-story red-brick town house in Georgetown, up the hill from M Street. Jake paid the cabdriver, straightened his tie, climbed the front steps, and rang the bell. She met him at the door, barefoot, wearing black slacks and a hip-length green-silk Chinese dressing-gown. She didn’t smile, but looked up and asked, “You’re Jacob Winter?”

“Yes, I am.” Jake had only seen her on television, where everyone was cropped to fit the screen and gorgeous blondes were a dime a dozen, and you paid no attention. But Madison Bowe was real, and the reality of the woman was a slap in the face. She was smaller than he’d expected, had short blond hair, a sculpted nose, direct green eyes, and a touch of pinkish lipstick. She spoke with a soft Virginia country accent, in a voice that carried some bourbon gravel.

She still didn’t smile; looked up and down the block, then said, “I hate it when I have to trust a Democrat.”

“I apologize,” Jake said. “I’ll go home and kill myself.”

Small blondes were his personal head-turner. His ex-wife might have been airmailed to him directly from hell—but she, too, had been a small blonde, and right up to the end, even at the settlement conference, the sight of her had turned him around. As did Madison Bowe. And Madison smelled good, like lilacs, or vanilla.

“You better come in,” she said, ignoring the wisecrack. “We’re in the parlor.”

He limped after her. He noticed her noticing it.

The other half of the “we” was a lawyer named Johnson Black, who was sitting on a sofa facing a coffee table, a delicate china cup in his hand. Jake saw him a half-dozen times a year at different lobbyist dinners. He was balding, with merry, pink cheeks and half-moon glasses. In his late sixties, he was one of the classic Washington regulars who moved between private practice and federal appointments.

Black wore a dark suit, as always, but had taken off his brilliant tie, which was draped over a shoulder. He stood up, smiling, to shake hands: “Jake, goddamnit, I couldn’t believe it when Maddy said
you
were coming over. I told her you were a good guy.”

“I appreciate that,” Jake said. “How’ve you been, Johnnie? How’s the heart?”

“Ah, I’m eating nothing but bark and twigs. It’s either that, or they do the Roto-Rooter on me.”

Madison was watching Jake. “Johnnie says you’re teaching at Georgetown,” she said. “Why’s a professor . . . ?”

“I’m not a professor. I teach a seminar. I work for the government as a consultant,” Jake said. “I specialize in . . .” He paused, looked at Johnson Black, and said, “I don’t know. What do I specialize in, Johnnie?”

“Hard to tell,” Black said. “Maybe forensic bureaucracy?”

“That’s it,” Jake said, turning back to Madison. “Forensic bureaucracy. When something goes wrong, I try to find out what
really
happened.”

Madison sat on the couch next to Black. She didn’t smile back, hadn’t smiled yet, and he really wanted to see her smile. Jake took an easy chair, facing them across the coffee table, put his case on the floor by his feet, leaned forward.

“The president has ordered me to find Senator Bowe. I’m going to start kicking bureaucrats, I’m going to raise hell over at Justice, with the FBI, with Homeland Security, and I’m going to talk to Governor Goodman.”

“In other words, you’re going to make a big public relations show, because the president is feeling the heat,” Madison said.

Jake shook his head: “No. No show. That’s an explicit part of my deal—I don’t do public stuff. But I will find your husband. There’s a reason he’s gone.”

“Because he spoke out. Because he was critical of Arlo Goodman and his thugs, and was tying them to this administration,” Madison said.

Jake held both hands up, palms toward Madison: “Mrs. Bowe: I heard you on television. I will keep that possibility in mind. But there are other possibilities, and I’m not going to let any of them go.”

“What other possibilities?”

“That your husband disappeared for reasons of his own,” Jake said.

“You can’t believe that,” she said, her back rigid. Her hands twisted in her lap, and he was happy that his neck wasn’t between them.

“I don’t believe anything in particular, Mrs. Bowe,” Jake said. “But there’s been speculation to that effect. That this is an effort to embarrass Arlo Goodman. That you’re jerking him around. There are radio talk show people saying that your appearance on TV was part of that effort.”

Her face was intent, earnest: “It was
not . . .”

Jake overrode her: “I’m outlining the possibilities, as I see them. I didn’t come over here to argue with you, or to comfort you. I need to ask some questions and to make a request.”

She settled back on the couch and crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you want?”

“Your husband is too important a public figure to disappear on his own,” Jake said. “If he disappeared of his own volition, then either you, or some close friend, knows where he is. I want you to call all of his close friends. Tell them that if they know anything about Lincoln Bowe, I want them to get in touch with me. We are now at the point where somebody’s going to jail, to prison, for involvement with this disappearance. That if this started as a joke, nobody’s laughing anymore.”

Now Madison leaned forward, her eyes locked on his: “That’s what I want! I want somebody to say that in public. The president. The attorney general. That we’re talking about prison. Or the death penalty. Or something. Finally get some pressure on whoever’s got him. They’ve just been out there playing around . . .”

“So you’ll make the calls?”

“Yes—but that won’t help,” she said. “He did
not
disappear on his own. He is not with a friend. He would have told me. Even more . . .”

She hesitated, and Jake said, “What?”

“He spends most of his time at our New York apartment,” she said. “He had two cats there. When he disappeared, probably that Friday afternoon, nobody realized that he was gone until Monday, when he missed appointments. When we called the apartment, the maid answered. She said he wasn’t there, but not only that: nobody had fed the cats over the weekend. They had no food or water, they were drinking from a toilet. Linc would never have done that, let the cats go like that. Even if he was planning to disappear, he would have made up some excuse to see that they were taken care of.”

Jake looked down at his lap and touched his forehead with his middle finger, unconsciously rubbing. In any hunt, any interrogation, there were key moments, when somebody said something that might seem obscure, that looked like a minor point but was, in fact, critical.

Madison misinterpreted his reaction: “What? You don’t believe me?”

“No, no,” Jake said, looking up again. “It’s the single piece of information I’ve gotten so far that makes me think you’re right. That he didn’t go away voluntarily.”

For the first time, her attitude softened. “I’ve been trying to tell everybody that. He’d never abandon the cats.”

He watched her for a few seconds, then said, “You say he spent most of his time in New York. Did you spend that time with him?”

“No, I . . .” She stopped, looked at Black, and then said, “We’re not exactly estranged. We’re friendly. But we don’t live together much anymore. He spends most of his time in New York, I spend most of mine at our farm. We mostly intersect here, in Washington . . . when we do.”

Jake took that as a complex of evasions suggesting that they no longer were in bed together.

“Do you think . . . if you’re only friendly, that he might have another friend? Somebody that he might have gone off with for a while?”

She was exasperated: “No, I do not. Frankly, if he was going to do that, he would have told me. And he would have fed the cats.”

Okay. Enough of that.

Jake looked at Black, then Madison: “There’s a concept, in the bureaucracy, called
The Rule.
Have you heard of it?”

Madison shook her head, but Black nodded. “From
Winter’s Guide:
You ask,
Who benefits?”

Jake said, “Exactly—though I didn’t think of it. I just picked it up.” He held Madison’s eyes: “In any analysis of a confusing political problem, the rule is to ask, ‘
Who benefits?’
You will find the answer to
any
political or bureaucratic question, if you can answer that one correctly. Now, Senator Bowe vanishes under suspicious circumstances, and you ask, ‘Who benefits?’ ”

“So?” she asked.

Jake shook his head: “It sure as hell isn’t this administration. The biggest beneficiaries so far have been your husband’s political allies. The biggest loser so far has been Arlo Goodman.”

“But . . .”

“I know what you think about Governor Goodman, that you dislike him.”

“He’s an asshole,” she said.

“So you see my problem. Your husband disappears, and almost nobody is hurt except Arlo Goodman. And, by extension, other Democrats. The election is in seven months . . .”

Madison looked at Black, and then back at Jake, anger again surfacing as a red flow up her neck and into her cheeks: “All right, let’s work through it again—because you’re wrong about who benefits. It’s not just a few Republicans against Arlo Goodman—a lot of people are scared of him. The Watchmen are like the Klan, or the Mafia, or the Gestapo. They take their orders from Goodman. If Lincoln’s never found, and nobody is ever caught, people become even more afraid of the Watchmen. That’s what they want. They want the fear. They want control. Who benefits if we don’t find Lincoln? The Watchmen do.”

“That’s a little overblown,” Jake said. “They’re a bunch of guys in leather jackets. Boy Scouts who got old.”

Her voice rose, never became shrill, but he could feel the anger in it: “That’s how they started. Most of them are still that way. Old Boy Scouts. But some of them . . . In Lexington, the Watchmen came to my house and tried to put me under house arrest. No warrant, no crime, just the Watchmen. Now they’re starting up in other states. You don’t know how dangerous Goodman is. He won’t stop with the governorship. That’s small potatoes. He’s aiming for the presidency.”

“I’m seeing the governor tomorrow,” Jake said. “I’ll talk to him about it.”

“For all the good that’ll do,” she snapped.

“Back to the point: we don’t benefit. I’m not sure I buy the analysis on the Watchmen, but I’ll keep it in mind. So: who else? Is there another party?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. If you start thinking it’s Arab terrorists or the Masons or the Vatican or a thousand-year-old conspiracy, you’ll probably kill him. The answer is closer than that.”

Jake nodded and picked up his case. “Okay. Make those phone calls, please. I’ll leave my private number for call-backs.”

“You’re going to find him.”

He nodded. “Yes. I will. He was last seen getting into a car with two or three other men. That was not an innocent ride, because not a single person has come forward to explain. So that, I think, must be the moment he disappeared, or began disappearing. And
that
means there’s a group of men who know where he is, what happened. I am going to hound everyone who can do anything to help us break that group. I
will
find him.”

“Be careful where you look. Especially in Virginia.”

“The Watchmen don’t frighten me,” Jake said.

“That bothers me,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because that might mean that you’re too stupid to find Lincoln.”

They stared at each other for a moment, poised over the coffee table, and then Jake cracked a smile: he really liked her. “Okay.”