Dead Watch (7 page)

And a close friend of his, asked by the FBI if Bowe drank, said that he’d never seen Bowe take more than two drinks in an evening.

Maybe he’d just started? Something had just happened?

Besides, Jake thought, speculations on alcoholism were pointless. Whatever had happened to Bowe had happened in the presence of a number of short-haired men with ear-bugs. He hadn’t gotten blind drunk and put the car in the river; he’d disappeared during the middle of the day.

Jake was still going through the paper when Chuck Novatny stuck his head in the door. He was trailed by his partner, George Parker.

“Man, you’re gonna get us in trouble,” Novatny said, without preamble.

“Ah, you enjoy your access to us elite guys,” Jake said. He stood up and shook hands with Novatny, then reached past him to shake with Parker. “Look what it’s done for your career.”

“Yeah. Fifteen minutes ago, I was in the canteen eating a salmonella-infected chicken salad on a three-day-old hamburger bun,” Parker said. “I can barely stand the eliteness.”

Novatny was wiry, sandy haired, fifteen years into his FBI career, a maker of model airplanes that he flew with his sons. Parker was tall, thick, and dark, with a lantern jaw and fifteen-inch-long shoes; a golfer. They both wore blue suits, and Jake had a feeling that the suits reflected a shared sense of humor, rather than the FBI culture. They were competent, and even better than that.

“Lincoln Bowe,” Novatny said.

“Yes. This is what you’ve got,” Jake said, waving at the paper on the conference table. “Mostly secondhand crap from the Virginia cops.”

“You need us to . . . ?”

“Kick ass. Take names. Threaten people. Push anybody who might know anything. Starting . . .” Jake looked up at the wall clock. “Now.”

“We’ve got some things to clean up,” Novatny said. “Send the paper down to us when you’re through, we’ll be on it in a couple of hours. We’ve been wondering when somebody would start to push.”

“When Madison Bowe went on the noon news,” Jake said.

“What a coincidence. That’s when we started wondering,” Novatny said.

They left, and Jake went back to the paper, typing notes into his laptop.

The witnesses who’d seen Lincoln Bowe get in the car with the men with ear-bugs said he hadn’t seemed under duress. He’d seemed to expect the ride, and he had no other ride waiting. The men were described as large, white, with business haircuts, wearing suits. One witness said Bowe had been smiling when he got in the car.

The abandoned cats argued for duress. The smile argued for cooperation.

On the one hand, he had only Madison Bowe’s word that he cared about the cats. On the other, if Bowe had been picked up by somebody who’d stuck a gun in his ribs and said, “Smile, or I’ll blow your heart out,” he might have smiled despite duress.

“Huh.” No way to make a decision yet. He needed more information.

One thing was clear from the interviews by the Virginia cops: Bowe’s speech to the law students had been wicked, and more than one person said that he seemed to be emotionally overwrought, and at the same time, physically loose. He’d been so angry that he seemed, at times, to be groping for words, and at other times, had used inappropriate words, words that simply didn’t fit his sentences.

Again, one witness thought he might have been drunk.

Jake looked at his watch, gathered and stacked the paper, called the clerk, told her to send digital copies of everything to his secure e-mail address, and to take the paper to Novatny’s office.

Time to see Arlo Goodman.

Jake grabbed a cab back home, made and ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, then headed south in his own car, a two-year-old E-class Mercedes. Washington to Richmond was two hours, depending on traffic, south through the most haunted country in America, some of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the Civil War.

Jake had walked all of them, on the anniversaries of the battles. Civil War soldiers, he’d concluded, had been tough nuts.

As was Arlo Goodman.

Four years earlier, Goodman had been the popular commonwealth’s attorney for Norfolk, a veteran of Iraq, and politically disgruntled.

His political unhappiness stretched in several directions—and he could do something about one of them. Norfolk was at the center of a series of military complexes; convinced that a terror attack was possible, he put together a team of five investigators, including his brother, a former special forces trooper. The team had set up an intelligence net in the port areas, extending to a couple of other independent cities; later, they recruited volunteer watchmen, all veterans.

Lightning struck.

A group of dissident Saudi students began planning some kind of attack, although exactly what kind was never determined. One of the watchmen picked up on it and talked to the investigators. The apartment of one of the Saudis was bugged, and Goodman got tapes of five students talking about weapons possibilities, and targets, including atomic submarines. The investigators followed them as they bought maps and took photographs.

At one point, three of the students went out to a state park and spent the afternoon throwing Molotov cocktails—gasoline and oil mixed in wine bottles—into a ravine, to see what would happen. The investigators filmed the explosions. They had the motive, the planning, the means. The Saudis were arrested in a flashy bust at their apartment, and the conviction was a slam dunk.

The next day, Goodman announced the formation of a veterans group called the Watchmen, to keep watch over the streets of Norfolk, in an effort to control street crime, prostitution, drugs, and to keep an eye out for “suspicious activities.”

As a popular prosecutor, he had a base. With the Watchmen being replicated in other counties, he had a spreading influence.

Although he was technically a Democrat, he admitted that he had little time for either the Republican or Democratic parties. When the Democratic Party decided to back a liberal candidate for governor, he launched a maverick campaign for the nomination.

He was, he said, a social conservative—he’d never met a Commandment he didn’t like—but an economic liberal. He wanted more help for the elderly, more for veterans, a higher minimum wage for beginning workers. He pushed for a state income tax that would apply only to the well-to-do, progressive license fees for automobiles that rose dramatically for cars that cost more than forty thousand dollars.

He took 45 percent of the Democratic vote in a three-way primary, and 59 percent of the vote in the final.

People who liked Goodman said that he was charming, down-to-earth, intelligent. People who disliked him said that he was a rabble-rouser and a demagogue, a Kingfish, a little Hitler—the last accusation pointed at the Watchmen.

Asked about the Hitler comparison, the governor said, “These same people, on both sides, have had this state mired in a political bog for fifty years. Now we’re moving again. Now we’re getting things done. So we create a volunteer force, to help keep an eye on possible terror targets, to help elderly people get their meals, to help mobilize in case of natural disaster,
and they call them Nazis.
Isn’t that just typical? Isn’t that just what you’d expect? I have two words for them: ‘Fuck ’em.’ ”

He’d actually said “Fuck ’em,” scandalizing the press corps, but nobody else, and his popularity moved up a half dozen points in the polls.

Two years earlier, with Goodman then only a year in the statehouse, Lincoln Bowe was running for a second term in the Senate. He was widely assumed to be an easy winner.

With encouragement from the White House, Goodman had supported a lightweight Democrat named Don Murray, and had been the local force behind the Murray campaign. The president had done a half dozen fund-raisers. The campaign went dirty, and Murray beat Bowe by four thousand votes, with an independent candidate trailing far behind. Goodman and the Watchmen had been either credited or blamed for Murray’s win, depending on which party you were from.

The bitterness that flowed from the campaign had never stopped.

Jake made Richmond in two hours and fifteen minutes, including a frustrating six minutes behind a fifty-mile-per-hour, boat-towing SUV that precisely straddled the highway’s center line; and an accident in which a blue Chevy had plowed into the rear of another blue Chevy. A highway patrolman was talking to the Chevy drivers, both women in suits, while ignoring the traffic jam they were creating.

By the time he got to Richmond, he was pissed, and Richmond was not the easiest place to get around, a knotted welter of old streets cut by expressways. Goodman’s office was in the Patrick Henry Building on the southeast corner of the Capitol complex.

Jake found the building, and after ten minutes of looking, spotted an empty parking space four blocks away, parked, and plugged the meter. He got his cane and briefcase out of the backseat, walked over to Broad Street, across Broad past the old city hall, and left along a brick walkway.

The walkway and the capitol grounds were separated by a green-painted wrought-iron fence; the fence was supported by posts decorated as fasces, which made Jake smile. As he approached the Patrick Henry Building, he saw two Watchmen sitting on a bench outside the door, taking in the sun. They were in the Watchman uniform of khaki slacks, blue oxford-cloth shirts, and bomber jackets.

When Jake came up with his cane, they stood, two tall, slender men, friendly, and one asked, “Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“Yes, I do, with the governor.”

“And your name?”

“Jake Winter.”

One of the men checked a clipboard, then smiled and nodded. “Go right ahead.”

As Jake started past, the other man asked, “Were you in the military?”

Jake stopped. “Yes. The army.”

“Iraq? Syria?”

“Afghanistan,” Jake said.

“Ah, one of the snake eaters,” the man said. “Have you thought about joining the Watchmen?”

“I don’t live in Virginia,” Jake said.

“Okay,” the man said. “We’ll be coming to your neighborhood soon. Think it over when we get there.”

“You were in the army?” Jake asked.

“He was a fuckin’ squid,” the other man said. “Excuse the language.”

Jake laughed and said, “See you,” and went inside.