Dead Watch (9 page)

In his office, the governor picked up a phone, tapped a number, said, “Give me a minute.”

Darrell Goodman arrived two minutes later, from his cubbyhole office on the floor below. “I talked to Winter,” the governor said. “He’s doing what he said he was going to do: he’s jacking people up.”

“Want us to track him?”

“I can’t decide. There are some risks . . .”

After a moment of silence, Darrell said, “I could probably get online access to Winter’s cell-phone account, the billing records. We wouldn’t know what he was saying, but we’d know where he was, and who he was talking to.”

“What are the chances of getting caught?”

“Nil. We monitor from a phantom account and do the access from public hot spots.”

“Fuckin’ with a White House guy is different than fuckin’ with Howard Barber,” Arlo Goodman said.

“Be a very light touch,” Darrell said.

“Then do it,” Goodman said. He picked up a soft rubber exercise ball from his desk, pushed it between the fingers of his ruined right hand, tried to tense the fingers. “We’re getting behind here. We need somebody we can squeeze. We need him now.”

Out on the street, Jake got on his cell phone and called Novatny at the FBI.

“I’ve got a name for you. Could you run it? And could you find out where a town called Scottsville is? I think it’s over by Charlottesville, maybe south?” He explained about the tip, without identifying the girl who had given it to him. On the note, she’d given her name as Cathy Ann Dorn, along with a local Richmond phone number.

While Novatny ran the name, Jake walked back to his car, edged back onto the streets, looking for an entrance to the interstate. Novatny called back: “Do you have any good reason to think this guy might be a problem?”

“No—just that my source said that Goodman and Patricia are looking for him, and think he might be involved.”

“So what are you going to do about him?”

Jake frowned, said, “Hey, Chuck—what’s up? What’d you find?”

“We found quite a bit on him. One of the things is, he’s got more guns than the National Guard.”

“What else?”

Carl V. Schmidt was a failed entrepreneur, Novatny said. He’d failed as an upholsterer, a dry cleaner, a cosmetics salesman, a limo driver, a lunch-van driver for construction sites, owner-operator of a security service, and twice as a real estate agent. Fifteen years earlier, he’d been given a general discharge from the navy, which wasn’t good. He tended to drink and fight, the navy reports said.

He’d had property attached both by Virginia and the U.S. government, for failure to pay taxes. He’d worked off the debts, eventually, and currently was up-to-date. He’d once been charged with fraud, but apparently paid back the victim, and the charges had been dismissed.

“He worked the MacCallum campaign, in the Senate election two years ago,” Novatny said. “There’s a notation in here . . .” He paused, apparently looking for it, then read, “Quote: Both the Murray and the Bowe campaigns complained that cars with their bumper stickers were systematically damaged. That seven houses in Lexington with Bowe yard signs were splashed with paint, apparently from paint balloons. Police questioned Schmidt and several others. All were released for lack of proof.”

“The Macs were bad news, some of them,” Jake said. “Fruitcakes.”

“He’s a member of a gun club and the NRA. He owns, let’s see, sixty-four guns,” Novatny said. He counted them out: “Fifteen rifles . . . ten shotguns . . . and thirty-nine handguns. Yeah, sixty-four. Jeez. The guns, let me see . . . mmm, they’re not collector items, they’re shooters.”

“So what do you think?”

“There’s nothing that suggests he ever had anything to do with Lincoln Bowe,” Novatny said. “If you think the tip is real, we could track him.”

Jake hesitated, then said, “Let me think about it.”

Novatny: “There’s a tendency for you political people to keep things off-the-record. I understand that, given your job. But if you’re gonna look into this yourself, take it easy. I’ve seen bios like this before. The guy could be a problem.”

“Maybe if I eased up on him,” Jake suggested.

“I don’t want to hear about it. Stay in touch. If you actually find a single thing that could tie him to Bowe, call us.”

“Talk to you tonight,” Jake said. “Could you e-mail me that file? Like, right now?”

“You’ll get it in two minutes,” Novatny said.

A well-tended fiftyish matron was waiting at a stoplight and Jake pulled over, stepped out of the car: “Excuse me? Do you know if there’s a Starbucks around here?”

She checked him out for a moment, looked at the Mercedes-Benz star on the front of the car, then smiled. Somebody of her own class: “If you go three blocks straight up this street, you’ll see a Pea-in-the-Pod shop. Turn right and go one block.”

“Thanks.”

The Starbucks was a hot spot. He parked, went inside, got a croissant and a grande latte, took his laptop from his briefcase and went online.

The file was there. Along with the information on Schmidt, Novatny included a map of the Scottsville area, pinpointing Schmidt’s house just off Highway 20, and across the James River south of the town. Scottsville was, as Jake thought, south of Charlottesville.

He finished eating, closed down the laptop, went to his car and pointed it out onto I-64.

There is no easy way to get from Richmond to Scottsville. Jake took I-64 west to Zion Crossroads, then south through Palmyra to Fork Union, and then west into Scottsville. When he saw the town, he remembered going through it on trips south of Charlottesville along Lee’s route of retreat from Richmond to Appomattox, which was farther southwest.

He actually didn’t remember the town so much—it had seemed to be a depressing place when he’d gone through before—as he remembered the bridge, a humped structure over the normally turbid James. Now, with all the rain they’d had in the spring, the river was rolling heavily against the bridge, showing some power.

The bridge was on Highway 20, south. Schmidt lived on County Highway 747, which was more of a lane than a highway, running in a loop off Highway 20. The house itself, painted a faded turquoise with a dirty blue trim, was not much better than a shack, and was sited almost beneath a line of high-tension electric wires.

An unpainted tin carport stood empty on the left side of the house, except for an old washer-dryer and a stack of two-by-fours. An ancient Ford tractor with rotting tires sat in a clump of weeds behind the house. An iron stake in the front yard, surrounded by a circular bald spot in the overgrown grass, suggested a large dog sometimes kept on a chain.

No dog visible. The front blinds were open. Could be a dog inside. From the road, he could see a sheet of white paper hanging on the door.

In training for Afghanistan, Jake had taken a course in burglary—what the army called surreptitious entry—from an ex-burglar hired by the CIA. It turned out that surreptitious entry was not particularly practical in Afghanistan, but the training had been interesting.

After three passes, he slowed and turned into Schmidt’s driveway.

Just to knock, and maybe get a look at the door . . .

The paper on the door was from the Watchmen:
Carl: Please call in. We’ll be at headquarters until 5 o’clock. This is super-important. Dave Johnson, District Coordinator, Watchmen.

The paper was limp with humidity, as though it had been on the door for a while.

Jake knocked: no barking—but the door was probably the newest piece of the house, a solid chunk of wood with two small view windows and a big Schlage lock. His elementary burglary skills were not going to work with it.

He walked around to the front. Same thing: old house, new door.

He walked around to the carport again, knocked, called: “Anybody home?”

The house was isolated, the occasional car buzzing by on Highway 20, out of sight, and the occasional bee from the weed patch out back. He took a quick trip around it. The house was set on a concrete-block foundation, so there might be a basement, but if so, it was windowless. The house windows were fairly high—Jake was tall, but their lower sills were almost chest high on him. The window glass was dirty enough that he couldn’t see much. Still, no barking, no sound from inside.

The carport entry was obviously the main one. Jake remembered one more thing from the surreptitious-entry course. The instructor said, “A lot of people hide a key outside the house. If they’re going to do that, it’s gonna be in about one of nine places: repeat after me . . .”

He found it in the wrecked washing machine, in the lint filter.