Dead Watch

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Dead Watch

A G. P. Putnam’s Sons Book / published by arrangement with the author

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2006 by John Sandford

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Electronic edition: May, 2006

ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

Rules of Prey

Shadow Prey

Eyes of Prey

Silent Prey

Winter Prey

Night Prey

Mind Prey

Sudden Prey

The Night Crew

Secret Prey

Certain Prey

Easy Prey

Chosen Prey

Mortal Prey

Naked Prey

Hidden Prey

Broken Prey

KIDD NOVELS

The Fool’s Run

The Empress File

The Devil’s Code

The Hanged Man’s Song

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

1

Despite the mist, she spent an hour working Chica, and working herself, and she smelled of it, mare-sweat and woman-sweat, with a tingle of Chanel No. 5. They’d turned down the trail from the south forty, easing along, and she could feel the mare’s heart beating through her knees and thighs.

The mist hadn’t felt cold while they were jumping, but now they were cooling off, and her cheeks and forehead were pink, and her knuckles were raw. A shower, she thought, would be nice, along with a hot sandwich and a cup of soup.

They’d just crossed the fence. She turned in the saddle to watch the gate relatch behind them, and saw the face in the tree line. There was no question that it was a face—and in a blink, it was gone, dissolving in the trees.

She turned away from it, casually, tried to capture an afterimage in her mind. A pale oval, truncated at top and bottom, with a dark trapezoid beneath the oval. The face of a man who’d been watching her through binoculars, she realized. The dark shape, the trapezoid, had been arms, joined at the binoculars, in a camouflage jacket.

A thrill of fear ran up her spine. They might be coming for her.

She suppressed the urge to run the mare, but not the urge to push her into a trot. They came down the fence line and she took the remote from her pocket, pointed it at the inside gate, and it swung open in front of them. They went through, and she turned and closed the gate, her eyes searching the tree line as she turned. Nothing. They went on to the barn, Chica in a hurry now, anticipating the feed bag.

When she came off the horse she was feeling loose and athletic and was beginning to question what she’d seen. Was she losing it? Was the pressure pushing her over the edge? There’d been nothing but a flash of white.

Lon, the barn man, came over as she led the horse inside to the smell of horseshit and hay and feed, the odors of a comfortable life. She brushed a fly away from Chica’s eye as she handed the reins over. “I worked her hard, Lon. She’s pretty warm.”

Then over the groom’s shoulder, in the lighted square of the open barn door, she saw the housekeeper jogging across the barnyard, a folded newspaper over her hair to deflect the rain. Lon, an older, hook-nosed man whose skin was grooved like the bark on an oak tree, turned to look and said, “She’s in a hurry.”

She met Sandi, the housekeeper, at the barn door. “Sandi?”

“Two men are here.”

“Two men?”

“Watchmen,” Sandi said.

She looked up at the house: “Did you let them in?”

“Um, it’s raining . . .” Sandi was suddenly afraid that she’d done wrong. “I left them in the front hall.”

“That’s okay. That’s fine.” She nodded. “Tell them that I’ll be a moment.”

Sandi fled back across the barnyard into the house. She and Lon talked about the horse for another thirty seconds, then, as she turned toward the house, Lon said, “Be careful, Maddy.”

She took her time, cleaning her boots on the boot-brush outside the door, and on the mat inside, peeling off her rain suit and helmet, shaking out her hair, hanging the gear on the wall-pegs in the mud room. Still wearing the knee-high boots, she clumped across the kitchen and up the back stairs to the bedroom. From the closet, she got the bedroom gun, a blue-steel .380. She jacked a shell into the chamber and disengaged the safety, stuffed it in her jacket pocket.

She was afraid of the Watchmen, but more than that: she was also interested in what they’d say and excited by the prospect of conflict. She wasn’t exactly a thrill-seeker, but she enjoyed a test, and the more severe, the better. She’d been a rock climber, she drove fast cars. And always the horses: the horses might someday kill her, she thought. Riding was as dangerous as a knife fight.

She took the back stairs down to the kitchen, walked out through the living room to the front entry. Two men waited there, both in leather bomber jackets, blue shirts, and khaki slacks. They’d put on their uniforms for the visit.

She knew one of them: Bob Sheenan, who worked behind the parts counter at Canelo’s Farm & Garden. He was about fourth or fifth in the local Watchmen ranks. She knew the other man’s face, but not his name.

“Been out riding?” Sheenan asked when she walked into the entry.

She didn’t answer. No pleasantries for the Watchmen: “What do you want, Bob?”

“Well, now . . .” Sheenan was a big man, with a bar-brawler’s face: pale blue berserker’s eyes, one damaged eyelid half-shading his left eye, scar tissue under both of them, a crooked banana nose, large yellow teeth. He smelled of pizza and beer, though it was not yet ten o’clock. “You’re telling people that the Watchmen had something to do with your husband.”

“You did,” she said flatly. “I want to know where he is. If you’re not here to tell me, then get out.”

He jabbed a finger at her, and stepped closer. “We had nothing to do with your husband. If you keep talking that way, we will take you to court.”

She squared off to him. “Or beat me up?”

“We don’t do that.”

“Bullshit. What about that Mexican kid two weeks ago? You broke his cheekbones.”

“He was attempting to escape,” the second man said.

“You’re not the police!” she snapped. “You’re supposed to be Boy Scouts. What were you doing capturing him, huh?”

Sheenan and the second man looked at each other for a second, confused, then Sheenan pulled himself back. “I don’t care about the Mexican. That’s got nothing to do with this.”

She bared her teeth: “Is this coming from Goodman? Or is this just some moronic crap you made up on your own?”

“This is not crap, missus.” His eyes widened and his shoulders tensed, as if he were about to strike at her. “You are tearing down our good name. I don’t know what your husband is up to, or where he’s gone, but we will find out. In the meantime, you shut your fuckin’ mouth.”

“I’m not going to shut my mouth,” she said. “I’ll tell you something, Bob: you better be here on Goodman’s orders, because you’re going to need as much backup as you can get. If you came here on your own hook, I’ll have your balls by midnight. Now: Are you going to get out, or do I call the sheriff?”

Sheenan shuffled a half step forward, looming, not worried at the threat. The security cameras were on. All this was on tape. She refused to move back, but slipped her right hand into the pocket of the jean jacket, touched the cold steel of the .380.

“Something’s going on here,” Sheenan hissed, jabbing the finger again, but not touching her. “We’re going to find out what it is. In the meantime, you stick close to the house, missus. We don’t want something to happen to you, too.”

Then he laughed, and turned, and walked out. The other man held the door, and before pulling it closed behind him, said, “We’re watching.”

She exhaled, walked into the library, out of range of the security cameras, took the pistol out of her pocket with a shaking hand, and engaged the safety. Her biggest fear was that they would do something stupid—that they would stage an accident, a mishap, a mystery killing, a disappearance. Even if they were eventually caught, that wouldn’t do her any good.

She could hear the local news anchor: “. . . and then she vanished, into the same darkness that took her husband.” She’d worked as a reporter for a television station in Richmond, and used to write that stuff; that’s how she’d do it.

She’d been planning to run for two weeks. Sheenan had pulled the trigger. She put the gun back in her pocket, headed for the stairs, and shouted, “Sandi?” Sandi came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Yes?”

“I’m going into town. Did you pick up the dry cleaning?”

“Yes, I did. I’ve still got them in the kitchen.”

“I’ll need the red blouse and the gray slacks. Bring them up, and put them on the bed. I’ll be in the shower.”

“What about the schnitzel? Will you be back for lunch?”

“I’ll get a bite in town. You and Lon and Carl could have sandwiches. . . and leave one for me in the refrigerator. I’ll eat it cold, this afternoon.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She took the pickup into Lexington, driving too fast, enjoying the feel of the back end kicking out in the turns, grabbing the gravel and throwing it. She was moving fast enough that anyone trailing her would be obvious. If anyone was there, she didn’t see him. The face across the fence haunted her: Had it been real? Was it imaginary?

In town, she stopped at the bank, took out five thousand in cash, returned two books to the library, filled the truck’s gas tank, went to the feed store and picked up four bags of supplement for the horses. At the post office, she turned off the mail and had it forwarded to Washington. The window clerk was a Watchman, but he was whistling as he put together the temporary change of address, and smiled at her when she said good-bye.

With the chores done, she stopped at Pat’s Tea House for a scone and a cup of tea. Pat was a friend, a fellow horsewoman, and came over to chat, as she always did: “How’s everything?”

“Delicious,” she said. “Listen, can I borrow your phone to call Washington? I left my cell at home.”

“Absolutely. Stop in the office when you’re done.”

She made the call, thinking all the time that she was being paranoid. They wouldn’t be watching the phones. Would they?

She was back at Oak Walk at one o’clock, sent Sandi to get Lon and Carl. When the three were assembled in the kitchen, she told them that she was going to Washington and didn’t know when she’d be back.

“With the controversy about Lincoln and with the Watchmen visiting this morning, I think I’d better move into town for a while. So you three will be running this place. Deborah Benson will deliver your paychecks on Fridays. If you need to buy anything big, call me, we’ll talk, and I’ll have Deborah issue a check. I’m going to leave three thousand in cash with Lon. If you need to buy small stuff, use that, and put the receipts in the Ball jar on the kitchen counter. I’ll leave the keys for the truck and the car with Lon.”

They had questions, but they’d done this before.

“Any idea when you’ll be back?” Lon asked.

“I’ll check back every once in a while, just to ride, if nothing else. But it could be a while before I’m back full-time—probably not until we find Linc,” she said.

When she was satisfied that the farm would be handled, she ate the cold schnitzel sandwich, opened the safe and removed and packed her jewelry, packed a small suitcase with clothes she wanted to take to the city, went to the security room, took the tape out of the security cameras, and put in a new one.

She spent another hour on Rochambeau—Rocky—an aging gelding that had always been one of her favorites, then cleaned up, put on her traveling clothes, and wandered around the house at loose ends, until four o’clock, when she heard the gate-buzzer chirp. She looked out the front window down the lawn where the driveway snaked up from the road. Two cars were coming up the hill, a gunmetal gray Mercedes-Benz sedan and a black Lincoln Town Car.

She went out on the porch when the cars stopped in the driveway circle. A chauffeur got out of the Benz and waited. Another chauffeur got out of the Town Car and held the back door. A young woman got out, followed by a slightly older man, both carrying briefcases. Madison met them at the top of the porch stairs.

“Hello,” the woman said. “I’m Janice Rogers, this is Lane Parks, Johnnie said to say hello for him. He will see you tonight.”

“Two cars?” she asked.

“Johnnie thought a convoy would be better,” Rogers said. “If you’re really worried . . . it would make it more complicated for anyone to interfere with us.”

“Good. Let me get my things,” she said.

The trip into D.C. took a little more than three hours. Her attorney, Johnson Black, was waiting on the porch when the Benz pulled up to the town house, alerted by the two junior attorneys in the Town Car. Black was dressed like his name, in shades of black, under a black raincoat, but with a brilliant jungle-birds necktie.

She got out, the chauffeur popped the trunk to get her luggage, and she walked up the sidewalk and Black kissed her on the cheek and said, “Quite an adventure.”

“The kind I don’t need.”

“Randall James is coming over tonight, if you don’t mind. He wants to talk about those tapes—he wants you on his show tomorrow.”

She was fumbling for the keys to the front door, found them. “You think that’d be the thing to do?”

“Well, I’ll have to look at the tapes, but so far, the press is acting like we’re just bullshitting about Linc and Goodman. This could change things. Depends on the tapes . . .”

Randall James had a noon gig as the Washington Insider on the local ABC outlet. The show got to the right demographic.

James showed up at nine o’clock, an unctuous man with careful black hair, a sharp nose, and a dimple on his chin. He would, she thought, lie for the pure pleasure of it; but he had the demographics.

He sat in the chair, watching the tapes, checking her profile from time to time. When they were done, he said, “I’ll put you on right at the top, at noon. Live. This is great shit, Mrs. Bowe.” He picked up a remote and ran back to the point where Sheenan had shuffled toward her. The threat seemed more explicit on the tape than it had in person. James froze the scene, said, “Look at the face on that fucker . . .”

Her name was Madison Bowe. Her husband was an ex–U.S. senator from Virginia, who, two weeks earlier, had vanished after a speech in Charlottesville. Vanished like a wisp of smoke.

Next day.

The governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia stood in the living room of the private quarters on the second floor of the governor’s mansion, watching the television. He was flushed, angry, but silent.

His brother was not. His brother screamed at the television: “Look at the bitch, Arlo. Look at that bitch. She’s ruinin’ you, and she knows it. Goddamn her eyes . . .”

“She’s good at it,” Arlo Goodman said after a moment, a small smile on his face. “That silly ass Randall James is wearing a toupee, huh? He looks like a circumcised cock being attacked by a rat.”

Darrell Goodman wasn’t amused. He sat on the couch behind the governor, wearing a tan raincoat, his hands in the pockets, a tennis hat shading his eyes, making them invisible in the already dimly lit room. His body was canted toward the TV, trembling with tension. “You want me to . . .”

The governor turned and pointed a finger at him: “Nothing. Nobody goes near her, not for any reason. I’ll make a statement, sweetness and light, apologize, kick the Watchman’s ass. What’s his name? Sheenan. We kick his ass. But if anything happened to her, I’d be cooked. Done. Finished. Stay the fuck away from her.”

“What about Sheenan? Maybe he’s working with her. Maybe it was a setup.”

The governor grunted: “If that was a setup, he oughta get the Oscar. But it wasn’t a setup, Darrell. That was a real, honest-to-God barefaced threat. He thought he was doing the right thing.”

“Dumb fuck, getting on tape.”

“Let it go. I’ll have Patricia deal with him. But I’ll tell you what, this is no way to get to be president.”

Darrell Goodman studied his brother, his calm face, the smile as he watched the televised assassination. Sooner or later, the governor would realize that they were in a war. Then he’d do more than rave. Then he’d get angry, then he’d move. Darrell looked forward to the day.

The hunter knew Madison Bowe’s name. He’d seen her picture, had never met her, had no idea where she lived, had no thought that she might be in his future. As she spoke to a half million people on Randall James’s show, he knelt on a rubber tarp, not forty miles from her farm, waiting. Above him, the sun was a dull nickel hidden in the clouds.

The rain had come every night for the past three, courtesy of a low-pressure system stalled over the Appalachians. The night before, the rain began just after 3 A.M. He’d woken in his guest room, upstairs in the cabin, snug under the slanting tin roof. He’d listened for a few moments, the water whispering down a drainpipe, the cotton smell of the quilt around him, and then he’d rolled over and slept soundly until four-thirty.

He woke at four-thirty every morning. When he opened his eyes, he lay quietly for a moment, surfacing, then looked at the bedside clock, stretched, and got out of bed. He did fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups on the colonial-style hooked rug from China, then a series of stretches, working hard on his bad leg. As he was finishing his routine, he heard an alarm go off down the hall.

He grabbed his jeans and a pair of fresh underpants from his bag, and padded barefoot down the hall to the bathroom. Better first than at the end of the line . . .

He brushed his teeth, skipped shaving, showered quickly. Out of the shower, he dried himself with his designated towel, pulled on the shorts and jeans, and opened the door. Peyson Carter was leaning against the opposite wall, green eyes, sleepy, wrapped in a bathrobe, holding a hair dryer.

“Morning, Jake,” she said, not looking at his bare chest. His name was Jake Winter. “Billy’s just getting up.”

“Yeah, let me get out of your way.”

He slid past her in the hallway, careful not to brush against her. Peyson was his best friend’s wife. Since Billy Carter first brought her around, fifteen years ago in college, he’d been a little in love with her. Some of the feeling, he suspected, was returned. They were always careful not to touch, because there might be a question of exactly when the touching would stop. And she loved Billy . . .

The guys downstairs were slower getting up, but by the time he’d gotten dressed and into his boots, and gathered his coveralls and gear, they were moving around. He could hear the downstairs shower going, and the plop-gurgle of the coffeemaker, the smell of hot coffee on a cool, rainy morning.

As he left the room, Peyson came out of the bathroom, steamy and pink, wrapped in the robe, and he said, “Scrambled?” and she said, “Yes,” and shouted, “Billy, get up,” and he followed her down the hall, watching her ass, and God help him, if Billy his best friend ever died in a car wreck, he would be knocking on this woman’s door the next week.

Peyson went on to the other bedroom and he turned down the stairs.

In the kitchen, he started breaking eggs into a bowl, got some muffin-premix poured into pan-molds, fired up the oven, took a package of bacon out of the refrigerator. Bob Wilson came out of the downstairs bathroom, hair wet from the shower, and said, “Rain.”

“Mist.”

“Gonna make the woods quiet, anyway. Hope the birds don’t hunker down.”

Sam Barger walked sleepy-eyed from the bedroom and asked Wilson, “You all done in the shower?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Rainin’,” Barger said. “TV says it should be outa here by noon.”

They took a little time over breakfast: the smell of muffins rising in the oven, bacon and eggs, coffee, the pine-wood walls of the cabin. Peyson Carter across from him, curly blond hair, catching his eyes. Did all attractive women keep a spare tire?

They hunted together every spring and fall, looking for Virginia wild turkeys, four men, one man’s wife. They had the routine down. Everybody knew what to bring—bows, boots, camo, pasta, booze, garbage bags, toilet paper, target faces—and everybody knew about where he or she would set up. They were all bow hunters. Between the five of them, they averaged two turkeys per season. Turkeys were tough.

All that brought him to the rubber tarp, where he knelt in the gloom, waiting for his bird to move. A little hungry now, trying to ignore it. The four-foot-square mat made it possible to shift his weight silently; he had to shift frequently because of his lame leg. The tangle of brush around him made it possible to draw the bow without the motion being seen.

He had a Semiweiss Lighting compound bow, the draw weight adjusted down to provide for a very long hold. He was shooting carbon-fiber arrows, one-inch broadheads with stoppers. A good-sized tom hung out in the oaks behind him. And the tom would be coming out to this cornfield, and with luck, following a track along a shallow ravine below him. He knew the bird sometimes did that, because he’d seen the scat and the tracks on scouting trips.

Whether the tom would do it this day, he didn’t know.

He waited, listening, straining to see in through the brush, the problems of the bureaucracy falling away from him. He’d hunted most of his life, since his grandfather had first taken him out when he was six years old. He hunted deer and turkeys in Virginia, elk and antelope out west. When he was hunting, he stepped into a Zen-space and became part of the landscape. Time didn’t pass, nor did it stop; it simply wasn’t. He faded away from himself and his day-to-day problems.

He’d been in place since dawn. The sun came up, rose higher, broke briefly out of the clouds, disappeared again. A breeze sprang up, played with the oak leaves, died again; squirrels ran across the ground, noisy beasts; a chickadee stopped on a branch a foot from his nose.

He saw it all, but didn’t look at it. He was waiting . . . When the cell phone went off.

“Ahhhh . . . Jesus!”

The sound was stunning, like being hit in the face by a snowball. He rushed back to the present, out of the Zen-space to the here-and-now. He unzipped a panel on his camo, pushed his hand through to a shirt pocket underneath, and took the phone out.

“Yes.” The only people who had the number for that phone were people he needed to talk with.

A woman’s voice, quiet, cultivated: “Jake, this is Gina Press. I’m sorry to bother you, I understand you’re on vacation. The guy needs to see you.”

“When?”

“Today. Where are you?”

“Down in the valley. It’ll be a while.”

“It’s pretty urgent. Can I put you on the log for four forty-five?”

He looked at his watch: One o’clock. “Okay—but give me a hint.”

“Madison Bowe.”

“I’ll be there.”

The killer could feel the pull of the .45 in his pocket, pulling down on his shoulders, and maybe his soul.

He was moving Lincoln Bowe. Bowe was pale, naked, unconscious, a sack of meat, for all practical purposes. The killer had him slung in a blue plastic tarp, purchased at a Wal-Mart, and wrestled him down the narrow stairs, under the single bare basement bulb.

He was a big man, straining with the load, trying for a kind of tenderness while moving two hundred pounds of inert human being. He wore blue coveralls from Wal-Mart, purchased for the murder, and a hooded sweatshirt, with the hood pulled over his head, and plastic gloves. He knew all about DNA, and it worried him. A hair, a little spit, and he could wind up strapped to the death gurney, a needle in the arm . . .

He got the load down, puffing and heaving all the way, then looked back up the stairs: two minutes and he’d have to take the body back up. But he couldn’t do the killing upstairs, the neighborhood was too tight, somebody might hear the shot.

He moved Bowe under the light, spread the tarp, exposed him. He was lying on his back, soft and helpless. His body was dead white, touched here and there with blemishes, pimples, the rashes and scrapes of an out-of-shape man in his fifth decade. He looked at Bowe for a few seconds, then said aloud, “Here we are. Christ Almighty.”

No response. Bowe had taken an overdose of Rinolat.

The killer took the .45 out of his pocket, an old, worn gun, made in the first half of the twentieth century, bought at a weekend sale, inaccurate at any distance farther than arm’s length. Which was enough for the task.

He cocked it with a gloved hand, then thought: “The phone book. Damnit.” He ran up the short flight of stairs, got the phone book off the kitchen table, and went back down, closing the door behind him. The phone book already had two bullet holes in it: tests he’d done out in the Virginia countryside. He placed it on the naked man’s chest.

He slipped the safety and said, “Linc . . .” and thought:

Ears . . . damnit.

He put the safety back on, ran back up the stairs, and got the earplugs. They were two bullet-sized bits of compressible yellow foam, made for target shooters. He twisted each one, fitted them into his ears, waited for them to reexpand. If he’d fired the gun in the confines of the basement, without the ear protection, he wouldn’t have been able to hear for a week.

He slipped the safety again, teared up, wiped the tears away, pointed the pistol at the point where the phone book covered the naked man’s heart, said, “Lincoln,” and pulled the trigger.

Without the earplugs, the blast would have been shattering; it was bad enough as it was. The naked man bucked upward, his eyes opening in reflex, the pupils milky with sleep. He stared at the killer for a second, then two, then dropped back flat on the floor.

“Holy mother,” the killer said, appalled. He stood staring for a second, shocked by the milky eyes, by a possible gleam of intelligence, the hair rising on the back of his neck. Then, after a moment, he stooped and picked up the phone book. The slug had gone through, and blood bubbled from a purple hole in the naked man’s chest. The hole was directly over his heart. He engaged the safety on the .45, slipped the gun back in his pocket, and squatted.

The naked man wasn’t breathing. His eyes, when the lids were withdrawn, had rolled up, showing only the whites. He pressed a plastic-covered finger against the naked man’s neck, waiting for any sign of a pulse. Didn’t find one. Lincoln Bowe was dead.

He rolled Bowe up, enough to look at his back. No exit wound. The phone book had worked like a charm: the slug was buried inside the dead man.

The killer was silent, kneeling, looking at the face of the man on the floor. So many years. Who would have thought it’d come to this? Then he sighed, stood up, pulled the magazine on the pistol, jacked the shell out of the chamber, replaced it in the magazine. Looked at the stairs.

This would be the dangerous part, moving the body. If the cops stopped him for anything, he was done.

But they’d made their plans, and he was running with them. He had a lot to do. He stood, still looking at the dead man’s face, then said, “Let’s move, Linc. Let’s go.”

2

Jake stopped at home and changed into a suit and tie, and then caught a taxi to the White House. He checked through the west working entrance, walking first past the outer gate, where a guard examined his ID, then through the inner gate with the X-ray machines.

The X-ray tech, a new guy, spent five minutes looking at his cane, until an older guy came by, glanced at it, and said, “It’s okay. Mr. Winter’s a regular.”

Once through security, he was slotted into a waiting room that offered coffee, newspapers, and high-speed Internet. The room had recently been redecorated—the walls painted blue, the First Lady’s favorite color, and hung with portraits of former First Ladies.

One of the formers, Hillary Clinton, smiled down on the bald spot of John Powers, a Georgetown professor and sometime advisor to the Department of Defense. Powers was sitting in an easy chair reading the Wall Street Journal. He and Jake knew each other as consultants, and as denizens of Georgetown.

“I’m much more important than you are,” Powers said to Jake, folding the paper as Jake limped in. He was an urbane man, who looked like he might have run an art gallery. His over-the-calf socks were dark blue with ladybug-sized smiling suns on them. “I publish in Foreign Policy.”

“That may be true, but my neckties are from Hermès,” Jake said, dropping into a chair across from him. “Wait’ll the faculty senate hears that you were reading the Journal.”

“They all read it, in secret, greedy little buggers,” Powers said. He probed: “Are you over for the boat review?”

Jake shook his head and lied. “Nope. I don’t know why I’m over. Probably the convention. History stuff, working it into the program, successor to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, William Jefferson Clinton, great Americans all, blah-blah-blah.”

“The convention.” Powers smiled, showing a set of glittering teeth. Campus rumor said that he’d had them veneered for television. “I’m here for the boats. Vice President Landers is leading the charge.”

“Good luck with that.” Jake opened his case and took out his laptop, balanced it on his knees, turned it on.

“You don’t mean that,” Powers said, tilting his head. Few people at Georgetown would have.

“I do,” Jake said. “I hope they build them all.”

Powers brightened, remembering. “Ah. That’s right. You were in the military.”

“For a while.” The boats were five atomic-powered attack carriers that would cost twelve billion dollars each. “With the budget as it is, and the old people loading up behind Social Security, I don’t think you’ve got a chance in hell.”

Powers frowned, said, “The Chinese and Indians . . .” A tall man in shirtsleeves stuck his head into the room and nodded at Powers. “Whoops, here I go. See you at school.” Powers took a step away, then said, “Really? Hermès?”

“Yup.”

“What do they cost now? Two-fifty?”

“Yup.”

When Powers was gone, Jake plugged into the Net, did a search for Madison and Lincoln Bowe. He got sixty thousand hits, filtered them to the last three days, and caught a reference to a Madison Bowe interview on Channel 7’s Washington Insider with Randall James.

He called it up from the station’s news cache and watched Madison Bowe do her thing: “They’ve got him, I know it.” The camera made love to her face. “They’ve got Lincoln. If they don’t, why are they so worried about me? They did everything they could to shut me up. I’ll be honest, I’m very worried. I’m worried that they’ll kill him when they’re done with him . . .”

She had tapes of a big shambling man threatening her in her own house. The tapes were made more effective by their security-camera, cinéma-vérité quality. “This is how they work,” she said after the tape ran out. She was appealing, with a nervous lip-nibble that made a male hormone jump up and shout, “I’ll take care of you.”

“This is what they’re doing to our America,” she said, speaking directly to the camera.

They, Jake mused, were us.

He was moving fast now, scanning the Net news, learning as much as he could about her, and about Lincoln Bowe, and the circumstances around Lincoln Bowe’s disappearance; and about their friends, their political allies. Lincoln Bowe had been a conservative Republican, faithful to the party and to the conservative cause, and an aristocrat. Madison Bowe was a lawyer’s daughter, smart, media-wise, good-looking, the perfect mate for a rising Republican star.

Then the star had fallen, brought down by Arlo Goodman.

The fight had started with Goodman’s run for the governorship, through the rise of the Watchmen, and then into Bowe’s reelection campaign. Bowe had been the big stud in Virginia politics, Goodman coming up in the other party, a threat to Bowe’s eminence. A fight that started out as political quickly became personal.

Bowe: Have you seen him with his Watchmen? Just like Munich in the 1930s, a tin-pot dictator with his political thugs, a little Hitler without the mustache . . .

Goodman: Did you ever see that picture of him during Iraq I? The baby-faced bigshot lawyer with his aristocratic chums, with his friends from Skull and Bones, playing poker and smoking Cuban cigars. Let the poor boys die; but none of our precious little richies with their snowy white sweaters with the big blue Y on the chest . . .

Bowe must have rued the day he’d worn that Yale sweater, let himself be shot in the sweater and shorts, sockless with tasseled loafers, a big cigar and playing cards on the table, the unruly hair falling over his forehead—a harmless, attractive photograph at twenty-four that would be shoved up his ass at forty-six . . .

Goodman had won the gubernatorial race. Two years later, with a lot of help from the White House, and a nationwide money-raising campaign, he’d spearheaded the campaign against Bowe. Bowe had lost his Senate seat to a Goodman crony.

Bowe had lost, but he hadn’t shut up. He had the money and the family to re-create himself as the administration’s most prominent critic, able to say what sitting members of Congress, too worried about maintaining their share of the pork, could not. Some thought he might run for his old Senate seat again. Some thought if the Republicans came back in, he might be in line for an ambassadorship, the Court of St. James’s, or Paris.

Then he’d vanished. Stepped into a car, and was gone, moments after making a vicious attack on the administration’s Syrian policy, and, domestically, on special-interest groups who supported the president.

The media had gone crazy. And the longer Bowe was gone, the crazier it had gotten.

ABC had compared his disappearance to Judge Crater’s and Jimmy Hoffa’s, with hints of organized crime. CNN had done a special that spoke darkly of Nazi, Middle Eastern, and South American politics. They’d intercut the film with shots of the Watchmen, in bomber jackets and khaki slacks, meeting in a football stadium in Emporia, with Goodman on a stage in front of a huge American flag; the implication was clear.

Fox had won the ratings war with a show on even crazier theories, including alien abduction and spontaneous combustion.

Jake had been waiting for forty minutes, and was still paging through media commentaries, when his cell phone rang. Gina. “You’re on the log. Come on up.”

Jacob Winter was thirty-three years old, six feet two inches tall, rangy, bony, with knife-edge cheekbones, a long nose, black hair worn unfashionably long, arty-long, and pale green eyes. His ex-wife referred to him as Ichabod-in-a-suit, after Ichabod Crane. He did wear suits: a saleswoman at Saks had once taken two hours of her life to coordinate neckties and shirts and suits with his eyes, and to explain how he could do it himself.

“Your eyes are the thing,” she’d said. “The right tie brings them out. Frankly, you would not normally be considered a great-looking guy, too many bones in your face, but your eyes make you very attractive. Your eyes and shoulders . . .”

Yes. The kind of guy who attracts saleswomen from Saks. Not a bad thing; her comment had cheered him for a week. A man of style . . .

Jake had been born in Montana and raised on a ranch. His mother was an engineer, his father a rancher’s son and a lawyer and eventually a congressman. Jake came late in their lives. Since his parents were both Catholic and pro-life, and politics were involved, the pregnancy was tolerated, but they weren’t much interested in raising another kid—Jake’s siblings were fifteen years older than he.

When he was two, his parents, moving between Billings and Washington, began leaving him for longer and longer periods with his grandparents. By the time he was five, they were out of his life. His grandmother died when he was nine; his grandfather followed when he was fifteen. His parents didn’t want him. After a year of prep school, he went to college at the University of Virginia, a lonely sixteen-year-old with a history book under his arm.

He graduated at nineteen and could afford to do as he wished—when his grandfather died, his will specified that the ranch be sold, and that the money go to Jake, rather than to his father . . .

Two weeks after graduation, he was in Army Officers Candidate School. He spent eight years with Army Intelligence. The first two years had been in training. The third, fourth, and fifth he’d spent in Afghanistan with a series of Army special forces teams.

At the beginning of the sixth year, he was standing too close to a roadside bomb when it went off on the outskirts of the town of Ghazni. A piece of shell the size of a softball cut through his hip. A medic had stuffed Stop-Flo padding into the hole in his leg and butt and on the medevac chopper, said, “Shit, man, you’re lucky. If you’d been standing ninety degrees to the right, that would’ve been your balls.”

The rest of the sixth year was spent at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, getting his leg to work again.

Then, still in therapy, he was posted to the Pentagon, where he discovered an uncanny ability to navigate the world of bureaucracy. While his military colleagues worked on assessments of Chinese special-forces training or the electronic characteristics of Indian shoulder-mounted missiles, Jake’s work had been done inside the Pentagon, the various limbs of Congress, and the rat’s nest of bureaus and departments that surrounded the intelligence agencies.

He found things out; became the Sam Spade of the circular file, the Philip Marlowe of the burn bag.

And though he could eventually run five eight-minute miles, in a hobbled, windmilling way, the Army would never consider him fully rehabilitated. That career was gone—he could stay in, take staff jobs, and someday retire as one of the colonel-intellectuals who argued war theory. Not interested.

Instead, as he worked through rehab and then in the Pentagon, he’d gone to graduate school at Georgetown, with the idea that he might teach at the university level. He’d written his PhD thesis on twentieth-century modernist ideas as they’d bled into politics, and had then rewritten the thesis as a book, Modernism & Politics: The Theories That Changed the World.

He’d gotten solid reviews in the important journals, and followed the first book with New Elites, a study of professional bureaucracies. That had nailed down his status as a political intellectual. He didn’t do television. Television, he thought, was sales. He was research and design.

He’d gotten married before he’d been wounded; the marriage hadn’t survived rehab. Wouldn’t have survived anyway, he thought. The woman was a crocodile. Although, he thought, if she’d known that he would wind up at the White House . . .

His most influential publication had never seen hard covers. At the urging of a military friend, he’d written Winter’s Guide to the Inside, a map and guide to the military/intelligence complex. It had become the best-selling Pentagon samizdat.

The Guide had also gotten him a part-time job with the second most important man in the country.

Ten seconds after Gina called down, Jake met a Marine Corps captain on the indoor side of the waiting room, and followed him into an elevator, up, and then down the eggshell white halls to Danzig’s office.

Going to see the guy. The guy was Bill Danzig, the president’s chief of staff. Danzig had been a deputy secretary of Defense two administrations back, then a Pentagon consultant when the party was out of power. He’d been given a copy of Winter’s Guide, and when he moved to the White House, Jake went on his consultants list.

Jake had done twenty jobs for him in three years, tracking down problems in the bureaucracy. As Danzig came to trust him, the problems became more difficult, the assignments more frequent.

Not quite a full-time job, but lucrative. The job also gave him access to some interesting government computers. Interesting, anyway, for a man who wanted to know what really happened.

A Secret Service agent was standing in the hall outside Danzig’s office door, wearing the neat suit, crisp shirt, and a burgundy necktie, with ear-bug. He nodded at Jake and the jar-head, stepped into the middle of the hallway, blocking a farther walk down the hall, toward the president’s office, and politely indicating the entrance to Danzig’s office.

Jake nodded and took the turn. The Secret Service man said, “Nice to see you again, Mr. Winter.”

“Nice to see you, Henry,” Jake said. Jake remembered everybody’s name; it was part of his talent.

Danzig’s outer office was twenty-five feet wide and twenty feet deep, with a small room to one side for printers and copy machines. He had three secretaries. Two sat opposite each other against the side walls, at identical cherry-wood desks, peering at computers.

A third sat behind a broad table, an antique with curved, carved legs pressing into the deep-blue carpet, under a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, beside the door to the inner office. The table was littered with paper, bound reports, a few family photographs, and a vase of cut cattleya orchids, large yellow blooms dappled with scarlet.

The third woman was Gina, the important one, the one who’d called him. She was in her forties, with a dry oval face and close-cropped hair, bright blue eyes, wrinkles in the skin of her neck. She nodded and smiled, as though she wouldn’t cut his throat in an instant if her boss asked her to. She said, “Great tie,” and touched a button on her desk. Danzig now knew Jake was waiting.

“Great halter,” Jake said. “Is that new?”

Gina touched the ID halter at her neck, from which her White House ID dangled; turquoise cabochons set in Navajo silver. “I just got it—my husband bought it for our anniversary.”

“Nice antique look,” he said. “I like it.”

ID cards separated Washington insiders from the tourists. The elite-insiders were now separating themselves from the clerk-insiders with gemstones: the sale of jeweled ID halters had been booming.

Gina glanced at her desktop, where a diode had gone green. She said, “Go on in. He’s waiting.”

Bill Danzig was tying his shoe. He looked up as Jake came through the door, grunted, and said, “Don’t buy round shoelaces.”

“I’ll make a note,” Jake said.

Danzig pointed at a chair and Jake sat down. “What’s your schedule?” Danzig asked. “Do you have any time?”

Jake shrugged. “I can always make time. We’re on Easter break this week, so I’ve got a week and a half clear.”

“Excellent. Now. What do you know about Madison Bowe?” Danzig asked, settling back. He was a fat man, with shoulders slanting down from a thin neck. He had small black eyes and thinning, slicked-back, dandruff-spotted black hair. The odor of VO5 hung about him like the scent of an old apple.

“What I’ve seen on television and been reading in the papers,” Jake said.

“Give me a one-minute version.”

Jake shrugged: “Madison Bowe, thirty-four years old, married money in the shape of former U.S. Senator Lincoln Bowe, forty-six. Tells the networks that Lincoln Bowe gave a quote moderately hot-tempered speech to a group of Republican law students at the University of Virginia.”

Danzig made a farting noise with his lips; Jake paused, then continued.

“Afterward, she said, he was seen getting into a car with three men in suits, and disappeared. Witnesses told her that the men seemed to be law-enforcement personnel, complete with short haircuts and ear-bugs. Mrs. Bowe says she was told by a highly placed source that the Watchmen picked him up. She fears for his life, since they would never be able to admit afterward that they actually did that.”

“That’s true,” Danzig said.

“She also says that she was being watched on her farm near Lexington, and had been threatened by Watchmen. She has a videotape to prove it. The intimidation part. If the tape isn’t a complete fake, I’d say she had reason to be frightened. The guy, the Watchman, acted like he was in the SS or something . . . and that’s about it. I mean, there are more details . . .”

“Fucking media,” Danzig said. He picked up a yellow pencil and began drumming it on his desktop. “Fucking little right-wing Virginia Law assholes, fucking horse-farm owners. This is the biggest circus since Bill Clinton’s blow job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“She’s good-looking, too. Madison Bowe. Blond. Good tits, great ass. The media like that.”

Jake said, “Yes, sir, I’ve seen her on TV.”

“Lincoln Bowe did not give a quote moderately hot-tempered speech,” Danzig said. He paused, watching Jake’s face from under his hooded eyes. “If you actually heard it, it was borderline nuts. He sounded like he might be drunk. He essentially said that the president and the Senate minority leader are criminals. It was completely out of control.”

“Yes, sir.”

Danzig flashed a thin-lipped fat-lizard’s smile: “I should ask, Jake—have any questions occurred to you?”

“The obvious one. Did the Watchmen take him?”

Danzig spun in his leather chair, a complete turn, caught himself before going around a second time: “That’s the question. And the answer is We don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose. God only knows what Goodman is cooking up down there.”

“So what’s our problem?” Jake asked.

“Embarrassment. Goodman is one of us, we can’t deny it. We loved that whole Watchman idea, the idea of volunteering for America—it was like the Peace Corps, but for us. Like something John Kennedy might have thought of. Best of all, it didn’t cost anything. Now people are starting to say that they’re a bunch of Nazis. We wanted to get rid of Lincoln Bowe, we wanted to get him out of the Senate, and we gave Goodman everything he needed to do the job. Then Bowe disappears, and it all comes back to bite us in the ass.”

Jake nodded. There wasn’t much to say. The Democrats, with the president leading the way, had poured seventy million dollars into the Virginia election, had used Goodman as their point man.

“So. Find out what happened to Bowe,” Danzig said. “Legal as you can. Use the FBI for the technicalities. But find him and give me updates through Gina.”

Jake said, “What’s the FBI doing? I’m not sure I could help.”

Danzig was irritated: “The FBI—they’re doing a tap dance, is what they’re doing. They know a dead skunk when they see one. They’re out looking around, but I’ve been talking to the director, and I know goddamned well that they don’t have their hearts in it. They’re saying that there’s no evidence of a kidnapping, no evidence of force, no evidence of anything. They just stand around and cluck.”

“So, what do I do?”

“Kick some ass. Turn over some rocks. Go threaten somebody,” Danzig said. “Do what you do. We need to get this thing out of the way. We can’t carry this through the summer, into the election, for Christ’s sake.”

“How much time?”

Danzig shook his head. “No way to tell. It’s already a mess. Right now, we’re sitting tight, going back-door to all the media, talking about how it’s a Virginia problem, not a White House problem. They’ve bought it so far. But you know how that works: one thing changes, and they’ll turn on you like a pack of rats.”

“What’s my authority?” Jake asked. Sometimes Danzig didn’t want anyone to know who was interested.

“I am,” Danzig said. “You can use my name. Gina will back you up.”

“Okay.” Jake slapped his thighs. “I’ll move on it.”

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.

3

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.”

When he left, she shook his hand. Her hands were harder and rougher than he’d expected, probably from riding, or working around the farm, he thought. He turned on the stoop and said, “I’ll talk to the governor about you—get you back to your farm, make sure you’re not harassed. If I need more information, can I come back?”

“Yes, you may, anytime,” she said. “If we don’t find Linc pretty soon, he’s gone. We’ll never find him.”

Black, standing behind her, said, “And hey, take it easy, huh? Listen to what Maddy’s saying about the Watchmen. From what I hear, you were always a little too quick to jump out of the airplane.”

When Jake was gone, Madison said to Johnson Black, “The Virginia state police and the FBI are looking for Linc. They’re not getting anywhere, so the president sends some bureaucrat to look for him? This is going to help? Am I going crazy?”

“He’s not exactly a bureaucrat,” Black said.

“That forensic bureaucracy thing was cute,” she said, as they idled back into the living room. “But what does it mean?”

“Jake fixes things,” Black said. “If there’s some really screwed-up problem, that nobody can fix, and that must be fixed, Jake fixes it. He makes lists of people who need to be fired, who need to be promoted. He has ears all over the bureaucracy . . . he scares the heck out of those people. And that’s what’s got to be done if you want to find Linc.”

“We need to scare bureaucrats?”

“That’s right. People are looking for him, they’re paying attention because of all the media coverage, but they’re not desperate to find him. Jake can make people desperate. He can make them feel that their careers are on the line if they don’t—and sometimes, they are.”

“Hmmp.” She settled back on the couch. “I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

“He used to be married to Nikki Lange, you know.”

Her eyebrows went up: “You’re kidding me. He’s the guy?”

“He’s the guy. Couldn’t last, of course. Nikki’s too deeply involved with herself.”

“And her money,” Madison said. “Did he get alimony?”

“No. He told the judge that all he was asking for was his life. The judge almost fell on the floor laughing—she knew Nikki, too. Besides, Jake’s pretty well fixed. Inherited a Montana ranch. Sold to a movie star for big bucks.”

“Maybe he rides,” she said.

“I’m sure he does.” Black smiled. “I was watching you two talk—you got sort of engaged.”

She stuck her tongue out at him, then said, “He’s not entirely unattractive.”

Black snorted. “Just . . . take it easy. Jake is a little strong for most people. As I understand it, he pretty much held his own with Nikki.”

“He jumps out of airplanes?”

“Jake was in Afghanistan for years. He killed people—that was his job. So. You can toy with him, but I wouldn’t annoy him.”

“Mmm,” she said again. “Maybe he can do something. Maybe we need somebody who’ll jump out of an airplane.”

Jump out of an airplane.

He dreamed of jumping out of airplanes that night, jumping all mixed up with the face and figure of Madison Bowe; but mostly jumping. Other jumpers talked about their best moment; popping the chute, flying . . . but for Jake, it had always been that instant when he hit the wind, hit the slipstream, the slap and tickle, the moment of commitment.

He’d liked Afghanistan, the fighting, the comradeship, the countryside, the Afghanis. In Washington ex-military circles, the fashion called for a grudging, manly acknowledgment of having been there, of the toughness of it, but nobody was supposed to have actually liked it, to have loved the exhilaration of combat.

But he did. He’d liked the night runs, he’d liked the ambushes, he’d liked the assaults. He hadn’t minded, too much, the occasional pain, right up until the time he took the bad one. He hadn’t even minded that pain, though he hated the disability that came with it.

He didn’t dream of the disability, though: he dreamed of the airplane door, of the helicopter rope, of the night-vision stalks through the rocky ravines . . .

He didn’t wake up smiling, but he didn’t wake up unhappy, either.

In the morning, after his usual four and a half hours of sleep, he cleaned up and went downstairs, ate toast and eggs, then spent an hour with online newspapers, catching up. When he’d finished with the papers, he went out on the government networks, going deeper on Lincoln Bowe and Arlo Goodman. By seven-thirty, he had their biographies down. He made a call to the FBI, then called a cab.

The day would be warm, he thought, as he locked the door. It must have rained sometime overnight, because the gardens and sidewalks were still wet, but now the skies were clearing again, and sun slanted down through the trees along the street. Because of the torn-up sidewalk, and construction equipment in the street, he walked out to the end of the block to wait for the taxi.

The driver was maybe twenty-one, silent, sullen even, wearing an old tweed coat over a T-shirt, and a flat tweed hat.

“Hard night?” Jake asked.

The driver’s eyes went up to the mirror. “They’re all hard, buddy.”

Jake suppressed a smile: the cabbie was living in a movie, delivering movie lines.

The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building was a bland outcrop of bureaucratic rock on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol. Jake checked through security, got an elevator. He didn’t need directions.

Mavis Sanders was the FBI’s assistant deputy director for counterterrorism. She met him at the door to her inner office. “Another headache,” she said. She was smiling, but her voice wasn’t.

“How have you been, Mavis?” Jake asked. He kissed her on the cheek.

“My day wasn’t too bad until seven-thirty A.M., when I got the note that said you were coming over,” she said.

“C’mon, we’re old chums.”

“Yeah. Sit down, old chum.” She was a slender fine-boned black woman who’d made her reputation tracking Iranian-based jihadists. She dropped into her chair, looked at a piece of paper, set it aside, knitted her fingers on top of her desk, and asked, “What’s up?”

“The president and the chief of staff have decided that I should find Lincoln Bowe. I need access to your investigative files, and then I need you—somebody, but preferably you—to make this thing a priority and get it settled.”

“It is a priority.”

“Bull. Everybody’s playing pass-the-hanky, hoping for the best,” Jake said. “Your Richmond guys are doing liaison, you’ve got nobody really senior involved, except in PR.”

“Jake, I really don’t know anything about it.”

“I’d like to get Novatny working on it.”

“Why us?” she asked, with exasperation. “We don’t do murders, and we’ve got a full plate.”

“Because you can talk privately to the director and tell him that the president is serious about this and that he’s pissed. Tell him that bureaucratic asses are going to be hanged, that careers are going to end. Okay?”

“Okay . . .”

“And because you’re the smartest people I know over here. And because, even though you don’t do murders, you do work counterterrorism, and this has got the flavor of a conspiracy. That’s what we need to penetrate: the ring of guys who picked up Lincoln Bowe. And finally, you’ve got guys who might possibly keep their mouths shut. We don’t want this to become a bigger deal than it already is. We want it to end.”

Her mouth turned down and she said, “It can’t get much bigger. Did you see Madison Bowe on television?”

“Yes. I talked to her last night.”

She looked at him for a moment, sighed, and said, “All right. I’ll talk to the director.”

“And he’ll go along.”

“Yeah. If you stand him in a half-mile-an-hour wind, he can tell you which way it’s blowing.”

“And we get Novatny.”

“Something can be worked,” she agreed.

“Terrific,” Jake said. He pushed himself out of the chair. “I won’t bother you any longer.”

“You’ll mention my name to the guy?”

“Absolutely,” Jake said. “You’ll be an ambassador in two weeks. What country do you want?”

“Fuck you.”

“Thanks, Mavis. Who do I talk to about the files?”

She found an empty conference room for him, and a clerk brought him a short stack of paper, computer printouts. Too short, he thought, when he saw it. The federal investigation was being run out of the FBI’s Richmond office, but the feds hadn’t actually taken control of it. Most of the work was being done by the Virginia Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which was treating Bowe’s disappearance as a missing-persons incident.

But not a routine one.

From paperwork copied from the state cops to the FBI, Jake understood that the cops thought they were on a murder hunt, or possibly some kind of fraud. The police had interviewed the last few friends who’d spoken to Bowe, the people who’d attended the speech he’d given at the law school, and had collected a half dozen interviews done by the NYPD, including the maid who’d found that the cats had gone hungry.

One comment had been repeated a couple of times: Bowe had been drunk in public on at least two occasions before he disappeared. Personal problems? Another woman he was hiding from Madison? But would that have him drinking during the day, on the way to public appearances? He’d have to be a far-gone alky to do that.

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.

Inside he found an airport-style security check. Goines showed up, apparently alerted by the Watchmen, as Jake was processing through the X-ray and metal detectors.

“Mister Winter?” Jake nodded, and as he retrieved his briefcase and cane, Goines said, “This way.”

Goines was annoyed. A small blond man with a dimpled chin, a ten-cent knockoff of his boss, he carried a petulant look. His eyes were like a chicken’s, and like a chicken, he cocked his head to the side to look at Jake as they rode up a couple of floors in the elevator. He led the way to his office, past a secretary in an outer cubicle, and said, “This better be important,” and pointed at a chair as he settled behind his desk.

“There are some indications that the Watchmen may be involved in the detention of Lincoln Bowe,” Jake said, crossing his legs. “The president wants me to find Bowe. He wants me to find him now.”

“What indications?”

“Rumors, mostly,” Jake said. “The FBI investigation is picking up vibrations that the Watchmen are involved, or, at least, that a lot of people think so.”

“That’s a bunch of crap.” Goines stood up again, walked over to his window, hands in his pants pockets, looked out his office window. He had a view of an aggressively blank-walled building on the other side of the street, part of a medical center. “People seem to be lining up to shoot at us. If it turns out that a Watchman is involved, he’s on his own, he’s an outlaw. We sure as hell don’t condone it.”

Jake said, “Just before he disappeared, Bowe called the governor a cocksucker.”

Blood drained away from Goines’s face, and a quick tic of fear passed across it. He shook his finger at Jake but said, casually enough, “That was unforgivable. Governor Goodman is a sophisticated gentleman, a successful lawyer before he entered public service. He understands the likes of Lincoln Bowe. He would never go after Bowe, but you can’t blame him for not liking a man who could be so vulgar. He won’t be pleased with the prospect of tearing up the Watchmen on Bowe’s behalf.”

Jake thought, Jesus, I haven’t seen a tap dance like this in years. Is this place bugged?

“I can absolutely understand that and so does the president,” Jake said. Bureaucratic-speak: he could do it as well as anyone, or even better. “The president said, ‘I trust Governor Goodman implicitly, but that doesn’t mean that there might not be some rotten apples at the bottom of the barrel.’ And that’s all I’m asking: that you check for rotten apples.”

“The governor can speak to that. But you must have heard that some of us think that Bowe has gone on a little vacation, and is letting us twist in the wind.”

“We’re looking into that, too,” Jake said.

“Good.” Goines looked at his watch: “One minute: let’s go see the governor.”

4

The governor’s outer office was a large, cool room with gray fabric chairs and mahogany tables, decorated with bald eagles—wildlife paintings of the kind seen on postage stamps, eagles with talons extended, about to land on weathered branches, or soaring over lakes with white-capped mountains in the background. A two-foot-long bronze eagle launched itself off a stand in the center of the room; a bronze scroll of the U.S. Constitution was draped over the stand.

An elderly secretary and a blond college intern worked behind a double desk. The elderly woman called into the governor’s office, and the intern smiled at Jake and didn’t stop smiling.

“I’ll tell the governor you’re waiting,” the older woman said.

Arlo Goodman was a friendly guy, big white teeth, blond hair falling over his forehead, flyaway, as though he’d been running his fingers through it. He was in shirtsleeves, the sleeves rolled up. He stuck his head out of his office door, something Danzig would never have done with a subordinate, and said, “Hey, Jake, come on in. You want some coffee or water?”

“Coffee would be good,” Jake said. They did the Arlo Goodman left-handed shake—Goodman had taken a Syrian bullet in the right hand, and the bones had been shattered, leaving a knot of shrunken fingers.

To his secretary: “Jean, could you get that?”

She went off to get it and Goines said, “I’ll let you guys talk.”

Goodman nodded and led Jake into his office, asked, “What’ve you been doing about the limp, you gimpy fucker? You working the leg?”

“It’s about as worked as it’s going to get,” Jake said. Goodman had done research on him; he pretended not to notice. “I keep stretching it, but it’s maintenance. How’s the hand?”

Goodman grimaced: “Same as with your leg. Not much point. Too much nerve damage. I can poke a pen through, to sign my name, so that’s a benefit.”

A minute more of physical-rehab chatter, then Jean arrived with the coffee—plain, heavy earthenware cups—and when she’d shut the door behind her, Goodman said, “I’m scared to death about Lincoln Bowe, Jake. He’s a fool, but I wouldn’t want any harm to come to him—for my own sake, if nothing else. I’ve got all these rumors bubbling around me . . . I mean, Jesus.”

“What’s there to be scared about?”

Goodman was deadly serious now: “Come on, man.”

Jake shrugged. “All right.”

Goodman pointed him at a chair in a conversation group, slumped in one opposite. “Jake: I’m sure you’ve been researching me, so you probably know my stump speech. This country is at a crossroads. We are losing the thing that makes us American. The idea is what holds us together: the idea in the Declaration, the idea in the Constitution. But the people running the country now—not the president, he’s a good man—but the Congress, and these people flooding across our borders, the South Americans, the Caribs, the Africans, the Arabs, they have one thing in common: they’re out to rip this country for whatever they can get out of it. End of story. They don’t care about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, all the rest of it . . . Well, like I said, you know the stump speech.”

“I do.” Jake waited.

“We’re the counterpressure against those things. People are constantly trying to bring us down, to shut us up. Bowe was one of those people. And he wasn’t fair about it—he wasn’t willing to take you on in open debate. He’d use any little piece of dirt he could find, real or imagined, to malign anyone on the other side of the question. He’d do anything . . . which was one reason we’d never do anything aimed at him. We’d never give him an excuse. Now this.” Goodman turned away and looked out his office window, toward the capitol. “Do you know Madison Bowe?”

“I’ve met her.”

“So have I,” Goodman said, grinning. “She’s quite the little package. Tits and ass and brains and, worst of all, professional camera training. Did you know she used to be a reporter here in Richmond? Pretty hot, too.”

“I saw something in her biography,” Jake said.

“And now, she’s your basic political nightmare, if you’re on the wrong end of things,” Goodman said. “If she’d married me, instead of Bowe, I’d be the president by now.” He laughed and turned back to his desk. Chatter done. “So what does Bill Danzig want? You’re doing what? An investigation? An inquiry?”

“A search,” Jake suggested. “Ordered by the president. Bowe is being used to hammer you and we’re getting the ricochets. It’s getting worse. We’ve got the convention coming up.”

“If there weren’t any ricochets, would they still be worried?” Goodman asked.

He was teasing, and Jake had to laugh. “Worried, but less worried,” he said.

“That’s what I figured. Danzig doesn’t take his eye off the ball,” Goodman said. “So, what specifically are you going to do?”

“I’m gonna find him—Lincoln Bowe—one way or another. I’m bringing in some FBI heavyweights. I may go to Homeland Security, the Secret Service, whatever. I’m going to squeeze. Some of your Watchmen, among other people.”

“Mmm.” Goodman peered at Jake for a moment, weighing him. Then, “We had nothing to do with the disappearance of Lincoln Bowe. You should convey that to the president.”

Jake said, “Are you talking for yourself, or the whole state of Virginia?”

Goodman was irritated. “For myself and the people around me. I obviously can’t speak for everybody.”

“Mrs. Bowe says the Watchmen are involved. And after the incident at her house . . .”

“That was a mistake made by a low-level Watchman, and he has been thoroughly counseled on his mistake,” Goodman said. “I’ve sent a letter of apology to Mrs. Bowe, with my personal guarantee that she can return to her farm with no fear of any interference. She has an absolute right to do that as an American. The Watchmen are not thugs, and we don’t tolerate any thuggishness.”

“You can understand her fear . . .”

“And perhaps you can understand ours, and why that poor dumbass Watchman did what he did,” Goodman said, now with some heat. “She has been throwing mud at us, just like her husband did. Calling us Nazis, telling people that we’re no better than the Klan. Slandering fine people who are only trying to heave this country up out of the mess that people like Lincoln Bowe got us into. Now, she’s trying to claim that we kidnapped her husband and probably killed him. It’s utter, errant nonsense.”

“Governor, nobody ever thought you would have given an order to get rid of Lincoln Bowe. You’re far too smart for that . . .”

“I’m too moral for that,” Goodman interjected.

“I’m absolutely willing to believe you,” Jake said. “But what if some Watchman somewhere decided that he’d had enough? Who thought he’d be doing you a favor? Like this guy who went to Mrs. Bowe’s house? Somebody who believes in direct action?”

Goodman: “You know John Patricia? The Watchman director?”

“I know who he is.”

“We’ve had him looking for exactly that. We’ve had him talking to our organizers at the county level and even at the town level. Looking for anything that might point to a Watchman involvement with Bowe. So far, nothing. So far, we’ve been chasing our tails.”

“So you’re looking.”

“We are looking and we will continue to look,” Goodman said.

“If you find anything, you will get in touch with me?” Jake asked.

“We will. Or the FBI, if that’s appropriate.”

They talked for another ten minutes, the governor adamant that Bowe’s disappearance must, in some way, have been brought about by Bowe himself—or maybe, though he didn’t believe it, was a routine crime gone bad, a robbery that turned into murder, with the body dumped in the woods.

“But that . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t believe that. These guys he drove away with . . . they sound like feds, to me. He didn’t do anything that’d get him picked up by some, you know, intelligence organization, did he? I mean, he was on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he’d know all kinds of weird stuff.”

“I don’t think so. Mrs. Bowe sort of agrees with you on this—she says the cause is close by. It’s no big international conspiracy.”

“She’s right,” Goodman said. “But she thinks I did it, and I think Bowe did it. He’s involved somehow. He engineered this, and it’s working.”

“You have no proof.”

“No. Of course not. If I had it, I’d be shoving it down their throats.” Goodman smiled again, quickly. “Even if I didn’t have it, but I was pretty sure about it, I’d stuff it down their throats. But I got nothin’.”

End of interview. They both stood up and Goodman reached out to shake hands again. “If you need anything, call Ralph. Any time of day or night,” Goodman said.

“Thanks,” Jake said, and moved toward the door.

Goodman asked to his back, “Would you do it again? The combat?”

Jake stopped and nodded. “Yes. I would.”

“Did you like it?” Goodman was grinning at him.

“Yes. Judging from your question, you did, too.”

“We’re a couple of unfashionable motherfuckers,” Goodman said, walking over to his desk. “Stay in touch, Jake.”

Goines gave him a private cell-phone number and left Jake at the elevators. Jake was almost out of the building when a woman’s voice called to him: “Mr. Winter.”

He looked to his left. The intern from Goodman’s office was standing in a side hallway. She held up a hand and folded her fingers toward herself. Jake stepped over. “Can I help you?”

She was a tall blonde, a southern belle, busty, long legs, pink tongue touching her puffy lips. Her skirt and blouse cost somebody a couple of hundred bucks each, he thought, and her silk vest looked like Hermès. “There’s a man named Carl V. Schmidt in a town called Scottsville,” she said. “He’s a Watchman. Goodman and Patricia and Goines are worried about him. They’re trying to find him and they can’t. They think he might have something to do with Lincoln Bowe.”

“Carl V. Schmidt.”

“That’s right. I printed out his name and address.” She handed him a slip of paper. “My name’s on there, too. You can call me at the house.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I don’t like Arlo,” she said. “He’s crazy. He wants to be president, and that wouldn’t be good. He also wants to sleep with me. Which he won’t get to do.”

Jake smiled at her. “You’re not worried about all this?”

She shook her head and smiled back. “My old man’s got more money than Jesus Christ and he’s a big contributor. Arlo won’t lay a finger on me.”

“But you work for Arlo . . . ,” Jake said, picking up her use of Goodman’s first name.

“Because I’m a poli-sci major,” she said. “He’s nuts, but he’s the governor. He’s an opportunity. Anyway, check out Carl V. Schmidt, and if it comes to anything, remember my name, and get me a job. I’ll take anything in the White House. I work really hard and I’m really smart.”

Jake nodded: “Thanks. If anything happens, I’ll call.”

“Thank you.” She turned and tripped away, down the side hall. Jake looked after her for a moment, watching her ass, and she knew it without turning around. She lifted a hand and twiddled her fingers at him, good-bye.

Very attractive, Jake thought, as he headed toward the door, and so young, for such treachery.

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.

The house was dim and smelled of old moldy wallpaper. The floorboards creaked underfoot as he walked through it. Once inside, there was no point in being casual: he hurried through, calling, “Hello? Hello? Mr. Schmidt?” No answer.

The house had two bedrooms, a small living room, a kitchen with a breakfast nook, a bathroom, and a basement that smelled of dirt and propane. One of the bedrooms had four Browning gun-safes lined up against a wall. There was no chance that he could have opened them, if he’d had to; but he didn’t have to, since the safe doors were standing open, and all four were empty.

He started looking for paper, or blood, or anything that would tie Schmidt to anything relevant. He went through the kitchen, checked the area around the telephone, the kitchen counter drawers, the stove drawer. He found paper, all right, but all of it was routine. Four phone bills, all old, all checked off with an ink scrawl, which probably indicated that they’d been paid. He stuck them in his pocket.

The kitchen cupboards were bare: they’d been completely cleared out. The refrigerator was empty and unplugged.

He went into the bedroom, found a three-inch stack of porno magazines under the bed, with maybe fifty gun magazines. Nothing under the mattress. There were still a few shirts hanging in the closets, some shoes on the closet floor, a few T-shirts and golf shirts in the bureau. He patted through them, found nothing. He did a tap dance on the floorboards, looking for a hidey-hole.

Noticed that there was no suitcase in the house; there were no bags at all.

The living room was spare. He gave it a minute, rolling an old couch up to look at the lining, rapped the floorboards and moldings, then gave up. A hallway showed a hatch that led up into the eaves. He pulled out a chair, pushed on the hatch, pushed harder. Dust began to fall out, and he let it go.

Into the basement, feeling the pressure of time. Damp. A jumble of cheap tools, rusting pliers, a five-dollar socket set, a broken coping saw, were strewn on a chest of drawers used as a workbench. A reloading bench sat in a corner, with a rack of brass and powders above it. A furnace and a water heater. Nothing much. He was about to head back up the stairs when he noticed a circular mark on the concrete floor: one end of the workbench had been rotated away from the wall. He listened for a moment, tension building—he’d been inside too long—then grabbed a corner of the bench and pulled it out from the wall.

Nothing behind it. Then he looked up: an aluminum heating duct was fastened between two joists. There was a space between the duct and the first floor’s subfloor. If you stood on the workbench . . .

He climbed up on it, slipped his hand up and down the top of the vent. At the far left side, he touched something, pulled his hand back. Couldn’t see. Tentatively touched it again. Felt like . . . rags. He gripped it. Heavy. Pulled it out.

A bundle of rags. He knew without looking what was inside: a gun. He carefully unwrapped the bundle and found a Colt .45. One of Jake’s personal favorites . . .

All right. The guy had four gun safes upstairs, once presumably full of guns, now all gone—and he’d hidden a .45 in the basement? What was that about? He weighed the options for a moment, then put the gun back, jumped down, pushed the bench back against the wall.

He’d have to think about all this, but first, he had to get out. The burglar/instructor suggested that you never stay inside a house more than four or five minutes: even if nobody comes, you begin to screw up, you leave behind prints, you give people a chance to see your car.

Jake hurried upstairs, peered through the windows. Nobody there, nobody coming. He slipped out, let the door latch behind him, put the key back in the washing machine. Picked it up again, wiped it, and still holding it in his shirtsleeve, dropped it back in place.

Walked back to his car, feeling self-righteous: Nope, I wasn’t in there, just knocked on the door. . . .

Got in the car and let out a breath. Damn: he hadn’t been that tense since Afghanistan. But he was smiling when he backed out of the driveway. He could feel the rush coming on. Feel the rush . . .

Schmidt was running. He might have expected to come back, but not anytime soon. All the perishable stuff was gone, the clothes left behind were all older, worn out, or showing wear. No suitcases, no guns. Had he sold the guns? Maybe the ATF could check; sixty-four guns would be worth at least twenty thousand.

If he’d sold all his guns, he probably was digging a deep hole. If he hadn’t, if he’d stored them someplace, then they’d have a lead on Schmidt’s best friend . . .

Jake was ten minutes in the car, already north of Scottsville, heading in to Charlottesville, heading home, when Novatny called.

Novatny was running, out of breath, shouting. “Where are you? Jake? Where are you?”

5

“We’re moving!” Novatny shouted.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“Sorry, I’ve been running up some stairs . . .” Novatny took a deep breath. “We’re getting a helicopter, heading out to Virginia. Are you still in Richmond?”

“I’m down south of Charlottesville.”

“Then you’re a hell of a lot closer than we are,” Novatny said.

“What happened?”

“The Buckingham County sheriff’s office has a body out in a rural area, a state forest, all burned up,” Novatny said. “They found a charred ID near the body. The ID belongs to Lincoln Bowe.”

“Ah, man.”

A moment of confused shouting at the other end, then, “We’ve got a chopper coming, oughta be off the ground in five, ten minutes. There’s a place down there, called, let me see, on my map it’s called Sliders, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything there. Here. Head south on Twenty . . .”

“Hang on, hang on, let me pull over.” Jake pulled into a driveway, got a notebook from his briefcase, and jotted down Novatny’s instructions. “. . . take a left on 636. You go in there a way, couple of miles, and you’ll come to the Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest headquarters. They’re telling us that’s the best place to put down a chopper.”

“Have you talked to Danzig?”

“No. I can’t get to him direct, I’d have to go through some routing. If you can call him direct . . .”

“I’ll call him. See you at the park.”

Jake backed out of the driveway, floored it, and the Mercedes took off like a scalded rabbit. He was forty miles away. He had to slow down going through Scottsville, but he didn’t slow much and turned heads as he went through. No cops, he thought, no cops, please no cops . . .

Over the bridge and out on Highway 20, past Schmidt’s place again, he swerved around a log truck, pushed it to eighty. The countryside was rolling, the road was curvy: perfect for a high-speed run in a German car if you didn’t mind killing the occasional housewife out to get her mail from the roadside mailbox.

He worried about that, a little, but didn’t slow. Instead he compounded the sin by punching Gina’s number on his cell phone. She came up and he said, “I need Danzig right now.”

“He’s talking to the president,” she said.

“Go get him.”

“Really?”

“Go in and get him. Get him!” Jake shouted.

“I’m going to put you on hold . . . hang on.”

Danzig came up, a worried cut in his voice: “What?”

“The FBI has a burned body down south in Virginia. There’s a possibility that it’s Lincoln Bowe.”

“A good possibility?”

“A charred ID was found nearby and it’s his. The FBI’s moving on it. I’m forty miles away in a car, heading down there fast as I can. We might need somebody to sit on the sheriff’s department, if it’s not too late. You gotta tell the press office, get them working.”

“Charred?”

“I don’t know what that means. But apparently, the body’s pretty badly burned.”

“Why are you only forty miles away?”

“I’ll tell you about it later. It might not be a coincidence,” Jake said.

“All right, all right. You go, I’ll take care of it at this end,” Danzig said. “Call me back for anything significant. Anything, even if you think I might already know about it. Call me.”

He kept the car at eighty, screamed through Dyllwyn, a fast right, then another right onto Highway 60 at Sprouse’s Corner, seventy miles an hour past the county courthouse at Buckingham—hell, none of the cops would be there, he thought—a left on 24, six miles, a helicopter overhead the last mile of it, rolling through the intersection of 636 and coming up on the forest headquarters complex as the black helicopter put down in a graveled parking area.

Three Buckingham County sheriff’s cars waited on the edge of the parking area, their light racks turning. As Jake pulled in, Novatny and Parker did the weird getting-out-of-a-helicopter hunched-over high step that everybody did. They were trailed by a senior citizen who clutched a hard plastic briefcase. A sheriff’s deputy got out of one of the cars and jogged toward Jake, who parked just inside the turnoff.

“Sir, this is a restricted area.”

“I’m with them,” Jake said, pointing at the chopper.

Novatny and Parker were talking to another uniform, Novatny waving Jake over. He and the cop walked over and Novatny nodded at the senior citizen and said, “Jake, this is Clancy, he’s with our crime-scene unit, and this is Sheriff Bill Winsome, his people are working the scene right now.” Then Novatny asked, “What the heck did you do? You start talking to people and we get a burning body the next day.”

Jake said, “Hey, I just put out the word.”

Parker said, “Somebody sure as shit got it. We’ll want to know who you talked to.”

All the cops looked at Jake for a beat, then Novatny turned back to Winsome. “You were saying . . .”

“Somebody tried to burn the body with brush and gasoline. You can still smell a little gas,” Winsome said. He was an elderly man, with a round pink face and white hair growing out of his ears. He had the sad liquid eyes of a bloodhound. “The wood is still damp from all the rain and didn’t burn. They had it stacked around the body like one of them pyres.”

“What about the head?” Parker asked.

“Still no head,” the sheriff said.

“What about the head?” Jake asked.

“The head’s missing,” Winsome said. “It’s hard to tell what happened, exactly, because . . . well, if you’ve ever seen a burned body, they sorta melt. This one’s pretty bad, the hands are gone, most of the feet . . . but there should be a skull, or indications of a head, and there isn’t one. A head. Of course, we haven’t been all the way through the ashes, but I don’t think there’s gonna be anything there.”

“Who found the body?” Jake asked.

“Guy who lives down there—Glenn Anderson—saw a fire last night. Where there shouldn’t be one—”

“He didn’t go over and check it?” Parker interrupted.

“No, that happens from time to time, you get people out on them hiking trails. Anderson was out working in his shop, changing the oil in his brush cutter, and he heard this whoosh, and he looked, and here’s a fire as big as a house. It died down pretty quick, and wasn’t any threat because it’s been so wet. He figured some camper poured white gas on his campfire and got more than he bargained for. But then he got to talking to a neighbor this morning—they could smell something bad—and they went over for a look.”

“Roast pig,” Novatny said.

“Where’s the scene?” Jake asked.

“Mile or so up the road, there’s a trail head, a hiking trail goes back into the woods,” the sheriff said. “It’s pretty narrow up there, lots of trees, thought it’d be better to put the chopper down here.”

“Who knows about this?” Parker asked.

“Nobody, except the people out here,” the sheriff said. “Won’t nobody find out about it until I say so, either, or somebody’ll wind up with their ass kicked up around their ears.”

Jake drove, trailed by the two cop cars, Novatny, Parker, and the sheriff riding with him. Clancy rode in one of the sheriff’s cars. The sheriff, in the backseat, said, “I think maybe they got more of a fire than they expected, panicked, and ran. People think you sprinkle a gallon of gas on a bunch of wood and you get a campfire. What you get is more like an explosion. You can burn your ass off if you’re not careful.”

The road was narrow, snaking through the woods, past a clear-cut the size of a couple of football fields, then over a hump and down a barely noticeable incline to the trailhead.

A half dozen cop cars with LED racks, a couple of unmarked cars, and a van were pulled into the trailhead parking area. A farmhouse stood on the other side of the road, most of a half mile away, Jake guessed. Maybe a couple of city slickers thought they could get away with a fire, that far from anything. Maybe . . . But why didn’t they just bury the body?

Two uniformed deputies and two men in civilian clothes were leaning on car fenders; when Jake pulled in, they straightened up and looked toward the newcomers. Jake got out with his cane, followed by Novatny, Parker, and Winsome. Clancy got out of the sheriff’s car and joined them. The odor of roast pig was thin, but definitely in the air. They all turned their noses toward it, looking back into the trees.

Winsome introduced them as FBI investigators, and one of the plainclothesmen, an investigator with the Virginia BCI out of Appomattox, whose name was Kline, said, “Better come on back.”

The body was fifty yards into the woods, a small end-of-the-trail clearing, clumps of old toilet paper in the brush, a few bottles and cans, a collapsed plastic trash barrel. The odor of burned pig was thicker here, with the smudgy underscent of petroleum. Though he’d seen people incinerated by napalm, Jake didn’t immediately recognize the body when they stepped into the clearing. It looked more like a rotting tree stump, with a new tree growing up out of the old roots.

“Jeez,” Novatny said. They all sidled toward it. The closer they got, the more the body looked like a stump, until the last few feet, when they could see bloody raw fissures in the blackened flesh. It still didn’t look human, until Jake went a bit sideways and saw the shoes. The shoes were badly burned, but still recognizable. The victim had been bound with wire to the tree, in a kneeling position, one foot on each side of the tree.

No head.

“Not just wire,” Novatny said. “Barbed wire. Wonder if we could trace that? Where they got it.”

“Could’ve just clipped it out of a fence in the night,” the sheriff said. “That’s what I would’ve done—if I was going to do this.”

“Was he alive? Were they torturing him?” Jake asked.

“Have to wait for the autopsy,” the sheriff said. “But nobody heard anything. No screaming, or shouting. No commotion. I don’t know why you’d wire him up if he was dead—why not just lay him down on a big stack of wood, and pile some more up around him?”

“Nobody saw a car?”

“No. After the fire died down, Anderson went back to changing his oil, he never saw a car leave. They must’ve come in here with a car, though. Didn’t see much in the way of tracks, it’s all gravel and bark in the parking area.”

“You done with the photos?” Clancy asked, looking at the sheriff.

“Yeah . . . got video and stills both. We were waiting for you before we did any more.”

Clancy walked once around the body, then stepped close, knelt on a bare patch of ground, took a short metal rod out of his case, and began pushing a shoe off the remains of a foot. The shoe fell apart, exposing a patch of reddened flesh. Clancy took another instrument from his case, a nine-inch-long polished steel tube that looked a bit like a syringe, cocked it by sliding the barrel, as if it were a tiny shotgun, pressed the tip against the red flesh, and squeezed. The instrument snapped, they all jumped, and Clancy pulled it back and stood up.

“How long?” Novatny asked.

“Pretty good sample. Ten minutes,” Clancy said. He put the sampler in his case and snapped the case. “I’ll go back to the car and do it.”

“Ten minutes?” The sheriff’s eyebrows were up. “How reliable?”

“With a good sample, ninety percent,” Clancy said. “I’ve got a digital DNA record in my laptop.”

“How come that doesn’t get down to us?” the sheriff asked. “On-scene DNA could be handy.”

Clancy shrugged. “You could have it if you wanted it—but the machine costs seventy grand, and it’s about two grand per test, counting amortization on the equipment. Regular’s what, a hundred and fifty bucks, for a two-day wait?”

“No head,” Jake said, as Clancy disappeared back down the track. “No blood? Any sign of a struggle, any . . .”

“What you see is what we got, other than the ID,” Winsome said. “We’ve already bagged the ID. We could do some soil tests, but we wouldn’t learn much. The autopsy ought to tell us if he was alive.”

Jake looked at Novatny: “Christ, I hope it’s not him.”

Parker said, “Chuck, it’s him. You know it, I know it. The media is gonna go exactly berserk. This is gonna be worse than a Hollywood murder. This is gonna be worse than anything we’ve ever seen.”

They all looked glumly at the body for another ten seconds, and Novatny said, “Well, at least we’re not gonna be bored.”

“Don’t usually smell the gas afterward,” Jake commented.

“What?” The sheriff looked at him.

“The gas usually burns up and the smell of the fire cloaks whatever is left. This smells like they either spilled some that didn’t burn, or they deliberately sprinkled it around where it wouldn’t burn.”

“Why?”

Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just telling you that you usually can’t smell gas afterwards. At least, you can’t smell jellied gas—napalm. Not the day afterwards.”

“Well . . .” The sheriff looked for a moment at Jake, then turned to the state investigator and said, “Make a note, I guess.”

Jake said, “When the Klan was big, a hundred years ago, they’d lynch black guys they thought had raped or killed or smart-assed a white woman.” He nodded at the body. “Sometimes they’d use barbed wire and wire the victims to trees, or light posts, and set them on fire. They often castrated them. I never heard about them taking a head, though.”

“Is that right?” the sheriff asked.

“That’s right,” Jake said. “The barbed wire was kind of a thing. It’s also the kind of thing that’ll get the attention of the TV people.”

The sheriff said, “Huh.”

Jake said, “So it’s possible that they poured the gas on him and got more fire than they expected. But why didn’t they just bury him? They could have put him two feet down, two guys working hard, in the time it took to pile up that wood. If they’d done that, he might not have been found for years. Was the fire really meant to burn him up? Or was it an advertisement? This whole scene looks to me like it was designed to get the media to freak out.”

The sheriff looked at him closely, starting from his shoes, then asked, “What exactly do you do?”

Novatny said, “You know, if that’s what it is . . . Jake, fifty people are going to look at our reports, the crime-scene stuff. It’s gonna leak.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Jake said.

The smell of the body had become intolerable, and there wasn’t much to do other than look at it. They were walking out of the woods and met Clancy halfway, coming in.

He nodded. “It’s him.”

Evening was coming on, and with it, the mos-quitoes. Jake walked down the road, kicking up little puffs of gravel dust, working his cell phone; Novatny walked the other way, working his.

Danzig said to Jake, “Jesus Christ. Hang on, Jake, Jesus Christ . . .”

Jake heard him, apparently on another phone: “It’s him. Yeah, ninety percent, they did DNA on him. Naw, naw, it’s him.” Talking to the president.

Then he was back: “Does that leave you anywhere to go?”

“Ah . . . maybe.”

“Do I want to know about it?”

“No. It’s not necessary—yet. And I’m on a cell phone here.”

“Okay. Tell me when it’s necessary to tell me. Has the FBI detailed anyone to talk to Madison Bowe?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Tell this Novatny guy that I’m calling the director. I want somebody with some rank to do it. I don’t want a goddamn sheriff’s deputy calling her on the phone. Tell Novatny to coordinate it with the director’s office. I’ll call the director right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Novatny, Parker, and the sheriff were standing in the parking area, waiting for Jake to get off the phone. When he did, Novatny asked, “Now what?”

“The case is yours,” Jake said. “Full-court press. You’re to coordinate with the director’s office on informing Mrs. Bowe. Danzig’s calling the director now. He may send the director himself over to tell her.”

“That’ll put him in a good mood,” Parker said. “The director being such a warm human being in the first place.”

“This is gonna be the mother of all task forces,” Novatny said to Parker. “And we got the gun. We need a full crime-scene crew down here right now. We need guys debriefing the Virginia cops. We need everything.”

The sheriff turned up his hands: “Then I’m out of it. Anything you need, call me.”

“You don’t sound that unhappy,” Parker said. “You don’t mind a bunch of feds trampling around your jurisdiction?”

An excessively thin smile from the sheriff: “I got five hundred eighty-nine square miles to take care of, that don’t have anything to do with U.S. senators getting decapitated and burned at the stake. I’ll take care of the five hundred eighty-nine, you take care of the senator. Of course, anything we can do to help, we’ll do, you poor fuckers.”

Back in the car, heading toward the helicopter, Jake said to Novatny, “About that tip, the guy with the guns.”

“Schmidt,” Novatny said. “I’ve been thinking about that, but I didn’t want to mention it around the cops. What’d you find?”

“I went by the house, nobody home. I looked in the windows. There are four gun safes in one of the bedrooms, their doors are open, they all look empty. Doesn’t look like there’s been anybody home for a while. There’s a note on the door from the Watchmen, asking him to check in. He apparently hasn’t.”

“All right.” Novatny nodded. “You didn’t go inside?”

“Of course not. But I was thinking, you might want to have some of your people take a look at it.”

“I’ll do that,” Novatny said.

“I mean right now. Because I’m gonna call the governor and tell him about the body. He’s gonna find out pretty quick anyway, and I want to be on his good side. Just in case that might be useful. If we have to approach the Watchmen . . . Anyway, you might want to have a couple of your guys on the scene before the Watchmen have a chance to go over the place.”

Novatny nodded again. “We’ve got two Richmond guys at a Holiday Inn in Charlottesville, they’ve been working the case from there,” he said, as they pulled up to the chopper. “Give me Schmidt’s address and a ten-minute head start.”

When Jake was back on the road, he called Goines again, told Goines to find the governor and to have him call back.

“I don’t know how fast I can find him,” Goines said.

“Make it as quick as you can. Make it an urgent priority,” Jake said.

Goodman was back in ten minutes, as Jake was coming into Buckingham, this time at the speed limit. “Mr. Winter? This is Arlo Goodman.” A little less friendly than he had been; more formal, as if he were expecting trouble.

“We found Lincoln Bowe’s body,” Jake said.

Long pause, the airwaves twittering through the cell phone. Then, “Here, in Virginia?”

“Down by Appomattox, between Buckingham and Appomattox.”

“Ah, no.” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“I thought you’d want to know,” Jake said.

“I appreciate it.” A little warmer now. Goodman could turn it on and off, even over the phone. “Who else knows?”

“Some cops. The FBI. The president. We’re moving to tell Mrs. Bowe. The FBI has taken over the scene, a full crime-scene crew is on the way in. Your BCI guys are already on the scene.”

“They didn’t call me,” Goodman said.

“The sheriff was discouraging calls, knowing that the FBI was on the way,” Jake said. “Everybody is walking on lightbulbs.”

“They should have called me,” Goodman said. His voice was quiet, but suffused with rage. Somebody was in trouble.

Jake asked, “You know anything about this, Governor?”

A pause—a shocked pause?—then, “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about a panic-stricken bunch of Watchmen looking for a gun guy named Carl V. Schmidt. I’m talking about the search being run from your office. Your Watchman even left a note hanging on Schmidt’s front door. The feds are closing in on Schmidt’s house now. If you guys know anything . . . I mean, it’ll all come out in the investigation.”

“What’s the name again?”

“Carl V. Schmidt.”

“I don’t know it. The Watchmen are looking for him?”

Jake ignored the lie; it was routine politics. “Yes.”

“I’ll talk to John Patricia. Right now,” Goodman said. “Will you be on this phone?”

“I will.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Out through Buckingham, at Sprouse’s Corner, Jake stopped, looked left. He could take Highway 20 back through Charlottesville, and then north. He could be home in two and a half or three hours. Or he could go straight down Highway 60, back into Richmond. If he went north, he could stop at Schmidt’s place and see what the feds were doing. On the other hand, Danzig would want him doing political assessment, not crime-scene work, about which he knew nothing.

He thought about it for a few seconds, then went straight through the intersection, down 60, back toward Richmond.

Back toward Goodman.

6

Howard Barber arrived late, cursing the traffic, the cops who wanted ID, who might have doubted that he could be both a friend and a Republican, who suspected he might be a media interloper of some kind

Barber disabused them quickly enough. He had an officer’s voice, a CEO’s voice, the voice of a man who ran one of the hottest high-tech start-ups. They waved him through when he used the voice, pointed him at a parking spot next to a stand of azaleas. Before he got out of the car, he got on his cell phone, checked in with his office: “Hold everything for me, don’t put anything through. I’m at the Bowes’, it’ll take a while.”

His secretary said, “You’re meeting Price and Walton at six o’clock at the Hay-Adams. You’re still going?”

“I’ll be there. And call Colonel Lake and tell him what’s happening, that I can’t get out of this. I’ll call him first thing tomorrow.”

He clicked off, sighed. He’d dreaded this. He got out of the car, went up the walk, said hello to a couple of people on the porch, got a biceps squeeze from one of them, then pushed into the scrum of people standing in Madison Bowe’s living room. Madison was talking to an old friend from Lincoln Bowe’s golf club, but broke away and came to Barber and hugged him. “Thanks for coming, Howard.”

“Jesus, Maddy . . .”

“We need to talk.” People were watching them from around the room, the late senator’s wife hugging a strikingly tall, handsome black man who was wearing what appeared to be a five-thousand-dollar suit. You could almost hear the hmmm. Madison said, “Let’s go, ah, God, not in the kitchen, there are a hundred people in there, let’s go somewhere.”

He followed her past the stairs to the study. The door was closed, and she opened it and poked her head in, saw that it was empty. “In here.”

They stepped inside and she pulled the door closed: “Linc . . . Was it Goodman?”

“I assume so,” Barber said.

“Did they torture him? I don’t think he could have taken any pain . . .”

“Maddy, I just don’t know,” Barber said. “Most of my contacts are at the Pentagon, not with the FBI. I called some staff people over on the Hill, but they haven’t been able to find out much. I assumed . . . What did the FBI tell you?”

“They don’t know anything,” she said. “This Winter, the guy I told you about—he was apparently there. I tried to call him at home, but he’s not answering. I left messages.”

“You said he was with Danzig’s office.”

“That’s right. I assume he went down there with the FBI. He said he was going to kick some FBI bureaucrats, get them going. I pointed him at Goodman.”

“I doubt that Goodman himself is involved—probably some Watchmen, maybe Darrell Goodman,” Barber said. “But Arlo Goodman is too smart . . . Actually, I don’t know what I think.” He shrugged, and glanced away.

And Madison thought, He’s lying about something. She said, “I’ll try to talk to Winter. I’ll try him every fifteen minutes until I get him. He’s like you, he was in Afghanistan.”

“I know about him,” Barber said. “He wrote a book about the Pentagon.”

She nodded. “Johnnie Black told me. Winter’s Guide to the Inside.”

“I think I ought to talk to him,” Barber said. “At some point, we might want to . . . influence the investigation. It’d be better if I did it, than you.”

“Okay. When I get him, I’ll tell him to call you.”

“It’d be better if he called me,” Barber said. “And I think it’d be a good idea if you told him about Linc and me. You know, the whole thing. That’d bring him in for sure . . .”

“Oh, Howard . . .” She was appalled.

“Look, it’s gonna come out. Better to come out that way.”

Barber turned away from her for a moment, staring at the window that was covered with blinds, as though he could see through it. “God bless me.” He rubbed his face and then turned back and asked, “How are you holding up?”

“I’m sad, I’m tired, I’m really angry.”

“And you’re really, really rich.”

“Howard . . .” Hands on her hips.

He shook his head, held a hand up, a peace gesture: “Hey, Maddy. Linc once told me that of all the women he’d ever met, you were the only one who’d never thought about his money. I think that’s why he went after you.”

She teared up, turned away, wiped the tears with the heels of her hands. “God, I hope he wasn’t alive. I hope he was dead before they burned him.”

“I’m sure he was,” Barber said. “I’m sure he was. You gotta believe that, Maddy.” After a second, he added, “Talk to Winter.”

Jake was on the highway, coming up to Amelia Court House, when Goodman called back and asked, “Where are you?”

“Passing Amelia Court House, heading into Richmond.”

“I talked to Bill Danzig. Now I need to talk to you,” Goodman said.

“Are you at the office?”

“I’m at the mansion. When you came into the office, did you come in from the capitol side of the building? Down a brick walkway?”

“Yeah.”

“The mansion is about, what, seventy-five yards from that. Yellow house, white pillars. There’s a gate to the mansion that faces the back entrance of the Patrick Henry. You’ll see a guardhouse, right there at the front. I’ll put you on the list.”

Jake found a parking spot faster than he had in the morning, couldn’t read the meter clearly enough to see whether it needed money, plugged it with quarters, tapped along the deserted walkway in the growing darkness. The governor’s mansion was a two-story brick house, painted yellow, with four white columns over the front steps. The place was smaller then he’d expected, with a modest lotus-flower fountain in a front parking circle.

At the guard gate, a uniformed guard was talking to a second man. The second man was dressed in a black raincoat, black shirt, black trousers, and black canvas Converse All Stars. He was wearing a khaki tennis hat. He was lean, with a face too weathered for his age, which was about the same as Jake’s. With his long nose and black clothing, he had the aspect of a crow. He saw Jake coming, watched him for a moment, then turned away and played with a television at the back of the guardhouse.

The guard said, “Jake Winter.” Not a question.

“Yes.”

“I’ll take you in,” he said. He popped a latch on the steel gate and led the way across the parking circle, up the steps, and through a double door.

Through the doors, the mansion seemed to expand. A fasces-styled chandelier hung overhead, with a long hall leading to a couple of big public rooms. A portrait of the Virgin Queen looked down the hall at them. The guard pointed to his left: “In here.”

A parlor. Goines was standing just inside, leaning against the doorjamb. Three other men, none of whom Jake recognized, were lounging on two long leather couches in a conversation area, briefcases at their feet. Legal pads were strewn across a coffee table in front of them, along with two coffee cups, two bottles of beer, and a silver bowl, shaped like a maple leaf, full of peanuts and M&M’s. One man had his feet on the table; another had taken off his shoes to show a pair of dark brown dress socks. A hint of cigar smoke rode on the air; a portrait of George Washington looked down from above.

The room vibrated with cronyism: this was the inner circle, no question about it. And Goodman was the chairman of the board. He sat, squarely, in a huge leather chair, at the head-of-the-table position between the two couches.

“Jake,” Goodman said. He stood up, gestured to a smaller, lower leather chair in the foot-of-the-table position. As Jake took it, Goodman said, pointing with his bad hand, “You know Ralph; and John Patricia, Handy Rice, Troy Robertson. Men, Mr. Winter is former special forces, got shot up in Afghanistan.”

Robertson said, “You look sort of bureaucratic.”

Jake shrugged. “I sit in an office, I’m outa shape. It’d probably take me . . .”—he made a little show of surveying Robertson—“. . . seven or eight seconds to snap your neck.”

The staff members laughed, and Goodman smiled down at him. Robertson said, “Snap Goines’s. He’s getting to be a major pain in the ass.”

Rice asked, “You want a beer?”

Jake took the beer, and they went to business.

Goodman said, “Jake, I swear to God, I swear on the bodies of my dead friends in Syria, I swear on anything you want—I had nothing to do with Lincoln Bowe’s death. Neither did the Watchmen.”

Jake nodded, and waited.

Goodman leaned forward, took a few peanuts from the bowl, rattled them in his fist, like dice. “So . . . now we get to the part where I sound like the psychotic that Madison Bowe says I am. I believe this whole thing is a carefully constructed conspiracy to bring me down. I believe Lincoln Bowe was involved, and probably Madison Bowe. She’s been too good at ripping me. It seems scripted. Does that sound insane?”

Jake raised his eyebrows a bit, and then said, “It doesn’t sound insane. I don’t know whether it’s probable.”

“Good. That’s all we want from you, that attitude,” Goodman said. “Danzig says you’re the best when it comes to developing information about a confusing political situation. We need information. We’re trying desperately to figure out what’s happening. Can you see that?”

Jake nodded. “Yeah—because that’s what I’m trying to do, too.”

“I want to suggest that you do two things at once. Make any assumptions you want. Assume that I did it myself, that I set Senator Bowe on fire after cutting his head off in the kitchen. Okay?”

Jake nodded: “I’m sure the FBI will do that.”

“But I want you to make another assumption, too,” Goodman said. “Assume that there’s a conspiracy against me. Start from that point. If you make that assumption, if you look at it that way, too, maybe you can see what we can’t. Because I’m telling you, we seem to be getting wound up tighter and tighter in this thing. Like this Carl V. Schmidt. Like Bowe getting immolated here in Virginia. But we didn’t have anything to do with it. We are being set up. We can feel it. And it could have serious, serious consequences.”

Jake blew a soft note across the top of the beer bottle. “But why? Governor, I don’t want to seem insulting, but you’re in the last year of your term. You can’t succeed yourself. You’re about to leave politics, at least temporarily. So why should they bother? A guy is dead—is somebody gonna murder a former senator in a weird conspiracy to get you out of office? I mean, even if they found Lincoln Bowe’s head in your bedroom, you’d probably be out of office before they could get you to trial. Or is there something else going on? Something I’m missing?”

Goines jumped in, jabbed a finger at Jake: “That’s what we can’t figure out. That’s exactly it.”

“Maybe just pure revenge,” Robertson suggested to Goodman. “After your showdown with Bowe. I mean, you really hurt him, there.”

“So they kill Bowe to get revenge for what I did to Bowe?” Goodman shook his head. “You need to spend more time thinking about that, Troy.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if that body in the woods isn’t Lincoln Bowe at all,” Patricia said.

“They did DNA,” Jake said.

“For DNA, you have to have two good samples,” Patricia said. “Where’d they get the first one? Who was the guy who did the test, and what are his politics like? Did they do backup tests?”

“Forget that, forget that,” Rice said to Patricia. “It’s Bowe. It’d be too crazy not to be Bowe. Asking those questions makes us sound like we are nuts.”

“Yeah, but the head’s missing,” Patricia said. “Why’s the head missing? I’ll tell you why—they couldn’t match the dental.”

Jake said, “I hadn’t thought of that. That might be something.”

Goodman raised a hand, shutting down the argument. “I personally believe it’s Bowe. When they finish with the postmortem, we should know. I understand that they are taking hair samples off his pillows, out of his car, and so on. Maybe from his mother. They will know.”

Jake broke in: “I have to ask the hard question, Governor. Who’s Schmidt, and why have you been tearing up the state looking for him?”

There was a quick interlocking exchange of glances around the room, then Robertson said, “We haven’t been tearing up the state.”

“There’s a letter on the door . . .”

“I’d like you to prove . . . ,” Robertson started.

“We looked around for him,” said Goodman, closing Robertson down with a finger. “He used to hang around with some Watchmen in Charlottesville. He was never inducted, never trained, never accepted. Our people up there always thought he was a little questionable. Then . . .”

Goodman shrugged and looked at Patricia.

“He mentioned a couple of times to our guys that something should be done about Lincoln Bowe,” Patricia said.

“Ah, Jesus,” Jake said.

“Yeah. The thing is, he was not one of our guys,” Patricia said. “But when we heard about this, we knew we could take the fall for it. So we were trying to find him.”

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?” Jake asked. “Why didn’t you tell me, this morning?”

“Because at that point, it was all politics,” Goodman said. Jake nodded: they all swam in a sea of politics, and the tide never went out, not even for murder. “Nobody knew where Bowe was. He might have been skiing in Aspen for all we knew. There was no evidence of a kidnapping, there was no evidence of anything. But we were nervous, and so we looked. Now this. We feel like we were . . . sucked into looking for him. Like somebody’s been working hard to set us up.”

Jake nodded, and thought about the gun in Schmidt’s house. That did have the feel of a setup. Why would he empty his gun safes, and leave one gun stuck away in the rafters, where an amateur burglar quickly found it?

“Look at the Bowes,” Goodman said, urgency riding in his voice. “Madison and Lincoln. Look at their friends. Look to see if you can see anything. Hypothesize something. Suspect something. Try to figure out what happened. What happened?”

They all sat and looked at each other, and then Jake said, “I need everything you’ve got on Schmidt.”

“You’ll get it,” Goodman said. “So will the FBI, for that matter. They’ve already asked. They’re at his house.”

“When can I get it?”

“Give us an e-mail address and we’ll get it to you tonight or tomorrow morning. So—you’re going to do this?”

“I’ll talk to Danzig,” Jake said.

“Talk to him and get back to us. Ralph will be your liaison.” He flipped a finger at his assistant. “He’ll be available twenty-four hours a day. If you need anything—anything—call him. Research help, legal advice . . .”

“Muscle . . . ,” Patricia said with a grin.

“Muscle won’t help,” Jake said.

Patricia: “Bowe got his head cut off and then his body was burned. Think about it.”

Goines said, “I wonder if this Schmidt guy was the same size and weight as Bowe?”

“That is goofy,” Robertson said.

“Hey, nobody has any ideas,” Goines said. He sorted some M&M’s from the silver bowl, tossed them into his mouth. “The way things are, nothing is too far-fetched.”

“There’s one thing that worries me; one line,” Jake said. “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”

“That’s what worries all of us,” Goodman said. “If some goof thought he was doing it on my behalf, the murder’ll stink like a mackerel in the sunshine and screw up our lives forever.”

They talked for a few more minutes, then Jake stood up and said, “I’m going to take off. I need to get back tonight. I’ve got lines out everywhere, and I’m waiting for people to call.”

On the drive back, Jake thought about the group gathered at the governor’s mansion: all male, all veterans, all had been in a combat zone. He liked that kind of company, as a general thing.

But there was something not right about Goodman’s group. They sparred with one another, like any group of vets; but with Goodman, they behaved as though they were still in the military, and they were subordinate officers. They deferred to him. More than that, they were obedient, subservient. Not like the usual political relationship—not the same relationship of the president to his staff—but a kind of abjectness, concealed beneath a hail-veteran-well-met bonhomie.

But they also projected a genuine air of confusion. They didn’t know what was going on, he thought. Bowe’s death had them panicked.

Darrell and Arlo Goodman talked in the first-floor kitchen. “We went through the security tapes. He talked to your intern, the blond chick.”

“Cathy . . .”

“Yeah. She stopped him in the hallway when he was coming out of the elevator. He seemed surprised, I don’t think he knew her. She gave him a piece of paper. We’re up and running on his cell phone, and he made a call from a cell in Scottsville, right by Schmidt’s house. He went straight there when he left here.”

“So it had to be her.”

Darrell nodded. “Unless he talked to somebody in the elevator, and . . . that didn’t happen. It’s her.”

“I sometimes thought . . .” Goodman shook his head. “I wonder what else she’s been selling?”

“No way to tell,” Darrell said. “What else you got?”

“It’d all be political stuff. Nothing that’d be trouble.”

“She doesn’t have access to your computer?”

“Not unless she’s broken the password,” Arlo said. “Besides, she doesn’t have a key to the office, and there’s always somebody around, even when I’m not. She wouldn’t have much time with it.”

“Wouldn’t need much, if she knew what she was doing,” Darrell said. “Slip in a piece of software . . . a keystroke register.”

“You want to look?”

“Yeah, I better. I’ll get a guy, I’ll do it tonight,” Darrell said. “Even if it’s clean, it’d be better if she were out of your office.”

“Can’t fire her,” Goodman said. “She works hard, she’s pretty good. Her old man helped with fund-raising during the campaign.”

“I’ll take care of it,” the man said. “Maybe she gets robbed.”

Goodman’s eyes narrowed. “Not robbed dead.”

“No, no. Dinged up a little.”

Jake called Danzig from the car, filled him in on the meeting.

“Goodman wants me to look around on this thing. He says he talked to you.”

“Yeah, he did. When I told you to find Bowe, I didn’t think you’d find him quite that fast. Or that way. We’re all sorta freaked out.”

“I hope I didn’t trigger an execution. I’d put out word that we’d be looking for him.”

“We don’t even speculate in that direction,” Danzig said. “Goodman is right about one thing, though—we don’t know what’s going on. We need to know. Right now. If it’s something that we can pin on Goodman, something that doesn’t impinge on national politics, then we can do that and forget about it. Let Goodman deal with it. If there’s more, we need to know about it.”

“I’ve got lines out.”

“Keep working them. This is out of control now. It’s wall-to-wall on CNN. It’s like that hurricane, Katrina, or Katinka, or whatever it was, and nine/eleven.”

Jake was tired when he got home, a little hungry, fighting the illusion that he could still smell Lincoln Bowe’s roasted body, that the odor hung in his clothes, in his hair. He took a shower, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, padded barefoot down to the kitchen, and poured a bowl of cereal. Two minutes until eleven o’clock. He carried the cereal bowl into the den, turned on the television to catch the beginning of the news cycle; at the same time, he brought up his laptop and linked into the Net.

The television news was all Lincoln Bowe. There were shots of Madison Bowe with a group of senators, standing on the front porch of her town house, swearing for the cameras that the government would hunt down her husband’s killers. There was a helicopter shot of Bowe’s body being carried out of the woods in a black bag on a stretcher, and of cops working the site.

Madison Bowe said she had no idea why her husband had been killed, other than his ongoing clash with the Virginia Watchmen. “He saw in them a revival of the Ku Klux Klan,” she said to the cameras. “A group supposedly of volunteers, whose real purpose is to intimidate the public. He hated that, and he challenged it . . .”

She looked terrific in black, Jake thought.

With one eye on the television, he checked his e-mail. He had a dozen messages, all routine. He hadn’t checked his phone since Novatny called, and got him running toward the crime scene: he did it now, found a message from Madison Bowe: “Call me. Please. Anytime before midnight.”

He also had a dozen hang-ups. He frowned at that: a dozen was too many. He checked the missed-calls register, and they’d all come from the same cell phone. He dialed the number, but the phone had been turned off.

He thought about calling Madison. He and Danzig were shuffling between pools of quicksand, and everything they did had to be considered in the light of possible criminal proceedings. On the other hand, he was coordinating with the FBI. . . .

She picked up quickly: “Yes?”

“Jake Winter returning your call.”

“You live someplace near me, right? Could I come over to talk to you?”

“Mrs. Bowe, things are getting complicated,” Jake said.

“I know that. I talked to Novatny,” she said. “I need to talk to you. This whole thing may be more in your area than Novatny’s.”

“The two areas have become somewhat the same,” Jake said.

“Listen, can I come over and talk, or what?” she asked.

While he waited for her, he clicked around the cable news channels. They had hardly any real news—aerial tapes of the crime scene, with FBI vehicles clogging the narrow road, Madison Bowe’s accusations from Washington Insider, taped interviews with the last persons to have seen Bowe alive—but they ran them in an endless loop, interspersed with interviews with prominent politicians and a couple of conservative movie stars.

Madison Bowe arrived at ten o’clock. He’d left the back gate open, and she nosed up to his garage. He let her in the back door, and she walked slowly through the house, appraising the kitchen, touching a table in the hallway that led to the living room, stopping to examine a watercolor, and peered at the newsreader on Fox, on the television in his den.

“She’s barely got any clothes on,” she said.

“She won’t have, if CNN’s ratings keep going up,” Jake said. “I’m looking forward to the day.”

In the living room, Madison settled into an easy chair next to the fireplace.

“This day . . .”

“I can imagine.”

“A nightmare. I’ve got people I don’t like all over the place. I’ve got the media, I’ve got the FBI . . .”

“It’s the only thing on the news,” Jake said.

“Yes.” She shuddered. “Somewhere, though, Lincoln is laughing. He would have hated to go as an old man with tubes dripping into his veins. He’d have wanted something spectacular. He once told me that if he lived to be eighty-five, he’d buy the fastest Porsche he could find, wind it up to two hundred miles an hour, and aim it at a bridge abutment. The only thing he wouldn’t like about this is that Goodman lived longer than he did. He would have hated the thought that he hadn’t managed to take Goodman down.”

“You don’t sound . . . mmm.”

“As upset as I might? Dead is dead. I was expecting it, to tell you the truth. I knew he hadn’t just wandered off.” She exhaled, slumped another inch; her eyes looked tired, with undisguised crow’s-feet at the corners. “Do you think this Schmidt person killed my husband?”

He said nothing for a moment, considering her, then said, “I don’t know. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I just don’t know.”

“Are the Watchmen involved?”

He thought about the five men in Goodman’s parlor. “I don’t know that, either. My inclination, at this moment, is to think they are not.”

Now it was her turn to consider him. Finally she said, “They are. Somewhere along the way, somehow, they’re involved.”

“I don’t know that,” he said. “I do know that they are running around like chickens over there. Between you and me, I can tell you that Goodman and all of his top people are personally involved in trying to figure out what happened.”

“You talked to him?”

“Tonight, at the governor’s mansion. They’re worried. They believe there’s a conspiracy against them. They believe that your husband was part of it, and that you may be.”

She shook her head, then asked, “Is it safe to walk here? The streets?”

“Sure.”

“So let’s take a walk around the block. I mean . . .” She flushed. “If your leg . . .”

“My leg’s okay,” he said. “Let me get my stick.”

They walked down the back stoop, past her car, out the alley to the sidewalk. She said, “Something happened today. Maybe. Everything was moving so fast, everything is so foggy.”

“What happened?”

“Let me think about it for a minute . . .”

They’d gone to the left, out of the alley. The corner house had an old-fashioned front porch, and a couple was sitting in a porch swing. Jake tapped along with his stick, and the man called, “Is that you, Jake?”

“Yeah, going for a walk. How’re things?”

“Very quiet, when they aren’t ripping up the street on your block. You can hear the jackhammers all over the goddamned neighborhood.”

“Ought to be done in a week,” Jake said. “Then my house will be worth a lot more money.”

“But not mine,” the man said.

“Suck it up, Harley,” Jake said. The woman laughed, and Jake and Madison continued down the sidewalk.

When they were out of earshot of the couple on the porch, Madison said, “I’m telling this to you, and not the FBI. The FBI would pretend to hold the information, but there’d be leaks, it’d all be the most cheesy kind of thing . . . I’m telling you because you’re political, but you’re still in a position where maybe you could get justice for Linc.”

“Okay.”

They walked along, and then she said, “Lincoln is not—was not—one hundred percent oriented toward women. Sexually.”

“Ah, jeez,” Jake said, and stopped in his tracks.

“It’s not unheard of, even for U.S. senators,” Madison said.

“It could have a bearing on the murder,” Jake said. “It could be a purely personal matter. In fact, if he was romantically active, then there’s better than a fifty-fifty chance . . .”

They were facing each other and she reached out and put a hand on his chest. “Gay doesn’t mean violent.”

“Of course not. But given any kind of secret sex life, and then a disappearance, there’s usually a connection. That’s just the way it is,” he said.

“What, you’re the big crime historian now?”

“No. But I read the papers, for Christ’s sake.”

“If that’s what it is, then it will come out. But that really isn’t the way it is—I know some of his friends, and they’re a good bunch. They’re also very, very private, and very sophisticated. They would not murder anybody over an infidelity.”

“You can’t know that for sure,” Jake argued. “All it takes is one crazy guy.”

“That’s not it,” she said. She sounded positive.

“Ah, boy . . .” They turned together and started walking again. Then, “If he was gay, why . . .” He waved his hand, taking her in.

“Did he marry a woman? Because he wanted a political career. All of his family is involved in politics, one way or another, and a conservative Republican gay was not going to get elected in the state of Virginia.”

“That’s not what I was going to ask. Why did you marry him?”

He could see her turn her face away from him, one hand going to her cheek. After a moment, “I wasn’t entirely aware of his . . . preferred orientation . . . when we got married. Also, I was tired of bullshit. Especially from men. I’d been in a long relationship that didn’t work out, and then I did some running around, and finally . . . I was tired of being chased by men who were more interested in my ass than they were in me. And here came Lincoln. He was smart, good-looking, powerful, he was rich, he was commanding. My mother picked up the gay thing, hinted at it before we got married, but there really wasn’t a performance issue on his part. We got together okay in bed.”

“And . . .”

“After we got married, the sex just drifted away,” she said. “Then I became aware that he had other attachments. There was usually an assistant or a political associate whom he was a little too fond of, whom he spent too much time with. Maybe that’s why I’m not as out of control as I should be. Linc was more like a favorite uncle. He hadn’t been a lover for years. There wasn’t that tie.”

“Where are we going with this?” Jake asked.

“Well, if it’s going to break, we’d like it to break in some civilized way. Not to leak. Not drizzle out. Not with all kinds of denials . . . Maybe, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you just announce . . . I was hoping you could help.”

“Jesus.”

“Years ago, the French president had a longtime mistress. Everybody knew, including his wife. They invited the mistress to his funeral, the public pretty much thought that was cool . . . maybe something like that would work with Linc.”

“No. Because Linc was murdered. His body was burned in the most spectacular way. If this comes out . . . ah, man.”

“Linc had a lover, for a year or so, a few years back. Then they stopped being lovers and got to be close friends, almost like brothers. His name is Howard Barber. He’s a tough guy, one of you ex-servicemen, Iraq, and he’s very successful. He started a company that sells electronics to the military. He came over this afternoon, after I got the news about Linc. He said it was going to come out. He said there was no way to contain it. He was hoping to find some way to . . . You know.”

“Be civilized about it.”

“Yes.”

“This is not a very civilized country when it comes to stuff like that,” Jake said. Then he revised himself: “Actually, the country is civilized, it’s the media that’re not.”

She walked along a little farther, and then she asked, “Can you do something?”

“Let me think about it. I need to talk to Barber.”

“Of course.”

“And you trust him.”

She hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

Jake picked up the hesitation: “You don’t trust him. I could hear it.”

“I do trust him . . . or I did trust him.” She paused, then added, “When he came over today, he was looking at me. He was checking me out. He kept talking about the Watchmen, and then he was watching me, watching how I reacted.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I had the feeling—just a feeling—that he knows more than I do, maybe knows what happened. He was checking me to see what I’d been told about it. To see where the investigation was going. And somehow, he was priming me to be angry. To point me at the Watchmen.”

“That’s not good,” Jake said.

“I might be misreading him. He’s got to be freaked out—as I said, he and Linc were really close. When this gay thing comes out, people are going to look at Howard. Big, good-looking guy, always single . . . he hangs out with all the important colonels at the Pentagon, plays poker with them, goes on fishing trips down the bay. You know, the people who buy his products. They’re probably not what you’d call gay-centric.”

“Probably not,” Jake agreed.

They’d turned two corners, and now walked across a street, Jake’s street, but went ahead, down another block. Nice walking in the night, humid, cooling, quiet.

“What do you want me to do?” Jake asked.

“Talk to him, talk to Howard. Not as a policeman, but as somebody who knows what the FBI knows . . . and who also knows about this. See if there’s anything.”

“I can talk to him. But if anything serious comes out of it, I’d have to tell the FBI.”

“Of course—if it looks like there’s reason to believe that Howard had something to do with it. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He and Linc really were like brothers. He’s the last person in the world who’d hurt Linc.”

“That makes me suspicious. If somebody told Miss Marple that so-and-so couldn’t possibly have done it . . .”

“You’d know who the killer was. I’m not Miss Marple, and Howard didn’t kill Linc.”

Twenty yards in silence; he could smell her, the scent of flowers, with some spice. Chanel, maybe? Had she put it on just before she came over? He pushed the question away and instead asked, “When did you last see Lincoln?”

“Two weeks before he disappeared. Sometimes I saw him every couple of days, sometimes I didn’t see him for weeks at a time. Besides the farm, and the town house here, we have an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Santa Fe,” she said. “He was always running around. He missed being in the Senate. He missed it desperately. That’s why he hates Goodman, and hates this administration, because he feels that they assassinated him. Though, the last couple of weeks before he disappeared, he finally seemed as if he was a little happier. I don’t know if something was going on, but it was as though he’d turned a corner.”

“Huh.”

They walked along for a while without talking, turning a corner and another one, finally ending back up at Jake’s house. They walked down the alley to the backyard, and at her car, she said, “I’ve got to go. But let me ask you one more thing. Or two things. Personal things, if you don’t mind. I talked to Johnnie Black about you . . .”

“Remember, he’s on the other side. An evil Republican.”

“Like me,” she said. He could see her upturned face in the light from his back window. “He said you were in Afghanistan. He said that’s where you got your disability. Is that right?”

“I was in the special forces for a few years,” Jake said. “What’s the second thing?”

“He said you were married to Nikki Lange.”

“Yes,” he said.

“The Queen of Push.”

“I try not to think about it. You know her?”

“I know her. We overlapped a year on the Smithsonian board. I heard a comment about sex and violence.” She sounded amused, peered at him in the dark. “That her husband provided the sex and she provided the violence.”

He tipped his head back and laughed. “I heard the same comment. It’s generally accurate. Looking back, I would have preferred an Afghani prison.”

“How could you have done that? Married her?”

“Well, she’s an attractive woman,” Jake said.

“Big tits, small ass . . .”

“Come on, be nice.” Jake said. “Anyway, our politics are generally the same, and like you and Lincoln, we got along pretty well in bed. I just didn’t understand that she was the queen and I was the equerry.”

“The what?”

“The equerry,” he said.

“My, you have a large vocabulary.”

“You ought to check out my conjunctions.”

“Some other time, maybe,” she said. “Do you ride? Johnnie said something about a ranch.”

“I probably rode every day of my life from the time I was three until I was fourteen. Until my grandpa died and the ranch got sold. I’ve still got friends out there, I go out and ride when I can.”

“You’ll have to come out to my farm sometime,” she said. “Of course, we ride the right way.”

“We don’t have that luxury. Our horses work for a living.”

She laughed quickly, quietly, popped open her car door, and looked at him across the window. “Stay in touch with me. Talk to Howard. Help me.”

“Mrs. Bowe, I work for Bill Danzig. I’ll help you if I can, but my loyalty runs to Bill. And the president.”

She nodded: “Then help me if you can.”

She got in the car, backed carefully out of the drive. He made sure the gate locked behind her, then went into the house, dropped into the living-room chair, and over a couple of hours, had a couple of beers.

He didn’t drink much, and he didn’t drink often, and the beer left him a bit loopy.

He thought, I could end it right now.

If he called CNN anonymously, or Fox, or any of the large newspaper chains, and simply said the word gay, they’d find out the truth in a matter of hours. And once that word was out there, the investigation would go in an entirely different direction. Politics would be out of it: the press would be hunting for a former lover, or a gay-hater, or somebody trying to cover up something else. . . .

But Madison wanted something “civilized,” if that was possible. He could feel the request twisting in him.

He owed a certain loyalty to Danzig, and through him to the president. But they wouldn’t care about civilized. If they found out that Lincoln Bowe was gay, their immediate instinct would be to get the word out, to create the greatest possible spectacle. The investigation of Lincoln Bowe’s death would lurch into a ditch—a gay thing, a sex killing—and both Goodman and the president would be off the hook.

It would no longer matter if Goodman or his friends were guilty of the killing, because nobody would be looking anymore . . .

He thought about Madison.

As they’d walked along through the evening, he’d felt the beginning of an intimacy. Not only had they told each other a few truths, he could remember the feel of her arm brushing along his, and the smell of her. He wished he’d kissed her good night; wished he had that kind of relationship with her.

Since his grandparents had died almost twenty years before, he’d been alone. Alone even in his marriage. He sensed a similar loneliness in Madison Bowe.

He was caught; torn. Decided that he didn’t have to release the information immediately, in either a civilized way or an uncivilized way. He could hold it for a while. Talk to Barber. See where the FBI investigation went.

Think about Madison some more.

7

The call came in two minutes after he’d gotten in bed. A male voice: “Mr. Winter? I understand you’re trying to find out what happened to Senator Bowe.”

“Yes, I am. Who is this?” He checked his caller ID, found the same number he’d seen on the hang-ups, but no name.

“I really can’t tell you that. I’m sure you understand.” Jake did understand—a whistle-blower, a backstabber, a do-gooder. The voice was soft, well modulated. A bureaucrat somewhere, or maybe a politician, somebody with a little authority. “I apologize for calling so late, I tried to call a few times earlier, but there was no answer. If you want to know about Senator Bowe, talk to Barbara Packer. She’s staff with the Republican National Committee. Ask her what she and Tony Patterson discussed three weeks ago in their meeting at the Watergate.”

“What’d they discuss?”

“They talked about nonconventional means of destabilizing the administration. By nonconventional, I mean criminal.”

“Give me one specific,” Jake said. “Give me a can opener.”

The man laughed. “You mean, for the can of worms? Okay. Tell her, ‘We know all about the Wisconsin thing.’ See what she says.”

“You’ve got to . . .”

“What I’ve got to do is, I’ve got to go. Don’t bother to trace the call. Or, for that matter, go ahead. I’m calling from a prepay cell phone. There’s no name on it.”

The man was gone.

Jake thought about calling Novatny to see if a trace might be possible. Maybe there’d be some weird way of figuring out who it was—security cameras over the cash register when the man bought the phone. Something tricky . . . and he thought, Later. Better to find Barbara Packer first, see what she had to say. Whatever it was, it’d be political, and usually it was a good idea to keep politics away from the FBI.

First thing in the morning . . .

He went back to bed, thought about his walk with Madison, and then drifted way.

His eyes snapped open four and a half hours later, and he was up. One benefit of a short night—short nights all his life—was that Jake got in a half day’s work before anybody else was moving. He was in his office by five-thirty, NPR’s Sunrise Classical running in the background, searching the federal databases for Packer, the Republican National Committee staff member, Tony Patterson, who apparently worked for ALERT!, a conservative political action committee, and Howard Barber, Lincoln Bowe’s onetime lover.

Packer and Patterson had spent their lives in political jobs, everything from grassroots organizing to campaign strategy. They were both backroom types, never out front.

Barber was more interesting. He’d been in Iraq, a platoon leader with the Rangers, and had taken home a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He hadn’t been badly wounded—he’d had light duty for two weeks, and then was back on the job. The Bronze Star sounded legitimate, won during an attack on a dissident strongpoint after an ambush.

Back in the States, he’d gotten start-up money from an American Express program, and had put together software that integrated digital radio receivers with mapping programs for low-level infantrymen. The receiver was worn on the wrist, like a large watch, and, among other things, could provide real-time aerial views of combat scenes at the platoon and squad level, as well as linked graphic displays to coordinate maneuvers at the company, platoon, and squad levels. Just like a video game, Jake thought, if you didn’t mind a really bloody “Game Over.”

By seven o’clock, he had everything that was nonclassified. If he needed more, he could go to Novatny, but he was reluctant to do that until he saw where things were headed. Satisfied with the morning’s research, he went to his newspapers, journals, and mail.

The Times had a two-column right-corner headline on Bowe, while the Post stripped the story across the top of the front page. Neither story had anything he didn’t know, except that an autopsy had been scheduled for last night.

At eight o’clock, he got Novatny on the phone: “What happened with the autopsy?”

“This is confidential,” the FBI man said. He crunched, as though he were chewing a carrot.

“I’m a confidential guy,” Jake said.

“I’m just saying . . .”

“Yeah, yeah . . .”

“For one thing, the chemistry will take a while. But: he was dead when they set him on fire, though recently dead. He’d been shot right dead in the heart. In the heart at least. We don’t know about the head, of course.”

“Did they recover any of the slug?”

“Yes, they did. Deformed, but useful,” Novatny said. “A copper-jacketed .45-caliber hollow point. As it happens, we recovered a .45-caliber pistol in Carl Schmidt’s house yesterday evening, hidden in the basement. It was full of copper-jacketed .45-cal hollow points with Schmidt’s fingerprints on them. I would bet my mother’s virtue that we’re gonna get a match on the slug.”

“Whoa.”

“My thought exactly,” Novatny said.

“When will you know?” Jake asked.

“A while. But today. Don’t want to screw this up.”

“I’m surprised that you didn’t get a through-and-through.”

“Well, you know, .45s aren’t exactly speed demons. With hollow points, they’re throwing a slug that looks like an ashtray, ballistically, and this one hit a vertebra after passing through the heart, and stuck. It’s hard to tell because of the burning, but the autopsy showed some kind of unusual debris in the wound canal, so it might have gone through something else before it hit him.”

“Weird debris? Like what?”

“Gotta wait for the chemistry,” Novatny said. “But it wasn’t a shirt, there were no fabric fibers. They’re working it.”

“Call me when you get it,” Jake said.

“Could get some of it today. Won’t get all of it for a couple of days.”

After he’d hung up, Jake leaned back in his desk chair, closed his eyes, and thought about it. If Schmidt was the killer, not only was he stupid, but he’d dumped Arlo Goodman in a political trash can. The media no longer dealt so much in facts, which had become unfashionable, as in speculation. And once they started speculating on Schmidt’s involvement with the Watchmen, and the Goodman-Bowe feud, combined with the sensational way Bowe had died . . .

He thought again: Should he make the call? An anonymous call about Bowe’s gay lifestyle would stop the investigation short. The news media had always been thoroughly hypocritical about sex, publicly preaching tolerance for anything but child sex, while at the same time exploiting any sign of sexual irregularity by politicians or other celebrities.

Still: he hesitated.

Did he really want to stop the investigation? In terms of his job, it would certainly be expedient, even if it led to an incorrect conclusion. And he felt the pull of his loyalty to Danzig. He should tell Danzig.

And he would, he decided: but just a little later. Maybe after he talked to Barber, after he’d looked into a few more things . . .

Two phone calls, the first to Danzig, to bring him up-to-date on everything but the gay stuff. The second to Ralph Goines, Arlo Goodman’s assistant.

Jake identified himself: “I need some information immediately, or as fast as you can put it together. I need to know when you first started putting out feelers about Schmidt and how you did that. Did anyone see or talk to him after you started putting out feelers? Is there any way to know whether or not Schmidt knew you were looking for him?”

He expected Goines to get back. Instead, Goines said, “Hold on. I’m going to put this phone down, I could be a minute or two.”

Jake held on, heard music in the background. Country-western, he thought. Then Goines picked up. “We began talking about him on the first, April Fools’ day. He was still around. We had a guy named Andy Duncan stop by and chat with him about Bowe’s disappearance. Duncan went as a Watchman, but he’s also an accident investigator for the highway patrol, and he knows what he’s doing. He got back to us and said Schmidt seemed to have missed the news stories that Bowe was gone. Remember, the stories weren’t that big, it was more like, ‘Where has the senator gone to?’ ”

“Okay. The point being that somebody asked him specifically about Bowe after Bowe disappeared.”

“Yes. Then he worked in a roadhouse down there, as a bartender. A couple of Watchmen talked to him the day after that, and probably the day after that, too, although we haven’t nailed that down. This was what, ten days ago. Anyway, when the newspaper stories started getting bigger, and we got a couple more guys wondering about Schmidt, we went down to see him again, and he was gone.”

“So this would be a week ago.”

“Don’t quote me, but it was about that. We can put a precise timeline together and e-mail it to you.”

“Mmm. That’s okay. Listen, I can’t give you the precise information I have, because it’s classified. But—everybody will know this in a next few hours—the hunt for Carl Schmidt is about to go big-time.”

“They found something.”

“Yes. Tell your boss. Way the media works, they could be holding his feet to the fire.”

Jake kicked back in the chair again, closed his eyes. Schmidt. He needed to know more about the guy. Because Schmidt had struck him as a loser, but not necessarily a moron.

If he’d been warned that people were curious about Bowe’s disappearance and his possible involvement, would he still have hidden the gun in the house? If he really wanted to keep it that badly, he could have put it in a couple of Ziploc bags and ditched it out in the woods. He could recover it in two minutes, but nobody would have found it in a hundred years . . .