Dead Watch

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.”