Madison took the car and went out for coffee and snacks, while Jake and Barnes watched the pile of paper grow in the printer tray, talked about Afghanistan and hospitals and drugs and old friends, including some who were no longer alive.
“This chick you got with you, is this serious?” Barnes asked.
“Hard to tell,” Jake said. “She lies to me sometimes.”
“She’s Madison Bowe, right?”
“No. Just looks like her,” Jake said.
Madison came back and said to Jake, “CNN has the gay story. I saw it at the Starbucks.”
“Oh, boy. I wonder where it leaked from?”
“What’s that?” Barnes asked.
Jake explained briefly, saying only that Lincoln Bowe had gay connections. Barnes shook his head and smiled at Madison and said, “They’ll be on you like fleas on a yellow dog. The media.”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
“Doesn’t bother you?”
“The possibility that people would find out, that there would be a story . . . it’s been out there for a long time. Lincoln and I talked about it, how to handle it. I’ll be okay.”
They were out of Barnes’s house an hour later, carrying two reams of paper and the restored laptop, blinking in the sunlight; Barnes had kept a copy of the hard drives, and would continue working through it. “What next?” Madison asked.
“Back to my place. Read this stuff. Figure out what you’re going to do.”
“I’m going to call Kitty Machela at CBS. Next week, I think. We’ll arrange for one of her famous interviews.”
“Woman-to-woman chat.”
“Dark set, conservative clothes, sympathy,” Madison said. “She’d sympathize with Hitler if she could get him in an exclusive interview. It’ll kill the story. My part of it, anyway.”
At Jake’s, they got comfortable in the study, flipping through the paper, while the television ran in the background, the gay story blossoming like a strange fungus. There were shots of the outside of Madison’s town house, pictures of reporters knocking on the door.
“Every network has to show its guy knocking on the door, even when they just saw another guy knocking on the door,” Madison said.
“Keep reading,” Jake said.
In a thousand sheets of paper, they found one thing, and Madison found it.
“The murders in Madison happened . . . there’s . . . mmm . . . there’s a note, a duplicate receipt for a private plane flying from Charlottesville to Chicago for two passengers, charged to a state account, early in the morning, five A.M., arriving back in Richmond at nine P.M. Charged to a state police account. I wonder why the cc would come back to Goodman?”
Jake took it, read it, then looked up. “Because Goodman ordered the plane, or had it ordered. Had to approve something. Somebody flew into Chicago, which must be three or four hours from Madison by car, the morning Green and his secretary were killed. They were back that night.”
“But why a state plane? There’d have to be a pilot, there’d be paperwork.”
“Because you can’t carry weapons on a commercial flight, not without registering them,” Jake said. “And they’re not going to register weapons with silencers, huh?”
“Why didn’t they fly into Madison?”
“Because the name might come up in a search, if someone like the FBI looked for flights going into Madison or Milwaukee, or anywhere in Wisconsin. They had to take a risk, but they minimized it by going to Chicago. Without this note . . . digging this out of the woodwork would be impossible, believe me. This is in the bottom of a computer file somewhere, and nobody will ever look at it again, without somebody asking for it. But since we know about it, they can’t escape. Because the paperwork is there.”
“But they’ll have some kind of story about what they were doing in Chicago,” Madison said.
“Probably. But this is a piece of the puzzle. And it tells
They locked eyes for a moment, but she didn’t say it:
“I trust you enough to plan a murder with you,” Jake said. “I wouldn’t even do that with Russell Barnes.”
She asked, “What murder?”
He said, “Just a minute. I’ve got to call Russell.”
Jake went to the phone and called. “Russell. Look at the encrypted stuff, the encrypted messages. See if you
