Dead Watch

said. “The only problem is the stakes. You make a mistake, you go to prison. Or worse.”
    “Even if Arlo Goodman knows what happened, what can he say about it?” Madison asked, building her confidence. “That he knows we did it, because he sent his brother to kill us?”
    “And if they investigated, what could they prove? Nothing. On top of all that, there’s the credible alternate story: hoodlums did it, in Norfolk. I think we’re good.”
    She straightened herself in the passenger seat, pulled down the vanity mirror, and checked her face. They’d heard the stories about Howard Barber; television was waiting for her in Washington. “You’re gonna be hard to train,” she said.
    “My first wife said the same thing.”
    “She was right.” She pointed out the windshield. “Now shut up and drive for a while. I’ve got to think about what we might have missed.”

    Arlo Goodman sat at home and waited for his brother to call. He expected a call around seven o’clock in the morning, or maybe eight, depending on how long it took to get through the forest above Winter’s hideout. But Darrell had warned him that it might take longer, and it would be unwise to use cell phones from the site of a murder . . .
    Especially with the murder victim in bed with Madison Bowe, and Bowe so willing to make accusations.
    Darrell had also suggested that after they did Winter, and got him in a suitable hole, he might put George in with him. That’d take some extra work.
    At eight, with no call, Goodman still wasn’t too worried. He sat in his office and watched television, the breaking story on Howard Barber—the FBI was investigating the possibility that Barber had killed Lincoln Bowe, with Bowe’s own connivance, the anchors said, with convincing excitement. The media was camped outside Madison Bowe’s house, waiting for a statement.
    At ten o’clock, he was apprehensive.
    At a little after ten, he learned that Madison Bowe was not in her town house, although she’d been there at midnight the night before, and the first newsies had arrived by 5 A . M . Had she slipped out? they asked. Had she gone into seclusion? Where was Madison Bowe? The last person to be seen at her house was a man with a cane.
    Arlo Goodman heard that and thought, Uh-oh . If she’d slipped out to be with Winter, if Darrell had killed them both, if something had gone wrong . . . He continued working: the state of Virginia doesn’t stop for a simple news story, or a missing brother.
    At eleven, he tried Darrell’s cell phone, and it rang but cut out to an answering service. Where the hell was he?
    At noon, now seriously worried, he was working at his desk when a thought popped into his head. Darrell and George had only gone to Wisconsin, where the pollster and his secretary had been killed, because of a conversation they’d overheard on the bug in the ceiling of Bowe’s town house. A conversation between Winter and Bowe, with no other witnesses.
    Winter hadn’t known the pollster’s name. Had never heard of him. When the killings were done, and Winter had a chance to think, might he have asked, “How did these people get here so fast?”
    If he was smart—and he was—he might have suspected a bug. If he suspected a bug . . .
    Had he set them up? Jesus Christ: had Winter dragged them into a trap?

    By six o’clock, he knew something had happened, but he didn’t know what. He could ask somebody to check on the location of Darrell’s cell phone, but he was unsure whether he should make the request. Better to wait until Darrell was obviously missing, let somebody else notice.
    The TV was still on, and he caught Madison Bowe, escorted back to her house by her attorney: she had been talking to the FBI, she said from her porch. She refused to believe that Howard Barber had killed Lincoln; refused to believe that it was all a fraud. Broke into tears for the first time: refused to believe that Lincoln could have done this without giving her a hint; done it to her , as much as anybody else.
    A good performance, Goodman thought. In fact, he was riveted.
    Not by Madison, though.
    The camera swung across the crowd of newsies, clustered on the porch. On one of the swings, it picked up a man leaning against a Mercedes-Benz, a half block away. One arm was braced against a cane.
    “That fuckin’ Winter,” Arlo Goodman said aloud to his television set. “That fuckin’ Winter.”

    Darrell, he thought, was dead. So was George.
    He