Dead Watch

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