Dead Watch

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