Dead Watch

little.”

    Jake called Danzig from the car, filled him in on the meeting.
    “Goodman wants me to look around on this thing. He says he talked to you.”
    “Yeah, he did. When I told you to find Bowe, I didn’t think you’d find him quite that fast. Or that way. We’re all sorta freaked out.”
    “I hope I didn’t trigger an execution. I’d put out word that we’d be looking for him.”
    “We don’t even speculate in that direction,” Danzig said. “Goodman is right about one thing, though—we don’t know what’s going on. We need to know. Right now. If it’s something that we can pin on Goodman, something that doesn’t impinge on national politics, then we can do that and forget about it. Let Goodman deal with it. If there’s more, we need to know about it.”
    “I’ve got lines out.”
    “Keep working them. This is out of control now. It’s wall-to-wall on CNN. It’s like that hurricane, Katrina, or Katinka, or whatever it was, and nine/eleven.”

    Jake was tired when he got home, a little hungry, fighting the illusion that he could still smell Lincoln Bowe’s roasted body, that the odor hung in his clothes, in his hair. He took a shower, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, padded barefoot down to the kitchen, and poured a bowl of cereal. Two minutes until eleven o’clock. He carried the cereal bowl into the den, turned on the television to catch the beginning of the news cycle; at the same time, he brought up his laptop and linked into the Net.
    The television news was all Lincoln Bowe. There were shots of Madison Bowe with a group of senators, standing on the front porch of her town house, swearing for the cameras that the government would hunt down her husband’s killers. There was a helicopter shot of Bowe’s body being carried out of the woods in a black bag on a stretcher, and of cops working the site.
    Madison Bowe said she had no idea why her husband had been killed, other than his ongoing clash with the Virginia Watchmen. “He saw in them a revival of the Ku Klux Klan,” she said to the cameras. “A group supposedly of volunteers, whose real purpose is to intimidate the public. He hated that, and he challenged it . . .”
    She looked terrific in black, Jake thought.
    With one eye on the television, he checked his e-mail. He had a dozen messages, all routine. He hadn’t checked his phone since Novatny called, and got him running toward the crime scene: he did it now, found a message from Madison Bowe: “Call me. Please. Anytime before midnight.”
    He also had a dozen hang-ups. He frowned at that: a dozen was too many. He checked the missed-calls register, and they’d all come from the same cell phone. He dialed the number, but the phone had been turned off.
    He thought about calling Madison. He and Danzig were shuffling between pools of quicksand, and everything they did had to be considered in the light of possible criminal proceedings. On the other hand, he was coordinating with the FBI. . . .

    She picked up quickly: “Yes?”
    “Jake Winter returning your call.”
    “You live someplace near me, right? Could I come over to talk to you?”
    “Mrs. Bowe, things are getting complicated,” Jake said.
    “I know that. I talked to Novatny,” she said. “I need to talk to you. This whole thing may be more in your area than Novatny’s.”
    “The two areas have become somewhat the same,” Jake said.
    “Listen, can I come over and talk, or what?” she asked.

    While he waited for her, he clicked around the cable news channels. They had hardly any real news—aerial tapes of the crime scene, with FBI vehicles clogging the narrow road, Madison Bowe’s accusations from Washington Insider , taped interviews with the last persons to have seen Bowe alive—but they ran them in an endless loop, interspersed with interviews with prominent politicians and a couple of conservative movie stars.
    Madison Bowe arrived at ten o’clock. He’d left the back gate open, and she nosed up to his garage. He let her in the back door, and she walked slowly through the house, appraising the kitchen, touching a table in the hallway that led to the living room, stopping to examine a watercolor, and peered at the newsreader on Fox, on the television in his den.
    “She’s barely got any clothes on,” she said.
    “She won’t have, if CNN’s ratings keep going up,” Jake said. “I’m looking forward to the day.”
    In the living room, Madison settled into an easy chair next to