Dead Watch

bunch. They’re also very, very private, and very sophisticated. They would not murder anybody over an infidelity.”
    “You can’t know that for sure,” Jake argued. “All it takes is one crazy guy.”
    “That’s not it,” she said. She sounded positive.
    “Ah, boy . . .” They turned together and started walking again. Then, “If he was gay, why . . .” He waved his hand, taking her in.
    “Did he marry a woman? Because he wanted a political career. All of his family is involved in politics, one way or another, and a conservative Republican gay was not going to get elected in the state of Virginia.”
    “That’s not what I was going to ask. Why did you marry him?”
    He could see her turn her face away from him, one hand going to her cheek. After a moment, “I wasn’t entirely aware of his . . . preferred orientation . . . when we got married. Also, I was tired of bullshit. Especially from men. I’d been in a long relationship that didn’t work out, and then I did some running around, and finally . . . I was tired of being chased by men who were more interested in my ass than they were in me. And here came Lincoln. He was smart, good-looking, powerful, he was rich, he was commanding. My mother picked up the gay thing, hinted at it before we got married, but there really wasn’t a performance issue on his part. We got together okay in bed.”
    “And . . .”
    “After we got married, the sex just drifted away,” she said. “Then I became aware that he had other attachments. There was usually an assistant or a political associate whom he was a little too fond of, whom he spent too much time with. Maybe that’s why I’m not as out of control as I should be. Linc was more like a favorite uncle. He hadn’t been a lover for years. There wasn’t that tie.”
    “Where are we going with this?” Jake asked.
    “Well, if it’s going to break, we’d like it to break in some civilized way. Not to leak. Not drizzle out. Not with all kinds of denials . . . Maybe, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you just announce . . . I was hoping you could help.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Years ago, the French president had a longtime mistress. Everybody knew, including his wife. They invited the mistress to his funeral, the public pretty much thought that was cool . . . maybe something like that would work with Linc.”
    “No. Because Linc was murdered. His body was burned in the most spectacular way. If this comes out . . . ah, man.”
    “Linc had a lover, for a year or so, a few years back. Then they stopped being lovers and got to be close friends, almost like brothers. His name is Howard Barber. He’s a tough guy, one of you ex-servicemen, Iraq, and he’s very successful. He started a company that sells electronics to the military. He came over this afternoon, after I got the news about Linc. He said it was going to come out. He said there was no way to contain it. He was hoping to find some way to . . . You know.”
    “Be civilized about it.”
    “Yes.”
    “This is not a very civilized country when it comes to stuff like that,” Jake said. Then he revised himself: “Actually, the country is civilized, it’s the media that’re not.”

    She walked along a little farther, and then she asked, “Can you do something?”
    “Let me think about it. I need to talk to Barber.”
    “Of course.”
    “And you trust him.”
    She hesitated, then said, “Yes.”
    Jake picked up the hesitation: “You don’t trust him. I could hear it.”
    “I do trust him . . . or I did trust him.” She paused, then added, “When he came over today, he was looking at me. He was checking me out. He kept talking about the Watchmen, and then he was watching me, watching how I reacted.”
    “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
    “I had the feeling—just a feeling—that he knows more than I do, maybe knows what happened. He was checking me to see what I’d been told about it. To see where the investigation was going. And somehow, he was priming me to be angry. To point me at the Watchmen.”
    “That’s not good,” Jake said.
    “I might be misreading him. He’s got to be freaked out—as I said, he and Linc were really close. When this gay thing comes out, people are going to look at Howard. Big, good-looking guy, always single . . . he hangs out with all the important colonels at the Pentagon, plays poker with them, goes on fishing trips down