Dead Watch

a conservative political action committee, and Howard Barber, Lincoln Bowe’s onetime lover.
    Packer and Patterson had spent their lives in political jobs, everything from grassroots organizing to campaign strategy. They were both backroom types, never out front.
    Barber was more interesting. He’d been in Iraq, a platoon leader with the Rangers, and had taken home a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He hadn’t been badly wounded—he’d had light duty for two weeks, and then was back on the job. The Bronze Star sounded legitimate, won during an attack on a dissident strongpoint after an ambush.
    Back in the States, he’d gotten start-up money from an American Express program, and had put together software that integrated digital radio receivers with mapping programs for low-level infantrymen. The receiver was worn on the wrist, like a large watch, and, among other things, could provide real-time aerial views of combat scenes at the platoon and squad level, as well as linked graphic displays to coordinate maneuvers at the company, platoon, and squad levels. Just like a video game, Jake thought, if you didn’t mind a really bloody “Game Over.”

    By seven o’clock, he had everything that was nonclassified. If he needed more, he could go to Novatny, but he was reluctant to do that until he saw where things were headed. Satisfied with the morning’s research, he went to his newspapers, journals, and mail.
    The Times had a two-column right-corner headline on Bowe, while the Post stripped the story across the top of the front page. Neither story had anything he didn’t know, except that an autopsy had been scheduled for last night.
    At eight o’clock, he got Novatny on the phone: “What happened with the autopsy?”
    “This is confidential,” the FBI man said. He crunched, as though he were chewing a carrot.
    “I’m a confidential guy,” Jake said.
    “I’m just saying . . .”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .”
    “For one thing, the chemistry will take a while. But: he was dead when they set him on fire, though recently dead. He’d been shot right dead in the heart. In the heart at least. We don’t know about the head, of course.”
    “Did they recover any of the slug?”
    “Yes, they did. Deformed, but useful,” Novatny said. “A copper-jacketed .45-caliber hollow point. As it happens, we recovered a .45-caliber pistol in Carl Schmidt’s house yesterday evening, hidden in the basement. It was full of copper-jacketed .45-cal hollow points with Schmidt’s fingerprints on them. I would bet my mother’s virtue that we’re gonna get a match on the slug.”
    “Whoa.”
    “My thought exactly,” Novatny said.
    “When will you know?” Jake asked.
    “A while. But today. Don’t want to screw this up.”
    “I’m surprised that you didn’t get a through-and-through.”
    “Well, you know, .45s aren’t exactly speed demons. With hollow points, they’re throwing a slug that looks like an ashtray, ballistically, and this one hit a vertebra after passing through the heart, and stuck. It’s hard to tell because of the burning, but the autopsy showed some kind of unusual debris in the wound canal, so it might have gone through something else before it hit him.”
    “Weird debris? Like what?”
    “Gotta wait for the chemistry,” Novatny said. “But it wasn’t a shirt, there were no fabric fibers. They’re working it.”
    “Call me when you get it,” Jake said.
    “Could get some of it today. Won’t get all of it for a couple of days.”
    After he’d hung up, Jake leaned back in his desk chair, closed his eyes, and thought about it. If Schmidt was the killer, not only was he stupid, but he’d dumped Arlo Goodman in a political trash can. The media no longer dealt so much in facts, which had become unfashionable, as in speculation. And once they started speculating on Schmidt’s involvement with the Watchmen, and the Goodman-Bowe feud, combined with the sensational way Bowe had died . . .
    He thought again: Should he make the call? An anonymous call about Bowe’s gay lifestyle would stop the investigation short. The news media had always been thoroughly hypocritical about sex, publicly preaching tolerance for anything but child sex, while at the same time exploiting any sign of sexual irregularity by politicians or other celebrities.
    Still: he hesitated.
    Did he really want to stop the investigation? In terms of his job, it would certainly be expedient, even if it led to an incorrect