Dead Watch

said, “Cathy Ann was injured last night. She’s in the hospital.”
    “Oh, my God. Is it serious?”
    “Pretty serious,” the woman said. She sounded grim. “They beat her up pretty bad. At least she wasn’t raped.”
    “Oh, my God,” he said. Again. “Could you give me her parents’ number, or at least their names? I really need to talk to somebody. This is awful.”
    He meant it, and the vibe got through to the woman on the other end of the line. “Of course. Sure.”
    “Could you tell me what hospital? I can promise you that this is official . . .”

    He got through to David Dorn in his daughter’s hospital room. Jake said, “I just talked to her about an internship and I was appalled . . . How serious is it?”
    “She won’t die, but she’s hurt pretty bad. They got her doped up pretty strong right now, she’s out of it. I’ll tell her you called when she wakes up.”
    “Please do that. Tell her to call me. The White House fellowship. She’ll know. Do the police have any idea who did it?”
    “None. Not a clue. Took her purse, took her computer and iPod. She was a target, I guess, young woman at night carrying a briefcase. I warned her so many times . . .” His voice caught; a crying jag. “I’ll tell you what, if I ever get my hands on these sonsofbitches . . .”
    Jake got off and thought: Goodman?
    A military unit doesn’t take kindly to traitors. Had they picked up on the fact that she’d talked to him? He thought about the security cameras in Goodman’s office building . . .

    Nothing to do about it, not yet.
    He picked up the phone again and called Thomas Merkin at the Republican National Committee offices. “Tom, Jake Winter here.”
    “Hey, Jake. I heard you were tangled up in the Lincoln Bowe thing.”
    “Yeah. Was. I’d like to come over and talk to one of your staffers,” Jake said. “Barbara Packer?”
    “Barbara? About what?”
    “About Senator Bowe,” Jake said. “What she’s heard, if anything. She’s a friend of his, I think.”
    “Well, hang on, will you? Let me see if she’s in.” He clicked away, and thirty seconds later, clicked back. “She’s in, but she doesn’t know anything about Senator Bowe.”
    “All I’d like to do is chat,” Jake said.
    “Hang on.” He was gone again, longer this time, then came back: “Should she have a lawyer?”
    “I’m not a prosecutor, Tom, I’m not an investigator.” But he put a little steel in his voice. “I’m just trying to tidy things up. If she wants a lawyer, that’s fine with me, but I haven’t even started a file on this thing.”
    “All right.” Merkin was wary. “Hour?”
    “See you then.”
    He called Howard Barber at his office. A secretary said that he was out for the morning but should be back after lunch. Jake left a message.

    To the RNC.
    He decided to take a cab down to the Tidal Basin, check out the cherry blossoms, then walk on over. And the cherry blossoms were excellent, a pink so pale that it was almost white. In fact, he thought, scratching his chin, they were white. Had anybody ever noticed before?
    The cherry blossom festival was starting, crowds of Japanese tourists with cameras, so he moved along, stopped at a café and got a bun and a cup of coffee, sat outside and watched the Washington women in their new spring ensembles blowing along the sidewalks. . . .
    He tapped his cane as he walked, and whistled a little Mozart. The ice was breaking up; lock tumblers were turning. He’d be done with Bowe in two days, he thought. Then maybe he could talk to Danzig about doing something with the conventions . . .

    There’d been a couple of unhappy events at the RNC, most recently a schoolteacher who claimed he had a dynamite belt and attempted to blow himself up on the committee’s front porch, in protest of Republican educational policies. A protest, in Jake’s view, that was fully justified.
    As it happened, the teacher himself was poorly educated. He didn’t have a dynamite belt, but a blasting-cap belt. He had confused the high-tech-looking caps, which he’d stolen from a quarry, with dynamite, and instead of blowing himself up, he’d blown off several hamburger-sized chunks of meat and fat, and had blinded himself in one eye.
    In any event, the RNC had installed heavy-duty security, and now was protected almost as well as the White House. Not that a passerby would know it. A glass wall showed off a plush lobby, with an unprotected woman sitting