Dead Watch

behind a wooden desk, friendly and open. The wall behind her, though, was a couple of feet thick—a blast wall—and between that wall and another inner, concrete wall was an airport-style scanner system.
    He walked through the security, the guard raised an eyebrow at the cane, X-rayed it, gave it back, and passed him through the inner wall to the real reception area, with a less expendable receptionist. She recognized him, though he’d never seen her before—she was one of the smiling, chatty women who were always out front. She’d pulled his bio, of course.
    “Mr. Winter. Good to see you, sir. Tom and Barb and Jay are waiting for you.”
    Merkin and Barbara Packer and Jay Westinghouse were sitting in a conference room at the back of the building; Jake knocked and stepped inside. From their faces, he suspected that he might have interrupted a heated discussion. Merkin he’d met several times, and Merkin introduced Packer and Westinghouse: “Jay is our lawyer. We thought, what the heck, he might as well sit in.”
    Yeah, what the heck. “Fine with me,” Jake said.
    Merkin was thin but soft, a guy who didn’t eat much, but who never worked out. Westinghouse was polished, a little too heavy, a man who liked his martinis.
    Packer looked harried. She was in her late forties, dark complected, with an efficient hairdo. She wore an efficient blue suit, as close to a man’s suit as she could get without being obvious about it, and a cobalt-and-gold silk scarf for a tie. They spread around the rosewood conference table and Jake webbed his fingers and smiled at Packer and said, “Do you have any idea of why Senator Bowe might have been killed? Some kind of political or personal issue that might have resulted in violence?”
    The other two men looked at her and she said, “No, of course not.” She had a grim mouth, a thin line turned down at the ends. At the same time, she seemed genuinely puzzled.
    Westinghouse said, “Is this . . . What’s the status here?”
    Jake shrugged. “I’m asking Ms. Packer about Senator Bowe. If she has no idea of why he might have been murdered, then okay. If she does, she better say so, or she better be prepared to kiss the kids good-bye for a few years.”
    “I don’t want to hear that,” Westinghouse said.
    “Hear it from me, unofficially, or hear it from the FBI when they cart her out of her house,” Jake said, half to Packer, half to Westinghouse. “We’ve been hung out to dry on this Bowe thing and we’re not putting up with it. The only people who are benefiting are you guys. The press is gonna start whipping Goodman, and by implication us, with Judge Crater stories, with black helicopters, with conspiracy theories. When we’ve worked our way through it, somebody’s going to pay. If there’s some kind of political thing going on . . .”
    “Jake, that’s crazy talk,” Merkin said, pushing his chair back. “You’ve got to know that.”
    “No, I don’t know that,” Jake said. “What I’m afraid of is that somebody at a low level, an operator—Ms. Packer, for instance—knows that something’s going on, and they think they’re being smart. I don’t really believe that you guys know about it, because you really are smart.” He nodded at Merkin as he said it, the flattery principle, “. . . but somebody, somewhere does. And if it’s somebody who thinks he, or she, is being smart . . . well.” He shrugged.
    Merkin looked at Packer: “You don’t know?”
    “No, I don’t.” She looked at neither Merkin nor Jake, and Jake felt a tingle. She knew something.
    “What did you and Tony Patterson talk about, over at the Watergate three weeks ago?” Jake asked.
    Her face turned white. She looked at him for a moment, as though he’d turned into a viper, then shook her head and pushed her chair back. “Oh, no.” She turned to Westinghouse. “I won’t talk to this man anymore.”
    “What the hell is going on?” Merkin asked.
    Jake had pushed the situation to a breaking point: now he could back away. Now he had to back away, since he didn’t have anything else, other than the one cryptic suggestion.
    “The Wisconsin thing could blow up on you. There’s a murder now,” he said. “At this point, none of this has to go anywhere. It’s just a bureaucratic dance. But, Tom, I suggest that you and Jay sit down with Ms. Packer and have a talk. She’s been acting in your name and you’ve got enough problems already. This Bowe thing is a