Dead Watch

führer the next.
    And he’d been lying about Bowe and the destabilization thing. Bowe had been into something. Now Jake had to work through it. Whatever it was, how did it tie in to Goodman? Or did it?
    He made another call about Cathy Ann Dorn—he got the nursing desk and was told that she had been awake, had eaten some cottage cheese, and was asleep again.

    He talked to Novatny.
    “Bowe was alive when he was shot, but he was full of drugs. Enough painkiller to knock him on his ass. They may have kept him sedated to control him. Shot him in the heart. The debris in the wound canal was newsprint. The thinking is, they may have tried to use a wad of paper to muffle the sound of the shot.”
    “That’s weird.”
    “Shooting a drugged guy is weird,” Novatny said. “Cold, ice-cold, murder. Don’t get no colder than that.”

    Jake went online, into the federal records. He had only limited access as a consultant, but he found a file on Darrell Goodman. The file was informative in an uninformative way—parts of his military record had simply been removed from the unclassified files. And that meant, almost certainly, that he was a snoop-and-pooper. Goodman had himself a hit man.
    Jake was thinking about it when Merkin, the contact at the Republican National Committee, called back.
    “Jake, we gotta talk. Where are you?”
    “I’m home. Is this about Packer?”
    “About Packer and Tony Patterson.” Merkin sounded worried.
    “Okay. I can come there, or you could come here. . . .”
    “No, no. How about at the National Gallery? Like in the nineteenth-century French paintings?” Merkin suggested. “I could walk over. Meet you outside in an hour?”
    “I should be there by then. If not, pretty quick after that.” And he thought, Doesn’t want to talk to me at his office . . . doesn’t want to be seen with me.

    Barber called Madison Bowe on her cell phone, caught her on the way back from the funeral home. “I talked to Winter,” he said. “He says he hasn’t told anybody about the gay thing.”
    “Huh. I was all braced.”
    “He’s afraid it’d derail the investigation.”
    “Ah, jeez,” she said. “I feel like I’m . . . It makes me feel rotten. I’m not made for this.”
    “I know, I know. Maybe you oughta just get out of it, get away from Winter. The guy is pulling stuff out of the air. I didn’t even want to look at him. I was afraid he could read my eyes.”
    “He is that way . . . ,” Madison said.
    “I’ll tell you, it doesn’t really make sense. He should have told Danzig by now,” Barber said. “I’m wondering . . . Maybe Winter is trying to do right by you.”
    “He likes me,” Madison said.
    “I could tell. And you like him back.”
    “Mmm.” She realized it was true. She hastened on. “About the other issue . . .”
    “Not on the phone,” Barber said. “Tell you what. I’ll stop over and see you when we both have time. We can talk it all out.”

    The National Gallery looks like a WPA post office. Jake found Merkin on the main floor, morosely examining Cézanne’s House by the Marne.
    “In Cézanne’s day, the Marne wasn’t the Marne,” Jake said, taking in the painting.
    “Looks like a creek,” Merkin said. “Not like a million dead men, or whatever it was.”
    “I didn’t know you were an art fan, Tom.”
    “Ah, it calms me down, coming here,” Merkin said. “I never see anybody from work.”
    “Probably be better if you did,” Jake said. “I mean, for the Republic.”
    Merkin nodded. “Let’s walk.”
    They walked toward the American wing, talking in hushed voices, Whistler’s huge White Girl peering at them down the long hall. Merkin said, “As far as I know, nobody did anything illegal.”
    “Then what’re we talking about?”
    “Patterson had worked with Packer in North Carolina on the Jessup campaign, and out in New Mexico on Jerry Radzwill’s. They saw each other around. Patterson is with ALERT! right now. He was an advisor on the Bowe campaign. He was set for a decent job if Bowe won, but Bowe didn’t, so he wound up at ALERT!”
    “He’s a Bowe guy.”
    “Was. Anyway, he got in touch with Packer and said he had a hypothetical for her. If, hypothetically, somebody had a package that would dump Vice President Landers off the ticket, when would be the best time for the package to be delivered?”
    “What’s in the package?”
    “Don’t know. Neither does Packer. Here’s the thing, here’s what