Dead Watch

then to federal DOT records, adding file information to what he’d been told by Patterson. The road project had been real enough, and the money was just what Patterson had said it was. Much of the money had come from the federal government—which meant that if the Landers package was legit, then Landers had committed federal felonies.

    The flight was called on time and the trip back was as quick and routine as the flight out: short, boring, noisy. When he got out of the seat in Washington, he had a little trouble standing up: his bruised muscles were cramping on him, and he stopped in the terminal to stretch a bit.
    Nothing helped much: he simply hurt. Outside, he grabbed a bag, took a cab to the White House, called ahead, and had an escort waiting at the Blue Room. Gina was in Danzig’s inner office, shoes off, twitching her toes in her nylons. The other two secretaries were gone. When Jake walked in, she asked, “How’s your head?”
    “Little ache. Could be hunger, though.” He had to explain exactly what had happened.
    Danzig: “So after you were down and before your friend fired the gun, they didn’t go after your wallet? They didn’t get your briefcase?”
    “No. That worries me.”
    Gina shivered: “I don’t like the sound of it.” Then she stood up. “You want coffee? I could get you a sandwich?”
    Jake said, “Yeah. Both. That’d be great.”
    “Ham and cheese? Tuna?”

    When she was gone, Danzig said, “She’s relentless . . . So?”
    Jake dropped into a chair across the desk from him, dug in his case, brought out a yellow legal pad, looked at his notes. “In Wisconsin, under the Landers administration, the state began work on a ninety-one-mile improvement of Federal Highway 65. The improvements began at I-94 east of the Twin Cities and ran up to a resort area called Hayward, in the Wisconsin north woods. There were about three hundred million federal dollars spent on it, plus about fifty-five million in state money. Landers and his friends allegedly stole about eight million dollars of it.”
    “Jeez, more’n two percent. That’s pretty good,” Danzig said. “How’d they do it?”
    “Don’t know. There’s this package . . .”
    Halfway through the briefing, they heard Gina come back, and Danzig put a finger to his lips, a “be quiet” signal. Gina came in with the sandwiches and coffee, and Danzig said, “Gina: take off.”
    “Oh, if you’ve still got things . . .”
    “Gina: go home. Say hello to your husband. I’m going to talk to Jake, get this whole project out of the way, then I’m going home myself. Tomorrow, I want to set up a daily report process for the convention, so get me a list of anyone critical that we need to bring into it.”
    “I could start that tonight.”
    “Gina: go home.”
    When she’d gone, reluctantly, Danzig turned back to Jake. “You were saying . . .”
    Jake finished the briefing, then Danzig asked, “How many people know about this package?”
    “Patterson thinks that quite a few have had a smell. If he’s right about Goodman . . .”
    Danzig was shaking his head. “That Goodman stuff sounds phony. Goodman’s way too smart to get mixed up in a kidnapping and murder. Or in beating you up, if you were thinking that.”
    “I don’t know,” Jake said, shaking his head. “They seem to have a thing going on down there. Goodman develops a wish and somebody does something about it.”
    “Like killing Lincoln Bowe?”
    “I don’t know,” Jake said. “But if this package is out there, and Goodman knows about it . . . I can see why Patterson’s worried. Goodman likes power. He’s going to lose it. He’s got a year left. He might see this package as a way back.”
    “Yup.” Danzig twiddled his thumbs: elementary.
    “The question is, do I take all this to Novatny, or do I keep looking around, or do we just forget about it?”
    Danzig studied him for a minute, then said, “This is the thing, Jake. Patterson was right about Landers, for sure. If we need to dump him, we need to do it soon. And we need to do it. We don’t need the New York Times or the Washington Post to break this on us. We need to look proactive.”
    “We need the package.”
    “Yes. Landers won’t go if we don’t have it. He’ll just dig in.”
    “Maybe we could . . . Never mind.”
    “You were going to say?” Danzig asked.
    “I was going to say, maybe we could replicate it. Put it together independently. But that would take an