Dead Watch

mean . . .” She flapped at him.
    “There’s no reason to think that? That there’s a connection?”
    “No, but it seems odd. Linc didn’t hide things from me. We no longer had a sexual relationship, but we were still married. We were certainly fond of each other. I didn’t know anything about an illness. I didn’t . . . I mean, what if Rosenquist drugged him somehow? Delivered him?” Her voice trailed away, and she frowned. “Am I being a dingbat?”
    “Not at all,” Jake said. “Nothing you said is crazy, I just don’t see where you’re going with it. Or where it can go.”
    She chewed her lip for a moment, looking at him, then said, “You don’t trust me.”
    “I do, as far as . . .” He stopped.
    “As far as what? You can throw a Toyota?”
    “No. I do trust you.” Another little lie. Or was it? She felt trustworthy. On the other hand, apparent trustworthiness was a quality that Washingtonians spent a lifetime perfecting.
    He’d thought of asking her about the Landers package, but decided not to: he had to do more checking. If she had it, or knew who did, he didn’t want to do something that might inadvertently pull a trigger, get the package dumped to the Times . Not until Danzig was ready for it, anyway.
    He stood up, said, “I’ll call you tomorrow. Let me think about all of this. I’ll call you.”
    She leaned back in the chair for the first time, took another sip of wine, looking at him over the top of the glass, and then said, “All right. This probably won’t help you learn to trust me, but I need to tell you something. I thought about it when we started talking about his sexual orientation.”
    “Okay.”
    “Linc had his outside relationships—but so did I. I’ve had two affairs in the last nine years. Both of them lasted about two years, with nice, discreet men, and then they stopped. They stopped basically because they weren’t going anywhere. Linc knew about both of them, and it was okay with him. I mean, he was a little wistful—but he understood.”
    Jake said, “Mrs. Bowe . . .”
    “You should call me Madison, under the circumstances.”
    “What circumstances?”
    “The circumstances of me using you as a confessor. But let me finish. I thought you should know, because it’s another thing about us . . .” Her forehead wrinkled, and she gestured with the glass, then, “. . . it’s another thing, that if I hadn’t told you, and you found out later, you’d wonder about. You’d wonder if there might be some reason that somebody would want to get rid of Linc. But: I promise you, I have had exactly two relationships, no more. Neither of the men involved would have any reason to wish harm to Lincoln. Neither affair continues. Everybody is more or less happy. So . . .”
    He nodded now, and said, “You really didn’t have to tell me. I don’t think people do what was done to Lincoln because of your outside relationships. In the most extreme cases, somebody might get shot, I suppose. But in this day and age . . .”
    “You’re a little cynical,” she said.
    “I work in Washington.”

    That night, he lay awake for a while, considering possibilities. One seemed clear: all roads to the truth ran through the dead body of Lincoln Bowe. And he thought about Madison Bowe and the medical records . . .
    He was gone before he knew it, awake again before five o’clock. He cleaned up, stretched, worked his leg. He ached from the beating, and the bruises, if anything, were darker, bluer. The lingering headache was still there, a shadow, annoying but not limiting. He’d been lucky.
    Or possibly, he thought, he was being manipulated, not only by Madison, but by the men who’d beaten him up. Perhaps they’d beaten him for some reason that he couldn’t even imagine, pushing him toward . . . what?

    From his office, he used his access to government records to go online with the Social Security Administration. There, he checked the records of one Donald Patzo, a man from deep in his past. Patzo had skills he might need . . .
    There were twenty-four Donald Patzos in the records, but only one fit by age and by employment. Patzo was sixty-six years old. He’d started drawing Social Security when he was sixty-two, and his employment record suggested that he wouldn’t have much of a pension—he’d had twenty-four jobs in the forty years after he’d gotten out of the military, and hadn’t worked at all for the fifteen years he’d spent