Dead Watch

not?”
    “Because there are strings floating all over this mess and I suspect some of them lead back to Goodman. Maybe even to the murders in Wisconsin.”
    “I’ll keep it in mind,” the president said.

    Jake went out the White House gate, stood in the street for a moment or two, then walked down a block, flagged a cab, and went home.
    He was home at seven-thirty. He took a shower, shaved again, just to feel fresh, brushed his teeth, put on clean jeans, a black T-shirt, and a sport coat. Then he went down to the study, pulled some books out of a shelf, found the green-fabric pistol case, took out the .45, slipped a clip into it, and dropped the gun in his jacket pocket.
    At ten minutes to eight, he went out and sat on the back stoop. At five after eight, a car turned down the alley. He recognized it as Madison’s, opened the back gate, and she drove into the yard. She got out of the car and asked, “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah. Come on, let’s get you out of sight.”
    Inside the door, she asked, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

    She had a soft leather carry-on bag and a briefcase. Jake took the bag, led her into the house, up the stairs to the guest room. “Bathroom, first door down the hall,” he said. “Come on: I’ll get you a glass of wine or a beer and tell you the story.”

    She took a beer, settled into a chair in his living room, while he sat on the couch across from her. “Tell me about the gun,” she said.
    “The two people killed in Madison were executed. They were killed in an office building and nobody heard any shots,” Jake said. “The gun was probably silenced, and the killers are probably professional—at least, they’d done it before. The only reason there weren’t more dead people in the building is that nobody happened to bump into them in the hallway.”
    “Why didn’t they come after you?”
    “I was behaving unpredictably, maybe. Or maybe they didn’t know I’d been there already,” Jake said. “After I found the bodies, I called the cops, and then there were cops all over the place.”
    “That’s why you’re carrying a gun,” she said. “You’re afraid they might come here.”
    “Yeah. Or to your place.”
    “You think my house is bugged. Why wouldn’t you think this place is?” Madison asked.
    “Because somebody followed me out to Wisconsin, or maybe even tried to get there before me. We talked about it in your living room. That’s the only place I talked about it. The thing is, I was on the earliest plane to Milwaukee and there was no way to get into Madison faster than I did, unless they’d rented their own jet and flown directly to Madison. That would leave too much of a trail.”
    “If they come here, you plan to shoot it out?” She sounded skeptical.
    “I’ve got alarms. The woman who used to own the place thought she might be raped and murdered at any minute, and she covered everything,” Jake said. “If anybody comes, we’ll know it. The gun would give us a chance to call for help. A little time.”
    She pushed off her shoes, curled her feet beneath her, and said, “It’s not Howard Barber, Jake. I know him well enough to tell you that he wouldn’t have executed a secretary.”
    “How about Schmidt? I know what he told you, but I want to see the guy.”
    She looked away from him, her tongue touching her bottom lip, and then she said, “We’re coming up on that trust thing. I made you feel bad the other night, when I asked if you trusted me, and made you admit that you weren’t quite there yet.”
    “You did make me feel bad,” he admitted.
    “Well, you were right . . . I’ve been lying to you a little. I didn’t know about Linc. That was a shock. But I knew about the package. I didn’t know the details, but I knew it was out there, I knew that it might bring down this administration. I didn’t tell you about it when you really needed to know.”
    Jake watched her for a moment, suppressing reaction. The truth was, he’d known that something wasn’t quite right. He hadn’t trusted her. “Then why did you send me out to Madison?”
    “I thought I was sending you on a wild-goose chase. I’m sorry. Howard had already talked to Al Green, and Al denied knowing anything about the package. We wanted to get you out of the way for a few days, hoping the whole hunt for the package would die down, so we’d have more time to find it. We sort of expected the gay thing to get