Dead Watch

asked.
    “Sure, if I had a computer the size of the solar system, and five or six billion years to work it . . . Let’s look at the drives.”
    He flipped the laptop over and started pulling it apart, moved a black box from one part of the workbench to the laptop, connected a couple of wires into the guts of the laptop, pushed a switch. A monitor lit up, and a program started running down the screen. He stared at it for a while, tapped some keys on one of the keyboards, and unencrypted English began running down the screen.
    “Whatcha got is a small amount of encrypted stuff, looks like e-mail, and a fair amount of unencrypted stuff. The encrypted stuff is only accessible if you get me the key. The unencrypted stuff I can print out for you. Most of it looks like crap, though. Some of it’s part of programs he bought . . . you know, illustrations from Word, that kind of thing.”
    “The encrypted e-mail . . . are the addresses encrypted? The places they were sent from?”
    “No. I can tell you where incoming messages originated and where outgoing messages were sent to.”
    “That’d be good. What we need are e-mails, letters, any text that appears to be, you know, independently generated.”
    “Take a while,” Barnes said. “I got a fast printer, but there’s quite a bit of stuff in here. Probably, mmm, I don’t know, could run eight hundred or a thousand pages.”
    “We can wait,” Jake said.

    Madison took the car and went out for coffee and snacks, while Jake and Barnes watched the pile of paper grow in the printer tray, talked about Afghanistan and hospitals and drugs and old friends, including some who were no longer alive.
    “This chick you got with you, is this serious?” Barnes asked.
    “Hard to tell,” Jake said. “She lies to me sometimes.”
    “She’s Madison Bowe, right?”
    “No. Just looks like her,” Jake said.

    Madison came back and said to Jake, “CNN has the gay story. I saw it at the Starbucks.”
    “Oh, boy. I wonder where it leaked from?”
    “What’s that?” Barnes asked.
    Jake explained briefly, saying only that Lincoln Bowe had gay connections. Barnes shook his head and smiled at Madison and said, “They’ll be on you like fleas on a yellow dog. The media.”
    “Yes. I’m sure.”
    “Doesn’t bother you?”
    “The possibility that people would find out, that there would be a story . . . it’s been out there for a long time. Lincoln and I talked about it, how to handle it. I’ll be okay.”
    They were out of Barnes’s house an hour later, carrying two reams of paper and the restored laptop, blinking in the sunlight; Barnes had kept a copy of the hard drives, and would continue working through it. “What next?” Madison asked.
    “Back to my place. Read this stuff. Figure out what you’re going to do.”
    “I’m going to call Kitty Machela at CBS. Next week, I think. We’ll arrange for one of her famous interviews.”
    “Woman-to-woman chat.”
    “Dark set, conservative clothes, sympathy,” Madison said. “She’d sympathize with Hitler if she could get him in an exclusive interview. It’ll kill the story. My part of it, anyway.”

    At Jake’s, they got comfortable in the study, flipping through the paper, while the television ran in the background, the gay story blossoming like a strange fungus. There were shots of the outside of Madison’s town house, pictures of reporters knocking on the door.
    “Every network has to show its guy knocking on the door, even when they just saw another guy knocking on the door,” Madison said.
    “Keep reading,” Jake said.

    In a thousand sheets of paper, they found one thing, and Madison found it.
    “The murders in Madison happened . . . there’s . . . mmm . . . there’s a note, a duplicate receipt for a private plane flying from Charlottesville to Chicago for two passengers, charged to a state account, early in the morning, five A . M ., arriving back in Richmond at nine P . M . Charged to a state police account. I wonder why the cc would come back to Goodman?”
    Jake took it, read it, then looked up. “Because Goodman ordered the plane, or had it ordered. Had to approve something. Somebody flew into Chicago, which must be three or four hours from Madison by car, the morning Green and his secretary were killed. They were back that night.”
    “But why a state plane? There’d have to be a pilot, there’d be paperwork.”
    “Because you can’t carry weapons on a commercial