Dead Watch (36 page)

He took a deep breath, listened for a car, heard nothing, started counting, “One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two . . .” stepped quickly over to the Mercury, pulled the hammer out of his pocket and hit the back window with it. The glass exploded inward, and the car alarm went. He knocked out the rest of the glass with the hammerhead, reached through the window into the screaming wail of the alarm, pulled open the back door, spotted the briefcase on the floor, grabbed it, and ran.

Down to the back door. Nothing coming up the ramp at him. Down the stairs and around, counting, “One-thousand-nine, one-thousand-ten . . .”

He stopped at the door, pulled down the mask, pushed it under his shirt collar, and stepped out. Madison was just cruising along the street, pulled over. Jake got in the car, still counting, but now, aloud. “One-thousand-fourteen, one-thousand-fifteen.”

He looked out the back window.

Nothing moved around the parking garage. They turned the corner and were gone.

“I had a thought,” she said. She was cool, contained, but with a little pink in her cheeks. “If Arlo thinks about this and thinks, ‘Jake Winter,’ what if he has the Highway Patrol look for us? Stop us on some phony drug charge? Search the car.”

“Huh.” He considered the idea for a minute, then said, “We can’t take a chance. Let’s go to the airport. We can rent another car, you can follow me back. If you see me get stopped, you can keep on going.”

“I’m so scared I could pee my pants,” Madison said.

“Those are obscenely expensive leather seats you’re sitting on,” Jake said. She started to laugh, and then he started, and he said, “I’m sweating like a horse myself. Let’s get the fuck out of Virginia.”

Russell Barnes was a double amputee with a mop of red hair tied in a ponytail with white string. A long, thin red beard straggled down the front of his green army T-shirt. He met them at the front door, took a long look at Madison, and said, “Jake, nice to see you. How’s the leg?”

“Not bad. How’s the pain?”

“I’m so hooked on the drugs that even if it goes away, I’m gonna have to deal with the drug problem. I don’t know if I can do that,” he said.

As they talked, they followed him, in his wheelchair, back through the dimly lit tract house to what had once been a family room, now jammed with computer equipment. A ten-foot-long wooden workbench, littered with electronic testing equipment, three keyboards, and a half dozen monitors of different sizes, was pushed against one wall, under a photograph of a man in an army uniform posed as the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The workbench was low, made for a man in a wheelchair; the room smelled of Campbell’s tomato soup.

“Whatcha got?” Barnes asked.

“Laptop,” Jake said, taking it out of his bag. “Password protected.”

He handed Barnes the HP laptop. Barnes looked it over, plugged it into an electric strip on the top of the workbench, brought it up. “This might take a couple of minutes.”

There was no place to go, no place to sit, so Jake and Madison stood and watched as Barnes played with the computer. He said, “Commercial password program. That’s not good.”

“You can’t get around it?”

“I can get around the password, but I suspect that a lot of the stuff on it is going to be encrypted. Encryption is part of the program.”

“Can you beat the encryption?” Madison 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 flight, not without registering them,” Jake said. “And they’re not going to register weapons with silencers, huh?”

“Why didn’t they fly into Madison?”

“Because the name might come up in a search, if someone like the FBI looked for flights going into Madison or Milwaukee, or anywhere in Wisconsin. They had to take a risk, but they minimized it by going to Chicago. Without this note . . . digging this out of the woodwork would be impossible, believe me. This is in the bottom of a computer file somewhere, and nobody will ever look at it again, without somebody asking for it. But since we know about it, they can’t escape. Because the paperwork is there.”

“But they’ll have some kind of story about what they were doing in Chicago,” Madison said.

“Probably. But this is a piece of the puzzle. And it tells
me
something. It tells me that your pal Barber probably didn’t do it.”

They locked eyes for a moment, but she didn’t say it:
I already told you that Barber didn’t do it. Don’t you trust me?

“I trust you enough to plan a murder with you,” Jake said. “I wouldn’t even do that with Russell Barnes.”

She asked, “What murder?”

He said, “Just a minute. I’ve got to call Russell.”

Jake went to the phone and called. “Russell. Look at the encrypted stuff, the encrypted messages. See if you can find one for the day before yesterday, originating in Chicago or anywhere in Illinois or Wisconsin.”

“Hold on. I’ll queue them up.”

Barnes was back in four minutes: “There’s one from Chicago at eight
A
.
M
., very short. There’s another from Madison, Wisconsin, at two o’clock, even shorter.”