All that brought him to the rubber tarp, where he knelt in the gloom, waiting for his bird to move. A little hungry now, trying to ignore it. The four-foot-square mat made it possible to shift his weight silently; he had to shift frequently because of his lame leg. The tangle of brush around him made it possible to draw the bow without the motion being seen.
He had a Semiweiss Lighting compound bow, the draw weight adjusted down to provide for a very long hold. He was shooting carbon-fiber arrows, one-inch broadheads with stoppers. A good-sized tom hung out in the oaks behind him. And the tom would be coming out to this cornfield, and with luck, following a track along a shallow ravine below him. He knew the bird sometimes did that, because he’d seen the scat and the tracks on scouting trips.
Whether the tom would do it this day, he didn’t know.
He waited, listening, straining to see in through the brush, the problems of the bureaucracy falling away from him. He’d hunted most of his life, since his grandfather had first taken him out when he was six years old. He hunted deer and turkeys in Virginia, elk and antelope out west. When he was hunting, he stepped into a Zen-space and became part of the landscape. Time didn’t pass, nor did it stop; it simply wasn’t. He faded away from himself and his day-to-day problems.
He’d been in place since dawn. The sun came up, rose higher, broke briefly out of the clouds, disappeared again. A breeze sprang up, played with the oak leaves, died again; squirrels ran across the ground, noisy beasts; a chickadee stopped on a branch a foot from his nose.
He saw it all, but didn’t look at it. He was waiting . . . When the cell phone went off.
“Ahhhh . . . Jesus!”
The sound was stunning, like being hit in the face by a snowball. He rushed back to the present, out of the Zen-space to the here-and-now. He unzipped a panel on his camo, pushed his hand through to a shirt pocket underneath, and took the phone out.
“Yes.” The only people who had the number for that phone were people he needed to talk with.
A woman’s voice, quiet, cultivated: “Jake, this is Gina Press. I’m sorry to bother you, I understand you’re on vacation. The guy needs to see you.”
“When?”
“Today. Where are you?”
“Down in the valley. It’ll be a while.”
“It’s pretty urgent. Can I put you on the log for four forty-five?”
He looked at his watch: One o’clock. “Okay—but give me a hint.”
“Madison Bowe.”
“I’ll be there.”
The killer could feel the pull of the .45 in his pocket, pulling down on his shoulders, and maybe his soul.
He was moving Lincoln Bowe. Bowe was pale, naked, unconscious, a sack of meat, for all practical purposes. The killer had him slung in a blue plastic tarp, purchased at a Wal-Mart, and wrestled him down the narrow stairs, under the single bare basement bulb.
He was a big man, straining with the load, trying for a kind of tenderness while moving two hundred pounds of inert human being. He wore blue coveralls from Wal-Mart, purchased for the murder, and a hooded sweatshirt, with the hood pulled over his head, and plastic gloves. He knew all about DNA, and it worried him. A hair, a little spit, and he could wind up strapped to the death gurney, a needle in the arm . . .
He got the load down, puffing and heaving all the way, then looked back up the stairs: two minutes and he’d have to take the body back up. But he couldn’t do the killing upstairs, the neighborhood was too tight, somebody might hear the shot.
He moved Bowe under the light, spread the tarp, exposed him. He was lying on his back, soft and helpless. His body was dead white, touched here and there with blemishes, pimples, the rashes and scrapes of an out-of-shape man in his fifth decade. He looked at Bowe for a few seconds, then said aloud, “Here we are. Christ Almighty.”
No response. Bowe had taken an overdose of Rinolat.
The killer took the .45 out of his pocket, an old, worn gun, made in the first half of the twentieth century, bought at a weekend sale, inaccurate at any distance farther than arm’s length. Which was enough for the task.
He cocked it with a gloved hand, then thought: “The phone book. Damnit.” He ran up the short flight of stairs, got the phone book off the kitchen table, and went back down, closing the door behind him. The phone book already had two bullet holes in it: tests he’d done out in the Virginia countryside. He placed it on the naked man’s chest.
He slipped the safety and said, “Linc . . .” and thought:
Ears . . . damnit.
He put the safety back on, ran back up the stairs, and got the earplugs. They were two bullet-sized bits of compressible yellow foam, made for target shooters. He twisted each one, fitted them into his ears, waited for them to reexpand. If he’d fired the gun in the confines of the basement, without the ear protection, he wouldn’t have been able to hear for a week.
He slipped the safety again, teared up, wiped the tears away, pointed the pistol at the point where the phone book covered the naked man’s heart, said, “Lincoln,” and pulled the trigger.
Without the earplugs, the blast would have been shattering; it was bad enough as it was. The naked man bucked upward, his eyes opening in reflex, the pupils milky with sleep. He stared at the killer for a second, then two, then dropped back flat on the floor.
“Holy mother,” the killer said, appalled. He stood staring for a second, shocked by the milky eyes, by a possible gleam of intelligence, the hair rising on the back of his neck. Then, after a moment, he stooped and picked up the phone book. The slug had gone through, and blood bubbled from a purple hole in the naked man’s chest. The hole was directly over his heart. He engaged the safety on the .45, slipped the gun back in his pocket, and squatted.
The naked man wasn’t breathing. His eyes, when the lids were withdrawn, had rolled up, showing only the whites. He pressed a plastic-covered finger against the naked man’s neck, waiting for any sign of a pulse. Didn’t find one. Lincoln Bowe was dead.
He rolled Bowe up, enough to look at his back. No exit wound. The phone book had worked like a charm: the slug was buried inside the dead man.
The killer was silent, kneeling, looking at the face of the man on the floor. So many years. Who would have thought it’d come to this? Then he sighed, stood up, pulled the magazine on the pistol, jacked the shell out of the chamber, replaced it in the magazine. Looked at the stairs.
This would be the dangerous part, moving the body. If the cops stopped him for anything, he was done.
But they’d made their plans, and he was running with them. He had a lot to do. He stood, still looking at the dead man’s face, then said, “Let’s move, Linc. Let’s go.”
2
Jake stopped at home and changed into a suit and tie, and then caught a taxi to the White House. He checked through the west working entrance, walking first past the outer gate, where a guard examined his ID, then through the inner gate with the X-ray machines.
The X-ray tech, a new guy, spent five minutes looking at his cane, until an older guy came by, glanced at it, and said, “It’s okay. Mr. Winter’s a regular.”