“I was told by somebody who knew him that Lincoln had a mean streak . . . a mean streak can mean a coldness. Maybe he could do it.”
She walked away from him, both hands on top of her head, as if trying to contain her thoughts. “I just, I just . . .”
“Novatny told me the autopsy indicated that Lincoln had been drugged—painkillers. We thought it was to control him; it was actually for the pain. I’d bet he was unconscious when they did it and I’ll bet you anything that Howard Barber set it up. He was Lincoln’s best friend, they share both a sexual orientation and a set of politics. They both hated Goodman, and Barber had done some rough stuff in the military. He had the skills, the guts, the motive, and Lincoln could trust him to do it right.”
“The Schmidt man?”
“I think he was set up. By Barber. I didn’t have a chance to dig for connections, but they were both in the military at the same time. Schmidt was given a general discharge, which usually means a kind of plea bargain. He did something, but they didn’t want to waste time with him, or maybe they didn’t want the publicity. I’ve got some access to military records. I can probably figure out what happened.”
“But why can’t they find . . . oh. You mean, Howard killed him, too? Killed Schmidt?”
“That’s what I think.”
“If Howard killed him, there had to be a plan, Linc would have to have known . . . I don’t think Linc . . . Linc wouldn’t go away without feeding the cats, he wouldn’t kill a man who was innocent.”
“Your husband didn’t have to know the whole plan,” Jake said. “May have preferred not to.”
“Another thing . . .” He fished the note out of his pocket. “I found a note in the second safe. It says, ‘All because of Lion Nerve.’ Do you have any idea what it means? It was right on top of the safe, with the pictures, like it was important.”
She looked at it for a moment, and a thoughtful frown wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t know what it means, but I know what it is. It’s an anagram for something. Linc talked in anagrams—he could come up with an anagram for anything, off the top of his head. He used them as mnemonics.”
Now Jake smiled: “You’re the first person I’ve ever heard pronounce mnemonics,” he said. He took the note back. “The ‘Lion Nerve’ is the anagram?”
“I’d think so.”
He tucked the note in his pocket. “One last thing . . .”
He told her about the package, about the attempt to push Vice President Landers out of his job, about Patterson, about a Wisconsin connection. She listened carefully, then asked, “I know Tony Patterson from the campaign. He’s a smart man—so why couldn’t it be Goodman? How do you know Goodman didn’t take Linc, to get this package? You say that’s what Tony Patterson thinks. That makes perfect sense to me.”
“Because then, Schmidt doesn’t make any sense,” Jake said. “What I think is this: I think we have two groups fighting it out in the dark. Goodman’s people have gotten a sniff of the package, and they are desperately trying to find it, to push it out early. Maybe even to make an explicit deal that would get Goodman into Landers’s job. Barber’s group has the package, or knows where it is, or who has it, and they don’t want it pushed out until the last minute, when it’ll do the most damage.”
Madison thought about it for a minute, then said, “Wisconsin.”
“That’s where the package is supposedly coming from.”
“There’s a man there named Alan Green,” Madison said. “He runs a polling company called the PollCats, something like that.”
“You think?”
She nodded. “He was an aide to a congressman here for ten years or so, before his guy lost and Alan went back home to make some money. He’s gay. He and Linc had a relationship. They’ve always been tight politically. If the package is coming from Wisconsin, Al knows everybody in Wisconsin. He could be the tie between Wisconsin and Lincoln.”
Jake thought about it for a few seconds, then, “I’ll go out there. Tomorrow.”
“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I know Alan fairly well, he’d talk to me.”
Jake was shaking his head. “You’re too visible. If there’s ever an investigation, you don’t want to have been anyplace around Wisconsin. You want to be able to claim that even if your husband was involved in the package deal, he didn’t tell you, specifically to protect you. If you’ve gone to Wisconsin . . .”
“What about you?”
“I’ll go to a little trouble to cover my tracks, though nothing’s ever perfect. You have to hope that the tracks get lost in the clutter.”
“All right.” She put her hands to her face and rubbed. “What will you do if you find the package?”
“Break it out,” Jake said. “I’ll have no choice.”
“You could just walk away,” she said. “Right now. Go back to the university. Write another book.”
“I could. But there are two factors here. If the Republicans—you guys—have it, you’ll break it out anyway, and wreck someone I like. The president. He’s a pretty good guy. But the other thing is, as long as there’s a scramble going on, you’re going to be near the center of it. Everybody’s going to at least check you. Both sides, Barber and Goodman, have people who I suspect would kill for it. I don’t want you to become a target.”
She shook her head. “Howard wouldn’t hurt me. We’ve always been sympathetic . . . simpatico.”
“This isn’t a friendship thing anymore,” Jake said. “Listen, I’ve got to . . . mmm . . . I don’t want to think that you’re playing me. That Madison Bowe is playing Jake Winter. Because there are some real problems. They’ve got lethal injection in Virginia. Even if Barber could beat the charge of killing Lincoln, making it out to be assisted suicide, he’s got the Schmidt thing hanging over his head. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that Schmidt’s buried out in the woods. If you know about it, you could be in trouble with him. You could be part of a murder conspiracy. If you don’t, you could still be a serious danger to him, and he to you. Either way, you could be in trouble.”
She stared at him for a second, then stood up and dusted the seat of her pants. “Maybe I should go to New York. Or Santa Fe. Tell a couple of people I can trust, and just split.”
“That might not be a bad idea, going to New York,” Jake said. He looked at his watch, stepped back toward the door. “I’m going to try to work this through. You—don’t isolate yourself. The more people you keep around you, the safer you’ll be.”
She walked him back to the door. “What you said a minute ago . . . whether I’m telling you the truth about Schmidt.”
“Yeah?”
He turned on the porch, his stick and briefcase in hand, hoping for a good-bye kiss, and she said, “You don’t trust me.”
“Not yet, not entirely,” he confessed. “But I’m trying as hard as I can.”
“Try harder.” She closed the door, and he walked down to the curb to wait for the taxi.
The governor was asleep when Darrell walked through the front door, punched a code in the burglar alarm, flipped on a hall light, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He tripped another alarm, a silent alarm, on the way up, and a strobe began blinking at the governor’s bedside.
Goodman woke and heard Darrell call, “It’s me, Arlo.” Goodman sat up, turned on the bedside lamp. “Come in. What happened?”
Darrell pushed into the bedroom. “Sorry. It’s important. I want you to know what I’m doing.”
“What?”
“We’ve got a lead on the package. Winter was in New York, he came back to talk to Madison Bowe, we got the whole conversation. They must’ve been sitting right under the bug.”