Dead Watch by John Sandford

start to push.”
    “When Madison Bowe went on the noon news,” Jake said.
    “What a coincidence. That’s when we started wondering,” Novatny said.
    They left, and Jake went back to the paper, typing notes into his laptop.
    The witnesses who’d seen Lincoln Bowe get in the car with the men with ear-bugs said he hadn’t seemed under duress. He’d seemed to expect the ride, and he had no other ride waiting. The men were described as large, white, with business haircuts, wearing suits. One witness said Bowe had been smiling when he got in the car.
    The abandoned cats argued for duress. The smile argued for cooperation.
    On the one hand, he had only Madison Bowe’s word that he cared about the cats. On the other, if Bowe had been picked up by somebody who’d stuck a gun in his ribs and said, “Smile, or I’ll blow your heart out,” he might have smiled despite duress.
    “Huh.” No way to make a decision yet. He needed more information.
    One thing was clear from the interviews by the Virginia cops: Bowe’s speech to the law students had been wicked, and more than one person said that he seemed to be emotionally overwrought, and at the same time, physically loose. He’d been so angry that he seemed, at times, to be groping for words, and at other times, had used inappropriate words, words that simply didn’t fit his sentences.
    Again, one witness thought he might have been drunk.

    Jake looked at his watch, gathered and stacked the paper, called the clerk, told her to send digital copies of everything to his secure e-mail address, and to take the paper to Novatny’s office.
    Time to see Arlo Goodman.
    Jake grabbed a cab back home, made and ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, then headed south in his own car, a two-year-old E-class Mercedes. Washington to Richmond was two hours, depending on traffic, south through the most haunted country in America, some of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the Civil War.
    Jake had walked all of them, on the anniversaries of the battles. Civil War soldiers, he’d concluded, had been tough nuts.
    As was Arlo Goodman.

    Four years earlier, Goodman had been the popular commonwealth’s attorney for Norfolk, a veteran of Iraq, and politically disgruntled.
    His political unhappiness stretched in several directions—and he could do something about one of them. Norfolk was at the center of a series of military complexes; convinced that a terror attack was possible, he put together a team of five investigators, including his brother, a former special forces trooper. The team had set up an intelligence net in the port areas, extending to a couple of other independent cities; later, they recruited volunteer watchmen, all veterans.
    Lightning struck.
    A group of dissident Saudi students began planning some kind of attack, although exactly what kind was never determined. One of the watchmen picked up on it and talked to the investigators. The apartment of one of the Saudis was bugged, and Goodman got tapes of five students talking about weapons possibilities, and targets, including atomic submarines. The investigators followed them as they bought maps and took photographs.
    At one point, three of the students went out to a state park and spent the afternoon throwing Molotov cocktails—gasoline and oil mixed in wine bottles—into a ravine, to see what would happen. The investigators filmed the explosions. They had the motive, the planning, the means. The Saudis were arrested in a flashy bust at their apartment, and the conviction was a slam dunk.
    The next day, Goodman announced the formation of a veterans group called the Watchmen, to keep watch over the streets of Norfolk, in an effort to control street crime, prostitution, drugs, and to keep an eye out for “suspicious activities.”
    As a popular prosecutor, he had a base. With the Watchmen being replicated in other counties, he had a spreading influence.
    Although he was technically a Democrat, he admitted that he had little time