Free Dead Watch by John Sandford

a soft rubber exercise ball from his desk, pushed it between the fingers of his ruined right hand, tried to tense the fingers. “We’re getting behind here. We need somebody we can squeeze. We need him now.”

    Out on the street, Jake got on his cell phone and called Novatny at the FBI.
    “I’ve got a name for you. Could you run it? And could you find out where a town called Scottsville is? I think it’s over by Charlottesville, maybe south?” He explained about the tip, without identifying the girl who had given it to him. On the note, she’d given her name as Cathy Ann Dorn, along with a local Richmond phone number.
    While Novatny ran the name, Jake walked back to his car, edged back onto the streets, looking for an entrance to the interstate. Novatny called back: “Do you have any good reason to think this guy might be a problem?”
    “No—just that my source said that Goodman and Patricia are looking for him, and think he might be involved.”
    “So what are you going to do about him?”
    Jake frowned, said, “Hey, Chuck—what’s up? What’d you find?”
    “We found quite a bit on him. One of the things is, he’s got more guns than the National Guard.”
    “What else?”

    Carl V. Schmidt was a failed entrepreneur, Novatny said. He’d failed as an upholsterer, a dry cleaner, a cosmetics salesman, a limo driver, a lunch-van driver for construction sites, owner-operator of a security service, and twice as a real estate agent. Fifteen years earlier, he’d been given a general discharge from the navy, which wasn’t good. He tended to drink and fight, the navy reports said.
    He’d had property attached both by Virginia and the U.S. government, for failure to pay taxes. He’d worked off the debts, eventually, and currently was up-to-date. He’d once been charged with fraud, but apparently paid back the victim, and the charges had been dismissed.
    “He worked the MacCallum campaign, in the Senate election two years ago,” Novatny said. “There’s a notation in here . . .” He paused, apparently looking for it, then read, “Quote: Both the Murray and the Bowe campaigns complained that cars with their bumper stickers were systematically damaged. That seven houses in Lexington with Bowe yard signs were splashed with paint, apparently from paint balloons. Police questioned Schmidt and several others. All were released for lack of proof.”
    “The Macs were bad news, some of them,” Jake said. “Fruitcakes.”
    “He’s a member of a gun club and the NRA. He owns, let’s see, sixty-four guns,” Novatny said. He counted them out: “Fifteen rifles . . . ten shotguns . . . and thirty-nine handguns. Yeah, sixty-four. Jeez. The guns, let me see . . . mmm, they’re not collector items, they’re shooters.”
    “So what do you think?”
    “There’s nothing that suggests he ever had anything to do with Lincoln Bowe,” Novatny said. “If you think the tip is real, we could track him.”
    Jake hesitated, then said, “Let me think about it.”
    Novatny: “There’s a tendency for you political people to keep things off-the-record. I understand that, given your job. But if you’re gonna look into this yourself, take it easy. I’ve seen bios like this before. The guy could be a problem.”
    “Maybe if I eased up on him,” Jake suggested.
    “I don’t want to hear about it. Stay in touch. If you actually find a single thing that could tie him to Bowe, call us.”
    “Talk to you tonight,” Jake said. “Could you e-mail me that file? Like, right now?”
    “You’ll get it in two minutes,” Novatny said.

    A well-tended fiftyish matron was waiting at a stoplight and Jake pulled over, stepped out of the car: “Excuse me? Do you know if there’s a Starbucks around here?”
    She checked him out for a moment, looked at the Mercedes-Benz star on the front of the car, then smiled. Somebody of her own class: “If you go three blocks straight up this street, you’ll see a Pea-in-the-Pod