The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “Don’t run,” LuEllen said. Her fingernails were digging into me now. Carp was gone. “Do not run. Just walk away. Just walk.”

  “Who were those guys?” I wondered.

  “I don’t know, but I bet Carp thought he knew. I bet he thought they were you and John.”

  “You think?”

  “A white guy and a black guy, coming on to him just like you came on to him in the trailer and at Rachel’s.”

  “But he knows John’s shot.”

  “He doesn’t know it. He knows he fired the pistol, but he was running before John went down.” We could hear sirens now, and LuEllen pushed me down to the corner. “The cops. Keep walking. They’ll want witnesses, and people saw us.”

  WE CROSSED Fourteenth, got into my car, and carefully drove away, going north. A few blocks up, I turned over to Fifteenth and followed it down past Meridian Park. We could look down the hill toward Carp’s, where two white District squad cars were jamming up the street. No sign of an ambulance, although there were more sirens in the air.

  LuEllen said, “If we keep doing this, I might have to go out for some Hamburger Helper.”

  “Naw. C’mon, goddamnit.” Hamburger Helper was her euphemism for cocaine. She’d had her nose into the stuff since I’d known her, and I’d given up trying to wean her off of it. But I hate that shit. If American civilization falls, it’ll happen because of the drug monkey on our backs.

  “Might need to,” she said.

  “Then why don’t you go home,” I said. “Better to have you out of it than sticking that shit up your nose.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s gonna kill you,” I said, avoiding the question. I really wanted her to stick around.

  She was silent for a while, and then, a mile out of the motel, her voice morose, shaky, she said, “Raisinet.”

  “What?” I was still irritated.

  “Eight letters. Old grape’s reason for being.”

  Chapter Eleven

  FEAR AND TREMBLING and a sickness unto death. We held everything together until the execution began to sink in. LuEllen started with, “That motherfucker. That motherfucker. He just killed the guy. The guy was laying in the street, and he just shot him, the motherfucker…”

  I kept saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “He was helpless. Did you see that? He was facedown in the street. I mean, Carp already shot him, he was hurt and Carp just walks up and blows him away. Bam.”

  With this stunned, incoherent rambling, we drove out of the District back to the hotel, where we sat around looking at CNN and every once in a while breaking out with another motherfucker.

  That evening, still in shock, we went looking for another wi-fi connection. We didn’t have to go far: the Washington area is what you call a target-rich environment. We found a new brick office building not far from the hotel in Rosslyn, got a strong signal, parked in the street beside it, hooked up, went out to the FBI, and popped the Jackson file.

  The feds were looking at a guy named Stanley Clanton, who’d been kicked out of the local KKK for being crazy. He’d told friends around the time that Bobby was murdered that he’d been out “rolling a tire,” which was apparently nut-group slang for assault on a black man.

  “She didn’t tell them,” LuEllen said, flabbergasted. “Welsh didn’t tell them that he’s Bobby. They’re chasing some fuckin’ cracker.”

  “Ah, man,” I said. “If they get on this guy, I’m gonna have to tell somebody that we did the cross.”

  LuEllen shrugged. She was leaning over into my half of the seat, her face next to mine, looking at the tiny screen. “Why? He might not have killed Bobby, but he sounds like the kind of asshole who’s just looking for the opportunity.”

  “LuEllen, for Christ’s sake, I’m not letting some guy I don’t know go to prison for something I did, and he didn’t.”

  “Whatever,” she said. She was glum, bitter, still reacting to the killing.

  DURING the trip north from Mississippi, I’d laboriously gone through the list in the DDC Working Group-Bobby file, searching the names on the Internet, and eventually nailed most of them down. The names belonged to government employees, a few of whom were identified in their credit reports as working for the Justice Department. Three were members of the Senate staff. The computer numbers went into a Justice Department system somewhere in northern Virginia. When I called them, I got a log-in screen, and nothing more: no way to pry up the edges.

  Eventually, I wrote a memo, and e-mailed it to the staffers on the Deep Data Correlation working group list in Carp’s laptop:

  Senator Krause’s senior staff will begin next week to compile a daily log of the senator’s activities and positions which may be of interest to key persons working with the senator and the DDCWG. This will be a continuing commentary, somewhat like the web-logs now popular on the Internet. The log will allow space for questions to the senator, and internal arguments concerning positions on the issues of the day. If you would like key-person access to the log, please supply us with a user name and a password that would allow you to access the system. You may reply to…

  I had to stop and go into my own notebook, and look up the address of one of the sterile dump sites I keep for this kind of one-time messaging.

  As I was typing it in, LuEllen asked, “What good is that gonna do?”

  “Everybody likes a chance to talk to the boss,” I said. “But nobody wants to remember more passwords than they have to-everybody’s already got too many. At least a couple of these guys are going to send me the same name and password they use to sign on to the committee system.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Never fails,” I said. I pushed the button that sent the memo. “But we won’t hear back until tomorrow.”

  “So let’s go get a decent dinner. Can we do that? I mean, I’m so screwed up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Something French. With snails in it. Or diseased goose liver. Or Italian. I could do Italian, but I’m pretty fuckin’ tired of panfried catfish.”

  Before we left, I checked for William Heffron of MacLean, Virginia, one of the guys who’d visited Bobby’s trailer. I found his home address and phone number, but no employer listing. Going back through one of the credit agencies, I found U.S. Department of Justice, 1989-1996, and then U.S. Government, 1996 to present. That usually wasn’t enough for a credit agency. They wanted specifics, and since they had settled without them, I assumed that Heffron was an intelligence operative of some kind.

  “He’s dead,” LuEllen said.

  “I know. We’ll probably find out more about him tomorrow.”

  I closed down the notebook, and we went looking for a restaurant.

  I’M probably totally and utterly wrong about this, if totally and utterly don’t mean the same thing, but I’ve always gotten the impression that half of the people in Washington are sleeping with someone they shouldn’t be sleeping with, in either the sexual sense or the political sense, or both. As a result, the city and the surrounding suburbs have these great little restaurants with tables where you can’t be seen. Exactly the opposite, say, of LA.

  We wound up right across the Potomac at Birdie-singular-a French cafe in Georgetown, a half-block off M Street, where LuEllen ate some things that nobody should ever eat. I stayed with rock doves, which I’m pretty sure are pigeons, but looked, on the plate, the size of sparrows with drumsticks like kitchen matches. They also had dainty, feathery little uncooked plant leaves across their roasted breasts. I lifted the leaves off and looked around, and LuEllen said, “No, don’t throw them on the floor, give them to me.”

  We had a bottle of wine with the dinner, and because we couldn’t be seen or heard, talked about the Carp pursuit.

  “The thing that’s interesting is that the FBI is chasing Bobby’s killer, but they still think it’s a racial killing,” LuEllen said. She was wearing black, as she always did when she got into a decent restaurant east of Ohio, and small diamond e
arrings. “But we know a high-up security person knows that Bobby was Bobby, so they ought to be all over it, but they’re not.”

  I poked a fork at her. “And somebody else, not the FBI, is chasing Carp, and now they might have a couple of dead bodies,” I said. “Did they know that Carp killed Bobby? Did they know he’s the guy dumping the stuff under Bobby’s name? Or is this some kind of operation? Is it the NSA, which it might be, because Rosalind Welsh apparently isn’t talking to the FBI? But one of the guys looking for Carp used to be with the Justice Department, and the FBI is a branch of the Justice Department. What the hell does that mean?”

  “Whoever it is, we’ve got government people killing each other.”

  “No. We’ve got Carp killing government people. Like you said, those guys didn’t even look like they were armed. They did the same thing we did, stumbling into him. I really don’t think the government goes around killing people… except like in wars, and so on.”

  “I don’t have your faith,” LuEllen said. “I know there are cops who’ve killed people who pissed them off.”

  “Sure. But they did it on their own. And maybe somebody higher up didn’t look into it as deeply as they should, but basically it’s not policy. If the killing’s found out, there’s a trial.”

  “So? So we’ve got an outlaw group.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll tell you one thing-if the FBI doesn’t figure out that Robert Fields was Bobby, and if Welsh doesn’t tell them, then we’ll have to. Carp ain’t walking away from this thing.”

  “We don’t even know that Carp’s the guy who killed Bobby. Maybe it was these two guys,” LuEllen suggested.

  “Oh, bullshit.” I swallowed most of a wing. “These guys were a couple of schmucks. And we know Carp is nuts. When we were in the trailer, the first time we ever saw him, he jumped up and fired a gun at John and me without ever asking who we were or where we were from. Nuts.”

  “Okay, he’s nuts,” she said. “There are a couple things we’ve got to know, though, that we don’t know yet-the biggest one is, is Carp working for someone? If he’s working for someone, then he may have already given the computer away. Or given up copies. And we may run into more trouble than we think, if we ever find him.”

  “Yeah… maybe we’ll figure out something tomorrow.”

  “Hope he doesn’t pop something else on the news,” LuEllen said. “He’s already got a feeding frenzy. What more does he want?”

  WE SPENT a little time fooling around that evening, in sort of a sad way, and in the quiet after the sex, LuEllen told me why she was thinking of quitting her life.

  “No big deal, it was just a TV show. I was down in Texas and they showed this thing about women in prison. They were all doing long terms for murder and… well, murder, mostly-and I started thinking that I could end up like them. Just one fuck-up. One alarm that I don’t see, or maybe a booby trap or I get hurt, somehow. I’d be in there. It wasn’t the jail so much that looked bad, it was the women. They all looked really messed up. Hurt. They looked sad… the saddest people you can imagine. I’d hang myself before I got that way.”

  There wasn’t much to say. She was right, it could happen. To either of us.

  She went on: “The saddest thing was the day their kids could come visit, and how happy they were to see their kids. Some of the kids didn’t even seem to remember their moms that well. And sometimes the women thought their kids might be coming and then they wouldn’t show up and they’d just sit in a corner and cry. And I thought, I don’t even have anybody who’d come to see me if I was inside.”

  I said, “LuEllen, you know-”

  “You couldn’t come,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you see me that way, even if you wanted to. But I was thinking, if I got caught, nobody would even know who I was. Know my name. Nobody but a couple of people I went to junior high school with. Nobody would even know.” She sat up suddenly. “My life has been okay so far. I didn’t have a lot of choices. It was this or maybe be a practical nurse like my mom, running pans of shit around a nursing home.”

  “You’re too smart for that.”

  “In this country, smart isn’t enough. You’ve got to be taught right, from the start. You’ve got to get that education, or have money from your parents, you just…” She flopped back on the bed. “I don’t know. But I’ve gotta find something else to do. I still get the rush, I still get high on it, when I’m inside somewhere, but I gotta get out of this before it’s too late.”

  That made for a great night’s sleep. That and recurring dreams that featured an overweight man facedown in the street…

  THE next day was a Saturday. We both woke early, twitched around a little, trying to get that last little patch of sleep, and I finally gave up and found the remote and clicked on the TV. The Menu screen came up with the day, date, and time. I hadn’t been paying attention, and when they registered with me, I said, “Saturday. Damnit. If nobody gets our e-mail, we won’t get any passwords back.”

  “I bet political people check their e-mail every five minutes,” LuEllen said. She sat up and stretched. “Let’s get breakfast and then go see.”

  While she cleaned up, I clicked around to the local channels, looking for news. I found it, but there was nothing about the shooting the night before. We went out, ate French toast-she was overly cheerful, and maybe a little embarrassed about the talk the night before, revealing herself like that-and then we got on-line at our big wi-fi building.

  LuEllen was right about political people. They check their e-mail. Seventeen replies had come in to the dump site. I transferred them to Carp’s machine, then called into the first number of the DCC working group. I got the log-in screen and started running names. Darryl Finch, the sixth guy on the list, had given us Dfinch/Bluebird9 in our solicitation for the senator’s log. That didn’t work, but Dfinch/bluebird5 punched us right through.

  Dfinch/bluebird5 got me into a personnel computer. Lots of details on the staffers, but no files on James Carp or Bobby. Then, browsing through a file on a Linda Soukanov, I spotted a letter that supported a complaint from a co-worker against Carp. Soukanov was with the working group. She said that she had witnessed Carp paying “unwelcome attention” to a co-worker in the next cubicle. The co-worker was identified as a Michelle Strom, with the Bobby project.

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “Got something?” LuEllen was bored.

  “Maybe… give me a minute.”

  I pulled the file on Michelle Strom and found a complaint that said that Carp had touched her in an elevator, “pressing his front against my back,” and that he’d one other time touched her breast under the pretext of looking at her identification photograph. She said she wouldn’t have reported the incidents because she wasn’t sure that he had intentionally touched her, but she’d heard reports now from other women…

  I looked at my senator-log sign-up list. Nothing from Linda Soukanov, but Michelle Strom was there: Mickey/DasMaus1. God help me.

  I signed out of Dfinch and tried Mickey/DasMaus1 and failed, spent five minutes going through possible combinations and got in on Mickey/Mauser. All things come to hackers who are patient.

  Most things, anyway. I got into Michelle Strom’s space, and found that I could push memos or reports into the system, but nothing could be retrieved without another code. From the way the front-end was set up, I suspected the link would shut me down rather than let me experiment-and would tell the system people that somebody was trying to crack the system after getting in with Strom’s password.

  “Stone wall,” I said.

  I got in on four more name/password combinations, but the security was better than I’d hoped. I could get administrative stuff, but I couldn’t get any operations files. Before I shut down, I entered William Heffron into a general search engine and immediately popped a half-dozen reports from Washington TV-news websites. I pulled the first one and read to LuEllen:

  “Two Virginia men were shot to death at a Meridian Park apartment
building Friday night by an assailant who shot one man on the building’s stairway and another as he fled to the sidewalk outside the building, District police said Saturday.

  “Terrance Small of Alexandria and William Heffron of McLean, both government employees with a Justice Department data processing center, were apparently on their way to visit a friend when they were shot. Police speculated that the men had inadvertently stumbled into a drug transaction at the Marlybone Apartments on Clay Ave.

  “Police say each of the men was shot once in the head at extremely close range, execution-style, in addition to suffering wounds to the body. Neither of the men had criminal records, police said. Terry Banks, a supervisor at the Justice Department’s Division of Data Integration, said, ‘This is a terrible tragedy. These were fine men; everybody liked them. I just don’t understand how these things can happen. The people in this division will be devastated.’ ”

  There was more, but that was the substance of it.

  “A drug deal? The government’s not even talking to the cops when their own people get murdered,” LuEllen said. “They’re as nuts as Carp is.”

  “Maybe they really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t know what Heffron and Small were doing there, that Carp has an apartment there.” I went back into the search engine, looking for Carp, and got only fish-related sites. “Nothing at all on Jimmy or James Carp.”

  LuEllen shook her head, the corners of her mouth turned down. I’m a skeptic when it comes to government; she’s a couple steps further along that road than I am.

  “SO now what?” LuEllen twisted around in her seat, looking out for passersby. “We’ve been here a long time.”

  “If you had to get better entry equipment, instead of the Target stuff, could you get it close by?”