The Hanged Man’s Song

by John Sandford

  “No. No.” I shook my head. “No, it’s just superstition. But it’s… interesting.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Maybe what he did to us,” I said slowly. “I gotta think about it. He doesn’t know that we know.”

  “What if he looks at your DMV records again and sees that somebody else has checked them. He’ll know it was you, and he’ll know why.”

  “We’re not dealing with a sure thing,” I said. “It’s all murky. Let’s go walk around the Mall and see if we can figure something out.”

  WE FIGURED something out, all right. What we figured out took an hour of talk-argument-working over the problem of the DDC group, the existence of the laptop and what that might mean, and the fact that Carp had identified me.

  Our strategy unwound like this:

  LuEllen asked a simple question: “Why don’t we just call him up and make a deal? Find out what he wants? We know that he killed Bobby and we could give the FBI a trail that leads to him-Baird saw him, and so did Rachel. We’ve got a big stick.”

  “So does he. He knows who I am.”

  “Right. So you should be safe with each other’s information. We call him up, tell him we want to look at the laptop-nothing more, we just want to look at it, meet at some safe, open place and make sure there’s nothing on it that incriminates us. After that, we walk away.”

  There was an objection to that idea. I said, “You’re saying we let him get away with killing Bobby.”

  “Not because I want to.”

  “And if we go online and try to make a deal, we give away our edge,” I said. “We know Lemon is Carp, and he doesn’t know we know.”

  “So what? So we know his exact name and the type of car he has and even the license number, but there are about a billion people in Washington. How are we gonna find him in this mess?”

  I was still unhappy with the idea. “What if he doesn’t even know what he’s got on us? He might not know yet, given the size of Bobby’s files. He might be willing to make a deal now, then find out something big, and decide to go with it.”

  “With the murder rap hanging over him?”

  “That’s exactly it. Suppose he found out what we did with the Keyhole satellites. He could use the information to deal his way out of a murder charge. I know the government deals down murder charges. You see it in the papers, some killer disappears into the Witness Protection Program, and the next thing you know, he’s your Little League coach.”

  “Damnit.”

  “The goddamn laptop is a bomb,” I said. “We gotta get it.”

  WE WORRIED about that for a while. “Look,” I said, “we gotta wonder why he came to Washington at all. To make a deal with somebody? To get his job back? He might still be hoping to do that, if nobody can prove he did the killings at the apartment. And shit, the way things run in Washington these days, not being proven guilty is considered the same as being proven innocent.”

  “Well, that’s what the letters in his laptop say-he’s trying to get back in with Krause.”

  “What if we went online and told Lemon that Senator Krause wants to make a deal with Carp. What if we throw that fly out on the water?”

  Once we got that going, other bits and pieces started falling into place, but it was all tentative, all guesswork, and all dangerous. LuEllen embroidered on the idea, and concluded, “It’s doable-but the whole idea depends on us spotting Carp first. And on where Krause lives. If he lives downtown in a big apartment complex, the Watergate or somewhere like that, it won’t work. Even if it’s in a house, he could have big-time security, with his job.”

  “We can figure out a way to finesse the security. And Krause’s been here for twenty years, he’s gotta have a house,” I said. “He shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  ONE of the keys to the hunt for Carp was the attack outside of Griggs’s apartment. We wondered, why there? How did he know about the park? The park had been a perfect spot for an ambush-small enough that he could watch the whole thing from one place, with good protective contour, good concealing foliage, busy enough that he wouldn’t be noticeable, quiet enough that he wouldn’t be shooting through a crowd.

  We went online to my pal in Montana, the government-files maven, and asked him to pull Carp’s tax returns and check the addresses. We had an answer in twenty minutes: Carp had lived for a year in a house not more than a two-minute walk from the park. And more background: he’d apparently moved into the apartment in the District only six months earlier. Before that, he’d lived in an apartment complex in south Arlington.

  We didn’t think he’d dare go back to his own apartment after killing the two government guys, so it was possible that he knew the people in the house he’d lived in, and bagged out there, or that he had a friend somewhere down in that apartment complex and was hiding there. Either would explain both the park meeting place and his invisibility.

  While my Montana friend was compiling the addresses, we did a quick check on Krause; he had a house in a northwestern suburb, as close as we could tell with our Washington map.

  “So it’s a possibility,” I said. “The whole setup we talked about.”

  “If we can spot Carp’s car…”

  WE KNEW Carp was driving a red Corolla. We knew the license number. He knew our car, and the number. No problem: we went out to National and rented a couple of cars, one from Hertz, one from Avis on my Harry Olson Visa card and Wisconsin driver’s license. We still had the walkie-talkies from New Orleans.

  We started looking, driving separate cars, staying in touch with the walkie-talkies.

  THE house in Ballston we crossed off immediately. The area seemed to be upgrading, and the house where Carp once lived was being rehabbed and was empty. Two carpenters were rebuilding the front porch, and you could look straight through the place. We headed down to south Arlington.

  Fairlington is a few hundred acres of low two- and three-story red-brick apartment buildings with white window trimmings in a faux-federal style, spread along narrow, quiet, two-lane streets overhung with oaks; a pleasant enough place for new families just getting started, and we saw a fair number of young mothers out pushing baby strollers.

  We thought Carp might be at the White Creek complex, a U-shaped building with four white pillars at the main entrance, and an asphalt parking lot in the front. I cruised the parking lot, which wouldn’t hold many more than a hundred cars, while LuEllen lingered up the block in another car. No Corolla.

  “You go around to the left, I’ll go right,” I told her.

  “Roger. Over and out.” She thought the walkies-talkies were fun.

  IF WE didn’t find him in the first sweep through the complex, we’d agreed that we’d check a few more times-he might simply have gone out for lunch.

  But he wasn’t out.

  LuEllen found the car fifteen minutes after we started looking for it. The Motorola beeped, I picked it up and said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Got it.”

  WE WENT out to a sandwich place in a shopping center on King Street, got chicken-salad sandwiches. “We could just stick the gun in his ear and threaten to pull the trigger if he doesn’t give us the laptop,” LuEllen said.

  “Two problems: we’d have to get close enough to him and we really might have to shoot him if we got that close. He’s got that gun. And what if he doesn’t have the laptop with him?”

  “We’d only try it if he had it with him.”

  “Too many windows looking out at us, too many mothers on the street.” I shook my head. “Let’s go the other way. Even if we miss, we’ll know where he’s staying.”

  “Simple is usually best. This isn’t simple.”

  “And this is fucking Washington,” I said.

  “Yeah-yeah,” she said. “Finish your sandwich. Lets go look at Krause’s house.”

  KRAUSE lived in a leafy neighborhood northwest of the city of Washington proper, on the opposite side of Burning Tree Country Club from I-495. We drove past the club entrance five minutes befo
re we cruised his house. The landscape was wooded and rolling, the streets smooth and quiet and curved and rich. His house sat above the street, with a hundred-foot black-topped driveway and a three-car garage.

  “When?” she asked.

  “This evening,” I said.

  “How do we know he’ll be in?”

  “It’s Sunday night. He could be out playing golf, and then have some friends over, but he ought to be home sometime in between-say, six o’clock. Dinnertime.”

  “How about a FedEx shirt?”

  “We can fake it,” I said.

  “Somebody might see your face.”

  “Can’t help it.”

  She said, “I just went to eighty percent on the LuEllen scare-o-meter.”

  THE whole thing was complicated to talk about, but the actual doing was fairly quick. We needed to get very close to Krause very quickly, and without scaring him. Once we were close, he wouldn’t have a choice about talking-but getting within conversational distance of a major Washington politician, alone, was not a sure thing.

  We went downtown and rifled a FedEx box, taking several cardboard letter-size envelopes and the bigger, sack-like envelopes. Then we stopped at an art store where I bought a jar of black poster paint, a watercolor brush, and an X-Acto knife. I bought a black golf shirt at a department store, and a black baseball cap from a sports shop two doors down the street.

  Years before, we once had needed a full-face mask, and found one, of former President Bill Clinton, at a novelty store. To LuEllen’s delight, the store was still there, and open, and she bought another one just like the first. The great thing about the Clinton mask was that it was Caucasian flesh-colored, and from more than a dozen feet away it might be mistaken for an actual face.

  We took all the supplies back to the hotel and up to LuEllen’s room.

  On the back of the cardboard FedEx envelope we found a logo just about the right size for a shirt. We cut it out with the X-Acto knife, and LuEllen sewed it above the pocket on the golf shirt, tacking it on with three stitches of black thread from her sewing kit.

  “Good from six feet,” she said, looking critically at the shirt. “If a cop stops us to give us a ticket, you can tear it off.”

  “Can’t have any cops,” I said. “We’ll have to do the plates when we get close to Krause’s, but they wouldn’t fool a cop.”

  “Gonna be some cops in that neighborhood,” she said.

  “We need five minutes,” I told her. “Give me five minutes with the guy.”

  “We could call him on the phone.”

  “He wouldn’t believe us. We’ve got one chance at it.”

  While we were talking, we cut another logo out of one of the FedEx bags, and we put that one on the baseball cap. “Who knows what a FedEx uniform looks like, anyway?” LuEllen said. “You just look at the logo, right? You just look at the box the guy’s carrying.”

  Before we headed to Krause’s place, we went out on the hotel line-this was nothing sensitive, just a Google search-and found a half-dozen pictures of Krause. Took a long look: he had sandy hair, a narrow face, a long nose, a rounded chin. He looked English, upper-class English.

  WE CRUISED Krause’s house at five o’clock, driving my rental car. High summer and still full daylight. That was a particular problem, because we couldn’t see any signs of life-no lights, no movement, all garage doors closed. We cruised it at five-thirty and at six, at six-thirty and at seven. In between, we found an elementary school with a deep turn-in. That’s where we’d do the painting, if Krause ever showed.

  “Maybe he’s not home,” LuEllen suggested, when we went by at seven. The house was still dark; and now the sun was going down. “A lot of these guys go back to their home states on weekends, right?”

  “That should have been mentioned on one of the schedules,” I said. “It wasn’t… and he’s not up for reelection for four years.”

  THE house showed lights at seven-thirty and I headed back to the school yard. “You ready for this?” LuEllen asked.

  “Let’s just do it,” I said. We pulled into the turn-in, and I got out and did a quick touch-up on the front license plate with the black poster paint-changed an H to an M, a 7 to a 1, made a 6 out of a 5. When I was done, I screwed the tops back on the paint bottles and put them in a plastic bag in the trunk. I pulled the Clinton mask over my face, held in place by a rubber band stretched around my head, above my ears. Once it was on, I rolled it up onto my forehead, so that when I was wearing the ball cap, the roll of the plastic mask was obscured by the bill.

  “Ready,” I said, when I got back in the car.

  LuEllen was in the backseat. “You know what you’re gonna say?” she asked nervously. We’d rehearsed the possibilities all the way over.

  “Yup.” I yawned, as nervous as she was.

  FOR all the sweat and preparation, we got this:

  I pulled all the way into Krause’s driveway, LuEllen lying down in the backseat. Once I was inside, she’d move up to the driver’s seat and get ready for a fast exit. I got out of the car, carrying a FedEx package full of newspapers and my Sony laptop, with the screen lit up. We thought that looked sort of like one of the FedEx delivery slates. If Krause’s wife came to the door, I would politely ask for her husband. If she wanted to take the package, I’d refuse, and say that I would come back the next day. If that didn’t get him, we’d leave.

  If Krause came to the door, I’d turn away as soon as I saw him, duck my head and pull the mask over my face, and show him the gun. I’d taken all the shells out, because if he did something weird, I didn’t want to wind up shooting him. Unfortunately, when you take the shells out of a revolver, the person who the gun is pointed at can see the empty cylinders. I’d have to be careful, show him only the side of the gun.

  MOST of the working-out stuff wasn’t necessary. I walked to the front steps, rang the doorbell, and a minute later saw Krause walking toward the door. He was wearing shorts and a madras shirt instead of his usual blue shirt, but his long face was unmistakable.

  As he came to the door, I turned my face away. The hand with the FedEx package was visible from the doorway, along with the lit-up computer screen; I pulled the Bill Clinton mask down. As I heard the door open, I realized that we were losing just a bit of the light-not quite twilight, but the sunlight was dimming.

  The door opened and the senator said, querulously, “FedEx?”

  I turned toward him and he shrank back, seeing the face.

  I put the gun up but said, quietly, “I’m not going to hurt you. Shut up and don’t move. I need five minutes of talk and then I’m going to get out of here.” I was holding the door open with my foot, still had the package and the laptop in the other hand.

  He took another step back and looked over his shoulder, looked back at me, and I said, “I’m going to save your career if you give me five minutes. If you start screaming, I’m gonna run, and it’ll be the worst decision you ever made.”

  He said, “FedEx?”

  “No. Listen to me. Do you know the shooting in Jackson, Mississippi, of the black man, where the cross was burned?”

  “Yes,” he said tentatively. He looked back over his shoulder again. He thought about running, but knew he wouldn’t make it.

  “The man who was killed was Bobby. Do you know who I’m talking about? The hacker Bobby?”

  He frowned. Now, for the first time, he thought of something other than escape. “I saw it on the news, but they didn’t say anything about a hacker.”

  “But you’ve heard of Bobby?”

  “I’ve heard of him, but I-”

  “Did you know that two men from your DDC group were killed yesterday?”

  “Who are you?” He was a politician, trying to take the offensive; and he had heard.

  I cut him off. “Bill Clinton. Listen, one of your former staff members at the Intelligence Committee, James Carp, killed Bobby-murdered him, beat in his head, and stole a laptop with information that could hurt me and other of
Bobby’s friends. Then he killed your people, while they were looking for him. He used information from the laptop-listen to me-to do all of the political hits of the past week, all the so-called Bobby stuff. The daughter of the senator from Illinois, the military execution, the Norwalk virus, the Bole-blackface story… there are at least thirty more stories ready to go. We think a lot of the stuff was taken out of your DDC group.”

  “What?”

  Now I had his attention. I repeated myself, and added, “What in God’s name ever possessed you to run total background security probes on other members of Congress? Do you think there’s any chance your career will survive? What do you think your chances are of not going to prison?”

  “I think you’re…” He looked at the gun. “Sir, I’m not sure that you are fully, uh, aware…”

  “I’m not nuts,” I said. I looked past him. “Is there anybody else home?”

  He hesitated, then said, “Not at the moment. My wife… should be home momentarily.”

  “I don’t want to frighten your wife. But if there’s a telephone close by, you could make a call to someone who would tell you that I’m a reliable, mmm, source. There’s a Rosalind Welsh at the NSA.”

  “I don’t know her.” He backed away a couple of steps, and I followed him inside.

  “Maybe you can introduce yourself,” I said. “I’m going to let you make the call, but if you have a panic code, or something, I’ll probably figure it out, and I’ll be gone. I’ll be gone from here before anyone can get here, anyway, so there’s no point in trying to yell for help-and if you do, you might not find out the rest of what I’m going to tell you.”

  “You said Jimmy Carp killed this boy… this, uh, man in Jackson.”

  “Murdered him. According to your FBI investigation, he beat in his head with an oxygen tank. Bobby was crippled and in a wheelchair and couldn’t defend himself.”