John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

Six hours in, I’d concluded that the DVDs were probably safe enough. The unencrypted stuff was all public record, as far as I could tell. I would save them to examine more thoroughly, but they didn’t feel threatening.

I HADdone maybe sixty of the DVDs when LuEllen got back, laden with shopping bags. She dumped the bags on a bed, turned on the TV, checked the remnants of the hurricane on the Weather Channel-it had stalled as a deep low-pressure system over Tifton, Georgia, which had gotten forty-eight inches of rain in twenty-four hours, drowning out the local McDonald’s among other worthy civic monuments-and then moved to CNN, where the burning-cross incident had dropped down the play list.

The only new wrinkle was a hard-faced, disdainful rejection of racial murder and cross-burning as not only criminal, but un-American, by the presidential press secretary. He worked up a good head of steam, using words like “miserable excuse for a human being” when talking about the killers. He seemed pretty cheerful a moment later, though, when talking about a breast cancer operation on the presidential dog.

As we watched the dog story, I told LuEllen about the DVDs, and she nodded. “Told you Bobby was careful.”

“But damnit, I’d like to find that laptop,” I said. “Can’t look at the FBI until seven o’clock tonight. From the TV, it doesn’t sound like they’re doing much.”

“TV doesn’t know shit,” she said. “TV knows press releases.”

She said she’d hit six buckets of balls while she was gone, and smelled bad. “I’m gonna take a shower. Back in fifteen minutes.”

“I can tell you’re getting bored,” I said. “But if we get an idea about where the laptop is, I might need you around.”

“I’ll stick around,” she said. “Just to see how it comes out.”

I WENTback to the final DVDs and on the last one found a single file that was smaller than anything else on the disks, and unencrypted. I opened it and found a high-res photo of John Ashcroft, apparently taken when he was a U.S. senator-there’s another well-known senator standing not far away, and they’re both in evening clothes and the other guy is holding a drink and Ashcroft is holding what appears to be a bottle of mineral water. There was no notation with the photo, which looked like any standard publicity shot, until I noticed that Ashcroft was apparently standing next to one of those chintzy, overdecorated French Baroque mirrors, the kind that Georgetown hostesses hang in their hallways. That wouldn’t mean much either-except that Ashcroft didn’t seem to have a reflection.

I was puzzling over that when LuEllen came back. She smelled good. She must have touched on a perfume counter during her shopping expedition. Coco, maybe. She asked, “Anything new?”

“More stuff. Take a look at this Ashcroft photograph.”

She looked, her left breast brushing my ear. She was wearing a silk blouse, and it felt kind of good. After a moment, she stood up, frowning, and said, “He doesn’t have a reflection.”

“Might be the angle of the shot,” I said.

“I don’t know. His shoulder’s right against the mirror.”

“Well, maybe it’s not really a mirror. Or maybe it’s curved and we can’t see it.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Huh.”

I thought for a few head-scratching minutes that it might be a clue to something in Bobby’s files. Maybe even a clue to the encryption keys. If it was, it was too subtle for me, and I reluctantly decided that it was a joke. At least, I hoped so. No reflection?

As I finished with the DVDs, LuEllen went to the clothes she’d bought. The motel room door was covered with a large mirror, and she started trying on blouses and slacks. Neither one of us is particularly body-shy and we’d spent enough time rolling around in bed together, on other occasions, when we weren’t involved with third and fourth people, that a little skin shouldn’t have been a big deal; and I’d only drawn maybe three hundred nudes starring LuEllen.

But that was drawing…

She’s basically a small woman with small breasts and a small butt. She was also wearing a small brassiere, which she really didn’t need, other than as anti-leer protection in convenience stores; but the brassiere sat under her breasts like a couple of daisies, just barely covering her nipples, and her underpants were of the low-cut Jockey variety. And she smelled good.

She changed blouses and then changed slacks and then changed blouses and into some other slacks, and the perfume was going round and round and I kept looking at more meaningless photographs and I could hear the pants coming off and see the shirts being tossed and I finally turned around and she was looking at herself in the mirror, posing in a half-open blouse and the underpants, and I shouted, “Jesus Christ, woman,” and threw her on the bed.

We didn’t get much more done that afternoon. But if LuEllen had been concerned that her brains were becoming overly tight, she no longer had anything to worry about.

GETTING YOUR LIFE BACKon track, after an enthusiastic change of direction, isn’t always the easiest thing. There’s guilt, when you reflect on other relationships, and you’re not sure you want to look your partner in the eye. Once you do, you’ll be able to see both that what happened was not a mistake, not an incident, not a fantasy or a dream, but actually, you know, happened … and that there are implications.

I woke up when I felt LuEllen moving around, turned my head, cracked my eyes. I felt her stretch; and the additional weight and warmth in the bed felt pretty good, even though we’d only been in it for two hours, and it wasn’t even dark yet. Finally, as I watched out of the corner of my eye, she sat up, stretched, and yawned. She hummed. She fluffed herself up. She purred for a while. She said, “You up?”

I feigned near-sleep. “I guess,” I groaned.

“We need to get some chocolate in here.” She bounced out of bed and ran around naked, all pink and jiggly. I had the urge to draw her, as I had so many times before, but I knew where that would lead.

“Let’s do it again,” she said.

“I’m an old man,” I groaned.

“Better to wear out than to rust.”

“Let me brush my teeth… but you go first.”

We did all of that, and what seemed to be a little while later, I looked at the clock: two hours had gone somewhere. “Ah… shit.”

“What?” She was looking at her toes, wiggling them, like little piggies.

“We gotta call Washington.” I stretched and yawned. “Like right now.”

“So come on in the shower.”

“If we get in the shower together, we might not get out of the room in time to make the call,” I said.

“Naw, come on…”

WE GOTout of the room, eventually, down to the car, still a little damp from the shower, to another pay phone. LuEllen had one of those anonymous pre-paid phone cards, and I went out to Washington.

Somewhere, in what I hoped was the locked office of a high-ranking FBI bureaucrat, a computer got busy. I’ve been into the FBI any number of times, and usually you have to work the system. This time, the guy’s desktop came up, and his files were right out front. When I popped them, I found one labeled Jackson . The file had last been opened two hours earlier.

“Is that too easy?” LuEllen worried. She looked up and down the street: no black helicopters; not even a black-and-white.

“Naw. It’s what my guy said it’d be. Besides, I don’t care,” I said. “We’ll be out of here before they could snap a trap even if it is one.”

The Jackson file contained a series of memos saying that: (a) the feds hadn’t found anybody who’d seen the cross-burners; (b) Bobby had been killed at least twelve hours before the cross-burning, according to early forensic tests, but no more than fourteen hours before, because he’d been seen alive then; (c) he’d been suffering from a degenerative nerve disease since early childhood and he’d been in a wheelchair for fifteen years; (d) he made his living writing computer code; (e) he had a caretaker named Thomas Baird who had seen him alive and well at two o’clock on the afternoon he died; and (f) the cross-burning might have been an effort to shift blame for the murder.