John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

“Bobby’s?” LuEllen asked. “Is that too much to expect?”

“Yeah, that’s too much,” I said, as we put it with the pack. “Baird said Bobby’s was an IBM. And this one doesn’t have a built-in optical drive. It’s a travel machine like my Vaio. Bobby’s was probably a lot heavier, with a bunch of built-in stuff. He didn’t travel.”

We’d been inside for five minutes at that point and my internal egg timer was telling me to get the fuck out. Same with LuEllen. “Unless you’ve got something special to look at…”

“Let’s go,” I said. That’s when we heard a car’s tire crunching on the gravel outside.

LuEllen touched my arm and moved to a window. She could see out through a crack in the blind, and she hissed at me, “Two guys,” and then, “Coming to the door.”

I couldn’t see out, but I glanced at LuEllen’s face: she seemed pleased. She liked this shit, because it cranked her up, and she lived for the crank.

She pointed to the bedroom, and we tiptoed to the back door, hardly daring to breathe. The thing is, houses give off vibrations-footfalls, weight shifts, voices. Mobile homes, which are more lightly built than regular houses, are the worst. At the back, LuEllen put her hand on the doorknob, and we waited. The idea is to open your door at the same time the other person is entering the other one; the noise and vibrations cancel each other out.

But they didn’t come in. They knocked, loudly. We heard them talking, and then one of them crunched around to the back, and a second later, knocked on the door where we were standing. The knob rattled-LuEllen lifted her hand when she realized what was happening-and then the guy crunched back around the house.

I moved to the window and peeked out. Two guys: one black, one white, both wearing short-sleeved dress shirts and khaki slacks. They looked like hot, out-of-shape office workers, both too fleshy and with careful, thirty-dollar haircuts. The white guy, blond, pink-faced, chubby, had a tidy spade-shaped soul patch, the kind worn to demonstrate cool; he was probably taking saxophone lessons somewhere. The black guy was wearing a pink cotton shirt, and he looked terrific.

They were talking, nervously, I thought, then they looked up and down the street, as if checking for somebody they might interrogate. Then they got in the car, bumped back onto the road, and left. I read their license number to LuEllen, who wrote it on her arm with a ballpoint pen. Then she put the Motorola to her mouth and said, “Dave, come on.”

We went out the back door and walked sideways across the narrow lawn, then up the street, carrying the backpack. John came up behind us, slowed, and we got in. The old guy had finished mowing his lawn and was sitting in a lawn chair drinking beer out of a brown bottle. He never turned his head as we went by.

“Goddamnit,” I said.

“Nothing?” John asked.

“Two guys came by and knocked on the door. We got their tags,” LuEllen said.

“Ah, shit. I didn’t know. I was outside.”

“Ford Taurus. Could have been a rental.”

“Cops?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “They were indoors people. Office workers. Maybe we’ll find out from the tags.”

“Damn,” John said. “We waste our time and almost get caught at it.”

“No, no-we got a laptop,” I said. “We found a laptop.”

“What?”

He checked my face to see if I was joking. “Jimmy James left it behind when he ran last night. It’s not Bobby’s, but it might tell us a lot about Jimmy James.”

I STILLhad the stew-can antenna. Before we started messing with Carp’s laptop, we went back to the truck stop and warehouse, went online, checked with a few friends for entry routes, and then went into the Louisiana auto registration database. The two guys’ license tag went back to Hertz. Hertz was an old friend. I was in the Hertz database two minutes later and pulled out the name William Heffron of McLean, Virginia. He was using a credit card issued to the U.S. government.

“McLean,” LuEllen said. “Weren’t we there when…”

“Yeah. It’s about a foot and a half from Washington.”

WE SPENT THE AFTERNOONat the Baton Noir. A small but pleasant swimming pool hung off a second-floor deck, and LuEllen put on a modest black bikini and went out to sun herself before the gathering insurance salesmen and lawyerly deal-makers. John began reading through the paper we’d taken out of Carp’s, and I did the laptop.

Among the paper John found dozens of bills, mostly unpaid, indicating that Carp owed upward of $30,000 to various credit card companies. Most of the bills had been sent to an address in Washington, D.C.

He also found Carp’s online service account numbers and e-mail addresses, and increasingly unpleasant letters both to and from a lawyer concerning his mother’s estate. In the latest of those letters, Carp accused the attorney of looting his mother’s bank accounts. John’s impression was that when the lawyer was finished, Carp got the aging mobile home and a few thousand dollars-but he also got the impression that there wasn’t much more than that anyway.

“But he’s really pissed,” John said. “If I were that attorney, I’d be watching for guys in clock towers.”

“He’s desperate for money,” I said. “His mother’s estate must have seemed like a dream come true, and it turns out to be a mirage.”

I GOTstarted on Carp’s laptop by working my way around the password security. I plugged my laptop into his via a USB cable, ran a program that took control of his hard drive from my laptop, deleted his password file, and I was in. It ain’t rocket science.

One thing I found immediately was that Carp had dozens of documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee: CIA briefings on Cuba, Venezuela, Korea, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and a half-dozen Middle Eastern countries, including some negative assessments of the leaders of Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. None of it was encrypted.

In another file, I found letters to Senator Frank Krause of Nebraska, the head of the committee. There was no indication of whether any had actually been sent, and several showed signs of incomplete editing. All of them were written to object to Carp’s firing, which had happened three months earlier. The other side of the correspondence wasn’t on the computer, and John couldn’t find it among the papers, so it was hard to know exactly why he’d been fired. Judging from Carp’s side of the issue, it may have involved his political views, which were unstated. There was a draft of a note to someone else, another staffer, complaining about the unfairness of his firing, which referred to “crazy feminist politics.”

The letters suggested that his employment involved office computer support-he kept the committee’s computers running, helped with basic software issues and security problems. In an e-mail file, I found a couple hundred complaints and questions typical of an office system: questions about ethernet connections, lost e-mail, distribution lists, password changes, equipment upgrades.

LuEllen came back, carrying a Coke, looking for her suntan cream. The pool was getting crowded, and she was moving from display to exhibition mode.

As she was about to leave again, I hit the mother lode: a file of photographs and short films, two of which we’d already seen on television-the military execution and the blackface film. Nothing about the Norwalk virus.

“This is the Bobby file,” LuEllen said. “This is it.”

We paged through the photos, looking at the captions. John, who’d spent most of his life in politics of a kind, was fascinated. “You could do an unbelievable amount of damage with these things,” he said. He wasn’t enthusiastic, he was awed. “Some of the biggest assholes in the Congress would go down… if this stuff is real.”