John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

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.”

FEAR AND TREMBLINGand 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.

DURINGthe 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’Mprobably 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 earrings. “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?”