John Sandford - The Hanged Man’s Song

THEhouse 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 WEdidn’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 WENTout 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.”

KRAUSElived 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 before 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.”

THEwhole 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 CRUISEDKrause’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.”

THEhouse 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.

FORall 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.