John Sandford: The Hanged Man’s Song

There were photographs. Framed photos of single faces, and groups of people gathered around cars or standing in front of houses, black people, all, smiling at the camera, dressed in suits and dresses as if they’d just gotten back from church, maybe a wedding; and the style of the photos, and the contents, judging from the cars that were visible, went back to the 1930s, and came forward, perhaps, to the eighties.

And there were books. Big piles of computer stuff, but also detective and thriller novels, and general fiction. A copy of Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole was split open over a chair that faced a wide-screen television. A comfortable house, a comfortable home, all come to a pile of laundry in a corner, with a starved-bony face and a pool of blood.

We found a toolbox in a kitchen drawer, and a box of vinyl gloves: actually, three boxes of vinyl gloves, which suggested that Bobby had had allergies, as well as the problem that had been killing him, whatever it was.

We spent an hour going through the house, working quickly, trying to cover everything. For practical purposes, the house was one-story-no basement, and while there was an attic space, access was through a ceiling hatch, and Bobby couldn’t have gotten to it. Anything important, we thought, would be on the main floor. We wanted computer disks, written files, anything that might involve Bobby’s complicated computer relationships.

I spent a half hour going through two file cabinets, mostly income tax and investment records. Nothing, as far as I could see, that related to his computer work except for computer purchase records from Dell and IBM. I took those, dropping them in an empty Harry and David fruit-delivery box.

Every time we went in the front room, we curled our faces away from the bundle in the corner-I saw John do it, and I felt myself do it. But there was the curiosity… what did the mysterious Bobby really look like? I couldn’t touch him, didn’t want to move him, but looking down at him once, forcing myself, I decided that he looked a little like photos I’d seen of Somalis on the ragged edge of hunger. He had been nice-looking, but there was not much left of him; and now he looked deflated, sad, unready to be dead. He gave us a sense of silence and gloom.

Under some shoes in the bedroom closet, John spotted a board that looked out of place. When he rattled it, and then lifted it, he found a green metal box, and inside that, an expired U.S. passport with the photo of a teenaged Bobby inside, a small amount of inexpensive, old-fashioned women’s jewelry-his mother’s?-and $16,000 in twenties and fifties.

“Take the money?” I asked John.

“If we don’t, the cops might,” John said, looking at me over the cash. “I don’t need it.”

“What if, uh, he has a will, and wants it to go to somebody?”

“We find that out and send it to them,” John said. “But I’m afraid that if we don’t take it, it’s gonna disappear.”

We put the money in the Harry and David box.

The biggest find came in the front room, in a built-in book cabinet not far from Bobby’s outstretched hand. It was hard to see-it had been designed that way-but the cabinet was deeper from the side than it was from the front. In other words, if you looked at it from the side, it was a full fifteen inches deep. If you looked at it from the front, it was barely deep enough for a full-sized novel. Some of the novels that had been in the shelves had been pulled out and were scattered around the floor by the body.

I turned and said, “Come look at this.”

John stepped carefully past the body and I pointed out the depth discrepancy. It took a minute to figure out, but if you pressed on one corner of the back of each shelf, a board simply popped loose. When you removed the board, you found a narrow little space behind the books. It was convenient, simple, and mostly effective.

Inside were seventy DVD disks: Bobby’s files. We put them in the Harry and David box. Working around the body, John said, morosely, “That smell-Jesus, Kidd, I feel like it’s getting into me.”

“Keep working. Don’t look.”

When we were done, we put our raincoats back on, put the Harry and David box in a garbage bag, and toted it out to the car. The rain was constant, but not cold, and I could hear it gurgling down drainpipes off the tin roof-a sound that was sometimes light and musical, but tonight sounded like Wagner. Before we finally closed the door and wiped the doorknobs, John said, “I hate to leave him like this.”

I looked back at the crumpled body on the floor and said, “You know, we really can’t. Somebody killed him and the sooner the cops get here, the more likely they are to catch the guy.”

“So we call the cops?” John didn’t like cops.

“We call somebody,” I said. “We’ve got to think about it. The thing is, we didn’t find a computer, and it looks like whoever came in, took it. That means that Bobby’s main machine is floating around out there.”

“You think… no.” John shook his head at his own thought.

“What?”

“Wishful thinking. I was gonna say, maybe this was neighborhood thieves, and he caught them at it, and they killed him. But then, if it was just a burglary, they would have taken other stuff. There was all kinds of stuff that thieves would take, just sitting around.”

“Yeah. But they only took the laptop. That means that they came for it. And were willing to kill for it,” I said.

“Shit.”

“If we’re lucky, he encrypted the sensitive stuff. Every time he wanted to send me something serious, I’d get the key, and then after I acknowledged it, the file would come in. If he whipped some encryption on it, we’re okay.”

“But if we’re not lucky and he didn’t encrypt…”

“Then we could be in trouble,” I said.

WE WERE AN ODD COUPLE,wandering around in the middle of the night, in a monsoon. If we’d been noticed at Bobby’s house by an insomniac neighbor, and if the cops later said something in the newspaper about looking for a white guy and a black guy seen together in the rain, I didn’t want the desk clerk at the La Quinta to have that memory.

Instead of going back to the motel to talk, we drove a loop through Jackson, windshield wipers whacking away, windows steaming up, talking about what to do. We had two problems: getting some kind of justice for Bobby, and finding the laptop. The lives of a lot of us could be on that thing. Events, dates, times, places. Bobby knew way too much-it was as if the legendary J. Edgar Hoover files were out wandering around the country on their own.

“It’s gonna be tricky,” I said. We drove past an open space with orange security lights inside, and a chain-link fence around the perimeter. We couldn’t see much of the buildings, which were huddled low and gray, as if depressed by the rain. “If we call the Jackson police, we’re gonna get a homicide guy with a notebook or maybe a desk computer, but most of what he figures out he’ll keep in his head. Calling up people on the phones and so on. There won’t be any way to track the investigation. If the killer-guy is a sophisticated outsider, which he probably is… they’re not going to come up with anything.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve gone into enough places to know the signs. The guy didn’t leave much. Besides, I was dating a cop, remember? And I’ve done some, mmm, preliminary research into the Minneapolis cops’ computer system.”

“That’s cold, Kidd.” He was a romantic, and offended.

“Hey, I wasn’t dating her to get at the system,” I said defensively. I fumbled around for the defroster and turned it on, blowing hot air on the windshield. All the heavy cogitation was steaming things up. “I was dating her because I liked her. It just happens that the system was sitting there.”