The Hanged Man’s Song (14 page)

WE DROVE A HALF-MILE
or so, taking it easy, watching for anything that was moving fast. Three or four minutes out, I turned LuEllen around and we went back into the neighborhood, looking for the Corolla. We didn’t find it, nor did we see Carp again. Life went on around the park-there were no cops, no people standing around scratching their heads. We both turned toward a running body, but it was a kid, having a good time. We’d given a gunfight, and nobody came.

“Let’s go to a zoo or something,” LuEllen said. She was manic, her eyes sparkling, her cheeks pink. “Let’s go on a hike. Let’s go for a run. Let’s do
something
. We gotta get out of that hotel room. I can’t think in there anymore.”

“Maybe we could, uh…” I was struck by a thought.

After a moment LuEllen said, “What?”

I looked out the car window at a large woman in a poppy-orange blouse, leading, on a leash, a dog the size of a biscuit. “Just drive, don’t talk to me.”

I kicked the seat back as far as it would go, put an arm over my eyes, and tried to work it out. Doing the numbers. Thinking about the tarot, about the King of Cups reversed. At some point LuEllen asked, “You all right?” I could feel the wheels bumping along the road, feel us rolling to a stop at a light-feel LuEllen looking at me.

Five minutes, doing the numbers, and then LuEllen said, “C’mon, Kidd. What happened? You’re not having a stroke?”

I exhaled, cranked the seat back upright, and looked out the window. We were at a little business intersection and I could see the Washington Monument ahead and off to the left, a white arrow against the blue sky. Nice day. “That motherfucker.”

“Who?”

“Carp is Lemon.”

We sat halfway through a red light before she noticed. As we went through, she said, “Tell me.”

“We get a note out of the blue-doesn’t have to be from Bobby, just has to be from somebody who knows Bobby is dead. Doesn’t demand contact, just allows us to make it on our terms, so that we feel safe. Guides us into Washington. John’s black and I’m white, and the two guys who went to his apartment…”

“Black and white.”

“And it was almost dark, and he was waiting for us, a black-and-white pair. He knew we’d be coming because he gave us the address, and he knew at that point that we weren’t from the government, because we’d responded to his e-mail. He knew we were Bobby’s pals because we told him so. He knew we’d check the address he gave us, to see if it was really Carp’s. We did. It’s the same technique he used to get Bobby. It’s like fly-fishing. You throw the fly out there, let it drift, wait for a strike.”

“But he-”

“Yeah. His big mistake-this must have really mind-fucked him-was that he didn’t know that there were two groups looking for him, that there were two black-and-white pairs. He must’ve thought that if two unknown people from Minnesota and wherever else got shot in a bad neighborhood, who could connect it to his apartment? But he kills a couple of government guys who were going to his apartment, so now…”

“He’s screwed.”

“Well. Maybe they can’t prove it. He was wearing that wig; he’ll have been reported as a blond.”

She thought about it for a minute “And he didn’t know John was shot…”

“Right. He didn’t know that for sure. He was already running when he pulled the trigger. And if he slowed down when he realized he wasn’t being chased, and circled back and looked at the car, he would have seen John walking out and getting in with the rest of us. And that’s where he got the tag number off the car.”

“Then, after the miss at his apartment, after he sees in the paper that he got the wrong guys, he sets us up,” she finished. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “Ah, shit.”

“Yeah. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’d say it’s at least ten to one that Carp and Lemon are the same guy.”

“We were chumps.”

“That’s not the major problem. I mean, we’re not dead, anyway. The major problem is, he contacted me. By name. He knows who I am.”

I was looking at her, and she turned her head and I saw something like fear in her eyes. “That’s… doesn’t get any worse than that.”

“Not this side of being dead. But we’ve gotta get back online. I can check this.”

THE
state of Minnesota allows anyone to check anyone else’s license plate, but requires you to identify yourself before the information is released. Your name is then put on the file, and the person whose plate you pulled is notified. That’s if you go in the front door. I never did, and I didn’t think Carp-Lemon-would be likely to go in the front door, either. But…

“How can you tell?” LuEllen said, peering at the laptop screen as I went online and dialed into the DMV.

“There’s a counter. You’d really have to tear up a system to beat it.” I got the plate database, checked my tag number. My name and address came up. The counter said the information had been accessed the night of the collision at Rachel Willowby’s apartment.

“There it is,” I said. “He had to have seen the car at Rachel’s place. That’s the only way he could have known.” It was a queer feeling. I’d been so careful, for so long, so unbelievably, unhealthily careful, that to have somebody crack my cover was like having your house burglarized.

“That fucker. He set us up.” A hint of admiration in her voice? She snapped her fingers as she remembered the tarot connection. “That was the tarot card. Remember? That was the-”

“King of Cups, reversed. Yeah, that popped into my head back at the park. Coincidence jumps up and bites you on the ass.”

“You been bit on the ass so many times you’re lucky to have an ass left,” she snorted. “When are you gonna believe? You’re some kind of fuckin’ gypsy spook or something.”

“No. No.” I shook my head. “No, it’s just superstition. But it’s… interesting.”

“What do we do?”

“Maybe what he did to us,” I said slowly. “I gotta think about it. He doesn’t know that we know.”

“What if he looks at your DMV records again and sees that somebody else has checked them. He’ll know it was you, and he’ll know why.”

“We’re not dealing with a sure thing,” I said. “It’s all murky. Let’s go walk around the Mall and see if we can figure something out.”

WE FIGURED
something out, all right. What we figured out took an hour of talk-argument-working over the problem of the DDC group, the existence of the laptop and what that might mean, and the fact that Carp had identified me.

Our strategy unwound like this:

LuEllen asked a simple question: “Why don’t we just call him up and make a deal? Find out what he wants? We know that he killed Bobby and we could give the FBI a trail that leads to him-Baird saw him, and so did Rachel. We’ve got a big stick.”

“So does he. He knows who I am.”

“Right. So you should be safe with each other’s information. We call him up, tell him we want to look at the laptop-nothing more, we just want to look at it, meet at some safe, open place and make sure there’s nothing on it that incriminates us. After that, we walk away.”

There was an objection to that idea. I said, “You’re saying we let him get away with killing Bobby.”

“Not because I want to.”

“And if we go online and try to make a deal, we give away our edge,” I said. “We know Lemon is Carp, and he doesn’t know we know.”

“So what? So we know his exact name and the type of car he has and even the license number, but there are about a billion people in Washington. How are we gonna find him in this mess?”

I was still unhappy with the idea. “What if he doesn’t even know what he’s got on us? He might not know yet, given the size of Bobby’s files. He might be willing to make a deal now, then find out something big, and decide to go with it.”

“With the murder rap hanging over him?”

“That’s exactly it. Suppose he found out what we did with the Keyhole satellites. He could use the information to deal his way out of a murder charge. I
know
the government deals down murder charges. You see it in the papers, some killer disappears into the Witness Protection Program, and the next thing you know, he’s your Little League coach.”

“Damnit.”

“The goddamn laptop is a bomb,” I said. “We gotta get it.”

WE WORRIED
about that for a while. “Look,” I said, “we gotta wonder why he came to Washington at all. To make a deal with somebody? To get his job back? He might still be hoping to do that, if nobody can prove he did the killings at the apartment. And shit, the way things run in Washington these days, not being proven guilty is considered the same as being proven innocent.”

“Well, that’s what the letters in his laptop say-he’s trying to get back in with Krause.”

“What if we went online and told Lemon that Senator Krause wants to make a deal with Carp. What if we throw
that
fly out on the water?”

Once we got that going, other bits and pieces started falling into place, but it was all tentative, all guesswork, and all dangerous. LuEllen embroidered on the idea, and concluded, “It’s doable-but the whole idea depends on us spotting Carp first. And on where Krause lives. If he lives downtown in a big apartment complex, the Watergate or somewhere like that, it won’t work. Even if it’s in a house, he could have big-time security, with his job.”

“We can figure out a way to finesse the security. And Krause’s been here for twenty years, he’s gotta have a house,” I said. “He shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

ONE
of the keys to the hunt for Carp was the attack outside of Griggs’s apartment. We wondered, why there? How did he know about the park? The park had been a perfect spot for an ambush-small enough that he could watch the whole thing from one place, with good protective contour, good concealing foliage, busy enough that he wouldn’t be noticeable, quiet enough that he wouldn’t be shooting through a crowd.

We went online to my pal in Montana, the government-files maven, and asked him to pull Carp’s tax returns and check the addresses. We had an answer in twenty minutes: Carp had lived for a year in a house not more than a two-minute walk from the park. And more background: he’d apparently moved into the apartment in the District only six months earlier. Before that, he’d lived in an apartment complex in south Arlington.

We didn’t think he’d dare go back to his own apartment after killing the two government guys, so it was possible that he knew the people in the house he’d lived in, and bagged out there, or that he had a friend somewhere down in that apartment complex and was hiding there. Either would explain both the park meeting place and his invisibility.

While my Montana friend was compiling the addresses, we did a quick check on Krause; he had a house in a northwestern suburb, as close as we could tell with our Washington map.

“So it’s a possibility,” I said. “The whole setup we talked about.”

“If we can spot Carp’s car…”

WE KNEW
Carp was driving a red Corolla. We knew the license number. He knew our car, and the number. No problem: we went out to National and rented a couple of cars, one from Hertz, one from Avis on my Harry Olson Visa card and Wisconsin driver’s license. We still had the walkie-talkies from New Orleans.

We started looking, driving separate cars, staying in touch with the walkie-talkies.

THE
house 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 WE
didn’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 WENT
out 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.”

KRAUSE
lived 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.