“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.