Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  >>> WE’D missed the initial newsbreak, being stuck in the car, but Senator David Johnson of Illinois was being accused of covering up a drunk-driving incident involving his oldest daughter. According to what CNN referred to as “the source known as Bobby,” Debra Johnson’s car had struck a middle-aged bicyclist in downtown Normal, Illinois. The man had suffered a broken wrist and bruises and scrapes, and his bike had been destroyed.

  Debra Johnson had paid a ticket for careless driving, but the initial ticket had been for Driving While Intoxicated, issued to her after she had failed a Breathalyzer test. She’d been transported to a local hospital after the accident, complaining of head pain, and had never been taken to police headquarters.

  The bicyclist had settled for twenty thousand dollars for pain and suffering. Initial reports said that the money had come from Johnson’s campaign fund, which is illegal.

  Johnson hadn’t yet made a statement, but the vultures were circling. A photograph accompanied the news release—a picture of a drunk-looking young woman standing in a city street, between a cop car and a Saturn, looking at the camera, her eyes bright red with the reflected flash.

  “Goddamnit,” I said. “He’s gotta let up.”

  “Pouring blood in the water,” LuEllen said.

  From the Johnson story, CNN went directly to the Norwalk virus–San Francisco story, which the talking head said was “consistent in style with other releases from the Bobby source.”

  California was planning to sue the federal government for a trillion dollars for damage done by the Norwalk virus experiment, CNN said. The money would be used to provide educational programs on the virus and to close the state’s budget gap. A San Francisco law firm had signed up seventy thousand people on its website for a class-action suit claiming that the virus did irreparable damage to the victims’ health, destroyed their businesses, drove away tourists, caused building foundations to fail, encouraged cats and dogs to interbreed, and allowed Russian thistle to invade the ecosystem. They also wanted a trillion dollars.

  A more serious study by UC Berkeley suggested that four people had died in San Francisco of complications arising from an initial Norwalk virus infection. Weeping members of all four families were shown, the cameras lingering lovingly on the tears rolling down overweight cheeks. The victims had all been good providers.

  The government was now denying that the experiment took place, but nobody believed it anymore. There was too much money at stake.

  In rounding up the Bobby stories, the anchorman said that the special forces officer accused of executing an Arab prisoner had been flown into Washington and was being questioned by members of the Army’s criminal investigation division.

  >>> THEN a second guy, a media specialist, went off in another direction: “The one question that everybody is asking is, ‘Who is this Bobby, where does he get this stuff, and what does he want?’ ” To help him with this conundrum, he interviewed two congressmen who were newly enough elected to be fairly clean, two media advisors—public relations guys, we supposed—and the mayor of San Francisco.

  After cutting through the bullshit, the answer was that they had no idea of who Bobby was, where he got the stuff, or what he wanted. One of the PR guys guessed that Bobby was a hacker who was getting his information from government databases, said Bobby probably wasn’t acting alone, and referred to Bobby’s group as “Al-Code-a.”

  “That’s bad,” I said.

  “Carp’s gonna have a short life span as Bobby,” LuEllen said. “If we don’t get him soon, somebody else will.”

  >>> CARP’S apartment was in the District, two miles due north of the White House, on Clay Street between Fourteenth and Fifteenth, and a half-block east of Meridian Hill Park. The building was a crappy brown-brick five-story wreck; we cruised it once, and on the back side found that half the tenants had their wash hung out on the balconies. The whole area was run-down, with the kind of street life that suggests you might want to look over your shoulder every once in a while: idle guys, walking around with their hands in their pockets, surrounded by an air of hip-hop cool; clusters of skaters; a drug entrepreneur whose eyes skidded right past me; women in government secretarial dress who walked as if they had a cold wind at their back, shoulders hunched, heads down. Alleys, with people in them; trash on the streets and sidewalks; and some graffiti.

  Up the hill from the apartment was Meridian Park, with a fountain that dropped in a pretty series of steps down a long hill toward the south. Down the hill was Fourteenth Street, with some ordinary strip-shopping-center businesses—nail places, a pizza parlor, a diner, a branch bank, like that. There was enough automobile traffic that nobody gave us a second look as we made the pass at Carp’s place. The curbs were packed with cars, mostly old and beat-up. No sign of a Corolla.

  From his bills, we knew Carp’s apartment was on the fifth floor, which, from the outside, appeared to be the top one. As we got to the bottom of the hill, at Fourteenth, an aging Ford Explorer started backing out of a parking spot across the street. I barged through oncoming traffic and grabbed the spot.

  We were now two hundred feet from the apartment entrance, parked in front of a place called either Lost and Damaged Freight or Major Brand Overstocks, or both; I never figured it out. We sat and watched for a while, then started working on a New York Times crossword puzzle, hung up on an eight-letter word across the middle of the puzzle, the clue being, “Old grape’s reason for being?”

  “Raison d’être?” LuEllen suggested. She took the words right out of my mouth.

  “Eleven letters,” I said, counting them on my fingers. “Unless I’m spelling it wrong.”

  “Look it up. Gotta be ‘raison’ something-or-other. The question mark in the clue means it’s a pun.”

  “Ah, man.” But I got out the laptop and called up the Merriam-Webster. Eleven letters.

  We were in the car for two hours, off and on, watching the sun go down, still working on the puzzle, hung up on the old grape. There was nothing going on in my brain that would answer that question, but I was still working on it when the streetlights came on.

  “Better think about what we’re gonna do,” I said.

  “Shush,” LuEllen said. “Look at these guys.”

  Two guys were walking up the street toward Carp’s apartment. They were hard to make out in the fading light, but one was black, one white.

  “The guys from Carp’s place, the mobile home?” I whispered, even though there was nobody around.

  “I think so. They look right. They’re built right,” she said. “They must be tracking him, just like we are.” The two stood on the low stoop for a minute, looking at the street, then up at the face of the apartment. One was dressed in khaki slacks, a T-shirt, and a sport coat, the other in slacks and a golf shirt. They were not from the neighborhood.

  “Cops of some kind?” I suggested, as they disappeared inside the building.

  “Probably not exactly cops,” LuEllen said. “They’re not carrying guns, unless they’re those little ankle things. They don’t have all that shit clipped to their belts that cops have. No beepers, no cell phones, no cuffs, nothing to conceal it with.”

  “So we know Carp’s place is hot. Somebody’s inside, probably the feds.”

  “Probably. All they’d need is one guy inside, in the hallway or on the stairs on the way up, and we’d be toast.”

  My eye was pulled to another too-fast movement in the direction of Meridian Park. “Uh-oh. Look at this, look at this,” I said. A bulky figure was jogging down the sidewalk. “That’s fuckin’ Carp,” I said.

  “This guy’s a blond, a blond.” Floppy blond hair fell around the jogger’s rounded shoulders.

  “I don’t care, that’s Carp,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Let’s go where?” She caught my arm.

  “Up the hill. See what happens. See what we can see.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, with a tone of urgency, but I was out of the car, and heard her car door
slam behind me as I crossed Fourteenth and headed into Clay Street, toward the apartment.

  Up ahead, most of a block away, Carp dodged a car and ran up the steps into the building. I was moving that way and LuEllen called, “Kidd, slow down, slow down.”

  I slowed. Slow is always best. “He didn’t have the laptop,” I said. “It’s either in his apartment or it’s in his car. If we can find the car, a red Corolla, it’s gotta be close.”

  “But if it’s in the apartment, then somebody else is in on the deal. Maybe he’s still working with these guys. Maybe they were in New Orleans to meet him, and we chased him away before they could meet.”

  She had my arm again, restraining me, just a bit of back pressure above the elbow. But I was moving along and we’d started up the hill when we heard the shots.

  This was not a .22. This was three or four shots from something a lot bigger. We stopped, then LuEllen said, “Turn around, turn around,” and we turned around so we were facing back downhill. A black guy was sitting on a stoop at an apartment across the street, reading a newspaper, and when he heard the shots, stood up quickly and stepped inside his door.

  “Keep walking, keep walking,” LuEllen said. We were walking downhill, looking over our shoulders, stumbling on the uneven sidewalk. Then the white guy we’d seen go inside the apartment, the white guy from the trailer, we thought, smashed through Carp’s apartment door, fell down the stoop, tried to get up, and fell down again, into the street, hurt bad.

  Carp was through the door, on top of him with the gun. He fired a single shot into the white guy’s head, and the white guy went down like a pancake, flat on his face.

  “Ah, Jesus,” I said, and LuEllen was chanting, “No, no, no,” and her fingernails dug into my forearm.

  Carp ran up the hill toward the park, stuffing the gun in his pocket as he went.

  Above us, on the second floor of Carp’s building, a woman threw open a window and began screaming, “Nine-one-one, nine-one-one, nine-one-one,” and I wondered why she didn’t call it herself, until it occurred to me that she didn’t have a phone. An old white man came out on the steps and pointed a shaky finger at the vanishing Carp. “There he goes. There he goes,” but there was nobody to look, and nobody to chase him.

  “Don’t run,” LuEllen said. Her fingernails were digging into me now. Carp was gone. “Do not run. Just walk away. Just walk.”

  “Who were those guys?” I wondered.

  “I don’t know, but I bet Carp thought he knew. I bet he thought they were you and John.”

  “You think?”

  “A white guy and a black guy, coming on to him just like you came on to him in the trailer and at Rachel’s.”

  “But he knows John’s shot.”

  “He doesn’t know it. He knows he fired the pistol, but he was running before John went down.” We could hear sirens now, and LuEllen pushed me down to the corner. “The cops. Keep walking. They’ll want witnesses, and people saw us.”

  >>> WE CROSSED Fourteenth, got into my car, and carefully drove away, going north. A few blocks up, I turned over to Fifteenth and followed it down past Meridian Park. We could look down the hill toward Carp’s, where two white District squad cars were jamming up the street. No sign of an ambulance, although there were more sirens in the air.

  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.”

  Chapter

  Eleven

  >>> FEAR AND TREMBLING and 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.

  >>> DURING the 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 push
ed 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’M probably 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.”