Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

We had a bottle of wine with the dinner, and because we couldn’t be seen or heard, talked about the Carp pursuit.

  “The thing that’s interesting is that the FBI is chasing Bobby’s killer, but they still think it’s a racial killing,” LuEllen said. She was wearing black, as she always did when she got into a decent restaurant east of Ohio, and small diamond earrings. “But we know a high-up security person knows that Bobby was Bobby, so they ought to be all over it, but they’re not.”

  I poked a fork at her. “And somebody else, not the FBI, is chasing Carp, and now they might have a couple of dead bodies,” I said. “Did they know that Carp killed Bobby? Did they know he’s the guy dumping the stuff under Bobby’s name? Or is this some kind of operation? Is it the NSA, which it might be, because Rosalind Welsh apparently isn’t talking to the FBI? But one of the guys looking for Carp used to be with the Justice Department, and the FBI is a branch of the Justice Department. What the hell does that mean?”

  “Whoever it is, we’ve got government people killing each other.”

  “No. We’ve got Carp killing government people. Like you said, those guys didn’t even look like they were armed. They did the same thing we did, stumbling into him. I really don’t think the government goes around killing people . . . except like in wars, and so on.”

  “I don’t have your faith,” LuEllen said. “I know there are cops who’ve killed people who pissed them off.”

  “Sure. But they did it on their own. And maybe somebody higher up didn’t look into it as deeply as they should, but basically it’s not policy. If the killing’s found out, there’s a trial.”

  “So? So we’ve got an outlaw group.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll tell you one thing—if the FBI doesn’t figure out that Robert Fields was Bobby, and if Welsh doesn’t tell them, then we’ll have to. Carp ain’t walking away from this thing.”

  “We don’t even know that Carp’s the guy who killed Bobby. Maybe it was these two guys,” LuEllen suggested.

  “Oh, bullshit.” I swallowed most of a wing. “These guys were a couple of schmucks. And we know Carp is nuts. When we were in the trailer, the first time we ever saw him, he jumped up and fired a gun at John and me without ever asking who we were or where we were from. Nuts.”

  “Okay, he’s nuts,” she said. “There are a couple things we’ve got to know, though, that we don’t know yet—the biggest one is, is Carp working for someone? If he’s working for someone, then he may have already given the computer away. Or given up copies. And we may run into more trouble than we think, if we ever find him.”

  “Yeah . . . maybe we’ll figure out something tomorrow.”

  “Hope he doesn’t pop something else on the news,” LuEllen said. “He’s already got a feeding frenzy. What more does he want?”

  >>> WE SPENT a little time fooling around that evening, in sort of a sad way, and in the quiet after the sex, LuEllen told me why she was thinking of quitting her life.

  “No big deal, it was just a TV show. I was down in Texas and they showed this thing about women in prison. They were all doing long terms for murder and . . . well, murder, mostly—and I started thinking that I could end up like them. Just one fuck-up. One alarm that I don’t see, or maybe a booby trap or I get hurt, somehow. I’d be in there. It wasn’t the jail so much that looked bad, it was the women. They all looked really messed up. Hurt. They looked sad . . . the saddest people you can imagine. I’d hang myself before I got that way.”

  There wasn’t much to say. She was right, it could happen. To either of us.

  She went on: “The saddest thing was the day their kids could come visit, and how happy they were to see their kids. Some of the kids didn’t even seem to remember their moms that well. And sometimes the women thought their kids might be coming and then they wouldn’t show up and they’d just sit in a corner and cry. And I thought, I don’t even have anybody who’d come to see me if I was inside.”

  I said, “LuEllen, you know—”

  “You couldn’t come,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you see me that way, even if you wanted to. But I was thinking, if I got caught, nobody would even know who I was. Know my name. Nobody but a couple of people I went to junior high school with. Nobody would even know.” She sat up suddenly. “My life has been okay so far. I didn’t have a lot of choices. It was this or maybe be a practical nurse like my mom, running pans of shit around a nursing home.”

  “You’re too smart for that.”

  “In this country, smart isn’t enough. You’ve got to be taught right, from the start. You’ve got to get that education, or have money from your parents, you just . . .” She flopped back on the bed. “I don’t know. But I’ve gotta find something else to do. I still get the rush, I still get high on it, when I’m inside somewhere, but I gotta get out of this before it’s too late.”

  That made for a great night’s sleep. That and recurring dreams that featured an overweight man facedown in the street. . . .

  >>> THE next day was a Saturday. We both woke early, twitched around a little, trying to get that last little patch of sleep, and I finally gave up and found the remote and clicked on the TV. The Menu screen came up with the day, date, and time. I hadn’t been paying attention, and when they registered with me, I said, “Saturday. Damnit. If nobody gets our e-mail, we won’t get any passwords back.”

  “I bet political people check their e-mail every five minutes,” LuEllen said. She sat up and stretched. “Let’s get breakfast and then go see.”

  While she cleaned up, I clicked around to the local channels, looking for news. I found it, but there was nothing about the shooting the night before. We went out, ate French toast—she was overly cheerful, and maybe a little embarrassed about the talk the night before, revealing herself like that—and then we got on-line at our big wi-fi building.

  LuEllen was right about political people. They check their e-mail. Seventeen replies had come in to the dump site. I transferred them to Carp’s machine, then called into the first number of the DCC working group. I got the log-in screen and started running names. Darryl Finch, the sixth guy on the list, had given us Dfinch/Bluebird9 in our solicitation for the senator’s log. That didn’t work, but Dfinch/bluebird5 punched us right through.

  Dfinch/bluebird5 got me into a personnel computer. Lots of details on the staffers, but no files on James Carp or Bobby. Then, browsing through a file on a Linda Soukanov, I spotted a letter that supported a complaint from a co-worker against Carp. Soukanov was with the working group. She said that she had witnessed Carp paying “unwelcome attention” to a co-worker in the next cubicle. The co-worker was identified as a Michelle Strom, with the Bobby project.

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “Got something?” LuEllen was bored.

  “Maybe . . . give me a minute.”

  I pulled the file on Michelle Strom and found a complaint that said that Carp had touched her in an elevator, “pressing his front against my back,” and that he’d one other time touched her breast under the pretext of looking at her identification photograph. She said she wouldn’t have reported the incidents because she wasn’t sure that he had intentionally touched her, but she’d heard reports now from other women. . . .

  I looked at my senator-log sign-up list. Nothing from Linda Soukanov, but Michelle Strom was there: Mickey/DasMaus1. God help me.

  I signed out of Dfinch and tried Mickey/DasMaus1 and failed, spent five minutes going through possible combinations and got in on Mickey/Mauser. All things come to hackers who are patient.

  Most things, anyway. I got into Michelle Strom’s space, and found that I could push memos or reports into the system, but nothing could be retrieved without another code. From the way the front-end was set up, I suspected the link would shut me down rather than let me experiment—and would tell the system people that somebody was trying to crack the system after getting in with Strom’s password.

  “Stone wall,” I said.

  I got in on four mo
re name/password combinations, but the security was better than I’d hoped. I could get administrative stuff, but I couldn’t get any operations files. Before I shut down, I entered William Heffron into a general search engine and immediately popped a half-dozen reports from Washington TV-news websites. I pulled the first one and read to LuEllen:

  “Two Virginia men were shot to death at a Meridian Park apartment building Friday night by an assailant who shot one man on the building’s stairway and another as he fled to the sidewalk outside the building, District police said Saturday.

  “Terrance Small of Alexandria and William Heffron of McLean, both government employees with a Justice Department data processing center, were apparently on their way to visit a friend when they were shot. Police speculated that the men had inadvertently stumbled into a drug transaction at the Marlybone Apartments on Clay Ave.

  “Police say each of the men was shot once in the head at extremely close range, execution-style, in addition to suffering wounds to the body. Neither of the men had criminal records, police said. Terry Banks, a supervisor at the Justice Department’s Division of Data Integration, said, ‘This is a terrible tragedy. These were fine men; everybody liked them. I just don’t understand how these things can happen. The people in this division will be devastated.’ ”

  There was more, but that was the substance of it.

  “A drug deal? The government’s not even talking to the cops when their own people get murdered,” LuEllen said. “They’re as nuts as Carp is.”

  “Maybe they really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t know what Heffron and Small were doing there, that Carp has an apartment there.” I went back into the search engine, looking for Carp, and got only fish-related sites. “Nothing at all on Jimmy or James Carp.”

  LuEllen shook her head, the corners of her mouth turned down. I’m a skeptic when it comes to government; she’s a couple steps further along that road than I am.

  >>> “SO now what?” LuEllen twisted around in her seat, looking out for passersby. “We’ve been here a long time.”

  “If you had to get better entry equipment, instead of the Target stuff, could you get it close by?”

  “In Philly,” she said. “You met the guy.”

  “I thought he was just guns.” He’d once armed me for a confrontation in West Virginia. Another thing I try not to dream about.

  “We can order stuff,” she said.

  “He creeps me out.”

  “ ’Cause he’s a creep,” she said. “But he can get the stuff and he’s trustworthy. We’re going in somewhere?”

  I rubbed my face, thinking about it. “Michelle Strom is interesting,” I said. “I’d like to look around her apartment. Let me . . .”

  I went back into the personnel computer using the Dfinch name, and pulled Strom’s file. She was single, thirty-three, with a B.A. in history and Russian, and an M.A. in Russian. She had some kind of supervisory capacity, though I couldn’t tell exactly how many people she supervised. There were two good photos of her, apparently used for her ID card. I copied down her home address, and her home, office, and cell phone numbers.

  “So . . .”

  “If we could get in and out, without her knowing, it would probably be worth it.”

  “Would we need time inside?”

  “Mmm . . . yeah,” I said. “Eight, ten, not more than fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s half a lifetime . . . so tell me why, in twenty-five words or less.”

  This was a joke with us—if you couldn’t explain why you were breaking into a place in twenty-five words or less, you hadn’t thought it through. I said, “Everybody takes work home, nowadays, even secret work. We can’t break into Strom’s office, we can’t get her online, so we hit her apartment. How many words was that?”

  “Less than twenty-five,” she said. “If nowadays is one word.”

  >>> LUELLEN made a call and we ran up to Philly. We were going to see a guy named Drexel, gun dealer to the trade, so to speak. I’d met him twice, on other trips to the Washington area. On those trips, he’d been living in an accountant-looking suburban house. This time, he was way west of the city, in a truck-garden exurb, in a house a third smaller than his earlier one.

  He met us at the door, smiled, and said, “Package got here fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Nice house,” LuEllen said, looking around as he let us in. The place was furnished in Early Twenty-first Century Discount Scandinavian. “Why’d you move?”

  “Soon as my daughter got out of school, she and my wife left,” he said. He was tall and thin, wore rimless glasses, and looked like the farmer in the Grant Wood painting American Gothic. He’d always been pleasant enough, though creepy, and too prissy for a man who dealt in illegal firearms. An underground gun dealer should, at a minimum, have an eye patch. He led us through the basement door, picking up a laptop as he went. “I guess they spent a few years not liking me.”

  “Jeez,” LuEllen said, as though that were unthinkable. She glanced at me, the glance telling me don’t say it.

  We followed him down the basement steps. His old house had had a basement workshop, too, and this one was much like the other: neatly kept, everything in rigid, soldierly order, and very dry. There were a lot of wires in the ceiling, and I suspected the place had excellent security. “Yes, well—I wish they’d told me earlier, so we wouldn’t have had to put up with each other all those years. I didn’t like them much, either.”

  “So you sold the house,” LuEllen said.

  “Had to. Wife got the money, but at least I’ve got no strings attached. No alimony. I’m happy.” He went to a workbench, flicked on an overhead light, pulled open a drawer, and took out a plastic carrying case. “These little babies are hard to find. I think they might have started out with the CIA—but wherever they started out, the police try to keep track of them.”

  “This one’s clean?” LuEllen asked, as she popped open the case.

  “Taken from a locksmith who died . . . natural causes, a heart attack.”

  Inside the case was a box about the size of a pack of cigarettes, but painted flat black. A probe stuck out the top of the box, with a hair-like plastic bristle sticking out of that; on the bottom of the box was a USB port. The plastic carrying case also contained a USB data key and a short USB cable.

  “There are five extra fibers,” Drexel told LuEllen. “If you mess them all up, I don’t know how you’d replace them. They’re supposed to be pretty sturdy, though.”

  “They’re okay,” LuEllen said. “I’ve used one once, but I rented it. Always wanted one of my own. How much?”

  “Seven thousand.”

  She bobbed her head. “I’ve got the cash in the car. But let’s plug it in first.”

  >>> DREXEL turned on his laptop, explaining to me that the USB data key simply held the software for any Windows-based laptop, and that he’d loaded it into his laptop when he was buying the device from his supplier. He brought the program up, and with a USB cable, plugged the black box into the laptop.

  “There’s a Yale lock on the storeroom door, if you want.”

  “Thanks.” LuEllen carried the laptop and the black box over to the door and slipped the fiber optic into the lock.

  The bristle, which was about the thickness of a broom straw, was a piece of fiber optic that acted like a tiny camera lens, and had been developed for heart and vascular surgery.

  When you pushed the fiber-optic probe into a normal lock, you could actually see, on the laptop screen, the pins and the key cuts inside the lock. If you knew your locks—LuEllen wasn’t a specialist, but she knew enough—you could cut yourself a key. The software made it unnecessary to actually see the interior of the lock, as it would specify a key blank and spacing for almost any lock in use in the U.S. or Europe, but, Drexel said, most people liked to see the inside, too. “Gives them confidence that the numbers are right.”

  We were watching as LuEllen probed the lock, and you could see the guts of the lock
right on the laptop screen. She watched, grunted, and shut it all down. “I’ll get the cash,” she said. She handed Drexel the box and headed up the stairs.

  >>> AS SHE went, Drexel reached up to turn off the light over the workbench, but as he did it, I put a finger to my lips and he paused. When LuEllen was walking away from the top of the stairs, I asked, “Would you have a small gun? Something handy, not too noisy? But threatening-looking?”

  “It’s best not to threaten people with a gun,” Drexel said solemnly. “If you get to the point of taking it out, it’s best to pull the trigger. And at that point, you probably shouldn’t worry too much about the noise. The difference in noise between a .380 and a .357 isn’t that critical, if you’re shooting it off in a motel with people all around. It’ll be noticeable either way, so you might as well have something that’ll do the job.”

  “So what do you have?”

  He looked pleased: guns had always been his first love, and he enjoyed dealing them. “That really depends on what you’re going to use it for.”

  “Look, I really don’t want to get too deep into this, and I’d like to get it done before my friend gets back.”

  “You’re not . . .” His eyebrows went up.

  I didn’t understand the question for a second, then said, “Jesus Christ, no, I’m not gonna shoot her. We’re dealing with a guy who’s a little nuts, but if I take a gun, LuEllen might argue.”

  He nodded. “Good. I’m glad it’s not her. She’s always been a good customer and I would hate to lose her. Okay, you’re not an enthusiast, you need it for close-up protection, nothing fancy. I have just the thing. Seven hundred dollars.”

  >>> WE WERE climbing the stairs when LuEllen came back, the pistol pulling down my pants pocket. It was a Smith & Wesson hammerless revolver—hammerless so it wouldn’t snag on your clothes when you pulled it out in a hurry—loaded with six rounds of .38 special. Guns are for killing. People can make a sport out of shooting, a pastime, a hobby, but all of those things are a perversion of a gun’s intention. Guns are for killing and handguns are for killing people; I wasn’t comforted by its presence.