The Hanged Man's Song

twentieth ring.
    “Sorry,” I said. “You told me if I ever needed a channel, you had one. You still got it?”
    “Yeah, but you’d have to wait until after six o’clock tonight, Eastern time.”
    “What, it’s on somebody’s desk?”
    “Yup.” That didn’t seem to bother him. “He’s a primo source, though. He gets a daily memo on every hot case in the country . . . criminal case, he’s not good on espionage. You wanted criminal, though, right?”
    “Yeah, that’s great. How much you want?”
    “For you? How about a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate on Amazon?”
    “I can get it to you this morning,” I said.
    “Got a pencil?”
    He gave me a phone number, a name, and a password, and I was good. We went down the road to another phone and I charged a $500 gift certificate to a Visa card belonging to my old invisible friend, Harry Olson of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the guy with the cleanest credit record in the United States of America. He kept it clean by not existing and by paying all bills immediately.
    >>> L U ELLEN spent most of the day screwing around. She was a jock, was quietly turning into a golf nut, and had always been a power shopper. I expected her back in the late afternoon with a sunburn and an armful of bags from the local shopping center.
    As she was acquiring a burn and assuring the financial stability of Abercrombie & Fitch and the Gap, I was digging through Bobby’s DVDs. Since I didn’t have an index, I wrote a little four-line Perl script that sorted through the files on each one and eliminated all the encrypted files.
    When all the encrypted files were eliminated, there wasn’t much left. I then sampled the remnant and found garbage—or if not garbage, then a pile of stuff that was simply useless unless you specifically needed it: databases from government agencies and newspapers, mostly. If, say, you needed sixteen hundred memos from the U.S. Department of the Interior writtenbetween August 1999 and January 2002, then I had them. But if you didn’t know what memos you wanted, you were wading in garbage.
    Six hours in, I’d concluded that the DVDs were probably safe enough. The unencrypted stuff was all public record, as far as I could tell. I would save them to examine more thoroughly, but they didn’t feel threatening.
    >>> I HAD done maybe sixty of the DVDs when LuEllen got back, laden with shopping bags. She dumped the bags on a bed, turned on the TV, checked the remnants of the hurricane on the Weather Channel—it had stalled as a deep low-pressure system over Tifton, Georgia, which had gotten forty-eight inches of rain in twenty-four hours, drowning out the local McDonald’s among other worthy civic monuments—and then moved to CNN, where the burning-cross incident had dropped down the play list.
    The only new wrinkle was a hard-faced, disdainful rejection of racial murder and cross-burning as not only criminal, but un-American, by the presidential press secretary. He worked up a good head of steam, using words like “miserable excuse for a human being” when talking about the killers. He seemed pretty cheerful a moment later, though, when talking about a breast cancer operation on the presidential dog.
    As we watched the dog story, I told LuEllen about the DVDs, and she nodded. “Told you Bobby was careful.”
    “But damnit, I’d like to find that laptop,” I said. “Can’t look at the FBI until seven o’clock tonight. From the TV, it doesn’t sound like they’re doing much.”
    “TV doesn’t know shit,” she said. “TV knows press releases.”
    She said she’d hit six buckets of balls while she was gone, and smelled bad. “I’m gonna take a shower. Back in fifteen minutes.”
    “I can tell you’re getting bored,” I said. “But if we get an idea about where the laptop is, I might need you around.”
    “I’ll stick around,” she said. “Just to see how it comes out.”
    >>> I WENT back to the final DVDs and on the last one found a single file that was smaller than anything else on the disks, and unencrypted. I opened it and found a high-res photo of John Ashcroft, apparently taken when he was a U.S. senator—there’s another well-known senator standing not far away, and they’re both in evening clothes and the other guy is holding a drink and Ashcroft is holding what appears to be a bottle of mineral water. There was no notation with the photo, which looked like any standard publicity shot, until I noticed that Ashcroft was