The Hanged Man's Song

still a little damp from the shower, to another pay phone. LuEllen hadone of those anonymous pre-paid phone cards, and I went out to Washington.
    Somewhere, in what I hoped was the locked office of a high-ranking FBI bureaucrat, a computer got busy. I’ve been into the FBI any number of times, and usually you have to work the system. This time, the guy’s desktop came up, and his files were right out front. When I popped them, I found one labeled Jackson. The file had last been opened two hours earlier.
    “Is that too easy?” LuEllen worried. She looked up and down the street: no black helicopters; not even a black-and-white.
    “Naw. It’s what my guy said it’d be. Besides, I don’t care,” I said. “We’ll be out of here before they could snap a trap even if it is one.”
    The Jackson file contained a series of memos saying that: (a) the feds hadn’t found anybody who’d seen the cross-burners; (b) Bobby had been killed at least twelve hours before the cross-burning, according to early forensic tests, but no more than fourteen hours before, because he’d been seen alive then; (c) he’d been suffering from a degenerative nerve disease since early childhood and he’d been in a wheelchair for fifteen years; (d) he made his living writing computer code; (e) he had a caretaker named Thomas Baird who had seen him alive and well at two o’clock on the afternoon he died; and (f) the cross-burning might have been an effort to shift blame for the murder.
    This last memo said that the time difference between the killing and the burning seemed to suggest that they were not part of the same act, and the motive for the act may have been computer theft, since an expensive computer was known to be missing. Huh. They had at least one perceptive guy on the job.
    There was also a reference to some unwashed intelligence about the local lads of the KKK, most of which was apparently canned Jackson Office file stuff.
    >>> “LET’S GO,” LuEllen said.
    “Not yet,” I said. We were outside a convenience store, and a large man in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and flip-flops, carrying a brown shopping bag, was walking toward us. His face was obscured by a pale straw hat and big sunglasses.
    “Look at this guy.”
    “Not yet,” I said. “Just a minute.”
    I stayed online for another five minutes—the guy in the Hawaiian shirt went on by and never looked back—saving everything to my laptop. LuEllen got increasingly nervous the longer we were hooked up. The last document was saved and I unplugged.
    “All done.”
    “We’re gone,” LuEllen said. She put the car in gear and turned slowly onto the street, her turn signals working. LuEllen would never be caught in a routine traffic stop. She continued up the street for a hundred yards, then pulled into a strip shopping center and parked in front of a store that sold Levolor blinds and Barrister bar stools.
    “What are we doing?”
    “Watching.” We sat there for ten minutes, watching the phone a block away, to see if any cops showed up. None did. She backed out and turned toward the street.
    “Probably watching us by satellite,” I said.
    “Funny man.” She leaned over and sniffed me. “You know, we ought to fool around more often. You really smell good.”
    I won’t tell you where she’d splashed the Coco when we finally got out of the shower, but hey: when she was right, she was right. I did smell pretty good.
    >>> BACK at the motel, we read the memos again, talked about them, then, as it began to get dark, changed into some running clothes and went for a jog. We did three miles in nineteen minutes, running around the edges of a golf course. When we finished, I felt better than any time since we first walked into the Wisteria and started dropping coins in the slot machines.
    We ate a quick dinner and then I went back to the DVDs; and a little more sex. And finally, after one of the longest days I’d had in a while, we crawled into bed.
    “Would you like me better if I was more boobilicious?” LuEllen asked as I began to drift away.
    I mumbled at her.
    “What was that? What?”
    I pushed myself up from the pillow. “I’m nowhere nearly stupid enough to answer that question,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
    >>> AS A news service, CNN is pretty predictable: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, weather, sports, bullshit, bullshit. The next morning, though, things were more serious. We turned on the tube a few minutes after 7:15, to a professionally cheerful