The Hanged Man's Song

wouldn’t still have the FedEx receipt for the package you sent, would you?”
    “I do have that,” he said. He went back to the parlor office, looked in another file, and found the receipt. The package had been sent to a Rachel Willowby in New Orleans.
    “You never heard anything more from her? No thank you?”
    “No, but I think her and Bobby were chatting on the computer. One of those chatterbox places.”
    We talked for a couple more minutes, then I went out to the car and got the sack with Bobby’s cash in it, brought it back in, and gave it to John. “This’ll seem a little funny,” John told Baird. “But this is the last of Bobby’s cash supply, as far as we know. Bobby wanted you to have it for . . . expenses, and transition and so on.”
    “Bobby did?” He was suspicious, but not too—you tend not to be too suspicious when you need the money and somebody’s putting a brick of cash in your hand. “Where’d you get it, then?”
    “Bobby kept some of his resources . . . outside,” John said. “Just in case. Anyway, he said to give it to you, and for you to do whatever you need to.”
    “Better stick it somewhere out of sight,” I said. “You don’t want the feds to see it.”
    He went to put it out of sight, and in the twenty seconds that he was gone, I wiped both John’s and my own beer bottle on my shirt. “Touch anything else?” I asked quietly.
    “I’m trying to keep my hands in fists,” he said. “I don’t think it’s necessary.”
    “Better safe,” I said.
    When Baird returned, I asked him not to tell the feds about the Bible salesman or the laptop he’d sent to the little girl. “Listen, it’s this way. That laptop could kill Bobby’s friends, if we don’t find it first.”
    “But what about catchin’ the guy who did Bobby?” he asked.
    “We want him as bad as you do,” John said. “One way or the other, he’ll get taken care of. I promise you. If we can’t figure itout ourselves, we’ll give everything we have to the feds and let them try.”
    I nodded, and Baird said, “Okay.”
    >>> THE laptop delivery was the key.
    Fifteen minutes after we finished with Baird, we were at a pay phone, and I was online with a friend who was a specialist in the National Crime Information Center, which is one of the more interesting branches of the FBI. He looked at Baird’s NCIC file, found that Baird had been convicted of misdemeanor theft in 1968 and a car-theft felony in 1970, served three months in a county jail, and had no record since. He also found that the last inquiry on Baird’s file had come ten days earlier, from the Slidell, Louisiana, police department. Slidell was somewhere outside New Orleans.
    Then I went out on my own to accounts at the big-three credit services, and found recent checks on Baird from a credit-counseling firm in New Orleans.
    “Bobby was mouse-trapped,” I told John, when we were headed back toward Longstreet. “I don’t know by who, but it wasn’t the feds. Whoever it was, did a pretty interesting job. Most people who’ve gone looking for the guy have been techies who tried to track him down online. This guy must of heard about Bobby’s kids.”
    Over the years, I told John, I’d heard online rumors that Bobby had helped out more kids than the one we knew about in Longstreet. Some inner-city kid would get a new computer in the mailfrom an anonymous donor, along with certain kinds of software, or a kid in Tennessee would come up with an unexpected laptop, or maybe expensive software like AutoCAD or Mathematica. Bobby had become an urban legend among the people who made up the computer world; the stories were like those about a kid who hangs around the playground and one day Michael Jordan comes along for a few minutes of one-on-one.
    “So somebody set up a fake kid, puts the fake where Bobby will hear about it, eventually gets a package, and tracks it back to Baird,” John said.
    “And before he goes to Baird, he checks him on the NCIC and the credit services, and probably a few other ways, and finds out that whoever Baird is, he isn’t Bobby. Doesn’t have the background, doesn’t have the education. Too old, for one thing. So then he tracks him, somehow. He’s probably a hacker at some level, so maybe he looks at Baird’s phone bills.”
    We both thought about it for a while, then John said, “If there were all these people looking for him over all those years, why didn’t somebody do this