The Hanged Man's Song

this.”
    >>> THE state of Minnesota allows anyone to check anyone else’s license plate, but requires you to identify yourself before the information is released. Your name is then put on the file, and the person whose plate you pulled is notified. That’s if you go in the front door. I never did, and I didn’t think Carp—Lemon—would be likely to go in the front door, either. But . . .
    “How can you tell?” LuEllen said, peering at the laptop screen as I went online and dialed into the DMV.
    “There’s a counter. You’d really have to tear up a system to beat it.” I got the plate database, checked my tag number. My name and address came up. The counter said the information had been accessed the night of the collision at Rachel Willowby’s apartment.
    “There it is,” I said. “He had to have seen the car at Rachel’s place. That’s the only way he could have known.” It was a queer feeling. I’d been so careful, for so long, so unbelievably, unhealthily careful, that to have somebody crack my cover was like having your house burglarized.
    “That fucker. He set us up.” A hint of admiration in her voice? She snapped her fingers as she remembered the tarot connection. “That was the tarot card. Remember? That was the—”
    “King of Cups, reversed. Yeah, that popped into my head back at the park. Coincidence jumps up and bites you on the ass.”
    “You been bit on the ass so many times you’re lucky to have an ass left,” she snorted. “When are you gonna believe? You’re some kind of fuckin’ gypsy spook or something.”
    “No. No.” I shook my head. “No, it’s just superstition. But it’s . . . interesting.”
    “What do we do?”
    “Maybe what he did to us,” I said slowly. “I gotta think about it. He doesn’t know that we know.”
    “What if he looks at your DMV records again and sees that somebody else has checked them. He’ll know it was you, and he’ll know why.”
    “We’re not dealing with a sure thing,” I said. “It’s all murky. Let’s go walk around the Mall and see if we can figure something out.”
    >>> WE FIGURED something out, all right. What we figured out took an hour of talk—argument—working over the problemof the DDC group, the existence of the laptop and what that might mean, and the fact that Carp had identified me.
    Our strategy unwound like this:
    LuEllen asked a simple question: “Why don’t we just call him up and make a deal? Find out what he wants? We know that he killed Bobby and we could give the FBI a trail that leads to him—Baird saw him, and so did Rachel. We’ve got a big stick.”
    “So does he. He knows who I am.”
    “Right. So you should be safe with each other’s information. We call him up, tell him we want to look at the laptop—nothing more, we just want to look at it, meet at some safe, open place and make sure there’s nothing on it that incriminates us. After that, we walk away.”
    There was an objection to that idea. I said, “You’re saying we let him get away with killing Bobby.”
    “Not because I want to.”
    “And if we go online and try to make a deal, we give away our edge,” I said. “We know Lemon is Carp, and he doesn’t know we know.”
    “So what? So we know his exact name and the type of car he has and even the license number, but there are about a billion people in Washington. How are we gonna find him in this mess?”
    I was still unhappy with the idea. “What if he doesn’t even know what he’s got on us? He might not know yet, given the size of Bobby’s files. He might be willing to make a deal now, then find out something big, and decide to go with it.”
    “With the murder rap hanging over him?”
    “That’s exactly it. Suppose he found out what we did with theKeyhole satellites. He could use the information to deal his way out of a murder charge. I know the government deals down murder charges. You see it in the papers, some killer disappears into the Witness Protection Program, and the next thing you know, he’s your Little League coach.”
    “Damnit.”
    “The goddamn laptop is a bomb,” I said. “We gotta get it.”
    >>> WE WORRIED about that for a while. “Look,” I said, “we gotta wonder why he came to Washington at all. To make a deal with somebody? To get his job back? He might still be hoping to do that, if nobody can prove he did the killings at the apartment. And shit, the way things run in Washington these days, not being proven guilty is