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 the Keyhole 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 considered the same as being proven innocent.”

“Well, that’s what the letters in his laptop say-he’s trying to get back in with Krause.”

“What if we went online and told Lemon that Senator Krause wants to make a deal with Carp. What if we throw that fly out on the water?”

Once we got that going, other bits and pieces started falling into place, but it was all tentative, all guesswork, and all dangerous. LuEllen embroidered on the idea, and concluded, “It’s doable-but the whole idea depends on us spotting Carp first. And on where Krause lives. If he lives downtown in a big apartment complex, the Watergate or somewhere like that, it won’t work. Even if it’s in a house, he could have big-time security, with his job.”

“We can figure out a way to finesse the security. And Krause’s been here for twenty years, he’s gotta have a house,” I said. “He shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

ONE of the keys to the hunt for Carp was the attack outside of Griggs’s apartment. We wondered, why there? How did he know about the park? The park had been a perfect spot for an ambush-small enough that he could watch the whole thing from one place, with good protective contour, good concealing foliage, busy enough that he wouldn’t be noticeable, quiet enough that he wouldn’t be shooting through a crowd.

We went online to my pal in Montana, the government-files maven, and asked him to pull Carp’s tax returns and check the addresses. We had an answer in twenty minutes: Carp had lived for a year in a house not more than a two-minute walk from the park. And more background: he’d apparently moved into the apartment in the District only six months earlier. Before that, he’d lived in an apartment complex in south Arlington.

We didn’t think he’d dare go back to his own apartment after killing the two government guys, so it was possible that he knew the people in the house he’d lived in, and bagged out there, or that he had a friend somewhere down in that apartment complex and was hiding there. Either would explain both the park meeting place and his invisibility.

While my Montana friend was compiling the addresses, we did a quick check on Krause; he had a house in a northwestern suburb, as close as we could tell with our Washington map.

“So it’s a possibility,” I said. “The whole setup we talked about.”

“If we can spot Carp’s car…”

WE KNEW Carp was driving a red Corolla. We knew the license number. He knew our car, and the number. No problem: we went out to National and rented a couple of cars, one from Hertz, one from Avis on my Harry Olson Visa card and Wisconsin driver’s license. We still had the walkie-talkies from New Orleans.

We started looking, driving separate cars, staying in touch with the walkie-talkies.

THE house in Ballston we crossed off immediately. The area seemed to be upgrading, and the house where Carp once lived was being rehabbed and was empty. Two carpenters were rebuilding the front porch, and you could look straight through the place. We headed down to south Arlington.

Fairlington is a few hundred acres of low two- and three-story red-brick apartment buildings with white window trimmings in a faux-federal style, spread along narrow, quiet, two-lane streets overhung with oaks; a pleasant enough place for new families just getting started, and we saw a fair number of young mothers out pushing baby strollers.

We thought Carp might be at the White Creek complex, a U-shaped building with four white pillars at the main entrance, and an asphalt parking lot in the front. I cruised the parking lot, which wouldn’t hold many more than a hundred cars, while LuEllen lingered up the block in another car. No Corolla.

“You go around to the left, I’ll go right,” I told her.

“Roger. Over and out.” She thought the walkies-talkies were fun.

IF WE didn’t find him in the first sweep through the complex, we’d agreed that we’d check a few more times-he might simply have gone out for lunch.

But he wasn’t out.

LuEllen found the car fifteen minutes after we started looking for it. The Motorola beeped, I picked it up and said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Got it.”

WE WENT out to a sandwich place in a shopping center on King Street, got chicken-salad sandwiches. “We could just stick the gun in his ear and threaten to pull the trigger if he doesn’t give us the laptop,” LuEllen said.

“Two problems: we’d have to get close enough to him and we really might have to shoot him if we got that close. He’s got that gun. And what if he doesn’t have the laptop with him?”

“We’d only try it if he had it with him.”

“Too many windows looking out at us, too many mothers on the street.” I shook my head. “Let’s go the other way. Even if we miss, we’ll know where he’s staying.”

“Simple is usually best. This isn’t simple.”

“And this is fucking Washington,” I said.

“Yeah-yeah,” she said. “Finish your sandwich. Lets go look at Krause’s house.”

KRAUSE lived in a leafy neighborhood northwest of the city of Washington proper, on the opposite side of Burning Tree Country Club from I-495. We drove past the club entrance five minutes before we cruised his house. The landscape was wooded and rolling, the streets smooth and quiet and curved and rich. His house sat above the street, with a hundred-foot black-topped driveway and a three-car garage.

“When?” she asked.

“This evening,” I said.

“How do we know he’ll be in?”

“It’s Sunday night. He could be out playing golf, and then have some friends over, but he ought to be home sometime in between-say, six o’clock. Dinnertime.”

“How about a FedEx shirt?”

“We can fake it,” I said.

“Somebody might see your face.”

“Can’t help it.”

She said, “I just went to eighty percent on the LuEllen scare-o-meter.”

THE whole thing was complicated to talk about, but the actual doing was fairly quick. We needed to get very close to Krause very quickly, and without scaring him. Once we were close, he wouldn’t have a choice about talking-but getting within conversational distance of a major Washington politician, alone, was not a sure thing.