I slowed down to forty, and LuEllen faded on him, and he got off I-395 and swung between the Pentagon and Arlington cemetery, along the Potomac and then across a bridge toward the Lincoln Memorial. Just across the river, he dropped off the highway onto a riverside street and headed north. I caught a street sign that said Rock Creek Parkway.
FOR the first mile or two, there was enough traffic to cover us. Carp was still moving slowly, but maybe, I thought, that was the way he drove. We went up the river, past people in rowing shells, past a single sailboat heading upstream under power, and then into the ravine that was the lower end of Rock Creek Park. Traffic disappeared, and before long, I was the next car behind Carp.
“I’m gonna have to get out,” I called to LuEllen. “I’m getting off at the next street. You stay back as far as you can.”
“Okay.”
Rock Creek Park must be several miles long; it’s the designated body-dumping spot for the Washington metro area. The lower end of the park is a narrow, steep-sided, heavily wooded ravine. In places, the boulder-filled creek runs precisely through the middle of it, with the road pinned to one side, and a hiking or jogging trail on the other. As I went past a narrow wooden footbridge across the creek, I began to get an inkling of Carp’s thinking, of why he’d taken a mountain bike with him. If he were ambushed in here by people in cars, and he were on the bike, he’d be able to outrun anyone on foot, and go where no car ever could. I wondered if he’d considered the fact that bullets can move even faster over rough terrain than mountain bikes.
A side street was coming; I switched on my right-turn signal and took it. As soon as I was out of sight of Carp, I did a U-turn and saw LuEllen go by. I fell in behind, keeping pace, but well back, always in touch with LuEllen by radio.
We wound farther into the park, and it got wilder and deeper. The cross streets were infrequent, and if Carp stopped to look at trailing traffic, he might bust us.
LuEllen called. “He turned, he’s getting out of the park. I gotta keep going or he’ll spot me.”
“I’ve got him,” I said.
I followed him up the side of the ravine, on a narrow black-topped street that suddenly got wider and merged with a busier street; lost him for a minute, then saw the Corolla turn right, fifteen or twenty cars ahead of me, onto Sixteenth Street. I charged up the hill, beeped impatiently at a car ahead of me-got the finger from the driver-turned right, and then timidly followed Carp a couple of blocks to a park.
As I called and gave directions to LuEllen, Carp turned into a street that led across the park to what looked like a small stadium. I stopped in front of a Presbyterian church, idled by the curb, and watched him drive toward the stadium. I was about to follow when he pulled into a parking spot.
“He’s parking,” I told LuEllen. Two minutes later, she pulled in behind me. A baseball diamond sat right on the corner, with soccer fields on the other side, and then tennis courts, and then the parking lot where Carp was getting the bike out of the car.
“Let’s watch some baseball,” I said to LuEllen on the walkie-talkie, and we both got out and walked over to the ball diamond, where a group of parents were sitting on a berm along the third-base line, watching their small children play T-ball.
We found a grassy spot and from there watched Carp assemble the mountain bike behind the Corolla.
When he was done, he rode it once, in a practiced way, around the parking lot. He seemed too big for the machine, but he rode it with a confidence that suggested that Jimmy James Carp had talents we didn’t know of. A second later, the bike having been tested, he went back to the car, pulled on a long-billed black fishing cap, then slammed and locked the door.
He didn’t have the briefcase with him.
“I’m gone,” LuEllen said. She’d try to stay with him. We both got up, both dusted the seat of our pants, and walked back to the cars. She did a quick U-turn and then went down the street beside the church and did another, so she was pointing back toward the park. Whichever way Carp went, she could follow, as long as he didn’t cut cross-country.
I watched Jimmy James pedal by, take a left, and head back to the street that had taken us up out of the park. LuEllen dropped in behind him, and I went after the Corolla.
ON THE front seat of my car, I had a plumb bob. Plumb bobs are one of the oldest surveying tools in the world, and were undoubtedly used to help build the pyramids. Basically, the modern version is a slender brass cone, with a sharp stainless-steel point. A long piece of string attaches to the precise center of the blunt end of the cone, and when you let the plumb bob dangle, and the pendulum movement subsides, the string makes a perfect vertical line.
That’s useful if you’re making a pyramid foundation.
Which I wasn’t. I’d pulled the string off and had thrown it away, leaving myself with a heavy brass cone with a sharp steel point. I pulled into a parking spot next to Carp’s car and called LuEllen.
She came back, “He’s headed back into the park, down the hill. I’m not gonna get out of the car, but I could lose him… I can still see him… Do the car now.”
“Doing the car,” I said.
I got out of my car, carrying the plumb bob. Stepping up to the driver’s-side window on the Corolla, I put the point of the plumb bob on the glass, just outside the inner door lock. I hit the blunt end of the plumb bob with the heel of my other hand, and the steel point poked easily through the glass with almost no sound at all, or obvious motion on my part.
I pulled the plumb bob out of the hole, stuck my finger through the glass, popped the lock. Inside the car, I took a few seconds to find the trunk latch: found it, popped the trunk, took the briefcase out. I couldn’t help myself: I looked inside, and there, just where it was supposed to be, was an IBM laptop.
“Excellent,” I said to myself as I got back in my car. “Kidd, you are a fuckin’ genius.”
THEN LuEllen called. Her voice was jerky, screeching, and for the first time I’d ever heard it, afraid: “Kidd, I’m in trouble here. I’m in trouble, Kidd. This is a trap, this is a trap. Carp’s running on the bike. They’re stopping cars. I’m gonna try to get out, oh, Jesus, Kidd. Get out. Get out, get out, wipe your car, dump your car, I’m gonna try to run.”
Two minutes later, I got a last call: “Kidd, if you can hear me…”
“I gotcha.” I sounded calm to my own ears, but my heart was in my mouth.
“It was a trap. They’re sweeping the park, there must be thirty of them,” she said. “They spotted me watching him, they blocked me out, they got the car. I don’t know if they got him, or not, I saw him heading into the woods on the bike.” She was breathing heavily, but no longer sounded frightened. “I’m on foot, in the woods, but they’re all around here, they’re gonna get me. I ditched all my ID, buried it, they’ve got nothing on me. I’m gonna throw the walkie-talkie in a minute. Get me out. Get me out, Kidd. Don’t leave me.”
And she was gone. I sat with the radio pressed to my ear, listening for anything. Nothing came.