“Ah, man,” I said. “If they get on this guy, I’m gonna have to tell somebody that we did the cross.”

LuEllen shrugged. She was leaning over into my half of the seat, her face next to mine, looking at the tiny screen. “Why? He might not have killed Bobby, but he sounds like the kind of asshole who’s just looking for the opportunity.”

“LuEllen, for Christ’s sake, I’m not letting some guy I don’t know go to prison for something I did, and he didn’t.”

“Whatever,” she said. She was glum, bitter, still reacting to the killing.

DURING the trip north from Mississippi, I’d laboriously gone through the list in the DDC Working Group-Bobby file, searching the names on the Internet, and eventually nailed most of them down. The names belonged to government employees, a few of whom were identified in their credit reports as working for the Justice Department. Three were members of the Senate staff. The computer numbers went into a Justice Department system somewhere in northern Virginia. When I called them, I got a log-in screen, and nothing more: no way to pry up the edges.

Eventually, I wrote a memo, and e-mailed it to the staffers on the Deep Data Correlation working group list in Carp’s laptop:

Senator Krause’s senior staff will begin next week to compile a daily log of the senator’s activities and positions which may be of interest to key persons working with the senator and the DDCWG. This will be a continuing commentary, somewhat like the web-logs now popular on the Internet. The log will allow space for questions to the senator, and internal arguments concerning positions on the issues of the day. If you would like key-person access to the log, please supply us with a user name and a password that would allow you to access the system. You may reply to…

I had to stop and go into my own notebook, and look up the address of one of the sterile dump sites I keep for this kind of one-time messaging.

As I was typing it in, LuEllen asked, “What good is that gonna do?”

“Everybody likes a chance to talk to the boss,” I said. “But nobody wants to remember more passwords than they have to-everybody’s already got too many. At least a couple of these guys are going to send me the same name and password they use to sign on to the committee system.”

“Yeah?”

“Never fails,” I said. I pushed the button that sent the memo. “But we won’t hear back until tomorrow.”

“So let’s go get a decent dinner. Can we do that? I mean, I’m so screwed up.”

“Yeah.”

“Something French. With snails in it. Or diseased goose liver. Or Italian. I could do Italian, but I’m pretty fuckin’ tired of panfried catfish.”

Before we left, I checked for William Heffron of MacLean, Virginia, one of the guys who’d visited Bobby’s trailer. I found his home address and phone number, but no employer listing. Going back through one of the credit agencies, I found U.S. Department of Justice, 1989-1996, and then U.S. Government, 1996 to present. That usually wasn’t enough for a credit agency. They wanted specifics, and since they had settled without them, I assumed that Heffron was an intelligence operative of some kind.

“He’s dead,” LuEllen said.

“I know. We’ll probably find out more about him tomorrow.”

I closed down the notebook, and we went looking for a restaurant.

I’M probably totally and utterly wrong about this, if totally and utterly don’t mean the same thing, but I’ve always gotten the impression that half of the people in Washington are sleeping with someone they shouldn’t be sleeping with, in either the sexual sense or the political sense, or both. As a result, the city and the surrounding suburbs have these great little restaurants with tables where you can’t be seen. Exactly the opposite, say, of LA.

We wound up right across the Potomac at Birdie-singular-a French cafe in Georgetown, a half-block off M Street, where LuEllen ate some things that nobody should ever eat. I stayed with rock doves, which I’m pretty sure are pigeons, but looked, on the plate, the size of sparrows with drumsticks like kitchen matches. They also had dainty, feathery little uncooked plant leaves across their roasted breasts. I lifted the leaves off and looked around, and LuEllen said, “No, don’t throw them on the floor, give them to me.”

We had a bottle of wine with the dinner, and because we couldn’t be seen or heard, talked about the Carp pursuit.

“The thing that’s interesting is that the FBI is chasing Bobby’s killer, but they still think it’s a racial killing,” LuEllen said. She was wearing black, as she always did when she got into a decent restaurant east of Ohio, and small diamond earrings. “But we know a high-up security person knows that Bobby was Bobby, so they ought to be all over it, but they’re not.”

I poked a fork at her. “And somebody else, not the FBI, is chasing Carp, and now they might have a couple of dead bodies,” I said. “Did they know that Carp killed Bobby? Did they know he’s the guy dumping the stuff under Bobby’s name? Or is this some kind of operation? Is it the NSA, which it might be, because Rosalind Welsh apparently isn’t talking to the FBI? But one of the guys looking for Carp used to be with the Justice Department, and the FBI is a branch of the Justice Department. What the hell does that mean?”

“Whoever it is, we’ve got government people killing each other.”

“No. We’ve got Carp killing government people. Like you said, those guys didn’t even look like they were armed. They did the same thing we did, stumbling into him. I really don’t think the government goes around killing people… except like in wars, and so on.”

“I don’t have your faith,” LuEllen said. “I know there are cops who’ve killed people who pissed them off.”

“Sure. But they did it on their own. And maybe somebody higher up didn’t look into it as deeply as they should, but basically it’s not policy. If the killing’s found out, there’s a trial.”

“So? So we’ve got an outlaw group.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll tell you one thing-if the FBI doesn’t figure out that Robert Fields was Bobby, and if Welsh doesn’t tell them, then we’ll have to. Carp ain’t walking away from this thing.”

“We don’t even know that Carp’s the guy who killed Bobby. Maybe it was these two guys,” LuEllen suggested.

“Oh, bullshit.” I swallowed most of a wing. “These guys were a couple of schmucks. And we know Carp is nuts. When we were in the trailer, the first time we ever saw him, he jumped up and fired a gun at John and me without ever asking who we were or where we were from. Nuts.”

“Okay, he’s nuts,” she said. “There are a couple things we’ve got to know, though, that we don’t know yet-the biggest one is, is Carp working for someone? If he’s working for someone, then he may have already given the computer away. Or given up copies. And we may run into more trouble than we think, if we ever find him.”

“Yeah… maybe we’ll figure out something tomorrow.”

“Hope he doesn’t pop something else on the news,” LuEllen said. “He’s already got a feeding frenzy. What more does he want?”

WE SPENT a little time fooling around that evening, in sort of a sad way, and in the quiet after the sex, LuEllen told me why she was thinking of quitting her life.

“No big deal, it was just a TV show. I was down in Texas and they showed this thing about women in prison. They were all doing long terms for murder and… well, murder, mostly-and I started thinking that I could end up like them. Just one fuck-up. One alarm that I don’t see, or maybe a booby trap or I get hurt, somehow. I’d be in there. It wasn’t the jail so much that looked bad, it was the women. They all looked really messed up. Hurt. They looked sad… the saddest people you can imagine. I’d hang myself before I got that way.”