Edge

Chapter 21

DOING NOTHING.

It’s not such a problem for us shepherds; we’re used to it. We’re like airline pilots, whose life is routine 99 percent of the time. We expect this and-though we train for the rare moments of action to avoid calamity-we understand that most of our lives on the job will pass in a waiting state. Ideally so, at least.

But for our principals, time spent in a safe house often becomes a nightmare. They’re plucked from their active lives and have to spend hour after hour in places like this, cozy though they may be, unable to work, unable to pursue projects around their houses, unable to see friends. Few phone calls, no email… Even TV is unsatisfying; the programs remind them of the world that exists outside their prison, fading reruns of our existence they may never see again, frivolous shows, both drama and comedy, that mock the tragedy they’re living through.

Doing nothing…

One consequence of which is that they often opt for the oblivion of sleep; there’s no reason for principals to wake early.

At 9:30 Sunday morning, I was sitting in the den at the desk, where I’d been since five, when I heard the snap of a door opening and creaks in the floorboards. I heard the voices of Ryan and Joanne, saying good morning to Lyle Ahmad, making small talk. He gave them details about coffee and breakfast.

I sent some more emails and then rose, stretching.

The night had passed in peace and a new spec in West Virginia told me in a deeper voice, though with a twang identical to that of his associate, that scans of the property had revealed nothing of concern. A car had driven by at midnight but it was taking a route that was logical for a local returning from dinner in Tysons Corner or the District. In any case, our GPS had measured his speed and he hadn’t slowed as much as one mile per hour when he passed, which took him off the threat list, according to our algorithms.

I joined the Kesslers in the kitchen and we exchanged greetings.

“Sleep well?” I asked.

“Well enough, yeah.” Ryan was bleary-eyed. He was moving slowly-because of the limp and, perhaps, a hangover. He wore jeans and an Izod shirt, purple, with his belly hanging over the belt buckle. He still wore his weapon. Joanne was in jeans too and a black T-shirt under a floral blouse. In a round compact mirror she inspected her lipstick-the only makeup she was wearing-then put it back in her purse.

Ryan said he’d talked to Amanda for a long time earlier and everything seemed okay at Carter’s place. The girl had enjoyed fishing yesterday and they’d had dinner with neighbors last night, a barbecue.

I’d called Bill Carter too, that morning. I told the Kesslers this and added, “He said there hasn’t been anything suspicious. Just that your daughter was still bothered about missing school tomorrow and her game and some volunteer job.”

“A student counseling hotline,” Ryan explained. “She practically runs the place.”

Knowing what I did about the girl now, I wasn’t surprised.

“Let’s hope she won’t have to miss anything,” Joanne said.

It was still early on Sunday. If we got Loving and the primary soon, the Kesslers’ lives could return to a semblance of normality by suppertime.

“What do we do today?” Ryan asked, looking outside. I’d seen golf clubs in the garage and I guessed he’d miss what might be a warm fall day on the links.

“You just relax,” I said. I couldn’t help but think of Claire duBois, who’d once commented to me as we were flying to Florida to collect a principal, “The pilots always say that, ‘Now just sit back and relax and enjoy the flight.’ What options are there? Do handstands in the aisles? Open a window and feed the birds?”

The Kesslers too had no options. I knew they weren’t going to like my further instructions, which I now delivered, that they had to stay inside.

“Inside,” Ryan muttered, peeking out through a slit in the curtain at a band of sun on leaves just beginning to color. He sighed and knifed butter onto an English muffin.

Doing nothing…

My phone rang and I glanced at caller ID. “Excuse me.”

I headed back to the den, clicking ANSWER. “Claire.”

“I’ve got some information.”

“Go ahead.”

Her youthful voice offered enthusiastically, “The electronic trackers? This’s interesting. They’re made by Mansfield Industries. The small tracker has a range of six hundred yards, the big one a thousand. That sounds impressive but they’re older models. The new trackers, like the ones we use, are GPS and satellite based, so you can sit in your office and track. The ones planted on you were cheap. That means they’re used by police departments.”

Yes, that was interesting. “And the model numbers-”

“-are the same used in the MPD.” Ryan Kessler’s employer.

“Serial numbers?” I asked.

But she said, “No serial numbers. So we don’t know the specific source.”

“Prints or trace evidence on them?”

“None.”

I considered this information. A principal who was a detective and hardware that might have come from the same police department he worked for.

Another piece of the puzzle.

I asked, “Graham?” The Department of Defense employee whose checkbook was stolen. The man who’d surprisingly dropped the charges.

Her voice lost its lilt as she said, “Okay. About that.”

Didn’t sound good. “What?”

“I think I may need some help.”

“Go on.”

“A teeny problem…”

An adjective I never quite got.

She continued, “I was researching and making some headway. I found that the chief of detectives-”

“Lewis.”

“Right. COD Lewis got a call from ‘somebody powerful.’ That’s a quote, though I have no idea what ‘somebody powerful’ means. It sounds like what a scriptwriter would say when he’s describing a bad guy, the nefarious character. Anyway, this power person had Lewis make sure the case wasn’t being pursued.”

“Somebody from the Pentagon?”

“I don’t know. Then I got some numbers. Graham makes ninety-two thousand a year. His wife fifty-three. They have a six-hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage and two daughters in college, in addition to their son, Stuart. The girls’re going to William and Mary, and Vassar. Their collective tuition is about sixty thousand a year. Room and board probably not too bad. I mean, with all respect to Williamsburg and Poughkeepsie. You ever been there, either of them?”

“No.” I considered this. “So the stolen forty thousand is a bigger hit for him to swallow than we thought.”

“Huge. I was thinking about when I went to Duke. My folks saved every penny they could for my tuition. It’d take something disastrous for them to give up and doom me to a career of memorizing specials of the day.”

“You mentioned a problem.”

Teeny…

“Actually…”

“Claire?”

DuBois came in a quirky package-her dancing mind, her bizarre observations-but she was, in her way, as much a competitor as I was and it was hard for her to admit defeat, especially if she’d made a mistake, which was what I sensed had happened.

“I got this idea. Because of his clearance, Graham would have had to take a lie detector test.”

All government employees with security clearances have to do this regularly. Some organizations have their own polygraphist; the DoD usually relies on the FBI.

“So I called up a friend at the Bureau to find out. Graham was scheduled to take one last week but he called the field office and said he was staying home. He had a bad cold. They don’t let you take the exam if you’re on medication. So it was postponed until next month.”

“You checked log-in records at the Pentagon.”

“Exactly. Graham didn’t stay home when he said he had. And nobody got the impression he was sick. He lied to avoid the test.”

“Good thinking. Go on.”

“Apparently somebody in Records let him know I’d been looking into it. Graham got my name. He called. He wasn’t happy.”

It wasn’t the best outcome, I agreed. I’d rather that Graham had been kept completely in the dark about our investigation. But I still wasn’t sure why duBois seemed so upset. Then she explained. “I figured as long as I was blown, I may as well interview him, see what he had to say about withdrawing the complaint. He got, um, uncooperative. Actually pretty insulting. He called me ‘young lady.’ Which I don’t really like.”

I was sure not.

“He told me, kind of R-rated, where I could put my warrant.”

“Warrant? How did a warrant come up?”

“That’s sort of the problem. I threatened to serve him.”

“For what?” I couldn’t see any scenario in which a warrant made sense.

“I made it up. I just got mad, the way he was talking. I said if he wasn’t going to answer my questions, I’d go to a magistrate, get paper and serve him to force him to talk.”

I was silent for a moment. Lesson time. “Claire, there’s a difference between bluffing and threatening. With a threat you have something to back it up. With a bluff you don’t. We threaten. We don’t bluff.”

“I was sort of bluffing, I guess.”

“Okay,” I said. “Where is he now?”

“His caller ID put him at home. Fairfax. I’m sorry. He’s stonewalling now.”

Young lady…

“Tell you what. Meet me at the Hyatt in Tysons. A half hour.”

“Okay.”

After disconnecting, I joined Ryan Kessler at a table in the living room, poring over documents. I told him about the trackers that Loving’s partner had slipped into my wheel wells.

“They were from the department?” he asked, surprised.

“We couldn’t source them. But they’re the same model numbers the Metropolitan Police buys.”

“Fact is, we never use them,” Ryan said. “They’re great in theory but that’s not how most tails work. Reception gets screwed up, the signals get crossed. Mostly we put ’em in buy-money bags if there’s a lot of cash and we’re afraid of losing it. But you can also get them from almost any security gadget company.”

“Anybody in the department you can think of who might be monitoring the Graham or Clarence Brown cases? Or one of your smaller ones?”

“Somebody inside working with Loving? Impossible. We don’t do that, cops don’t do that to each other.”

I said nothing, though I thought: People will do anything to anybody-if the edge is right.

I returned to my computer and, not wanting him to hear my request, wrote an email to duBois, giving her another item on her growing to-do list. She acknowledged it.

Garcia and Ahmad were making rounds. I told them I was leaving for a while to continue investigating who the primary was. I stepped outside to the detached garage and opened the door. Inside was a Honda Accord, registered to a fictional resident of Arlington, Virginia. Billy’d made some modifications to it-run-flats, better horsepower and a bit of armor-but it was still pretty much off the shelf. I started the car and drove out of the compound, cruising through the tunnel of leaves and branches glowing in the sun.

I was about ten minutes from the safe house when the phone buzzed. I recognized Westerfield’s number. I’d forgotten my promise to Aaron about keeping the prosecutor up to speed.

So I answered.

I shouldn’t have.