Edge

Chapter 34

AWARE OF THE fine shooting that the partner was capable of, we didn’t expose ourselves by surveying any vantage points for more than a second or two before dropping to the ground or crouching behind trees.

In five minutes we arrived at the house and made arrangements for the tactical entry. This is not my area of expertise, nor was I as heavily armed as everyone else in the group. I would remain outside on the front porch and keep an eye out for any flanking movement until the house was cleared. Another tactical officer would do the same at the back door.

Freddy gestured to one of his tac officers. The large man examined the door and with a single kick sent it flying inward, simultaneously blurting the requisite, “FBI, serving a warrant!” Agents streamed inside through the front and back doors. Flashlights clicked on but I ignored the search and continued surveying the front and side yards, crouching and presenting as little target as I could to a sniper in the surrounding woods. Using my night vision monocular, I scanned but spotted no evidence of shooters.

Finally Freddy stuck his head out the front door. “We’re clear.”

“Any sign of inhabitants recently?”

“Yep. Food and drinks with pretty far-off expiration dates. A set alarm clock. Five a.m. Boy’s an early riser. Fresh linens. Some clothes that don’t seem too old. Loving’s size.”

So he had been staying here.

I walked inside and drew closed any open shades and curtains, then clicked on the lights. The air was musty and tinged with cedar and rot. An agent appeared in the doorway; he’d checked for evidence of the vehicles but reported that the driveway and apron were gravel and he’d found no tire prints.

“What are we looking for?” another agent called. Freddy tipped his head to me.

“Credit card receipts, correspondence, computers or hard drives, bills… anything with or without Henry Loving’s name on it. He uses fake identities a lot.”

I doubted we’d find much about his immediate plans; he was too smart to leave obvious evidence but even a player as conscientious as he made mistakes sometimes.

Game theory takes this into account. In a “trembling hand equilibrium,” a player can accidentally pick an unintended strategy-say, when you reach for a queen’s bishop’s pawn and accidentally move the knight’s in error. If you release the piece, you’ve made the move, even if the consequences are the opposite of what you’d intended and are disastrous.

Still, we found little or nothing that was helpful.

But one thing I did indeed find was Henry Loving’s past.

Virtually all of it. Neither he nor his family had eradicated his history.

Everywhere throughout the house were photographs, framed postcards, ribbons from awards won at state fairs and carnivals, pictures of Loving family vacations. On the mantelpiece and on the shelves in place of books were souvenirs and memorabilia like ceramic animals, ashtrays, hats, candleholders.

And, in the den, scrapbooks. Probably thirty or forty of them. I checked quickly but none was more recent than about five years ago. The most current one contained only a single item about Loving himself. It was a clipping from the Washington Post, the same clipping I had in my office, as a matter of fact. About Loving’s murder of Abe Fallow and the woman he’d been guarding. Had he clipped it? And if he had, why? I guessed it was a matter of craft: to see how the authorities were handling the investigation.

I flipped through the memorabilia and examined the many pictures of a younger Henry, his sister and their parents. I was struck by the fact that in most of them he seemed somber and preoccupied, rarely smiling and seemingly distracted. But there were also a number of images of the young Henry laughing. One or two showed him with a girl, presumably on a date, though there was little physical contact between them.

Young Henry’s sports were track and archery. There were no pictures of him with teammates. He seemed to enjoy solitary pursuits.

I went back even earlier. I opened one page and stared down at it. Beneath a piece of yellowed Scotch tape was a tuft of clipped brown hair. I read the careful script below. The hair was Henry’s, at one year of age. I started to reach out and touch it. Then withdrew my hand when Freddy walked into the room.

“Whatcha think, son?” Freddy asked. “Anything helpful here? You’re looking like you found Bernie Madoff’s stash.”

I shook my head. “Nothing pointing to his next move. But everything pointing to him.”

“That helpful?”

“Not immediately. But ultimately, I hope so. Only there’s a lot here to go through. We’ll collect it all, take it in. You folks have evidence bags?”

“In the cars.”

I then noticed something against the opposite wall: another shelf on which a dozen shoe boxes sat. I picked one up. Inside were stacks of photographs. I supposed the family had stored them here temporarily until somebody got around to pasting them into a scrapbook. I realized, to my surprise, that there was a dust-free rectangle at the end. The last shoe box had been removed-today, if not within the last hour or so.

Had he sped back here from his cousin’s for the purpose of grabbing this one box?

What was there about it that Loving wanted?

Did it reveal something about his past that he wished to keep secret?

Or was there something sentimental connected to it?

I mentioned this to Freddy, who noted it without much interest. I flipped through the others. Like the scrapbooks, they revealed nothing immediately helpful, though we’d have forensic teams prowl through them for clues to summer houses or family members we hadn’t been able to locate earlier.

“Corte?” Freddy asked. He was getting impatient, I supposed.

“Okay,” I told him.

“Got something here,” a tactical officer called from the hallway that led to the kitchen in the back of the house. Freddy and I joined him.

“Looks like bills, sir.”

Sitting on the floor beside the kitchen table was a stack of envelopes, bound with a rubber band.

“He must’ve dropped them and not noticed.”

Trembling hand…

The agent picked them up but then froze. They only came halfway and tugged to a stop.

“Fuck,” he muttered and we all stared at the thin strand of fishing line that vanished through the hole in the floor.

Freddy grabbed his radio. “Clear the house, IED, IED!”

From the basement I heard the bang of the booby trap-softer than I expected-and saw on the foliage and trees a brief flare as the flash radiated through the basement windows.

The room was eerily silent. For a moment I thought the device might be a dud and I’d have ample time to collect the scrapbooks and shoe boxes.

But I’d taken only one step toward the repository of Henry Loving’s history when the nearby basement door blew outward and a vortex of orange and yellow flame shot into the hall, while simultaneously the fire raging in the basement erupted from every floorboard vent and crevice on the first floor.