Edge

tell at which picture or certificate or diploma. Finally he said to Teasley, “Give him Kessler’s address.”
    The young woman jotted it in far more legible handwriting than her boss’s. When she handed it to me I was hit by another blast of perfume.
    I took it, thanking them both. I’m a competitive game player—all sorts of games—and I’ve learned to be humble and magnanimous in victory, a theory I’d carried over to my professional life. A matter of courtesy, of course, but I’d also found that being a good winner gives you a slight advantage psychologically when you play against the same opponent in the future.
    They rose. The prosecutor said, “Okay, do what you can—find out who hired Loving and why.”
    “Our number-one priority,” I assured him, though it wasn’t.
    “Au revoir. . . .” Westerfield and Teasley breezed out of the doorway, the prosecutor giving sotto voce orders to her.
    I too rose. I had to stop at the town house and pick up a few things for the assignment.
    “I’ll report from the location,” I told Ellis.
    “Corte?”
    I stopped at the door and glanced back.
    “Not sending the Kesslers to the slammer . . . it makes sense, right? You’d rather get them into a safe house and run the case from there?” He’dbacked me up—Aaron Ellis was nothing if not supportive of his troops—and would go with my expertise on the question. But he wasn’t, in truth, asking for reassurance that it made tactical sense not to put them in protective custody.
    What he was really asking was this: Was he making the right decision in assigning me, and not someone else, to the job of guarding principals from Henry Loving? In short, could I be objective when the perp was the one who’d murdered my mentor and had apparently escaped from the trap I’d set for him several years before?
    “A safe house’s the most efficient approach,” I told Ellis and returned to my office, fishing for the key to unlock the desk drawer where I kept my weapon.

Chapter 3
    MANY GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES are wedded to initials or acronyms to describe their employees or departments, but in ours, for some reason, nicknames are the order of the day, as with “lifter” and “hitter.”
    The basic bodyguards in our organization are the close protection officers, whom we call “clones,” because they’re supposed to shadow their principals closely. Our Technical Support and Communications Department is staffed by “wizards.” There are the “street sweepers”—our Defense Analysis and Tactics officers, who can spot a sniper a mile away and a bomb hidden in a principal’s cell phone. The people in our organization running surveillance are called, not surprisingly, “spies.”
    I’m in the Strategic Protection Department, the most senior of the eight SPD officers in the organization. We’re the ones who come up with and execute a protection plan for the principals we’ve been assigned to guard. And because of the mission, and the initials of the department, we’re known as shepherds.
    One department that doesn’t have a nickname is Research Support, to me the most important of all our ancillary divisions. A shepherd can’t run apersonal security job without good investigative research. I’ve often lectured younger officers that if you do research up front, you’ll be less likely to need tactical firepower later.
    And I was lucky to have as my protégée the person I considered the best in the department.
    I called her now.
    One ring. Then: “DuBois,” came the voice from my earpiece.
    It was the woman’s secure mobile I’d called, so I got her work greeting. With its French origin, you’d think the name would be pronounced doo-bwah but her family used doo-boys.
    “Claire. Something’s come up.”
    “Yes?” she asked briskly.
    “Loving’s still alive.”
    She processed this. “Alive? . . . I’m not sure how that could happen.”
    “Well, it has.”
    “I’m thinking about it,” she mused, almost to herself. “The building burned. . . . There was a DNA match. I recall the report. There were some typos in it, remember?” Claire duBois was older than her adolescent intonation suggested, though not much. Short brunette hair, a heart-shaped and delicately pretty face, a figure that was probably very nice—and I was as curious about it as any man would be—but usually hidden by functional pantsuits, which I preferred her wearing over skirts and dresses. The practicality of it,