Edge

also renditions for interrogation.”
    “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Ryan muttered. “Jesus.” Then some silence passed and he asked, “After we met . . . did you keep doing it?”
    “No. Well, for about a year I was active but I didn’t run any operations. I told them no. They wanted me to. But I told them no.”
    They’d want her because she was good, I surmised.
    Then she turned to me. “Really, Corte, the people in my organization have looked into everything. There’s no connection between any of my assignments and Henry Loving. I left six years ago. It makes no sense for anybody to target me now.”
    Ryan Kessler was then staring out the window and from the icy smile on his face I saw that his thoughts had arrived where mine had been for the past ten minutes or so. He asked his wife, “Were you doing this when I met you?”
    Joanne swallowed, her face flushed. “I told you I was active for a year but I didn’t—”
    “No, I mean the day I met you, Jo?”
    When she said nothing he continued, “Oh, my God. At the deli. You were on assignment.”
    Joanne lowered her eyes.
    I supposed that the owner and his wife were probably key in some terrorist cell. Joanne and the partner had been ordered to eliminate them. They had gone into the deli and as soon as it was clear they called in the contractor, who was fronting as arobber for the security camera. He killed the couple. The plan would have been for him to flee, and Joanne and the partner would give statements to the police describing the incident as a robbery gone bad.
    Only, Detective Ryan Kessler had heard the shots and raced into the store.
    The hero . . .
    “It wasn’t some crankhead from South East who shot me; it was your fucking hit man.”
    Now emotion bled into Joanne’s voice. “I checked the police schedule a dozen times! Nobody was supposed to be nearby.”
    “You were the one in charge?”
    She sighed. Like me, she knew what was coming. “I was primary anchor on that one, yes.”
    “The anchor gives the . . . what’d you call it? A shoot order?”
    “We don’t call it that but I gave the order, yes.”
    “And you also gave him the order to shoot me?”
    Joanne started to speak but her voice choked to a stop. “We had to get our contractor out of there. I used a code. It means to use nonlethal force on an innocent. We never would have done it if you hadn’t been armed. But all of a sudden there you were.”
    There was a crash, and I jumped at the sound. Maree had leapt to her feet and a wineglass and coffee cup had tumbled to the floor and shattered. She stepped forward and leaned into her sister’s face. Joanne looked down as Maree raged, “You go off on me because I end up with a boyfriend you don’t like. You say those terrible things about me, being irresponsible. And you . . .” Her voice choked. “You murdered people for a living!”
    Joanne said nothing but looked away. I saw her fists were kneading and fingers white. Maree spun around and stomped up the hallway to the bedroom.
    Ryan shook his head and said to Joanne, “I didn’t rescue you. I didn’t rescue anybody.”
    “I . . . Oh, honey. A million times I tried to tell you. I—”
    “So you went out with me for sympathy. Out of guilt.”
    “No! I went out with you because I wanted to change. I wanted a real life, a normal life. I wanted you. You were good. You did the right thing! I couldn’t live with what my organization was doing anymore.” She moved her hand toward him. He eased away. He stepped into the kitchen, snagged the whiskey bottle that had been untouched for a day and vanished down the hall.
    The bedroom door closed. Though I expected a slam, I knew it was shut only because the wedge of light faded to black. I didn’t hear so much as a latch click.

Chapter 46
    I WAS IN the den with Joanne, alone.
    Looking over the top-secret sheets duBois had emailed me. Much was redacted, including the name of her organization, which was far less public even than mine. Though one thing that wasn’t redacted was a picture of Joanne from eight or ten years ago. And her name within the organization, Lily Hawthorne. The woman in the picture looked much like the woman in front of me. Handsome but not pretty, unsmiling, slim.
    Reserved and secretive too.
    I realized a lot of other curiosities over the past few days made sense now. Joanne’s desperation to get her stepdaughter away from her, afraid that she was in fact the reason the girl might be