Edge

bear just out of hibernation.
    Pogue and I nodded toward him.
    “Anything?” The detective eyed the outbuilding.
    “Not yet.”
    We stood in silence. Ryan’s hands were in his pockets. He stared down. His eyes were red.
    “How’s Maree?”
    “Holding up okay.”
    More silence.
    Then came the snap of a lock as the door opened. Ryan jumped. Pogue and I did not.
    Joanne stepped out and announced, “I’ve got it. I know where Amanda is.”
    Without another word she started for the house, walking ahead of us, as she used disinfectant wipes to clean the blood off her hands.

Chapter 59
    IN GAME THEORY the concept of the grim trigger is an interesting one.
    This occurs in “iterated” games—those in which the same opponents play the same game against each other over and over again. Eventually players settle into strategies that achieve the best common good, even if it’s less than perfect for their own self-interest. For instance, they learn in the Prisoners’ Dilemma the best outcome is to refuse to confess.
    But sometimes Player A “defects,” breaks the pattern, by confessing, which means he gets off scot-free while Prisoner B gets a much longer sentence.
    Player B then might play grim trigger, abandoning any semblance of cooperation and defecting forever.
    Another way to put it is that if one player decides even one time not to play by the rules, the opponent from then on plays exclusively—and ruthlessly—for his own self-interest.
    There was no cooperation involved between Henry Loving and me, of course, in this deadly game we were playing but the same theory applied. By kidnapping a teenager to torture her and extractinformation, as far as I was concerned, Loving had defected.
    I was now playing grim trigger.
    Which meant unleashing Joanne Kessler—in her incarnation as Lily Hawthorne—on Loving’s associate, McCall, to lift the information from him. Whatever that took. My interrogation skills are good but it would take time to get somebody like McCall, terrified of Henry Loving, to talk.
    I needed somebody he would fear more.
    Hence my subtle request to Joanne in the living room twenty minutes before, using chilling euphemisms, which she picked up on instantly. I could see from her eyes.
    Appeal to his sense of decency?
    As Amanda’s stepmother, yes.
    She and I had then gone to the outbuilding. We’d found McCall looking up from the heavy chair, scared, yes, but resolute in not betraying Loving. As I’d gestured Ahmad out, McCall had barked an uneasy laugh. “You’re giving me that voodoo look, Corte. What’s this about?”
    Joanne Kessler definitely wasn’t giving him any looks. She was just studying him.
    “Why isn’t anybody saying anything?” His voice caught.
    The sense of threat in the room reminded me of the Zagaev interrogation Bert Santoro and I had conducted not long ago.
    Only this was real.
    Joanne had nodded to me and I’d gone to a control panel in the wall and inserted a key and hit several buttons. I’d told her, “No communication out or in. The video’s off. You’re invisible.”
    “Look, Joanne,” McCall had said desperately. “I just can’t help you out, I’m sorry. I wish I could but I can’t. I feel for you, I really do. If there was any way . . .”
    She wasn’t paying any attention to him. She’d turned back to me and asked, “Any tools here?”
    “Under the sink. Nothing fancy.”
    “That’s all I need.” Joanne had then closed the door.
    Another thing about the outbuilding. The designers completely soundproofed the place. The reason for this was so that the principals couldn’t hear threats or demands coming from the outside.
    The corollary was that neither could you hear screams from inside.
    Night was around the compound as we gathered on the front porch of the safe house. Joanne seemed no more agitated than someone who’d survived a bargain basement sale at a mall store, standing her ground at the popular sizes and snagging the best.
    She said to me, “They’ve taken her to an old military installation on Route Fifteen near Leesburg, a mile south of Oatlands.”
    I knew Oatlands. A venue for Renaissance fairs and dog shows. Peggy and I had taken the boys there once.
    She continued, “The facility’s about a hundred yards west of Fifteen down an unmarked dirt road, in the side of a hill, like a bunker. McCall doesn’t know why they want her. It’s very secret. He would’ve told me if he did.”
    Joanne was speaking loudly. She