Edge

suburban-warrior guise.
    Ellis waved to the chairs across from the coffee table.
    The slim man entered, trailed by his assistant, Chris Teasley. Interesting, I couldn’t help but observe: Here were Westerfield and I, flanked by our seconds, attractive women both, and a decade-plus younger. I noticed that Chris Teasley slipped her eyes toward duBois’s Macy’s suit and silver bracelet. I regretted to note also that the loaded glance had also registered with my protégée.
    “Well, to the matter at hand,” Westerfield said.“I was pretty surprised the whole morass rose as high as it did.” He caught that mixed metaphor, at least, and hesitated. Then: “A U.S. senator. Hm.” His voice and attitude continued to be as irritating as I remembered from the last time we met. Well, every time we’d met.
    I shifted my foot gingerly. Inhaled at the pain. Focused again.
    “So, Corte. Dish . . . s’il vous plaît. ”
    I explained to him what I’d told Sandy Alberts not long before: that Loving had been hired because of Amanda’s intention to blog about the death of a student Stevenson had molested.
    “How’d you figure it out?”
    The idea had occurred to me, I said, when I’d been speaking to Amanda last night in my car at the abandoned government facility. Of everything she’d told me about her recent life, one thing that stood out as a possible reason for Henry Loving’s assignment was her job as a student volunteer at the self-harm prevention program and the blog about Susan’s suicide.
    Teasley asked, “But how’d you make the leap to Stevenson?”
    “The senator himself helped me there. It just seemed a little curious that a senatorial aide would contact us about illegal eavesdropping right after we’d gotten the assignment. Last night I had Claire find out if Stevenson had actually scheduled committee hearings into wiretaps. He hadn’t.”
    I’d realized that I was the one who’d speculated that Stevenson had come out against illegal surveillance from an ideological standpoint; the senator himself had never even commented on it.His speech at the college—possibly where he met Susan—was nothing more than classic rhetoric about the rule of law.
    “He and Alberts had just made up the issue to look over my shoulder on the Kessler job.”
    My boss and I shared a glance. Westerfield apparently didn’t know about my lapse in arranging for the illegal taps on Loving a few years ago. And perhaps Stevenson didn’t either. The issue might arise, but then again it might already be dead.
    “So I thought more about Stevenson: a man with a reputation for dating younger women. And lecturing regularly at schools. He’s from Ohio, which isn’t far from Charleston, West Virginia. That’d be a good central place for Alberts and him to have met Loving. I had Claire look into it. Checked phone and travel records, incidents of complaints in the past about him groping women, paying them off afterward.” I shrugged. “It was a theory, not 100 percent certain, so I set up a sting about Global Software to see if Alberts would take the bait and try to lead us toward Peter Yu.”
    “Yes, saw the alert about Global,” Westerfield said sourly, probably thinking that I’d yet again taken him in too, though in this instance it had nothing to do with keeping him off my back.
    I said, “Alberts. I’m pretty sure he’s going to roll over.”
    The Prisoners’ Dilemma . . .
    Ellis said, “But kidnapping a girl, planning to torture her . . . and security contractors. This was a big operation, extreme. Why? And what was the deadline all about? They needed the information by last night.”
    That was obvious to me. I explained, “Well, in the first place, Stevenson didn’t want to go to jail, of course, so he’d try to silence any witnesses who could tie him to Susan’s death. But there’re more people involved in this than just Stevenson and Alberts.”
    This perked up Westerfield’s attention. Conspiracy theories often do. “How do you mean?”
    “For one thing, the Supreme Court nominee. The confirmation vote in the Senate’s tomorrow. Amanda was going to be blogging about Susan all week, looking into her suicide.”
    The U.S. attorney said, “I still don’t get the connection.”
    I explained that Stevenson was the one who’d built the coalition of votes to win the confirmation of the right-wing justice. “He’d managed to get a one-vote majority. If he got arrested or even implicated in a