Edge

might be an exhausting proposition.
    She sat across from me.
    “Principals’ phones.” I handed her the bag containingthe Kesslers’ Nokias and Samsungs and BlackBerrys and their respective batteries, which I’d removed. She’d put them in the sealed room up the hall, in Hermes’s work area. If Ryan or Joanne absolutely needed a number from their phones in an emergency and had no other way to get it, Hermes or a wizard in Technical would go inside, power up the phone and get the information, without any risk of a telltale signal escaping.
    “Loving?” duBois asked.
    “His partner was there but no further description or lead except a blue four-door, probably Buick. Nothing else.”
    A raised eyebrow. “Light or dark? Blue, I mean. There’re about twenty-five shades of green for current passenger vehicles, I happen to know. Eighteen red. I haven’t looked at blue, sorry, but it’s probably the same. Oh, and they typically fade one degree of color temperature every six months. Depending.”
    “Darker.”
    She jotted this down in her ubiquitous notebook.
    “Now, there’s this.” I handed her the plastic bag containing the trackers.
    DuBois lifted a thick, dark eyebrow. “Two. Okay. You were telling me they do that sometimes. Sometimes three. In your car at the flytrap?”
    I nodded. “Loving’s partner did it. I need prints. And source of origin.”
    “I’ll track them down,” she said, without any irony at her choice of verb.
    I asked, “Now, Ryan’s cases?”
    DuBois didn’t need to glance at her notes. “First, the forgery. Graham, Eric. Forty-nine. Civilian employee of the DoD. Here’s the background.They call it the Inner Circle, where he works. I think it’s Ring E or something like that. Inside the center of the Pentagon. I couldn’t find out exactly what he does, even with my ID and pulling strings, but we can go with it’s classified and it involves weapons development.”
    “How’d you find that?” Weapons developers are very careful to make sure they never say they develop weapons.
    “Checked his résumé, his clearances, correlated some times and places of meeting with a defense contractor or two. You know, sometimes you can tell more about somebody from what he doesn’t tell you than what he does. I put it all together.”
    DuBois was really a gem.
    She tucked away strands of hair, and the charms on her bracelet jingled. I saw a sterling silver dog, an armadillo, a baguette and a tiny silver King Wenceslas, which she’d bought in Prague when we’d been on assignment there. She continued, “No security incidents involving Graham. But something’s come up, something odd. I don’t know what to make of it.” She was looking at my sandwich. “Is that dinner?”
    I looked at my watch. It was a little after 4:30 p.m. I said, “It’s more lunch. Go on. What else did you find, you were saying?”
    “I went back to the Detective Bureau at the Metropolitan Police—to find out more—and it seems Graham’s decided to drop the case.”
    “Dropping it?”
    “He called the chief of detectives, Lewis, on Friday and told them he’s not going to pursue it. He wants it dropped.”
    “Any reason?”
    “Because of his job is what he’s saying. Security issues. He doesn’t want to be public.”
    “Seems odd. What does getting robbed have to do with national security? Ryan told me the perp didn’t get anything sensitive, no computers or files from work.”
    DuBois agreed, “That’s right.”
    “Why now?” I wondered. “Wouldn’t he have been worried about that from the beginning and not even reported the theft in the first place?”
    “You’d think. And there’s something else. I checked the law. He’s to blame. It seems if you’re careless with your checkbook or your signature, if you’re negligent, then the bank doesn’t have to cover a forged check. It’s your own insurance company that has to pay. Which isn’t going to happen unless there’s a police report.”
    I tried to understand this. “So essentially, he’s taking a forty-thousand-dollar hit. Walking away.”
    “Is the government going to reimburse him? Now, that’s not likely. I’ve been trying to get to talk to him. Which is not easy, I’ll tell you. Go ahead. Eat. I saw you looking at the sandwich. You ever notice in restaurants if people are with somebody, they look at their food more than at the other person? If they’re not with somebody, they watch people more than the food.”
    I