Edge

He’s kind of a player,” duBois said. “Has that small place in the South East tenement, sure. But he also lives in the Watergate. Which he doesn’t talk about much. State tells me he’s been to Dubai, Jeddah and Jordan in the past two years.”
    This was a portrait very different from the one Ryan Kessler had uncovered.
    “That’s helpful.” It was my highest compliment. “What about those smaller cases Ryan was running?” The cop had dismissed these but I’d asked her to talk to Chief of Detectives Lewis and check them out anyway.
    “Oh, the stolen credit cards?” duBois continued. “They were all pretty small. Most of them got pled out. The identity thefts were bigger, low-class felonies. Most were pled. The big one was some kids ordering electronics online. They picked the wrong vic—a computer security expert with Advanced Circuit Design.”
    One of Intel’s big competitors.
    “The victim traced the perp and turned them in. But they got off with probation and fines. That’s pretty neat. Somebody who got hacked got revenge by hacking in after the hackers. Rough justice.”
    I finished my sandwich, reflecting: some leads, yes, but nothing golden. I was frustrated. “Keep digging.”
    “Got my shovel.”
    “Both cases.”
    “Got my Indian clubs.”
    I gave her a smile. I hoped Cat Man treated her right.
    Flipping through my phone, I jotted some information. “A few more things to look into.” I slipped the note to her and gave her some more instructions. “A priority,” I added.
    “Sure.”
    “I’ve got to get the Kesslers to the safe house.”
    She rose. Hesitating.
    I glanced at her, a gaze of curiosity.
    “I heard, at the flytrap . . . Loving got pretty close.”
    She fell into a rare bout of silence.
    But there was nothing to talk about regarding the topic of my brush with mortality. It was in the past, and what might have happened—Loving’s death ormine—hadn’t. There were no lessons to be learned from it, nothing for me to file away for future strategies, nothing to impart to her.
    Speculation about the past is inefficient. And therefore irrelevant to achieving your goal.
    So I simply regarded her with a neutral gaze.
    “I’ll get right on these, Corte,” she said, using my name for what I believed was the first time in all the years we’d worked together.

Chapter 15
    I COLLECTED GARCIA’S car, to which Billy had given a clean bill of surveillance health, and I piloted it back onto the highway. I made several bizarre but legal route changes and, when I was convinced nobody was following me, returned to the highway and drove toward the Hillside Inn.
    At a little after 7:00 p.m. I arrived at the motel and parked behind it once more, in about the same spot as when I’d left, several spaces down from the Yukon.
    I looked to the north and saw in the haze the distant hints of housing developments. I was probably looking at two or three thousand people . . . such a tiny sliver of the population in the county, and a smaller portion yet of the region. I couldn’t help but think, as I often did on a job, that the lifter was out there somewhere. But where?
    How close?
    Thirty miles away, lost in the same speculation about where the principals and I were?
    Or was he very close, a mile or less, with knowledge of our whereabouts and a clear strategy for killing the shepherds and kidnapping Ryan Kessler?
    I returned to the room, calling Ahmad on the phone to announce my arrival. We don’t use secretknocks, though it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea. He let me in and I got a cup of black coffee from the kitchenette. The smell of room-service food—onions and garlic mostly—permeated the air. Two plates, one clean, one picked over, sat on a tray near the sink.
    “We’re going to be leaving soon, for the safe house.”
    Everyone was looking at me in anticipation and I realized that I’d left under mysterious circumstances. But keeping with need-to-know, I didn’t explain about where I’d been, just told them they should pack up anything they’d unpacked when we arrived.
    While Maree and Joanne were doing this, I pulled Ryan aside. He’d had more liquor, I could tell, but he didn’t seem any more inebriated than when I’d left. “We’ve found out something about the Graham case. He dropped the charges.”
    “He did what?” The cop was surprised. “That doesn’t make sense. Are you sure?”
    I told him I was.
    He continued, “When I first interviewed Graham