Edge

bleary-eyed. He was moving slowly—because of the limp and, perhaps, a hangover. He wore jeans and an Izod shirt, purple, with his belly hanging over the belt buckle. He still wore his weapon. Joanne was in jeans too and a black T-shirt under a floral blouse. In a round compact mirror she inspected her lipstick—the only makeup she was wearing—then put it back in her purse.
    Ryan said he’d talked to Amanda for a long time earlier and everything seemed okay at Carter’s place. The girl had enjoyed fishing yesterday andthey’d had dinner with neighbors last night, a barbecue.
    I’d called Bill Carter too, that morning. I told the Kesslers this and added, “He said there hasn’t been anything suspicious. Just that your daughter was still bothered about missing school tomorrow and her game and some volunteer job.”
    “A student counseling hotline,” Ryan explained. “She practically runs the place.”
    Knowing what I did about the girl now, I wasn’t surprised.
    “Let’s hope she won’t have to miss anything,” Joanne said.
    It was still early on Sunday. If we got Loving and the primary soon, the Kesslers’ lives could return to a semblance of normality by suppertime.
    “What do we do today?” Ryan asked, looking outside. I’d seen golf clubs in the garage and I guessed he’d miss what might be a warm fall day on the links.
    “You just relax,” I said. I couldn’t help but think of Claire duBois, who’d once commented to me as we were flying to Florida to collect a principal, “The pilots always say that, ‘Now just sit back and relax and enjoy the flight.’ What options are there? Do handstands in the aisles? Open a window and feed the birds?”
    The Kesslers too had no options. I knew they weren’t going to like my further instructions, which I now delivered, that they had to stay inside.
    “Inside,” Ryan muttered, peeking out through a slit in the curtain at a band of sun on leaves just beginning to color. He sighed and knifed butter onto an English muffin.
    Doing nothing . . .
    My phone rang and I glanced at caller ID. “Excuse me.”
    I headed back to the den, clicking ANSWER . “Claire.”
    “I’ve got some information.”
    “Go ahead.”
    Her youthful voice offered enthusiastically, “The electronic trackers? This’s interesting. They’re made by Mansfield Industries. The small tracker has a range of six hundred yards, the big one a thousand. That sounds impressive but they’re older models. The new trackers, like the ones we use, are GPS and satellite based, so you can sit in your office and track. The ones planted on you were cheap. That means they’re used by police departments.”
    Yes, that was interesting. “And the model numbers—”
    “—are the same used in the MPD.” Ryan Kessler’s employer.
    “Serial numbers?” I asked.
    But she said, “No serial numbers. So we don’t know the specific source.”
    “Prints or trace evidence on them?”
    “None.”
    I considered this information. A principal who was a detective and hardware that might have come from the same police department he worked for.
    Another piece of the puzzle.
    I asked, “Graham?” The Department of Defense employee whose checkbook was stolen. The man who’d surprisingly dropped the charges.
    Her voice lost its lilt as she said, “Okay. About that.”
    Didn’t sound good. “What?”
    “I think I may need some help.”
    “Go on.”
    “A teeny problem . . .”
    An adjective I never quite got.
    She continued, “I was researching and making some headway. I found that the chief of detectives—”
    “Lewis.”
    “Right. COD Lewis got a call from ‘somebody powerful.’ That’s a quote, though I have no idea what ‘somebody powerful’ means. It sounds like what a scriptwriter would say when he’s describing a bad guy, the nefarious character. Anyway, this power person had Lewis make sure the case wasn’t being pursued.”
    “Somebody from the Pentagon?”
    “I don’t know. Then I got some numbers. Graham makes ninety-two thousand a year. His wife fifty-three. They have a six-hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage and two daughters in college, in addition to their son, Stuart. The girls’re going to William and Mary, and Vassar. Their collective tuition is about sixty thousand a year. Room and board probably not too bad. I mean, with all respect to Williamsburg and Poughkeepsie. You ever been there, either of them?”
    “No.” I considered this. “So the stolen forty