Edge

thousand is a bigger hit for him to swallow than we thought.”
    “Huge. I was thinking about when I went to Duke. My folks saved every penny they could formy tuition. It’d take something disastrous for them to give up and doom me to a career of memorizing specials of the day.”
    “You mentioned a problem.”
    Teeny . . .
    “Actually . . .”
    “Claire?”
    DuBois came in a quirky package—her dancing mind, her bizarre observations—but she was, in her way, as much a competitor as I was and it was hard for her to admit defeat, especially if she’d made a mistake, which was what I sensed had happened.
    “I got this idea. Because of his clearance, Graham would have had to take a lie detector test.”
    All government employees with security clearances have to do this regularly. Some organizations have their own polygraphist; the DoD usually relies on the FBI.
    “So I called up a friend at the Bureau to find out. Graham was scheduled to take one last week but he called the field office and said he was staying home. He had a bad cold. They don’t let you take the exam if you’re on medication. So it was postponed until next month.”
    “You checked log-in records at the Pentagon.”
    “Exactly. Graham didn’t stay home when he said he had. And nobody got the impression he was sick. He lied to avoid the test.”
    “Good thinking. Go on.”
    “Apparently somebody in Records let him know I’d been looking into it. Graham got my name. He called. He wasn’t happy.”
    It wasn’t the best outcome, I agreed. I’d rather that Graham had been kept completely in the darkabout our investigation. But I still wasn’t sure why duBois seemed so upset. Then she explained. “I figured as long as I was blown, I may as well interview him, see what he had to say about withdrawing the complaint. He got, um, uncooperative. Actually pretty insulting. He called me ‘young lady.’ Which I don’t really like.”
    I was sure not.
    “He told me, kind of R-rated, where I could put my warrant.”
    “Warrant? How did a warrant come up?”
    “That’s sort of the problem. I threatened to serve him.”
    “For what?” I couldn’t see any scenario in which a warrant made sense.
    “I made it up. I just got mad, the way he was talking. I said if he wasn’t going to answer my questions, I’d go to a magistrate, get paper and serve him to force him to talk.”
    I was silent for a moment. Lesson time. “Claire, there’s a difference between bluffing and threatening. With a threat you have something to back it up. With a bluff you don’t. We threaten. We don’t bluff.”
    “I was sort of bluffing, I guess.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Where is he now?”
    “His caller ID put him at home. Fairfax. I’m sorry. He’s stonewalling now.”
    Young lady . . .
    “Tell you what. Meet me at the Hyatt in Tysons. A half hour.”
    “Okay.”
    After disconnecting, I joined Ryan Kessler at a table in the living room, poring over documents. Itold him about the trackers that Loving’s partner had slipped into my wheel wells.
    “They were from the department?” he asked, surprised.
    “We couldn’t source them. But they’re the same model numbers the Metropolitan Police buys.”
    “Fact is, we never use them,” Ryan said. “They’re great in theory but that’s not how most tails work. Reception gets screwed up, the signals get crossed. Mostly we put ’em in buy-money bags if there’s a lot of cash and we’re afraid of losing it. But you can also get them from almost any security gadget company.”
    “Anybody in the department you can think of who might be monitoring the Graham or Clarence Brown cases? Or one of your smaller ones?”
    “Somebody inside working with Loving? Impossible. We don’t do that, cops don’t do that to each other.”
    I said nothing, though I thought: People will do anything to anybody—if the edge is right.
    I returned to my computer and, not wanting him to hear my request, wrote an email to duBois, giving her another item on her growing to-do list. She acknowledged it.
    Garcia and Ahmad were making rounds. I told them I was leaving for a while to continue investigating who the primary was. I stepped outside to the detached garage and opened the door. Inside was a Honda Accord, registered to a fictional resident of Arlington, Virginia. Billy’d made some modifications to it—run-flats, better horsepower and a bit of armor—but it was still pretty much off the shelf. I started the