Edge

criminal case.” He gave a tight, insincere smile. “Why burden the D.C. police department anyway? They’ve got more important things to do than deal with a careless computer jockey who left his checkbook where it shouldn’t’ve been.”
    We sat down around a circular coffee table with a glass top and a recess in the middle. Inside were pictures of Graham’s sports successes—college football and tennis. On the walls were some family photos: vacation, school pageants, holidays. I saw a few of his son, presumably the one whose future education had been derailed. I noted too photos of the daughters, also in college. They were twins. Many were of Graham with what looked like wealthy business associates and a politician or two.
    There were no sights or sounds of family, though I saw two nearly empty coffee cups on the dining room table, around the remains of the Sunday Washington Post , and heard NPR talk radio on the stereo, the volume in the netherworld portion of the dial. I heard creaks coming from upstairs. A door closed. He’d sent the women and children off to the hills when the marauders arrived.
    “I’m sorry about Detective Keller.”
    “Kessler.”
    “Who’s had all this trouble. He seemed like a nice guy when he interviewed me. I know”—another nonglaring glare at duBois—“that some hit man or somebody was curious about him because of something.”
    Interesting way to phrase it.
    “I’m sorry about that. But there’s no way my situation could have anything to do with it. You’re thinking that whoever stole my checkbook wants to kill him? That just doesn’t make sense.”
    I held up my hands. “Like I said, we’re not here about that. We’re here . . .” My voice faded and I glanced at Claire duBois.
    She took a deep breath. Her eyes down. “I’m here to apologize, Mr. Graham.”
    “To . . . what?”
    “When my supervisor,” she began, looking at me, “learned what I’d said and done in our conversation—”
    “ Conversation, ” Graham said sardonically.
    “He advised me that I’d acted in an unprofessional manner.”
    “To put it mildly.”
    I merely observed; I said nothing but turned and studied the room.
    Graham was smugly pleased I wasn’t defending my aide. He looked to duBois. She explained, “See, we have profiling software. When I ran the situation through the computers, the scenario that was number one on our list was that Detective Kessler had been targeted because he’d learned something about your check fraud situation. What it laid out for us was that somebody, possibly a security threat, had stolen your checkbook and used the funds for something that might compromise you. They then blackmailed you into either handing over secrets or maybe sabotaging some of your designs for the DoD. It was a credible scenario.”
    He snapped, “Except it wasn’t.”
    Nodding, duBois said, “I’m fairly new to this position. I don’t know if you’ve worked in any place other than the federal government.”
    “I was in the private sector for a while.”
    She said, “I was too. I was a security consultant for a major software developer. I can’t really mention which one but we had a huge piracy problem. Tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. You’re into computers, you know source codes.”
    “Of course.” He gave a subtle eye roll.
    I heard duBois say, “We had a situation where an employee was being blackmailed into giving important parts of source codes to a competitor. I managed to track him down. There were some similarities between that situation and your case. I kind of leapt on that.”
    “I told you there wasn’t a problem. You kept pushing.”
    “Yes, I know. I got a little focused.”
    “Or blinded, you could say.”
    “Blinded,” duBois agreed.
    “So you had a taste of success at your other company and you wanted to relive it.”
    “I . . . that’s about right.”
    “You’re an ambitious little thing, aren’t you?”
    She was silent.
    “Ambition’s fine. But you need the goods, you need to deliver.”
    “Yessir. I didn’t have the goods.”
    “If you don’t have them, you can’t deliver.”
    “Right.”
    “No delivery.” He offered her a drippy, condescendingsmile. “I’ll give you two pieces of advice. First, and this is from somebody in the business: Computers can only do so much. They point you in a certain direction. You need to use that pretty little brain of yours in deciding where