Edge

addresses into my GPS, hit START ROUTE and obediently followed the synthetic woman’s commands.

Chapter 31
    I DROVE TO DuPont Circle, once the home of cottage industries, a pungent waterway and a famous slaughterhouse. Now the hood was among the more trendy parts of the nation’s capital.
    GPS—whose voice I had decided sounded unnervingly like Chris Teasley’s, Westerfield’s assistant—took me to a storefront off Connecticut Avenue. It was a used-CD store, manned by a few slow-moving clerks. The customers were mostly in their twenties, along with a few smudged, bearded music lovers about my age. I walked up to one young man behind the register, flashed my ID along with a security picture of the Asian man who’d collected the gold coins in New Jersey, a perp in the Graham forgery case.
    He claimed he knew nothing. I asked four or five other people. Nobody seemed to know anything about funny checks or the Asian.
    Finally, with a last glance around the store, I pushed out the door, which had a quaint old-time bell on an armature. I looked around and headed into a coffee shop nearby. DuPont Circle survives on chic and Café Cafe had that aplenty. The accent mark was a clue, as was the $25/ LB . sign in one bin of dark beans. I ordered a black filtered Colombian,the cheapest thing on a menu full of exotic concoctions, none of which were to my mind coffee, tasty though they might be.
    I recalled an image from years ago, another one I didn’t particularly want. Peggy ordering her favorite, a mochaccino. I was never sure what that was exactly. But I remembered her heart-shaped face turning toward the drink with effervescent anticipation. She’d once commented that she loved grocery shopping because she felt comfort in watching people buy their special treats.
    “It’s a tough life,” she’d said. “It’s the little things that get us through the day.”
    How true, I’d thought at the time. How true I knew now.
    I sipped the coffee, set down the steaming cup and began to compose a text message about my progress on the Graham case, when I heard a squeak—the front door. I was gazing down at the screen of my phone when I felt a shadow over me. I looked up and behind into the face of a man in his early twenties. He was white, good-looking, slim, wearing jeans and a seriously wrinkled striped shirt.
    “Yes?”
    “I work in the CD store you were just in?”
    When I didn’t say anything he repeated, “I work there.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Stu.” He eyed me carefully. “You were asking some things? In the store?”
    His statements were inflected as questions.
    I stared at him. He looked down fast.
    “What do you want?” I finally asked.
    “You were asking about Jimmy Sun? I know him.”
    “You know where he is now? I need to find him.”
    “You’re like an FBI agent?”
    “Where’s Jimmy? Do you know?”
    A hesitation. “I don’t, no.”
    “Sit down.” I gestured at the table.
    He sat and clasped his hands together in front of him. People I deal with occasionally sit in exactly this position, except that they do so because their wrists are in cuffs.
    “How do you know Jimmy?” I asked sternly.
    “He comes into the store sometimes. He likes music. Why were you looking for him there? At the store?”
    “Traced him through credit card receipts. He shops there.”
    “Oh. Sure.”
    “He’s in a lot of trouble. It’d be a big help if we could find him.”
    “I thought . . . I mean, I heard there was some problem. Something about a check.”
    “A forgery case.”
    Stu said, “But, the thing is, the case was dropped. I heard it was dropped. So he’s not in any trouble anymore.” He lifted his hands and offered a shallow smile.
    I didn’t smile. “It was dropped by the police department in D.C.”
    “Um . . .”
    I went on to explain, “But you see, there are different jurisdictions for a single crime. Jurisdiction can be geographic. Like if you commit mail fraud, you can be guilty of a crime in all the states youscammed people in, all fifty of them, maybe. Separate crimes in each one. Or jurisdiction can be the power of a governmental body. Murdering a federal agent, for instance, is both a federal crime and a state crime.”
    “Oh.”
    “This Jimmy Sun, he stole the victim’s checkbook in the District. The D.C. police can decide to drop that case. But he used the Internet to launder money.”
    “Launder money?”
    “He bought gold coins and presumably he sold them