Edge

what?”
    “Everything. Not saying anything, just looking.He was smart. Really smart. His best subject was history.”
    One of my degrees. I hadn’t known that about Loving.
    I called, “Freddy?”
    The agent appeared in the doorway.
    “Got a lead. Let’s get the teams to Ashburn.” From my notebook I tore a slip of paper containing the address Frank had given me. I handed it to the FBI agent. I’d already memorized it.

Chapter 33
    PEOPLE WANT TO avoid the past.
    I suppose that’s natural. When we tally up all we’ve said and done over the years, despite the wonderful memories, the regrets may be fewer but stand out more prominently, glowing coals that we can never quite extinguish, try though we might.
    Yet without the past my job wouldn’t exist. Whether it’s because of the good things that people like Ryan Kessler have selflessly done that land them in a lifter’s sights or the bloody histories of professional killers, they’re in my care as a consequence of what they did months or years earlier.
    At the moment, though, driving as quickly as I could over the dusk-filled, slippery roads that would take me back to Loudoun County, I was thinking of the past for a different reason. Twenty minutes ahead lay the past of the man who was a threat to my principals, a past that could be very helpful in finding evidence of his present.
    The past of a man who had tortured and murdered my mentor.
    And I wanted so badly to flip back through the years and learn what I could about him.
    From what his cousin had told me—that the family house sale was a scam, in effect—it was possiblethat inside were decades’ worth of family artifacts. Would I find pictures of Loving as a child? Would I find toys he once played with?
    I thought again of one of duBois’s first assignments for me, before the run-in with Loving in Rhode Island. My protégée’s job had been to learn all she could about Marjorie, Loving’s sister. DuBois had leapt into the task with typical exhausting energy and had written a bio of the woman, who’d spent much time with her brother in their teen years, before he turned to crime and fled the family. I was convinced—incorrectly, it turned out—that details about his sister could somehow lead us to him. DuBois learned of her bouts with cancer, the remission, the onset once again . . . and then the tragic death in the Occoquan, the river feeding into the Chesapeake.
    Nothing helpful in the pursuit, but I’d grown fascinated reading duBois’s notes about the one person with whom Loving had had some authentic and recurring connection.
    I wanted to know more and hoped the old house would deliver.
    Of course, when his parents found out about their son’s crimes, they might have eradicated any trace of him and the house would be as vacant as air. If I had a child as troubled as Loving, would I do so?
    Claire duBois called. She’d run a title search and collected what information she could about the house. The single-family, eighty-year-old structure was on about two acres outside Ashburn, a large area of scattered town houses and single-family homes halfway between Dulles Airport and Leesburg,growing rapidly, as commuters moved farther and farther from D.C.
    The Loving house had been unoccupied for nearly a year and a half, though the owner who’d been deeded the property sent a handyman occasionally to fix and prune. The owner reported that Loving hadn’t contacted him for years but had prepaid more than ten years’ rent.
    “You didn’t find all that on Google,” I complimented duBois.
    “It’s interesting, I could tell the owner was sort of guilty, even though he hadn’t done anything illegal. When you’re sort of guilty you sort of want to talk.”
    Ten minutes later I slowed on the winding asphalt road, no streetlights, and checked numbers. I braked and pulled into a thick stand of bushes, about fifty yards from the house. There were six or seven houses in the vicinity, all of them set back some distance from the road. Trash littered the ground around me and a fragment of red brake light plastic attested to the treacherous curves and bad visibility.
    I pulled out my mobile and placed a call to Freddy.
    “You get the warrant?” I asked. There was an argument that we wouldn’t need one but in legal proceedings it’s best to avoid arguments in the first place and, in case we found helpful evidence inside, I wanted to make sure a good defense lawyer didn’t get it