Edge

by Jeffery Deaver

  I said nothing.

  "You know what he was telling me just the other day?"

  "What?"

  "Korea, right, you'd think it was tea, tea, tea. Like China and Japan. But the last emperor of Korea, his name was Sunjong, the nineteen twenties, he loved the West and always had coffee at the palace. He and his father would sit around drinking coffee and talking about world affairs. Word got around and the citizens began to drink coffee. They liked to do what their emperor does. There're more coffee drinkers in Korea than any other Asian country. They even have coffee shop hookers. Dabang girls, they're called."

  He fell silent. I'd rarely seen anyone looking more miserable.

  Tears running again. "Please," he begged. "Call the FBI. Tell them Jimmy's not dangerous!"

  Then I heard duBois's voice: "Corte. It checks out. They gave Amnesty International thirty-one thousand."

  "Okay." Then I said to her, "Tell the troops to stand down."

  "What?" she asked, confused.

  "I'll call you in a minute." I cut off the com device.

  Under other circumstances I might have let Stu spin in the wind a little but I couldn't forget Graham's arrogance and his insulting duBois. I said, "I don't think we need to pursue this any further. I'll hold off the investigation for now, provided there's no recurrence."

  "No, sir. No! I promise."

  I rose and started for the door. I turned back. "Next year, your dad could get more money. Or he could get a loan for your tuition. I'm just curious. What're you going to do then?"

  The young man turned his red eyes toward me. His jaw was set. "I'm going to tell him to go to hell."

  I believed him. I couldn't help but respond, "Good."

  I left the coffee shop.

  Well, I had the answer about one of Ryan Kessler's cases. I called duBois.

  "You were right," she said.

  The theory had presented itself in Eric Graham's den, when I'd looked over the decor and photographs and had studied his reaction when duBois had laid out our theory as to why Loving had been hired. I'd decided he was telling the partial truth--nobody was blackmailing him. DuBois's computer analysis of his expressions and body language bore this out. On the wall were pictures of the young man I'd deduced was his son, along with a man about the same age of Asian extraction, who closely resembled the suspect on the security video, involved in the forgery scam. Backed up by the ORC computer analysis, she'd run credit cards, DMV information, face recognition analysis, blog and social networking site postings, school records, insurance claims, phone records, dozens of other databases.

  The slim Caucasian was in fact Stuart Graham. The Asian was James Sun. No record, active in gay rights, a grad student at George Washington, a resident of DuPont Circle.

  I'd learned that Stu had a part-time job at the Music Gallery, also in DuPont Circle.

  When I saw that the arrogant Eric Graham had turned his den into a shrine to Princeton University, I figured there could be a major gulf between father and son, and that the young man might be behind the theft. But I needed to confirm my theory, which my visit here had.

  "So, can I ask?" DuBois's voice had an inquisitive lilt to it. "You were threatening with your warrant but I was bluffing with mine."

  Good, I thought. My protegee was feeling her oats.

  I explained. "My fake warrant was supposedly in Jimmy's name. He wasn't at the coffee shop to call my bluff. Yours would have been in Graham's. If he'd asked for it, what would you have done?"

  "Oh. . . . Paper covers rock."

  Though I keep much of my private life secret, even from her, duBois has heard about my fondness for games. "That was clever," I told her and I meant it.

  "So we're back to the Pamuk case being the likely reason Ryan was targeted."

  "That's right."

  "I was--wait." Her voice had taken on urgency. "I've just got an email . . . a lead to somebody who could treat Loving."

  "Go on."

  "I'm reading. . . . It's his cousin."

  After Loving killed Abe Fallow, we'd fleshed out his bio and tried to track down family. He'd been born in Virginia, we knew, but had no relatives within a few hundred miles of the capital. His parents were dead. Of siblings he had one sister and he'd kept up some contact with her but she'd died in an accident a few years ago.

  I knew of the cousin. "He was the one who went to medical school in New York, right?"

  "Right. But he got his ticket here and moved to Falls Church about two years ago. He's a doctor at Arlington Hospital." DuBois continued, "I'm looking at phone records now. . . . About a half hour after Loving was wounded at Bill Carter's place, the cousin got a call on his landline from a blocked number. It lasted three minutes."

  "What's the story on him?"

  "Single, thirty-two. No record, other than a few traffic stops. Name's Frank Loving. ER background and now he does internal medicine. He had good grades in medical school--he went to SUNY."

  She gave me the address.

  I thanked her and fired up the Honda and punched the address into GPS, then pulled into traffic. I called Freddy and told him that I'd eliminated Graham's forgery as a lead to the primary. But more important I had a lead to where Loving might've gotten medical treatment.

  "He still there, you think?"

  "He'd get in and out as fast as he could. But let's assume he is. Move in slow and quiet, with a couple of small tactical teams."

  "I'll put it together."

  "And Freddy . . ."

  The agent filled in, "Don't tell Westerfield."

  I said, "Exactly."

  "No problemo. Man can be a dick, I'll give you that. On the other hand, that assistant of his is hot."

  "If you like pearls," I said.

  "That was good, son." Freddy gave one of his chuckles. "This job's bringing out a whole 'nother side of you."

  Chapter 32

  FRANK LOVING LOOKED younger than the age duBois had recited. He was crewcut, tall and in the fit shape that most medicos of his age seem to be.

  He was also very nervous. Understandable, considering his murderous cousin had just paid him a visit--and a half dozen armed FBI agents had just searched every nook of his residence.

  He lived in a luxury town house in Arlington, one of those four-thousand-square-foot places with columns and arches and rococo trim, all of it prefabricated and bolted into place efficiently over the course of a busy few weeks. The walls, where you'd expect prints-on-canvas of shot pheasants or Venice or medieval still lifes, were incongruously covered with sports posters. The Redskins mostly; what else?

  Glancing into the kitchen, I could see bloody towels and discarded white and orange sterile packets from dressings or disposable instruments and syringes. A bottle of Betadine sat on the counter, an orange ring from the disinfectant staining the pale marble. Frank had been trying to scrub it away.

  "I don't know where he is, really," Frank said. "Honestly."

  Freddy's tactical team had cleared the house and was outside, talking to neighbors who might have seen Loving or his car.

  I asked the doctor to join me in the sparse den and held his eye as I said, "Let me tell you something, Doctor, an hour or so ago, your cousin was about ten minutes away from kidnapping and torturing a sixteen-year-old girl to force her father to give him some information."

  Eyes widening, he seemed genuinely horrified at this. He whispered, "We knew he was a fugitive. I mean, I was mostly shocked to see him alive. I should have called somebody as soon as he left but . . . I didn't."

  "Why not?"

  "He scares me."

  I said, "Doctor . . ." Respecting the title goes a long way if it's an M.D. you're talking to, I'd learned from protecting a few of them. "Doctor, we really need some help here."

  The man grimaced and played with his watch. "Honestly, I don't know where he is. Please. You have to believe me."

  "A sixteen-year-old girl," I said slowly. And stared into his evasive eyes.

  He slumped. "
What can I tell you?"

  "First, how badly was he hurt?"

  "Bullet wound to his abdomen, six inches above the left hip bone. In and out. I cauterized some small veins, cleaned and stitched. Oh, also a small splinter of rock was lodged in his thigh. I removed it, cauterized the vessels and stitched that too. Did you shoot him?"

  "Yes."

  "To save the girl."

  I nodded.

  "She's okay?"

  "Physically." I let that sit for a moment. "I need to find him. Can you tell us anything that'll help? Car?"

  "He didn't park in front, I know that. He'd walked from someplace else. Look, Officer, I saw the news about the shootouts. I didn't know it was him. He said he'd been robbed and this guy from South East shot him. If I'd known . . ."

  He was lying, I could see, but it sounded like typical improvised backpedaling when speaking to law enforcement, not co-conspirator deception. All I wanted was for him to focus on the visit. "What else did he say? Think back. Anything at all."

  The doctor frowned. "Well, you know, there was one thing. He wanted nitrous oxide for the procedure--he didn't want to be out. But I didn't have any gas. I had some Propofol. Very short-acting--the sort of thing they use for colonoscopies. He didn't go out completely but he went into that zone, you know? I was doing what I always do with patients, just chatting away, distracting them. He said something I didn't think about at the time. He said he wasn't happy that they were doing all that development out in Loudoun County. That made me think he'd been to his parents' house. Near Ashburn. Maybe he's staying there."

  I knew of the place. When Loving killed Abe, we'd learned about the house where he'd grown up. But it had been sold years ago. We never followed up on it. I told the doctor this but he said, "Well, it wasn't exactly sold."

  I frowned and told him to go on.

  "Technically, yes. The deal was that Henry and his sister--the heirs--sold it on the cheap to the man who owns it now. But he agreed to lease it back to them for . . . I think it was twenty years or something. Henry's sister was sick--it was terminal--and I assumed he wanted to get the property out of his name but make sure Marjorie had some place to live until she passed."

  Henry Loving's only close family connection was this sister, a few years older. She'd suffered from cancer but her death a few years ago had been in a boating accident. Her boyfriend, the one driving the powerboat drunk in the Occoquan River, had died not long after. I'd assumed Loving had been behind the death; the young man had also drowned, but in his bathtub--exhibiting the same symptoms of someone who had been water boarded for two to three hours.

  I couldn't recall where the family house was. Frank Loving found the address and I wrote it down.

  I then asked, "Is he on painkillers now?"

  "He wouldn't take any Demerol or Vicodin with him."

  No, Loving would endure agony to keep a clear head.

  "I gave him some preloaded lidocaine syringes for the pain. Topical." Frank looked down at his large hands. "I remember him from when we were kids. It wasn't like he was beating people up or getting into fights. Just the opposite. He was quiet, polite. I remember he was always watching."

  "Watching 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 possible that 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 protegee'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 excluded.

  "Yep."

  "Where are you?"

  "About fifteen minutes away, probably less. You?"

  "Just got here."

  "Jesus, Corte, your outfit doesn't have those cars with flashing lights on the top. You're gonna kill yourself driving like that."

  "I wanted to move fast. I thought there was a chance I might find him here."

  "But you didn't."

  "I didn't. I'm looking at the house now," I told him. "No lights, no movement. But there're ab
out fifty good shooting positions in the woods all the way around the place. You guys have thermals with you?"

  "Sure, but mostly, if you're talking forest, the deer'll light up the equipment. And Bambi doesn't do much sniping."

  Eyes on the house, I told him, "I'm going quiet."

  We disconnected and I climbed from the car. I removed my body armor vest from the trunk, strapped it on and donned a jumpsuit, the black one. I moved through the cool autumn air, stopping between two broad oak trees. Mist floated around the house, which was about two hundred feet off the road. I could hear the creak and groan of insects that had survived the end of summer. Frogs too. I sensed the faint flutter from invisible motion above me, bats.

  I have no superstition within me whatsoever and I don't believe that we can feel the spirits of the dead. But I don't deny that there sometimes occurs a ripening of impressions, clues and the memories of experience that trigger an understanding within us that seems like a sixth sense. I had no sense of dread or foreboding but I suddenly knew that I had to draw my weapon immediately, kick my mind into a defensive mode and keep it there. I nearly got a crick in my neck as I spun behind me and saw the shape of a man. Finger on the trigger of my Glock, I drew a target. Breathing hard, I eased against the solid, rough tree trunk. Only a moment later the saplings that had configured themselves into the lifter separated in the breeze and then gently drifted back.

  The shape of a man but not a man.

  Which didn't mean that my concern was unwarranted. Loving could easily be nearby.

  I turned back to the house. The two-story country manse, gabled, was painted dark brown. The handyman the owner had hired was long on landscaping and short on woodwork and painting. The railing was sagging, the stairs dipped and three of the beige shutters hung from their last hinge. Scales of dull paint rolled from the siding. On the front porch, which extended across the front of the entire house, a swing was attached to the beams above by only a single chain.

  Another look around me. No sign of human life. Gazing at the porch again, I wondered if Loving the boy had spent any time in the swing on summer or fall evenings. And with whom? I noted farmland behind the broken-down picket fence in the back. Would he have gone hunting small game there? I'd heard rumors that he'd tortured animals when he was young. But I didn't believe that. There was no evidence suggesting that Loving was a sadist and enjoyed the physical pain he inflicted; when he set the sandpaper and alcohol bottle in front of the person he needed to extract information from, I knew that the main thought in his mind was my own: What's your goal and what's the most efficient way to achieve it?