Edge (51 page)

I explained to him what I'd told Sandy Alberts not long before: that Loving had been hired because of Amanda's intention to blog about the death of a student Stevenson had molested.

“How'd you figure it out?”

The idea had occurred to me, I said, when I'd been speaking to Amanda last night in my car at the abandoned government facility. Of everything she'd told me about her recent life, one thing that stood out as a possible reason for Henry Loving's assignment was her job as a student volunteer at the self-harm prevention program and the blog about Susan's suicide.

Teasley asked, “But how'd you make the leap to Stevenson?”

“The senator himself helped me there. It just seemed a little curious that a senatorial aide would contact us about illegal eavesdropping right after we'd gotten the assignment. Last night I had Claire find out if Stevenson had actually scheduled committee hearings into wiretaps. He hadn't.”

I'd realized that
I
was the one who'd speculated that Stevenson had come out against illegal surveillance from an ideological standpoint; the senator himself had never even commented on it.
His speech at the college—possibly where he met Susan—was nothing more than classic rhetoric about the rule of law.

“He and Alberts had just made up the issue to look over my shoulder on the Kessler job.”

My boss and I shared a glance. Westerfield apparently didn't know about my lapse in arranging for the illegal taps on Loving a few years ago. And perhaps Stevenson didn't either. The issue might arise, but then again it might already be dead.

“So I thought more about Stevenson: a man with a reputation for dating younger women. And lecturing regularly at schools. He's from Ohio, which isn't far from Charleston, West Virginia. That'd be a good central place for Alberts and him to have met Loving. I had Claire look into it. Checked phone and travel records, incidents of complaints in the past about him groping women, paying them off afterward.” I shrugged. “It was a theory, not 100 percent certain, so I set up a sting about Global Software to see if Alberts would take the bait and try to lead us toward Peter Yu.”

“Yes, saw the alert about Global,” Westerfield said sourly, probably thinking that I'd yet again taken him in too, though in this instance it had nothing to do with keeping him off my back.

I said, “Alberts. I'm pretty sure he's going to roll over.”

The Prisoners' Dilemma . . .

Ellis said, “But kidnapping a girl, planning to torture her . . . and security contractors. This was a big operation, extreme. Why? And what was the deadline all about? They needed the information by last night.”

That was obvious to me. I explained, “Well, in the first place, Stevenson didn't want to go to jail, of course, so he'd try to silence any witnesses who could tie him to Susan's death. But there're more people involved in this than just Stevenson and Alberts.”

This perked up Westerfield's attention. Conspiracy theories often do. “How do you mean?”

“For one thing, the Supreme Court nominee. The confirmation vote in the Senate's tomorrow. Amanda was going to be blogging about Susan all week, looking into her suicide.”

The U.S. attorney said, “I still don't get the connection.”

I explained that Stevenson was the one who'd built the coalition of votes to win the confirmation of the right-wing justice. “He'd managed to get a one-vote majority. If he got arrested or even implicated in a sex abuse scandal, that coalition would fall apart and the Republican's dream justice doesn't get confirmed. I'm pretty sure some people from the PAC supporting Stevenson and somebody from Alberts's lobbying firm were involved.”

A wolf's gleam in Westerfield's eye. “That's good.”

I said, “Look at the anger out there, look at the partisanship. People seem willing to do whatever they need to for their side to win.”

Too much screaming in Congress. Too much screaming everywhere.

Westerfield looked toward Teasley, who wrote furiously in her notebook, and then he repeated, “That's good, Corte. Good . . .”

But he didn't exactly mean good. Something more was coming.

“Only . . .” He rocked back on his skinny butt and gazed at the ceiling momentarily. Regret—real or faux—filled his face. “How'd you like to retire in a blaze of glory?”

“Retire?” Aaron Ellis asked.

“See, you kind of played us.”

The U.S. attorney's office, I assumed he meant.

“What're you saying, Jason?” Ellis asked.

“That incident about sending the Kesslers to the slammer? It was pretty awkward.”

There'll be some fallout. You outright lied to me. . . .

I supposed that the attorney general himself had been there or some other higher-up in Justice. Perhaps hoping to interview Ryan Kessler, the hero cop. There'd been some damage to Westerfield's career.

“I'm thinking your resignation would be in order. Letter of apology. Let the powers that be know you intentionally pulled the wool over our eyes.”

Clichés again. Did judges ever reprimand him in court for his clunky figures of speech?

Westerfield continued, “I'll make sure you get full benefits, of course. But a slip-slide into a private security company might be a good idea. Hey, you'll double your salary. I can even set you up with some nice prospects.”

“Jason,” Ellis began.

“I'm sorry. I really am,” Westerfield said. Again a dark face, a troubled face. “But if that doesn't happen . . . hate to say it, but there is some issue I heard tell about: surveillance warrants.”

I felt several pairs of eyes slide toward me.

So, Westerfield did know about them, which
meant he had an edge on me. A pretty damn good one.

The prosecutor said, “How 'bout we shake on it? Go our separate ways? Aren't you tired of getting shot at, Corte?”

The Nash bargaining game, named after the famous mathematician John Nash, is a favorite among game theorists and one of my favorites too. It works this way: There are two players who each want a portion of something that can be divided. Say, two bosses who need to share an administrative assistant, who can work only forty hours a week total. Each player writes down on a slip of paper how many hours he wants the assistant to work for him, without knowing what the other is asking for. If the total amount equals forty hours or less, each gets the assistant for the time he's asked. If the total exceeds forty hours, neither gets the assistant at all.

I was now, apparently, the subject of the bargaining game being played between Ellis and Westerfield.

But game theory only works when the rules are clearly set out ahead of time. In the Nash bargaining game here, neither of the players was aware of another rule presently at work: that what they were bargaining over—me—might be a player in the game too.

As Westerfield and Ellis were proposing some face-saving compromise—I wasn't paying attention—I interrupted. “Jason?”

He paused and looked at me.

I said, “I'm not leaving. I'm not writing any letters of resignation. You're going to drop the matter.”

Both my boss and Westerfield blinked. The prosecutor glanced at his equally startled assistant, who was fondling her pearls.

A cool smile parted Westerfield's tiny lips. “Now, you're not . . .”

He didn't want to say “threatening me, are you?” But that was where his ominous sentence flared for a landing.

Ellis said, “Corte, it's okay. We can work out something. There's room for compromise here.”

I rose and walked to the door, closed it.

Westerfield looked mystified. Ellis wanted to be elsewhere. DuBois gave what passed for a smile. My kind of smile. “Go ahead,” I said to her and sat back. I teach my protégées about dealing with lifters and hitters and primaries. I also teach them about dealing with our compatriots.

She turned to Westerfield and said respectfully, “Sir, we thought it would be prudent—in shoring up the case against Mr. Alberts and Senator Stevenson—to find out exactly when and how they became aware that our organization was running the protection operation for the Kesslers. That was the big unanswered question that Officer Corte and I were wondering about. Of course, there are no official announcements when we take on an assignment. It's vital that our organization remain as anonymous as possible. As you can imagine, we can hardly function efficiently if people are dropping in and poking their noses into our work. In fact, the guidelines that all law enforcement agencies are given specifically state that they're prohibited from mentioning our existence, let alone that we're engaged in a specific assignment.”

“Poking noses?” Westerfield lifted his hands in an irritated fashion, meaning:
Your point?

“It seems, based on phone records—obtained with duly issued warrants, of course—that Sandy Alberts called
your
office one hour before he came here to discuss the matter of illegal surveillance with Director Ellis and Officer Corte on Saturday. Before that phone call neither Alberts or Senator Stevenson had any awareness that we were involved in the Kessler case.”

“My office? Ridiculous.”

DuBois blinked. “Actually not, sir. Here're the phone records.” She opened the document and her charm bracelet tinkled like bells. She was bejeweled once again. “I highlighted the relevant portions in yellow. It's a little lighter than I would have liked. Can you see them okay? I tried blue. But that was too dark.”

Chris Teasley was clutching her own notebook fiercely. Her pretty, pale face went red, the color seemingly reflected in the pearls, though that was surely my imagination. She whispered, “Alberts knew about the Kesslers. He knew the name. I just assumed . . . he only wanted to know who was running the protection detail. That's all he asked. I thought . . . I thought it was okay.”

Claire duBois, bless her, kept her eyes steadily on Westerfield and didn't offer so much as a millisecond of a glance toward her unfortunate counterpart.

“Ah, yes,” the U.S. attorney said slowly.

After a moment, during which the only sound in the room was that of duBois's bracelet as she slipped the documents back into her attaché case,
Westerfield jutted out his lower lip. “Looks like we better get to work putting a senator
et son ami
in jail.” He rose. His assistant did too. “So long, gentlemen . . . and lady.” The two of them left.

My edge, apparently, trumped his.

IN MY OFFICE
I opened my safe and extracted the board game that I'd received on Saturday.

As I undid the bubble wrap and opened the lid the aroma of old paper and cardboard arose. The scent of cedar too, which was pleasing to me. One of the things I like about board games is their history. This particular one had been bought new in 1949. It could have passed through several generations of one family or moved laterally to another, thanks to a yard sale, or perhaps found its way to a New England inn, where it would sit in a bed-and-breakfast parlor for amusement on Saturday afternoons when the rain derailed the leaf viewing.

The smell of moth deterrent suggested that it had spent its recent days in a closet. The board itself was scuffed and stained—one of the reasons it had been such a bargain—and I wondered how many people had moved the markers from start to finish, who they were, what they were doing now, if they were still with us.

For all their cleverness and high-definition graphics, computer games can't match the allure of their elegant, three-dimensional forebears.

I slipped the game into a shopping bag. It was 4:00 p.m. and I was about to go home.

Across my office a small TV sat on my credenza, the sound down. I glanced up at the screen and saw on CNN a flash: breaking news. That was something that duBois might comment on: breaking news versus news flashes versus news alerts.

I read the crawl. Lionel Stevenson was announcing he was going to be leaving the Senate, effective immediately. He was under investigation, it seemed, but no details were forthcoming. Sandy Alberts, his chief of staff, had been arrested, as had the head of the political action committee that Alberts was affiliated with and a partner at Alberts's old lobbying firm.

Whatever else you could say about Jason Westerfield, grass didn't grow under the man's feet.

A voice from the doorway startled me and I shut the TV off. “I have it,” my personal assistant, Barbara, said. “You ready?”

I took the document from her and read through it. It was a release order, freeing the Kesslers from our care. The letter is merely a formality; if a lifter who hadn't, say, heard the primary was in custody and made a move on our principals again, of course, we'd be there in a minute, even after the release was signed. But we're a federal agency like any other and that means paperwork. I handed the signed document to Barbara and told her I'd be back in three days, maybe four, but she could always reach me. Which she knew but I felt better saying.

“Take some time,” she said in a motherly way, which I found heartwarming. “You're not looking so good.”

The effects of the pepper spray were gone, as
far as I felt. I frowned. She explained, “You're still limping.”

“It's just a scrape.”

Then she said coyly, “You have to let that toe heal.”

I laughed, thinking I never in a million years could have come up with that one. Maree and Freddy were right, I don't joke much. But I'd try to remember the heal and toe line, though I doubted I would.

I gathered the board game, my computer and gym bag of clothes and walked to duBois's office. She was on the phone when I stepped into her doorway. Her playful tone told me she was probably speaking to the Cat Man. It was the night for a romantic dinner, it seemed. She was describing to him—with typical duBois detail and digression—a chicken dish she had in mind.