Edge (21 page)

She might have been referring to his biting comment that he was a better shot than me and the others protecting him.

Or to his implication that we were cowards, afraid to engage Loving.

“I understand.” I did.

“He's never quite recovered from the deli shooting. I don't mean the wound, the limp—he's okay with that, most of the time. I mean the psychology. How it affected him. He had to move to a desk. He loved working the street. That's what his father did, in Baltimore. After Ryan moved to Financial Crimes his father seemed to lose respect for him.”

I remembered that both of his parents were dead and I wondered what the relationship between father and son had been toward the end. My own father had died young; it was always a regret that I had been too busy to make it to the birthday party that had turned out to be his last.

A regret too that, because of his death, he hadn't been at my son's first.

Joanne continued, “He does his job but his heart's not in it. Now they've saddled him with that administrative work.” She paused. “They know about the drinking. He thinks he covers it up. He doesn't. You can't.”

I reflected that I too would find it hard to give up what I do and not be able to play my games against people like Henry Loving, not to be with my principals.

But I didn't tell Joanne this, of course. I always have to be on guard against sharing things with the people in my care. It's not professional. They might spill something about you—if they were captured by a lifter or if they talked to the press. There's another reason too. Principals and their shepherds are going to part ways. That's as sure as the seasons. It's better not to form any connection; minimize the risk of emotional hurt. This is why Abe
Fallow told us to refer to them as “my principals” only.

“Keep them anonymous, Corte. This is a two-dimensional business. You have to be a cardboard cutout of a person. That's how you have to look at them. Learn only what you need to learn to keep them alive. Don't use their names, don't look at their kids' pictures, don't ask 'em if they're all right, unless you've been dodging bullets and you need to call a medic.”

But the irony is that principals love to talk to us shepherds. Oh, do they want to share. Partly it's the presence of mortality that puts them in a talkative mode. Confessional, often. They've done some things wrong in their lives—who hasn't, of course?—and they want to assuage the guilt by talking. More important, though, I'm no threat. I'm in their lives for twelve hours or forty-eight or at the most a few weeks. I go away at the end of that time and will never be in a position to repeat the secrets to their friends or loved ones.

So I listen and I nod, without being particularly encouraging, and I make no judgments whatsoever. Part of this is calculated, of course. The more they depend on and trust me, the more they'll do exactly what I tell them to—instantly and without question.

Joanne glanced at my computer, though I'd turned the screen so she couldn't see it. She asked, “Which of Ryan's cases do you think it is?”

“My associate's investigating them now.”

“At ten o'clock Saturday night?”

I nodded.

“Ryan doesn't talk to me about his job much.
You'd think it'd be pretty obvious who's the . . . what did you call it, the primary?”

“That's it, yes. You mean, to warrant hiring somebody like Henry Loving, there'd have to be a lot at stake?”

“Yes.”

“True. But sometimes you never know. I've had plenty of assignments where the identity of the primary was a big surprise.”

Maree appeared, poured herself a glass of wine and walked up to us.

I asked, “The room okay?”

“Very Martha Stewart, Mr. Tour Guide. Old paintings of horses. Tons of horses. They have skinny legs. Fat horses and skinny legs. I wonder if they really looked like that back then. You think they'd fall over a lot.”

Joanne smiled at this—an observation worthy of Claire duBois.

Maree then asked, “How do I go online? I need to check email.”

“I'm afraid you can't.”

“Oh, not the spy stuff again? Please. Can I beg?” She said this with that teenager's coy glint in her eyes. Her lips, of course, pouted admirably.

“Sorry.”

“Why not?”

“We have to assume Loving's found your account. If you read messages or send any, it's possible for him to correlate time with router and server traffic in the area here.”

“Corte, do you look
four
ways before crossing the street?”

“Mar,” Joanne chided. “Really.”

“Oh, puh-lease.”

I said, “Just taking precautions.” I regarded her serious expression and nodding head. “What's wrong?”

“If I can't get my masseur here, then somebody owes me a massage. . . . Say, Mr. Tour Guide, is that in your job description?” I must have been staring at her blankly. She said, “You don't joke much, do you?”

“Maree,” her sister said sternly. “Give it a rest.”

“Seriously,” she said to me. “I'd just like to send a few emails. I've got to get some images to a gallery for a show.”

“If it's really important, I can encrypt it, send it to our central communications department and we could route it through some proxies in Asia and Europe.”

“Is
that
a joke?”

“No.”

“So other people would read it?”

“Yes, three or four. And me.”

“Then I think I'll just opt for the exciting alternative of . . . going to bed.” She turned defiantly and vanished down the dim corridor.

Joanne watched her sister walk away, Maree's slim hips shifting under the wispy skirt as she took steady, almost flirtatious strides.

“What's she taking?” I asked.

Joanne hesitated. “Wellbutrin.”

“Anything else?”

“Maybe an Ativan. Or two or three.”

“And?”

“Nothing else she needs a prescription for. She never got insurance so I see her medical bills. Because I pay for them. . . . How'd you know?”

I told her, “Language, some of her behavior. I found out about her hospitalizations. There were two, right?”

Joanne barked a cautious laugh. “You know about those?”

“My associate looked into anything that might be relevant. Suicide attempts? That's what I deduced from the report.”

Joanne nodded. “The doctor said more of a gesture than an attempt. She'd been dumped by her boyfriend. Well, not even a boyfriend. They'd only gone out for six months or so but she was ready to move in, have his babies. You know the drill, I imagine.”

Her voice faded and she was looking me over, as if maybe I didn't know the drill. Ryan had probably told her I was a single man with no children.

She continued, “A note, a little overdose. The second time, same thing. A bit worse. Different man. I wish she'd get as obsessed about going to therapy as she gets about lovers.”

I glanced up the hall and then asked softly, “Was it Andrew who hurt her?” I tapped my arm.

Joanne's eyelids fluttered. “You're good. . . .” She shook her head. “To be honest, I don't know. He
has
hurt her, in the past. He put her in the hospital once. She claimed it was an accident. They always do that, abuse victims. Or she says it was her fault. This time she was pretty convincing that some guy knocked into her. But I just don't know.”

“And the forwarded mail? She broke it off with Andrew and moved in with you?”

Joanne caught her reflection in an old, scabby mirror and looked away. “That's right. Andrew's
got a lot going for him. He's talented, he's handsome and he thinks my sister's talented. Or at least he tells her she is. But he's also jealous and controlling. He convinced her to quit her day job and move in with him. That lasted a couple of months. He was mad at her all the time but when she moved out he got even madder. Thank God we were in the area; she had someplace to go when she bailed.”

Maree, who'd been born Marie and never officially changed her name, duBois had learned, also had been the subject of some runaway reports, filed with local police, when she was in her teens, and a few drug and shoplifting charges, which had been dropped; it seemed the boys she was with had coerced her to join them. They'd tried to set her up to take the fall.

None of this was relevant to my job or to the conversation we were having, though, and I said nothing about it.

“So you do your homework, do you?”

“For the job? Yes.”

After a moment Joanne, who didn't seem to joke any more than I did, gave me a brief smile. “What'd you find out about me?”

I wasn't sure how to answer. DuBois's research on Joanne had revealed a thoroughly unremarkable life. She'd been a responsible student, grad student, statistician and homemaker. She was on the PTO at Amanda's school. The only incidents that rose above, or descended below, the four decades of routine were in themselves not unusual: for instance, a backpacking trip abroad before grad school—the high point of her younger days, I imagined—and a
serious auto accident years ago that required some months of physical therapy.

“I found out that you're the one I don't have to worry about.”

The smile dissolved. Joanne held my eye. “You'd make a good politician, Corte. Good night.”

AT 11:00 P.M.,
after making rounds inside the house, I stepped outside and settled into a nest of fallen leaves. I began scanning the property with a Xenonics SuperVision 100 night vision monocular. They're very expensive but the best on the market. We could afford only three in the department and I'd checked out the last one earlier today.

This was normally the work done by a clone but I believed that even we shepherds should get our hands dirty on the job regularly. Abe's philosophy, of course—a belief, you could say, that killed him.

I was concentrating on looking for anything that seemed out of the ordinary. I found my shoulders in a knot. I was breathing hard. I began reciting silently to myself:
rock, paper, scissors . . . rock, paper, scissors . . .

Lulled by the flow of moon shadows from the slowly moving clouds, I began to relax. After forty minutes, my fingers numb and arm muscles shivering from the chill, I headed inside.

In the shepherd bedroom I unsnapped my Royal Guard holster and took a bottle of Draw-EZ from my gym bag. I massaged some of the gel into the natural-colored leather, now tanned as a beloved baseball glove. The smooth side fit against my skin,
the rough facing outward. I didn't really need to work on the leather—I've timed my draws and they're acceptable—but I found it relaxing.

When I was through, I took care of business in the bathroom and then rolled into the lumpy old bed, blinds drawn, of course, though the odds of a shooter emerging from the glorious line of old oaks to pump a round into the room were pretty slim.

The window, though, was open a crack and I could hear the faint unfurling sound of the wind and the softer rustle of the water over the falls a half mile away.

I'm lucky because I can sleep almost anywhere, nearly on command. Which I've learned is particularly rare in my job. Not surprisingly, my principals suffer from insomnia. I knew I'd doze off soon but at the moment I was pleased to lie in bed, fully clothed, though minus shoes, and stare at the ceiling. I was thinking: Who'd lived in this house originally?

It had been built around 1850. I supposed it had been a farmhouse, with much of the land devoted to oats, corn, barley—staples, not the designer crops you see nowadays. I had an amusing image of a working-class nineteenth-century family kicking off supper with an arugula and spinach salad.

Though the property hosted ten thousand trees now, I knew the vista back then from Mathew Brady's and others' photographs. Much of what was now woods in Northern Virginia had been open agricultural land around the time of the Civil War.

Great Falls had been occupied early by the Union Army. This area wasn't the scene of any major battles, though nearly four thousand troops
met briefly at what was now Route 7 and Georgetown Pike, in December 1861, resulting in about fifty dead and two hundred wounded. It was considered a Union victory, though most likely because the Confederates saw no strategic point in occupying an area where they weren't greatly supported, and they simply walked away.

More than any other area in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Great Falls had been a place of mixed sympathies. Those favoring the Union and those the Confederacy were often neighbors. Here, “brother against brother” was not a cliché.

I knew this from reading history—another one of my degrees—though I've also learned a lot about world affairs and conflict from playing board games. I enjoy those games that re-create famous battles, which are almost exclusively of American design. The Europeans prefer economic and socially productive games, the Asians abstract. But Americans love their combat. Among the games I have are Battle of the Bulge, Gettysburg, D-Day, the Battle of Britain, the Siege of Stalingrad, Rome.

Some people I've met through the gaming community shunned them, claiming they were disrespectful. But I believed the opposite was true: that we honor those who died in the service of their country by remembering them however we can.

Besides, who wouldn't admit that rewriting the past has a deep appeal? I once utterly defeated the Japanese military at a game based on Pearl Harbor. In my world, the Pacific campaign never happened.

My thoughts kept returning to the family who'd lived here when the house was new. It had been a large clan, I assumed; many children were the rule
then. The seven bedrooms could easily have accommodated the offspring plus an older generation or two.