Jeffery Deaver - Edge

“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 backpedalling 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.

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 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 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.”