Jeffery Deaver - Edge

And, in the den, scrapbooks. Probably thirty or forty of them. I checked quickly but none was more recent than about five years ago. The most current one contained only a single item about Loving himself. It was a clipping from the Washington Post , the same clipping I had in my office, as a matter of fact. About Loving’s murder of Abe Fallow and the woman he’d been guarding. Had he clipped it? And if he had, why? I guessed it was a matter of craft: to see how the authorities were handling the investigation.

I flipped through the memorabilia and examined the many pictures of a younger Henry, his sister and their parents. I was struck by the fact that in most of them he seemed somber and preoccupied, rarely smiling and seemingly distracted. But there were also a number of images of the young Henry laughing. One or two showed him with a girl, presumably on a date, though there was little physical contact between them.

Young Henry’s sports were track and archery. There were no pictures of him with teammates. He seemed to enjoy solitary pursuits.

I went back even earlier. I opened one page and stared down at it. Beneath a piece of yellowed Scotch tape was a tuft of clipped brown hair. I read the careful script below. The hair was Henry’s, at one year of age. I started to reach out and touch it. Then withdrew my hand when Freddy walked into the room.

“Whatcha think, son?” Freddy asked. “Anything helpful here? You’re looking like you found Bernie Madoff’s stash.”

I shook my head. “Nothing pointing to his next move. But everything pointing to him .”

“That helpful?”

“Not immediately. But ultimately, I hope so. Only there’s a lot here to go through. We’ll collect it all, take it in. You folks have evidence bags?”

“In the cars.”

I then noticed something against the opposite wall: another shelf on which a dozen shoe boxes sat. I picked one up. Inside were stacks of photographs. I supposed the family had stored them here temporarily until somebody got around to pasting them into a scrapbook. I realized, to my surprise, that there was a dust-free rectangle at the end. The last shoe box had been removed-today, if not within the last hour or so.

Had he sped back here from his cousin’s for the purpose of grabbing this one box?

What was there about it that Loving wanted?

Did it reveal something about his past that he wished to keep secret?

Or was there something sentimental connected to it?

I mentioned this to Freddy, who noted it without much interest. I flipped through the others. Like the scrapbooks, they revealed nothing immediately helpful, though we’d have forensic teams prowl through them for clues to summer houses or family members we hadn’t been able to locate earlier.

“Corte?” Freddy asked. He was getting impatient, I supposed.

“Okay,” I told him.

“Got something here,” a tactical officer called from the hallway that led to the kitchen in the back of the house. Freddy and I joined him.

“Looks like bills, sir.”

Sitting on the floor beside the kitchen table was a stack of envelopes, bound with a rubber band.

“He must’ve dropped them and not noticed.”

Trembling hand …

The agent picked them up but then froze. They only came halfway and tugged to a stop.

“Fuck,” he muttered and we all stared at the thin strand of fishing line that vanished through the hole in the floor.

Freddy grabbed his radio. “Clear the house, IED, IED!”

From the basement I heard the bang of the booby trap-softer than I expected-and saw on the foliage and trees a brief flare as the flash radiated through the basement windows.

The room was eerily silent. For a moment I thought the device might be a dud and I’d have ample time to collect the scrapbooks and shoe boxes.

But I’d taken only one step toward the repository of Henry Loving’s history when the nearby basement door blew outward and a vortex of orange and yellow flame shot into the hall, while simultaneously the fire raging in the basement erupted from every floorboard vent and crevice on the first floor.

THE DEVICE MUST have been made up of a grenade or small plastic explosive charge attached to a large container of gasoline. I could smell the distinct, astringent odor of burning fuel. In seconds, the fire was racing up the walls and consuming the rugs. I kicked the basement door closed but the flames and heat muscled it back open, as the fire spiraled outward and up.

“Freddy, anybody down there?” I shouted.

He called, “No. After they cleared it they came upstairs.”

I started forward again toward the den. Yet every time I edged a few feet through the smoke, there’d be another flare-up and I’d have to spin backward to keep from losing eyebrows and skin. I looked around for water or a fire extinguisher or even a blanket I could use to protect myself to get to the scrapbooks and shoe boxes and save as many as I could.

I supposed that Freddy wasn’t as convinced of the importance of the memorabilia as I was but he knew that this was my expertise-dealing with lifters and hitters from a strategic, rather than tactical, position-and he helped me push furniture against the vents and fling rugs over the flames that sprouted from the floorboards. I didn’t think we could control the fire-it was going to win-but at least we might contain the flames long enough to get to the books.

We tried for three or four minutes but finally the heat was too intense, the smoke blinding. I was close to vomiting from the fumes and ash. I grew light-headed and knew that to faint here would mean death. Choking, our eyes streaming, we had to retreat. The living room was now a mass of flame and so was the kitchen. We kicked out a side window and rolled onto the ground. The rest of the agents were nearby and, thinking that the fire could be a diversion, they were covering the trees, the logical position for a sniper to take out those fleeing the house.

But there were no shots. I wasn’t surprised. Loving, I knew, would be gone.

“Report!” Freddy shouted. His fellow agents called back about their condition. They were all accounted for. One had a slight burn and another had been cut, breaking through a window to flood the basement with water from a garden hose-a futile effort, of course. There were no serious injuries, however.

No, the only victim here was Henry Loving’s past.

I rubbed my stinging eyes, wondering if, as I’d speculated, this had in fact been a trap all along.

I was alive but this round of our game was a decided loss for me.

Scissors cut paper …

The roar of the flames was so loud that the fire trucks were almost to the property by the time we heard the sirens.

Freddy said, “A shoe box with pictures in it. He destroyed everything else. Why’d he save that? What’s inside?”

A good question and one that I knew I’d ponder into the early hours. Did it contain photos of his sister? Of himself and her? Some place he liked to go? Pictures of a cabin in the woods or a lake somewhere he planned to retire to? I said nothing but stared at the fiery tornado that had been the family house. I walked back to my car to call the safe house in Great Falls and check on my principals.

I didn’t, however, get very far.

Two black vans, with flashing red and blue lights on top, skidded to a stop not far away and a small entourage got out, making right for me.

My eyes closed momentarily as I realized who was leading them: Jason Westerfield and Chris Teasley, his assistant, possibly sans pearls. She wore a zipped-high jacket; I couldn’t see any necklaces.

I shouldn’t have been surprised to see these two. I now realized that, of course, Westerfield would have learned about the house and that I’d probably be here, because we were on record: We’d gone to a federal magistrate to request a warrant to search Loving’s family’s house. The U.S. attorney had sped directly here to find the man who’d lied to him and sent him an empty armored van.