A crime scene tech was inventorying the contents of Alberts's shoulder bag, which had been upended on the floor of Yu's garage. I too looked over the stash. Documents and pictures and some plastic bags that would have physical evidence--probably some strands of Amanda Kessler's hair or something else with her DNA on it. Alberts and his thug had come here to plant the clues to suggest that Professor Yu was the primary who had hired Henry Loving.
"Sandy," I said. "Senator Stevenson. Let's talk about him for a minute."
Desperately the aide said, "I don't know what you mean."
Freddy snorted a laugh.
I said, "We know everything."
"What are you talking about?"
"Well, let's start with: We know that the senator likes lecturing at schools. We know he likes the company of young ladies."
Alberts's eyes grew wide. Then he recovered and looked down.
I continued, "Sometime in the past year Stevenson met a student after a speaking engagement--at a community college in Northern Virginia. Her name was Susan Markus. He thought she was a college student. But she actually was in high school. Sixteen years old. A classmate of Amanda Kessler's."
As duBois had pieced things together, it seemed to be the same event that I'd read about in my research on Stevenson: the community college where he'd given his popular "rule of law" speech.
I told Alberts, "Whether he invited her to his office or a motel or the back of his limo, we don't know."
"Yet," Freddy added. "We don't know yet."
"But we're pretty sure there was some . . . inappropriate behavior on the senator's part."
"That's a lie!" But there was no conviction behind Alberts's protest.
I said, "The senator can't be stupid. He didn't think she was underage. He met her at a community college and he probably assumed she was a student there, not a high school girl. In any case, whatever happened was statutory rape at the minimum. Amanda Kessler was a volunteer at her school's self-harm prevention program. Susan was depressed about what happened and she came in to get some help. Amanda was the girl she talked to. Susan told her she'd been involved with an older man and he was pressuring her not to say anything about the incident. Amanda set Susan up with an adult counselor but before she went to the appointment she killed herself. Amanda took the death hard and planned to devote her blog to the girl's suicide, looking into why she killed herself, what led up to it. She was going to be talking to Susan's friends, her family. It was just a matter of time before Amanda got to the truth."
"And," Freddy said, "we're not completely sure that Susan actually did take her own life. She might've been . . . helped."
Alberts began to speak but then fell silent.
Freddy, better at the dramatics than I, said, "Oh, going to say something about the coroner's report ruling the death a suicide? Going to say you've looked into it? Why would you've done that?"
Still, silence.
I continued, "Your job was to hire somebody like Loving to find out the names of everybody Amanda had talked to about Susan's death. Get all of Amanda's notes, everything. And then kill her too."
Alberts's shoulders sagged and he glanced around Yu's house.
I gave voice to his thought, which was too incriminating for Alberts to utter. "I know, you thought we were looking at Global Software Innovations and Peter Yu. . . . No, that was just bait to draw you out into the open. I suspected you and the senator but I didn't have any real proof. I made sure you were on the list to get the interagency alert about Global. If you were guilty I figured you'd come here to plant evidence implicating Yu."
"I'm completely innocent of any wrongdoing. That's all I'll say. I want an attorney."
"Help us out here, Sandy," I said in a reasonable voice. "We've got you cold. Come on." I glanced toward the solid, unsmiling suspect with him. "I know you found him and the other mercenaries through your contacts at the Armed Services Committee, right? They put you in touch with Henry Loving. They arranged for the helicopter. And you were desperate to find out what we knew so you came up with the story about the investigation into warrantless taps."
His eyes swung desperately.
I said, "Don't take the heat for this, Sandy. Work with us. . . . We know you cut your ties to your lobbying outfit before you went to work with Stevenson but they were involved too, weren't they?"
A paltry shake of his head.
"And the political action committee backing Stevenson? They need him to be the darling of the party. They couldn't afford a scandal. Who there--at the PAC--was involved?"
Alberts, near tears, blurted, "Senator Stevenson is a great man." The protest was both humorous and remarkably sad. "He didn't know. . . ."
"What?" I asked firmly. "What didn't he know?"
Alberts's shoulders slumped.
I gazed at an FBI van up the street. Inside was the man whose house this was, Professor Peter Yu, and his wife. They'd agreed to let us use their place as a takedown set after they pretended to leave for work. Alberts looked that way too and it seemed he finally understood how completely scammed he'd been.
Glancing at Freddy, whose nod gave me carte blanche to take over, I stepped a bit closer to Alberts. "We can work a deal, if you cooperate."
Alberts muttered, "To implicate the senator."
Freddy barked a laugh. "What else would we be interested in?"
"I don't think I can do that."
The word "think" was critical, since it told me he had acknowledged we had an edge over him. I articulated my position in general terms. "All I know is that you could spend the rest of your life in jail or you could spend a lot less than that." I let the thought register. Then I gestured toward another agent, who approached. To Alberts I said, "We're going to take you to detention now. Just think about what I said."
His lips tightened and his eyes closed momentarily.
As he and his partner were led off, Claire duBois turned to me and actually managed to make me smile, nodding toward Alberts's back and saying, "What you were telling me about game theory? How's that for the Prisoners' Dilemma?"
Chapter 70
I WAS SITTING in Aaron Ellis's office, again focused on one of the pictures his child had painted. Maybe it was a haystack with turrets. Maybe a yellow castle, gold or brass. Hard to say.
The time was 10:30 a.m. Claire duBois was pulling up a chair beside me. My boss said, "He's on his way up."
"In fact," another voice filled the room, "voila! He's here." U.S. Attorney Jason Westerfield paused in the doorway. "Was that a dark tone you were speaking in, Aaron? Ha, just being amusing. Okay pour entrer?" Today he was dressed like an attorney, very different from his Saturday suburban-warrior guise.
Ellis waved to the chairs across from the coffee table.
The slim man entered, trailed by his assistant, Chris Teasley. Interesting, I couldn't help but observe: Here were Westerfield and I, flanked by our seconds, attractive women both, and a decade-plus younger. I noticed that Chris Teasley slipped her eyes toward duBois's Macy's suit and silver bracelet. I regretted to note also that the loaded glance had also registered with my protegee.
"Well, to the matter at hand," Westerfield said. "I was pretty surprised the whole morass rose as high as it did." He caught that mixed metaphor, at least, and hesitated. Then: "A U.S. senator. Hm." His voice and attitude continued to be as irritating as I remembered from the last time we met. Well, every time we'd met.
I shifted my foot gingerly. Inhaled at the pain. Focused again.
"So, Corte. Dish . . . s'il vous plait."
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 He
nry 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."
Cliches 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 protegees 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 attache 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.
Chapter 71
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.