The Devil's Teardrop Read online

  Parker waved his hand abruptly to silence her. "I'll have to ask you to leave now. Good luck."

  Cage shrugged, looked at Lukas. She handed Parker her card, with the gold-embossed seal of the Justice Department on it. Parker had once had cards just like these. The typeface was Cheltenham condensed. Nine-point.

  "Cell phone's on the bottom. . . . Look, at least if we have any questions, you mind if we call?"

  Parker hesitated. "No, I don't."

  "Thank you."

  "Goodbye," Parker said, stepping back into the house.

  The door closed. Robby stood on the stairs.

  "Who were they, Daddy?"

  He said, "That was a man I used to work with."

  "Did she have a gun?" Robby asked. "That lady?"

  "Did you see a gun?" Parker asked him.

  "Yeah."

  "Then I guess she had one."

  "Did you work with her too?" the boy asked.

  "No, just the man."

  "Oh. She was pretty."

  Parker started to say, For a lady cop. But he didn't.

  Back here in Washington I live under a sorrowful pall, haunted as I am by visions of Polly on horseback . . .

  Parker, back in his basement study, alone now, found himself thinking of the letter in front of him as Q1. FBI document lab procedures dictated that questioned documents were called Q's. Authentic documents and handwriting samples--also called "knowns"--were referred to as K's. It had been years since he'd thought of the suspect wills and contracts he analyzed as Q's. This intrusion of police mindset into his personal life was unsettling. Nearly as troubling as Joan's appearance.

  Forget about Cage, forget about Lukas.

  Concentrate . . .

  Back to the letter, hand glass in front of his face.

  He now noted that the author--whether it had been Jefferson or not--had used a steel pen; he could see the unique flow of ink into fibers torn by the nib. Many forgers believe that all old documents were written with feather quills and use those exclusively. But by 1800 steel pen points were very popular and Jefferson did most of his corresponding with them.

  One more tick on the side of authenticity.

  I think of your Mother too at this difficult time and though my dear I do not want to add to your burden I wonder if I might impose on you to find that portrait of Polly and your Mother together, do you recall it? The one Mr. Chabroux painted of them by the well? I meant to bring it with me that their faces might sustain me in my darker moments.

  He forced himself not to think about the context of the letter and examined a line of ink where it crossed a fold in the paper. He observed there was no bleeding into the gully of the crease. Which meant the letter had been written before it was folded. He knew that Thomas Jefferson was fastidious about his writing habits and would never have written a letter on a piece of paper that had been previously folded. Score another point for the document. . . .

  Parker looked up, stretched. He reached forward and clicked on the radio. National Public Radio was broadcasting another story about the Metro shootings.

  " . . . report that the death toll has risen to twenty-four. Five-year-old LaVelle Williams died of a gunshot wound. Her mother was wounded in the attack and is listed in critical--"

  He shut the radio off.

  Looking at the letter, moving his hand glass over the document slowly. Swooping in on a lift--where the writer finishes a word and raises the pen off the surface of the paper. This lift was typical of the way Jefferson ended his strokes.

  And the feathering of the ink in the paper?

  How ink is absorbed can tell you many things about the type of materials used and when the document was made. Over the years ink is drawn more and more into the paper. The feathering here suggested it had been written long ago--easily two hundred years. But, as always, he took the information under advisement; there were ways to fake feathering.

  He heard the thud of the children's feet on the stairs. They paused, then there were louder bangs as first one then the other jumped down the last three steps to the floor.

  "Daddy, we're hungry," Robby called from the top of the basement stairs.

  "I'll be right there."

  "Can we have grilled cheese?"

  "Please!" Stephie added.

  Parker clicked out the brilliant, white examination light on his table. He replaced the letter in his vault. He stood for a moment in the dim study, lit only by a fake Tiffany lamp in the corner, beside the old couch.

  I meant to bring it with me that their faces might sustain me in my darker moments.

  He climbed the stairs.

  5

  "The weapon," Margaret Lukas called abruptly. "I want the deets on the shooter's weapon."

  "You want what?" Cage asked.

  "Deets. Details." She was used to her regular staff, who knew her expressions. And idiosyncrasies.

  "Any minute now," C. P. Ardell called back. "That's what they're tellin' me."

  They were in one of the windowless rooms in the Bureau's new Strategic Information and Operations Center on the fifth floor of headquarters on Ninth Street. The whole facility was nearly as big as a football field and had recently been expanded to let the agency handle as many as five major crises at once.

  Cage walked past Lukas and as he did so he whispered, "You're doing fine."

  Lukas didn't respond. She caught sight of her reflection in one of the five-by-fifteen-foot video screens on the wall, on which was displayed the extortion note. Thinking: Am I? Am I doing fine? She hoped so. Lord, how she hoped that. The legend that went around the Bureau was that every agent got one chance to strike gold in his or her career. One chance to get noticed, one chance to move up exponentially.

  Well, this sure as hell was hers. An ASAC running a case like this. It never happened. Not in a . . . what had Cage said? Not in a month of blue Mondays.

  Looking past her reflection at the note, which glowed white with spidery black letters on the huge screen. What am I not thinking of? Lukas wondered. In her mind she ran through what she had thought of. She'd sent the dead unsub's fingerprints to every major friction ridge database in the world. She had two dozen District cops trying to find the delivery truck that hit him, on the chance the unsub uttered some dying words to the driver (and had had miracle-worker Cage secure an immunity-from-prosecution waiver on the hit-and-run charge to induce the driver to talk). She had two dozen agents tracking down wits. Hundreds of tag numbers were being checked out. Handlers were milking CIs all over the country. Phone records in and out of City Hall for the past two weeks were being checked. She was--

  A call came in. Len Hardy started to pick up the phone but Cage got to it first. Hardy had shed the trench coat, revealing a white polyester shirt with thin brown stripes and razor-crease slacks and a brown tie. Despite lying in a Northern Virginia field for an hour his marine-officer hair was still perfectly in place and there was not a bit of dirt on him. He looked less like a detective than a clean-cut Jehovah's Witness about to offer you some brochures on salvation. Lukas, who wore a new Glock 10, thought the thin Smith & Wesson .38 revolver on Hardy's hip was positively quaint.

  "You doing okay, Detective?" Lukas asked him, seeing his disgruntled expression as Cage swept the phone out from under his nose.

  "Right as rain," he muttered, not too sardonically.

  She gave a faint laugh at the expression, which she knew was an indigenous Midwestern phrase. She asked if he was from there.

  "I grew up outside Chicago. Downstate. Well, that's what they call it--even though my hometown was northwest of the city."

  He sat down. Her smile faded. Right as rain . . .

  Cage hung up. "Got your deets. That was Firearms. Gun was an Uzi. About a year old and there was a lot of barrel spread. That weapon's seen some serious action. Mineral cotton in the silencer. Hand packed, it looked like. Not commercial. The shooter knows what he's doing."

  "Good!" Lukas said. She called to C. P. Ardell, across the ro
om, "Have somebody check out Web sites that give instructions for homemade silencers and converting Uzis to full auto. I want e-mail addresses of recent hits."

  "Do they have to give up that info?" C. P. asked.

  "Not without a warrant. But make 'em think they do. Be persuasive."

  The agent made a call and spoke for a few minutes. He reported, "Com-Tech is on it." The Bureau's crack computer and communications unit, headquartered in Maryland.

  To Cage, Lukas said, "Hey, got an idea."

  The agent lifted an eyebrow.

  She continued. "What we can do is get that guy, from Human Resources?"

  "Who?" Cage asked.

  Lukas continued. "That guy who examines applicants' handwriting and writes up their personality."

  "The District does that too," Len Hardy said. "It's supposed to weed out the wackos."

  "Whatta you mean?" C. P. asked Lukas. "We already sent it to Quantico."

  The big agent was referring to a copy of the note that had been sent to the Bureau's Behavioral section for psycholinguistic profiling. Tobe Geller sat at a computer terminal nearby, waiting for the results.

  "No, no, that's to link him to similar MOs and profile his education and intelligence," Lukas said. "I'm talking about profiling his personality. Graphoanalysis."

  "Don't bother," a voice from behind them said.

  Lukas turned and saw a man in jeans and a leather bomber jacket. He walked into the lab. He wore a visitor's badge around his neck and was carrying a large attache case. It took a moment to recognize him.

  Cage began to speak but stopped himself. Maybe afraid that he'd scare him off.

  "Artie let me up," Parker Kincaid said. The Bureau's employee entrance night guard. "He still remembers me. After all these years."

  This was a very different image of Kincaid, Lukas thought. He'd seemed frumpy at his house. It hadn't helped that he'd been wearing some god-awful sweater and baggy slacks. The gray crew-neck sweater he wore now, over a black shirt, seemed much more him.

  "Mr. Kincaid," Lukas said, nodding a greeting. "Don't bother with what?"

  "Graphoanalysis. You can't analyze personality from handwriting."

  She was put off by his peremptory tone. "I thought a lot of people do it."

  "People read tarot cards too and talk to their dear departed. It's bogus."

  "I've heard it can be helpful," she persisted.

  "Waste of time," he said matter-of-factly. "We'll concentrate on other things."

  "Well. All right." Lukas pledged that she'd try not to dislike him too much.

  Cage said, "Hey, Parker, you know Tobe Geller? Doubling as our computer and communications man tonight. We tracked him down on his way to a ski trip in Vermont."

  "It was New Hampshire," the trim agent corrected, offering Kincaid one of his ready grins. "For holiday pay I'll do anything. Even break a date. Hi, Parker. I heard about you."

  They shook hands.

  Cage nodded to another desk. "This's C. P. Ardell. He's from the D.C. field office. Nobody knows what C. P. stands for but that's what he goes by. I don't think even he knows."

  "Did a while ago," C. P. said laconically.

  "And this is Len Hardy. He's our District P.D. liaison."

  "Nice to meet you, sir," the detective said.

  Kincaid shook his hand. "Don't really need the 'sir.'"

  "Sure."

  "You Forensic? Investigative?" Kincaid asked him.

  Hardy seemed embarrassed as he said, "Actually I'm Research and Statistical. Everybody else was out in the field so I got elected to liaise."

  "Where's the note?" he asked Lukas. "I mean, the original?"

  "In Identification. I wanted to see if we could raise a few more prints."

  Kincaid frowned but before he could say anything Lukas added, "I told them to use the laser only. No ninhydrin."

  His eyebrows lifted. "Good . . . you've worked in forensics?"

  She had a sense that, even though she was right about not using the chemical, he was challenging her. "I remember from the Academy," she told him coolly and picked up the phone.

  "What's that?" Hardy asked. "Nin . . ."

  As she punched in a number Lukas said, "Ninhydrin's what you usually use to image fingerprints on paper."

  "But," Kincaid finished her thought, "it ruins indented writing. Never use it on suspect documents."

  Lukas continued to make her phone call--to ID. The tech told her that there were no other prints on the document and that a runner would bring the note up to the Crisis Center stat. She relayed this to the team.

  Kincaid nodded.

  "Why'd you change your mind?" Cage asked him. "About coming here?"

  He was silent for a moment. "You know those children you mentioned? The ones injured in the subway? One of them died."

  With a solemnity that matched his, Lukas said, "LaVelle Williams. I heard."

  He turned to Cage. "I'm here on one condition. Nobody except the immediate task force knows I'm involved. If there's a leak and my name gets out, whatever stage the investigation's in, I walk. And I deny I even know you people."

  Lukas said, "If that's what you want, Mr. Kincaid, but--"

  "Parker."

  Cage said, "You got it. Can we ask why?"

  "My children."

  "If you're worried about security we can have a car put on your house. As many agents as you--"

  "I'm worried about my ex-wife."

  Lukas gave him a quizzical glance.

  Kincaid said, "I've had custody of my children since my wife and I got divorced four years ago. And one of the reasons that it's me who has custody is that I work at home and I don't do anything that'd endanger them or me. That's why I only do commercial document work. Now it looks like my wife's reopening the custody case. She can't find out about this."

  "Not a single problem in the world, Parker," Cage reassured him. "You'll be somebody else. Who d'you want to be?"

  "I don't care if you make me John Doe or Thomas Jefferson as long as I'm not me. Joan's coming by the house tomorrow morning at ten with some presents for the kids. If she finds out I went off on New Year's Eve to work on a case . . . it'll be bad."

  "What'd you tell them?" Lukas asked.

  "That a friend of mine was sick and I had to go visit him in the hospital." He pointed a finger at Cage's chest. "I hated lying to them. Hated it."

  Recalling his beautiful boy, Lukas said, "We'll do our best."

  "It's not a question of best," Kincaid said to her, easily holding her eye. Which is something very few men could do. "It's either keep me out of the picture or I'm gone."

  "Then we'll do it," she said simply, looking around the room. C. P., Geller and Hardy all nodded.

  "All right." Kincaid took his jacket off, pitched it onto a chair. "Now, what's the plan?"

  Lukas ran through the status of the investigation. Kincaid nodded, not saying anything. She tried to read his face, see if he approved of what she was doing. Wondered if she cared whether he did or not. Then she said, "The mayor's going on the air soon to make a plea to the shooter. He's going to suggest that we'll pay the money to him. Not come right out and say it but hint at it. We're hoping he'll contact us. We've got the money downstairs in a couple of trace bags. We'll drop them wherever he wants."

  Cage took over. "Then Tobe here'll track him back to his hidey-hole. Jerry Baker's tactical team's on call. We'll nail him when he gets back home. Or take him down on the road."

  "How likely is it he'll go for the cash?"

  "We don't know," Lukas said. "When you take a look at the note you'll see the unsub--the guy who got killed--was pretty slow. If his partner, this Digger, is just as dumb he might not go for it." She was thinking of the criminal psychology she'd learned at the Academy. Slower perps were far more suspicious than intelligent ones. They tended not to improvise even when circumstances changed. Lukas added, "Which means he might just keep on shooting the way he's been instructed to."

  Cage added,
"And we don't even know if the shooter'll hear Kennedy's broadcast. But we just don't have a single damn lead."

  Lukas noticed Kincaid glance down at the Major Crimes Bulletin. It was about the firebombing of Gary Moss's house. Bulletins like these described the crime in detail and were used to brief subsequent officers on the specifics of a case. This one mentioned how Moss's two children had just escaped being burned to death.

  Parker Kincaid stared at the bulletin for longer than he seemed to want to, apparently troubled by the stark report of the attempt to murder the family.

  The two children of the Subject were able to effectuate an escape from the structure with only minor injuries.

  Finally he pushed it away. Looked around the Center, taking in the banks of phones, computers, desks. His eyes ended up on the video monitor displaying the extortion note.

  "Can we set up the ready-room someplace else?"

  "This is the Crisis Center," Lukas said, watching him scan the note. "What's wrong with here?"

  "We're not using most of the space," Kincaid pointed out. "And hardly any of the equipment."

  Lukas considered this. "Where did you have in mind?"

  "Upstairs," he said absently, still staring at the glowing note. "Let's go upstairs."

  *

  Parker walked through the Sci-Crime document lab, looking over the array of equipment he knew so well.

  Two Leitz binocular stereo microscopes with a Volpi Intralux fiber optic light source, an old Foster + Freeman VSC4 video spectral comparator and the latest of their video spectral comparators--the VSC 2000, equipped with a Rofin PoliLight and running QDOS software through Windows NT. Also, sitting well-used in the corner were a Foster + Freeman ESDA--an electrostatic detection apparatus--and a thin-layer gas chromatograph for ink and trace analysis.

  He noticed the glass windows the tourists paraded past every day, nine to four, as part of the FBI headquarters tour. The corridor was now dark and ominous.

  Parker watched the other members of the team find seats at desks and lab tables. The room was cluttered, smelly and uncomfortable, the way real working laboratories were. But he preferred to be here--rather than in the glitzy Crisis Center--because he firmly believed in something he'd learned from his father, a historian who specialized in the Revolutionary War. "Always fight your battles on familiar ground," the professor had told his boy. He'd chosen not to give this answer to Lukas; another thing William Kincaid had told his son was "You don't have to share everything with your allies."