Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

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.

"The weapon," Margaret Lukas called abruptly. "I want the deets on the shooters weapon."

"You want what?" Cage asked.

"Deets. De-tails." 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 Bureaus 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 room, "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 attaché 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 Bureaus employee entrance night guard. "He still remembers me. After all these years."