Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

And Jackie hugged her mother and her father and two days later flew back to Washington, D.C., to change into Margaret.

After graduating she was assigned to the field office. She got to know the District, got to work with Cage, who was as good a changeling father as she could've asked for, and must have done something right because last year she was promoted to assistant special agent in charge. And now, with her boss photographing monkeys and lizards in a Brazilian rainforest, she was running the biggest case to hit Washington, D.C., in years.

She now watched Len Hardy jotting his notes in the corner of the lab and thought, He'll come through this okay.

Margaret Lukas knew that it could happen.

Just ask a changeling…

"Hey," a man's voice intruded on her thoughts.

She looked across the room and realized that Parker Kincaid was speaking to her.

"We've done the linguistics," he said. "I want to do the physical analysis of the note now. Unless you've got something else in mind."

"This's your inning, Parker," she said. And sat down beside him.

First, he examined the paper the note was written on.

It measured 6 by 9 inches, the sort intended for bread-and-butter notes. Paper size has varied throughout history but 8½ by 11 has been standard in America for nearly two hundred years. Six by 9 was the second-most-common size. Too common. The size alone would tell Parker nothing about its source.

As for composition of the paper he noted that it was cheap and had been manufactured by mechanical pulping, not the kraft-chemical pulping-method that produced finer-quality papers.

"The paper won't help us much," he announced finally. "It's generic. Nonrecycled, high-acid, coarse pulp with minimal optical brighteners and low luminescence. Sold in bulk by paper manufacturers and jobbers to retail chains. They package it as a house brand of stationery. There's no watermark and no way to trace it back to a particular manufacturer or wholesaler and then forward to a single point of sale." He sighed. "Let's look at the ink."

He lifted the note carefully and placed it under one of the lab's compound microscopes. He examined it first at ten- then at fifty-power magnification. From the indentation the tip of the pen made in the paper, the occasional skipping and the uneven color, Parker could tell that the pen had been a very cheap ballpoint.

"Probably an AWI-American Writing Instruments. The bargain-basement thirty-nine-cent-er." He looked at his teammates. No one grasped the significance.

"And?" Lukas asked.

"That's a bad thing," he explained emphatically. "Impossible to trace. They're sold in just about every discount and convenience store in America. Just like the paper. And AWI doesn't use tags."

"Tags?" Hardy asked.

Parker explained that some manufacturers put a chemical tag in their inks to identify the products and to help trace where and when they'd been manufactured. American Writing Instruments, however, didn't do this.

Parker started to pull the note out from under the microscope. He stopped, noticing something curious. Part of the paper was faded. He didn't think it was a manufacturing flaw. Optical brighteners have been added to paper for nearly fifty years and it's unusual, even in cheap paper like this, for there to be an unevenness in the brilliance.

"Could you hand me the PoliLight?" he asked C. P. Ardell.

"The what?"

"There."

The big agent picked up one of the boxy ALS units-an alternative light source. It luminesced a variety of substances that were invisible to the human eye.

Parker pulled on a pair of goggles and clicked on the yellow-green light.

"It gonna irradiate me or anything?" the big agent said, only partly joking, it seemed.

Parker ran the PoliLight wand over the envelope. Yes, the right third was lighter than the rest. He did the same with the note and found there was a lighter L-shaped pattern on the top and right side of the paper.

This was interesting. He studied it again.

"See how the corner's faded? I think it's because the paper-and part of the envelope too-were bleached by the sun."

"Where, at his house or the store?" Hardy asked.

"Could be either," Parker answered. "But given the cohesion of the pulp I'd guess the paper was sealed until fairly recently. That would suggest the store."

"But," Lukas said, "it'd have to be a place that had a southern exposure."

Yes, Parker thought. Good. He hadn't thought of that.

"Why?" Hardy asked.

"Because it's winter," Parker pointed out. "There's not enough sunlight to bleach paper from any other direction."

Parker paced again. It was a habit of his. When Thomas Jefferson's wife died, his oldest daughter, Martha, wrote that her father paced "almost incessantly day and night, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely exhausted." When Parker worked on a document or was wrestling with a particularly difficult puzzle the Whos often chided him for "walking in circles again."

The layout of the lab was coming back to him. He walked to a cabinet, opened it and pulled out an examining board and some sheets of collecting paper. Holding the note by its corner, he ran a camel-hair brush over the surface to dislodge trace elements. There was virtually nothing. He wasn't surprised. Paper is one of the most absorbent of materials; it retains a lot of substances from the places it's been but generally they remain firmly bound into the fibers.

Parker took a large hypodermic syringe from his attaché case and punched several small disks of ink and paper out of the note and the envelope. "You know how it works?" he asked Geller, nodding at the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer in the corner.

"Oh, sure," he said. "I took one apart once. Just for the fun of it."

"Separate runs-for the note and the envelope," Parker said, handing him the samples.

"You got it."

"What's it do?" C. P. asked again. Undercover and tactical agents generally don't have much patience for lab work and know little about forensic science.

Parker explained. The GC/MS separated chemicals found at crime scenes into their component parts and then identified them. The machine rumbled alarmingly-in effect it burned the samples and analyzed the resulting vapors.

Parker brushed more trace off the note and envelope and this time managed to collect some material. He mounted the slides on two different Leitz compound scopes. He peered into one, then the other, turned the focusing knobs, which moved with the slow sensuality of oiled, precision mechanisms.

He stared at what he saw then looked up, said to Geller, "I need to digitize images of the trace in here." Nodding at a microscope. "How do we do that?"

"Ah, piece of proverbial cake." The young agent plugged optical cables into the base of the microscopes. They ran to a large gray box, which sprouted cables of its own. These cables Geller plugged into one of the dozen computers in the lab. He clicked it on and a moment later an image of the particles of trace came on the screen. He called up a menu.

Said to Parker, "Just hit this button. They're stored as JPEG files."

"And I can transfer them on e-mail?"

"Just tell me who they're going to."

"In a minute-I'll have to get the address. First, I want to do different magnifications."

Parker and Geller captured three images from each microscope, stored them on the hard drive.

Just as he finished, the GC/MS beeped and data began to appear on the screen of the computer dedicated to the unit.

Lukas said, "I've got a couple of examiners standing by in Materials and Elemental." These were the Bureaus two trace evidence analysis departments.

"Send 'em home," Parker said. "There's somebody else I want to use."

"Who?" Lukas asked, frowning.