Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

"You celebrating?" She nodded at a gold, pointed hat with HAPPY NEW YEAR printed on it. There were a couple of noisemakers too.

Moss picked up the hat. "Somebody brought it for me. I said what was I supposed to do with half of Madonna's bra?"

Lukas laughed. Then she grew serious. "I just called on a secure phone. Your family's fine. There're plenty of people looking out for them."

"I never thought anybody'd try to hurt me or my family. I mean, when I was deciding to go to the FBI about what I found at the company. I figured I'd get fired but I never thought people'd want to hurt us."

He hadn't? The kickback scheme involved tens of millions of dollars and would probably result in the indictment of dozens of company employees and city officials. Lukas was surprised that Moss had survived long enough to make it into federal protection.

"What were you going to be doing tonight?" she asked. "With your family."

"Go to the Mall and watch the fireworks. Let the girls stay up late. They'd like that more than the show. How 'bout you, Agent Lukas? What'd you have planned?"

Nothing. She had nothing planned. She hadn't told anybody this. Lukas thought about several of her friends-a woman cop out in Fairfax, a firefighter in Burke, several neighbors, a man she'd met at a wine tasting, someone she'd met in dog class where she'd tried futilely to train Jean Luc. She was more or less close with all of these people and a few others. Some she gossiped with, some she'd shared plenty of wine with. One of the men she slept with occasionally. They'd all asked her to New Year's Eve parties. She'd told them all that she was going to a big party in Maryland. But it was a lie. She wanted to spend the last night of the year alone. And she didn't want anybody to know this-largely because she couldn't have explained why. But for some reason she looked at Gary Moss, a brave man, a man trapped in the firestorm of Washington, D.C., politics and she told him the truth. "I was going to be spending it with my pooch and a movie."

He didn't offer any cloying sympathy. Instead he said brightly, "Oh, you have a dog?"

"Sure do. Black Lab. She's pretty as a fashion model but board-certified stupid."

"How long you had her?"

"Two years. Got her on Thanksgiving."

Moss said, "I got my girls a mutt last year. Pound puppy. We thought we'd lost her in the firebombing but she got out. Had the good sense to leave us behind and just take off, got away from the flames. What movie were you gonna watch?"

"Don't know for sure. Some chick flick, probably. Something good and sappy that'd make me cry."

"Didn't think FBI agents were allowed to cry."

"Only off duty. What we're going to do, Mr. Moss, is keep you here until Monday then you'll be moved to a safe house run by the U.S. Marshals."

"Ha. Tommy Lee Jones. The Fugitive. Wasn't that a good movie?"

"I didn't see it."

"Rent it sometime."

"Maybe I will. You'll be fine, Gary. You're in the safest place you could possibly be. Nobody can get to you here."

"Long as those cleaning men stop scaring the shit out of me." He laughed.

He was trying to be upbeat. But Lukas could see the man's fear-it was as if it pulsed though the prominent veins on his bony forehead. Fear for himself, fear for his family.

"Well get some good dinner brought in for you."

"A beer maybe?" he asked.

"You want a six-pack?"

"Hell, yes."

"Name your brand."

"Well, Sam Adams." Then he asked uncertainly, "That in the budget?"

"Provided I get one of them."

"Ill keep it nice 'n' cold for you. You come back and get it after you catch that crazy guy."

He toyed with the hat. For a moment she thought he might put it on but must have realized that the gesture would look pathetic. He tossed it onto the bed.

"Ill be back later," she told him.

"Where you going?"

"To look at some maps."

"Maps. Hey, good luck to you, Agent Lukas."

She walked through the door. Neither wished the other a happy New Year.

Outside, in the cool air, Parker, Cage and Lukas walked along the dimly lit sidewalk on the way to the Topographic Archives, six blocks from headquarters.

Washington, D.C., is a city of occasional beauty and some architectural brilliance. But at dusk in winter it becomes a murky place. The budget Christmas decorations did nothing to brighten the gray street. Parker Kincaid glanced up at the sky. It was overcast. He remembered that snow was predicted and that the Whos would want to go sledding tomorrow.

They'd trim the bushes in the backyard, as he'd promised Robby, and then drive out west, toward the Massanutten Mountains, with their sleds and a thermos of hot chocolate.

Lukas interrupted these thoughts by asking him, "How'd you get into the document business?"

"Thomas Jefferson," Parker answered.

"How's that?"

"I was going to be a historian. I wanted to specialize in Jeffersonian history. That's why I went to UVA."

"He designed the school, didn't he?"

"The original campus he did. I'd spend days in the archives there and at the Library of Congress in the District. One day I was in Charlottesville, in the library, looking over this letter Jefferson had written to his daughter, Martha. It was about slavery. Jefferson had slaves but he didn't believe in slavery. But this letter, written just before he died, was adamantly proslavery and recanted his earlier opinions. He said that slavery was one of the economic cornerstones of the country and should be retained. It seemed strange to me-and strange that he'd write it to his daughter. He loved her dearly but their correspondence was mostly domestic. The more I read it the more I began to think the handwriting didn't look quite right. I bought a cheap magnifying glass and compared the writing with a known."

"And it was a fake?"

"Right. I took it to a local document examiner and he analyzed it. Caused quite a stir-somebody slipping a forgery into the Jefferson archives, especially one like that. I got written up in the Post."

"Who'd done it?" Lukas asked.

"Nobody knows. It was from the sixties-we could tell that because of the absorption of the ink. The archivists think that the forger was a right-winger who'd planted the letter to take some of the wind out of the civil rights movement. Anyway, from then on I was hooked."

Parker gave Lukas his curriculum vitae. He had an M.S. in forensics from George Washington University. And he was certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners in Houston. He was also in the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, the National Association of Document Examiners and the World Association of Document Examiners.

"I did free-lance work for a while but then I heard that the Bureau was looking for agent-examiners. Went to Quantico and the rest is history."

Lukas asked, "What appealed to you about Jefferson?"

Parker didn't even consider this. He responded, "He was a hero."

"We don't see many of them nowadays," Cage said.

"Oh, people aren't any different now than they ever were," Parker countered. "There've never been many heroes. But Jefferson was."

"Because he was a renaissance man?" Lukas asked.

"Because of his character, I think. His wife died in childbirth. Just about destroyed him. But he rose above it. He took over raising his daughters. He put the same amount of effort into deciding what kind of dress to buy Mary as he did in planning an irrigation system for the farm or interpreting the Constitution. I've read almost all of his letters. Nothing was too much of a challenge for him."

Lukas paused, looking at a window display of some chic clothes, a black dress. He noted she wasn't admiring it; her eyes took in the outfit the way she'd looked at the extortion note, analytically.