Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

Lukas nodded toward a pizza parlor half a block away. "I'll take that," she said to Parker. "You want to wait here for Tobe and the shrink?"

"Sure."

Lukas started up the street, leaving Parker alone.

The temperature was continuing to fall. There was now a sharp edge to the air: that frostiness that he enjoyed so much in the autumn-evoking memories of driving the children to school while juggling mugs of hot chocolate, shopping for Thanksgiving dinner, picking pumpkins in Loudon County. But tonight he was aware only of the painful sting in his nostrils and on his ears and fingertips; the sensation was like a razor slash. He stuffed his hands in his pockets.

Maybe because most of the agents had left, the locals were returning to the streets. Two blocks away, a nondescript man in a dark coat stepped out of a bar and walked slowly up the street then stepped into the darkened alcove of a check-cashing outlet-to pee, Parker guessed.

A tall woman, or transvestite, obviously a hooker, walked out of the alley where she'd been waiting for the crowd to disburse.

Three young black men pushed out of an arcade and cracked open a bottle of Colt 45 malt liquor, laughing hard as they disappeared down an alley.

Parker turned away and happened to glance across the street.

He saw a thrift store. It was closed and at first he didn't pay much attention to the place. But then he noticed boxed sets of cheap stationery on shelves near the cash register. Could this be where the unsub had bought the paper and envelope for the note?

He stepped to the window of the store and gazed through the greasy glass, cupping his hands against the glare of the one nearby streetlight that still worked and trying to see the packages of paper. His hands shook in the chill. Beside him a rat nosed through a pile of trash. Parker Kincaid thought, This is crazy. I have no business being here.

But, still, he lifted his sleeve and, using the fleece cuff of his bomber jacket, wiped the grimy glass in front of him as carefully as a diligent window cleaner so that he'd have a better view of the merchandise inside.

"Maybe I seen him. Yeah, maybe."

Margaret Lukas felt her heart pump faster. She pushed the picture of the unsub closer and the counterman at the Gravesend pizza place-a chubby Latino in tomato-sauce-stained whites-continued to study it carefully.

"Take your time," she said. Please, she thought. Let's have a break here…

"Maybe. I no so sure. What it is, we get tons 'n' tons of people in here. You know?"

"Its very important," she said.

She'd remembered that the coroner had found steak in the belly of the unsub. There was no steak on the menu here. Still, it was the only twenty-four-hour restaurant on the street near the Metro stop and she figured that the unsub might have stopped in at some point in the past few weeks. Maybe he'd even planned the extortion scheme here-he might've sat under this sickly light at one of the chipped tables to draft the note as he looked around at the sad people eating greasy food and thought, arrogantly, how much smarter he was than they. How much richer he was about to be.

She laughed to herself. Maybe he'd been as smart and arrogant as she was. As much as Kincaid.

Three of them, all alike.

Three hawks on a roof. One's dead; that leaves two on the roof. You and me, Parker.

The clerk's brown eyes lifted, gazed into her blue ones. They dropped bashfully to the paper again. It seemed to be a personal defeat when he finally shook his head. "No, I no think so. Sorry. Hey, you want a slice? The double cheese, it's fresh. I just made it."

She shook her head. "Anybody else working here?"

"No, just me tonight. I got the holiday. You did too, looks like." He struggled for something to say. "You work many holidays?"

"Some," she said. "Thanks."

Lukas walked to the front door. She paused, looked outside.

The agents from the field office were canvassing across the street. Cage was talking to more gangstas in the vacant lot and Kincaid was ogling some thrift store as if the crown jewels were in the window.

The other agents were dispersed where she'd sent them. But had she been right? she wondered. Who knew? You can read all the books on investigative techniques ever written but the bottom line is improvisation. It was just like solving one of Kincaid's puzzles. You had to look beyond the formulas and rules.

In front of her, through the greasy windows, she could see the dilapidated streets of Gravesend fade into smoke and darkness. It seemed so large and impenetrable.

She wanted Tobe Geller here, she wanted the Georgetown psychologist, she wanted the list of on-line subscribers… Everything was taking too long! And there were far too few leads! Her hand balled into a fist, a nail pushing into her palm.

"Miss?" came the voice behind her. "Miss Agent? Here."

She turned. The anger dissipating like steam. The counterman was offering her a Styrofoam cup of coffee. In his other hand were two packets of sugar, a little plastic container of half-and-half and a stirrer.

The man had brushed his hair back with his hands and looked at her with a forlorn puppy gaze. He said simply, "It's getting colder out."

Touched by his oblique admiration, she smiled, took the cup and poured in one sugar.

"Hope you get some celebrating in tonight," he said.

"You too," she said. And pushed out of the door.

Walking down the cold streets of Gravesend.

She sipped the bad coffee, felt the hot steam waft around her mouth. It was getting colder.

Well, keep going, she thought. Get colder and colder. Today had been far too like autumn for her. Please… Snow like mad.

Scanning the street. The two agents from the field office were out of sight, probably on an adjacent block. Cage too had vanished. And Kincaid was still gazing into the store near the staging area.

Kincaid…

And what exactly was his story. Turning down a special-agent-in-charge slot? Lukas couldn't understand that-an SAC was the next destination on her roadmap to the dep director spot. And beyond. Still, even though she didn't comprehend his not wanting the position she respected him more for saying no than if he'd taken the job without wanting it.

What did explain the walls he'd put up around his life? She couldn't guess but she saw them clearly; Margaret Lukas knew walls. He reminded her of herself-or rather of her selves, plural. Jackie and Margaret both. Thinking of the changeling story she'd read years ago, she wondered what kind of books Parker read to his children. Dr. Seuss, of course-because of his nickname for them. And probably Pooh. And all the Disney spin-offs. She pictured him in that cozy suburban house-a house very similar to the one Jackie had lived in-sitting in the living room, a fire burning in the fireplace, reading to them as they lay sprawled at his side.

Lukas's eyes happened to fall on a young Latino couple walking down the sidewalk toward the staging area. The wife bundled in a black scarf, the husband in a thin jacket with a Texaco logo on the chest. He pushed a baby carriage, inside of which Lukas caught sight of a tiny infant, packed in swaddling, only its happy face visible. She thought instinctively about what kind of flannel she'd buy to sew the child a pair of pajamas.

Then the couple moved on.

Okay, Parker, you like puzzles, do you?

Well, here's one for you. The riddle of the wife and the mother.

How can you be a wife without a husband? How can you be a mother without a child?

It's a tricky one. But you're smart, you're arrogant, you're the third hawk. You can figure it out, Parker.

Lukas, alone on the nearly deserted street, leaned against a lamppost, curled her arm around it-her right arm, ignoring her own orders to keep shooting hands free. She gripped the metal hard, she gripped it desperately Struggled to keep from sobbing.