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.
A wife without a husband, a mother without a child . . .
Give up, Parker?
I’m
the answer to the riddle. Because I’m the wife of a man lying in the cold ground in Alexandria Cemetery. Because I’m the mother of a child lying beside him.
The riddle of the wife and mother . . .
Here’s another: How can ice burn?
When an airplane drops from the sky into a field on a dark November morning, two days before Thanksgiving, six days before your birthday, a hot autumn day, and explodes into a million fragile bits of metal and plastic and rubber.
And flesh.
That’s how ice can burn.
And that’s how I became a changeling.
Oh, puzzles
are
easy when you know the answer, Parker.
So simple, so simple . . .
Hold on, she thought, letting go of the lamppost. Taking a deep breath. Locking away the urge to cry. Enough of that.
One thing Special Agent Lukas didn’t tolerate was distraction. She had two rules she repeated endlessly to new recruits in the field office. The first was “You can never have too many deets.” The second was “Focus.”
And “focus” was what she now ordered herself to do.
Another breath. She looked around. Saw some motion in a vacant lot nearby—a young kid, wearing gang colors. He stood over an oil drum, waiting for some of his homeys. He had a teenager’s attitude—which was a hell of a lot more dangerous than a thirty-year-old’s, she knew. He gave her the eyeball.
Then up the street, a block away, she thought she saw a man in the alcove of a check-cashing store. She squinted. Was anybody there? Somebody hiding in the shadows?
No, there was no more motion. It must’ve been her imagination. Well, this’s the place to get spooked.
Gravesend . . .
She tossed out the remains of the coffee and walked toward the teenager in the vacant lot to see if he knew anything about their mysterious unsub. Pulling the computer printout from her pocket, she wove easily around rusting auto parts and piles of trash—the same way
Jackie
Lukas used to maneuver through the perfume counters at Macy’s on her way to a drop-dead sale in women’s sportswear.
* * *
Parker stepped away from the thrift store, disappointed.
The stationery he’d seen inside wasn’t the same as the extortion note or the envelope. He looked around the streets. He was shivering hard. He thought: Stephie’s outgrown her down jacket. I’ll have to get her a new one. And what about Robby? He had the fiberfill, the red one, but maybe Parker would get the boy a leather bomber jacket. He liked his father’s.
He shivered again and rocked on his feet.
Where the hell was that van? They needed the on-line service subscriber list. And the demolition and construction permit information. And the shrink. He wondered too what the tape of the shooting would show.
Parker looked around once more at the devastated streets. No Lukas, no Cage. He watched a young couple—they looked Hispanic—wheeling a baby carriage toward him. They were about thirty feet away. He
thought about the times just after Robby was born when he and Joan would take after-dinner strolls like that.
Again his eye caught the man huddling in the check-cashing alcove. Absently wondered why he was still there. He decided to be useful and fished in his pocket for a picture of the unsub. He’d do some canvassing himself.
But something odd was happening. . . .
The man looked up and, though Parker couldn’t see clearly through the dim light and smoke from the oil drums, reached into his coat and pulled something out, something black, shiny.
Parker froze. It was the man who’d followed them near the Archives!
It was the Digger!
Parker reached into his pocket, for the gun.
But the gun wasn’t there.
He remembered the pistol pressing into his hip as he sat in Cage’s car and he’d adjusted it in his pocket. It must have fallen out into the front seat.
The man glanced at the couple, who were between him and Parker, and lifted what must have been the silenced Uzi.
“Get down!” Parker cried to the couple, who stopped walking and stared at him uncertainly. “Down!”
The Digger turned toward him and lifted the gun. Parker tried to leap into the shadows of an alley. But he tripped over a pile of trash and fell heavily to the ground. His breath was knocked out of him and he lay on his side, gasping, unable to move, as the man walked steadily closer. Parker called to the couple once more but his voice came out as a breathy gasp.
Where was Cage? Parker couldn’t see him. Or Lukas or any of the other agents.
“Cage!” he called but his voice was still merely a whisper.
The Digger approached the couple, only ten feet from him. They still didn’t see him.
Parker tried to climb to his feet, waving desperately to the young man and woman to get down. The Digger moved forward, his round face an emotionless mask. One squeeze of the trigger and the couple and their baby would die instantly.
The killer aimed his gun.
“Get . . . down!” Parker rasped.
Then a woman’s brash voice was shouting, “Freeze, federal agents! Drop the weapon or we’ll shoot!”
The attacker turned, gave a choked cry as the couple spun around. The husband pushed his wife to the ground and shielded the baby carriage with his body.
“Drop it, drop it, drop it!” Lukas continued, screaming now, moving forward steadily, hand extended in front of her, drawing a perfect target on the man’s large chest.
The Digger dropped the gun and his hands shot into the air.
Cage was running across the street, his own weapon in his hand.
“On your face!” Lukas shouted. “On your face!”
Her voice was so primitive, so raw, that Parker hardly recognized it.
The man dropped like a log.
Cage was speaking into his phone, summoning backup. Parker could see several other agents sprinting toward them. He climbed unsteadily to his feet.
Lukas was crouched on the ground, her gun pressed into the killer’s ear.
“No, no, no,” the man wailed. “No, please . . .”
She cuffed him, using only her left hand, the gun never wavering from its target.
“What the hell’re—” he choked.
“Shut up!” Lukas snapped. She pushed her weapon harder into the man’s head. Steam rose from the man’s groin; he’d emptied his bladder in fear.
Parker held his side, struggling to fill his lungs.
Lukas, breathing deeply herself, backed away and holstered her weapon. She stepped into the street, eyes contracted and icy, glancing at Parker then at the suspect. She walked to the shaken couple and spoke to them for a few moments. Wrote their names in her notebook and sent them on their way. The father glanced uncertainly at Parker then ushered his wife down a side street, away from the staging area.
As Cage frisked the attacker one of the other agents walked over to the man’s weapon and picked it up.
“Not a gun. It’s a video camera.”
“What?” Cage asked.
Parker frowned. It
was
a camera. It had broken in the fall to the concrete.
Cage stood. “He’s clean.” He flipped through the man’s snakeskin wallet. “Andrew Sloan. Lives in Rockville.”
One of the other agents pulled out his radio and called in a warrants request—federal, Maryland and Virginia.
“You can’t—” Sloan began to protest.
Lukas took a step forward. “You keep your mouth shut until we tell you to answer!” she raged. “Understand?” Her anger was almost embarrassing. When he didn’t answer she crouched and whispered in Sloan’s ear, “You got me?”
“I got you,” he responded in a numb voice.
Cage pulled one of Sloan’s business cards from his wallet. Showed it to Lukas and Parker. It read northeast security consultants. Cage added, “He’s a private eye.”
“No warrants,” said the agent who’d called in the request.
Lukas nodded at Cage.
“Who’s your client?” Cage asked.
“I don’t have to answer.”
“Yeah, Andy, you do have to answer,” Cage said.
“My client’s identity is confidential,” Sloan recited.
Two more agents arrived. “Under control?” one asked.
“Yeah,” Cage muttered. “Get him up.”
They pulled him roughly into a sitting position. Left him on the curb. Sloan glanced down at the front of his pants. The wet spot didn’t embarrass as much as infuriate him. “Asshole,” he muttered to Cage. “I got a law degree. I know my rights. I wanta take a video of you beating off in the bushes, I can do it. I’m on a public street here and—”
Lukas came up behind him, bent down. “Who . . . is . . . your . . . client?”
But Parker leaned forward, motioned Cage out of the streetlight so he could get a better look. “Wait. I know him.”
“You do?” Lukas asked.
“Yeah. I saw him at the Starbucks near me. And I think someplace else too in the last couple of days.”
Cage kicked the man gently in the leg. “You been following my friend here? Huh? You been doing that?”
Oh, no, Parker thought, finally understanding. Oh, Jesus . . . He said, “His client’s Joan Marel.”
“Who?”
“My ex-wife.”
There was no reaction in Sloan’s face.
Parker was in despair. He closed his eyes. Shit, shit, shit . . . Until tonight every foot of tape the private eye might’ve shot would have shown Parker to be a diligent father. Going to PTO meetings, chauffeuring twenty miles a day to school and sports practices, cooking, shopping, cleaning, wiping tears and working on Suzuki piano with the Whos.
But tonight . . . of all nights. Sloan was an eyewitness to Parker’s being right smack in the middle of one of the city’s most dangerous police actions. In harm’s way, his children lied to and entrusted to a baby-sitter on a holiday . . .
Mr. Kincaid, as you know, the judicial system will bend over backwards to place the children with their mother. In this case, however, we are inclined to place them with you, subject to the caveat that you can assure the court there will be no possibility that your career will in any way jeopardize the well-being of Robby and Stephanie . . .
“That right?” Cage asked Sloan ominously.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. She hired me.”
Cage saw Parker’s expression and asked, “This a problem?”
“Yeah, it’s a problem.”
It’s the end of the world . . .
Cage surveyed the private eye. “The custody fight thing?” he asked Parker.
“Yes.”
In disgust Lukas said, “Get him outa here. Give him back his camera.”