What . . . ?
A moment later Parker Kincaid was breathing deeply. Content in the sleep of a parent whose children were close in his arms, and there is no sleep better than that.
* * *
When he opened his eyes it was five minutes to ten in the morning.
Parker had been awakened by the sound of a car door slamming and Joan’s voice saying, “We’re a few minutes early but I’m sure he won’t mind. Watch your step—he knew we were coming and he didn’t bother to shovel the walk. Typical. Typical.”
He rolled
from the bed.
Nauseous, head throbbing, he looked out the window.
Joan was walking toward the house. Richard was with her, bringing up the rear, sullen. He didn’t want to be here. And another woman too—the social worker. Short, clattering along on stocky heels, looking at the house appraisingly.
They walked to the front door. The bell rang.
Hopeless . . .
He stood in the upstairs hallway, toes curling on the carpet. Well, just don’t let her in, he told himself. He’d stonewall. Make her get a court order. That would buy a couple of hours.
Parker paused, looked at his sleeping children. He wanted to grab them and escape out the back door, drive away to West Virginia.
But that would never work, he knew.
The bell rang again.
What can I do? How can I stall?
But Joan would still know something was wrong. Stalling would make the paranoid woman even more suspicious. And what would two or three hours buy him?
He took a deep breath and started down the stairs.
What could he possibly say about the bullet holes in the walls? The blood? Maybe he could—
Parker stopped at the landing.
Stunned.
A thin, blond woman in a long, black skirt and white blouse, her back to Parker, was opening the door.
Which was surprising enough. But what truly shocked him was the condition of the house.
Immaculate.
Not a piece of broken porcelain or glass anywhere. Not a bullet hole in any of the walls. They’d been plastered and primed; buckets of paint sat in the corner of the living room on white tarps. The chair that had been peppered with bullets last night had been replaced by a similar one. There was a new breakfront.
And the Digger’s corpse—gone. On the spot where he’d died was a new oriental carpet.
With Joan, Richard and the social worker standing in the doorway, the woman in the dark skirt turned. “Oh, Parker,” said Margaret Lukas.
“Yes,” he answered after a moment.
She smiled in a curious way.
He tried again. “Morning.”
“How was your nap?” she asked. Then prompted, “Good?”
“Yes,” he said. “It was good.”
Lukas turned back and nodded to the visitors. She said to Joan, “You must be Parker’s wife.”
“Ex-wife,” Joan said, stepping inside. The social
worker—a pudgy brunette—entered next, followed by handsome and impeccably slow-witted Richard.
Parker continued down the stairs and couldn’t resist touching a wall where he
knew
he’d seen a cluster of bullets strike last night. The plasterboard was smooth as Stephie’s cheek.
He had a terrible pain in his shoulder and head from where he’d dived to the floor last night as the Digger came through the kitchen door. But if not for that he’d have thought the entire attack was a dream.
He realized that Joan was staring at him with a put-out smile on her face. “I said, ‘Hello, Parker.’”
“Morning, Joan,” he said. “Hello, Richard.” Parker walked into the middle of the living room and kissed Joan’s cheek, shook her husband’s hand. Richard carried a shopping bag of stuffed animals.
Joan didn’t introduce Parker to the social worker but the woman stepped forward. She shook his hand. She may or may not have given her name. Parker was too dumbfounded to notice.
Joan looked at Lukas, “I don’t think we’ve met. You’re . . .”
“Jackie Lukas. I’m a friend of Parker’s.”
Jackie?
Parker lifted an eyebrow. The agent noticed but said nothing about the name.
Joan glanced at Lukas’s trim figure with a neutral look. Then her eyes—the color so reminiscent of Robby’s, the cynical expression so different—took in the living room.
“Did you? . . . What did you do? Redecorate or something? I didn’t notice it last night.”
“I had some free time. Thought I’d fix things up a little.”
His ex studied him. “You look awful, Parker. Didn’t you sleep well?”
Lukas laughed. Joan glanced at her.
“Parker invites me over for breakfast,” Lukas explained, offering the two women a look of female conspiracy. “Then he goes upstairs to wake up the children and what’s he do but fall back asleep.”
Joan’s grunt repeated what she’d said earlier: Typical.
Where was the blood? There’d been a lot of blood.
Lukas asked the guests, “You want some coffee? A sweet roll? Parker made them himself.”
“I’ll have some coffee,” the social worker said. “And maybe I’ll have half a roll.”
“They’re small,” Lukas said. “Have a whole one.”
“Maybe I just will.”
Lukas disappeared into the kitchen and came back a moment later with a tray. She said, “Parker’s quite the cook.”
“I
know
,” Joan answered, unimpressed with her ex-husband’s talents.
Lukas handed out coffee cups and asked Parker, “What time did you get back from the hospital last night?”
“Uhm.”
“The hospital? Were the children sick?” Joan asked this with melodramatic concern, glancing at the social worker.
“He was visiting a friend,” Lukas responded.
“I don’t know what time,” Parker said. “It was late?” The answer was largely a question; Lukas was the writer of this scene and he felt he should defer to her script.
“What friend?” Joan demanded.
“Harold Cage,” Lukas said. “He’ll be all right. Just a broken rib. Isn’t that what they said?”
“Broken rib.”
“Slipped and fell, right?” Lukas continued her award-winning performance.
“Right,” Parker recited. “Slipped and fell.”
He sipped the coffee that Lukas had put in his hand.
The social worker ate a second sweet roll. “Say, could I get the recipe for these?”
“Sure,” Parker said.
Joan kept a benign smile on her face. She walked around the living room, examining. “The place looks all different.” As she passed her ex-husband she whispered, “So, Parker, sleeping with skinny little Jackie, are we?”
“No, Joan. We’re just friends.”
“Ah.”
“I’ll get some more coffee,” Lukas said.
“I’ll help you,” Parker said.
In the kitchen he swung the door closed and turned to Lukas. He whispered, “How? How on earth . . . ?”
She laughed—undoubtedly at the expression on his face. “You called Detention last night. Said you were spooked. Night watch called me. I tried to call you. Bell Atlantic said your line’d been cut. Fairfax County SWAT got here around three-thirty on a silent roll-in and found a dead body downstairs and you in bed taking a nap. Who was the shooter who got the Digger? Wasn’t you, right?”
“Some kid. He said the Digger killed his father. The Digger brought him here with him. Don’t ask me why. The boy just took off . . . Now answer one for me—who was the body on the bus?”
“The bus driver. We figure the Digger kept him alive and then made him run for the exit in the back. Then Digger shot him then the gas tank and when the fire started he climbed out one of the windows. Used the
smoke for cover. Got away through the traffic jam. Smarter than he seemed.”
But Parker shook his head. “No, it was Fielding. He told the Digger to do that. He wasn’t going to sacrifice his boy at all. This wasn’t going to be their last job. They probably had years of this ahead of them . . . But the house.” Parker waved his arms. “How—?”
“That was Cage. He made a few calls.”
The miracle worker.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“We got you into this mess. It’s the least we could do.”
Parker wouldn’t argue with that.
“Wait . . . What did you call yourself? Jackie?”
She hesitated. “Nickname,” she said. “It’s what my family calls me. I don’t use it much.”
There were footsteps on the stairs, soft thuds as the children came down to the living room. Parker and Lukas could hear the voices through the kitchen door: “Mommy! Hey!”
“Hello, both of you,” Joan said. “Here, here . . . This is for you.”
Rustling of paper.
“Do you like them?” Joan asked. “Do you?”
Stephie’s dubious voice said, “Oh, it’s Barney.”
Robby laughed out loud. Then he groaned. “And Big Bird.”
Parker shook his head at his ex-wife’s incompetence and gave Lukas a smile. But she didn’t notice. Her head was turned toward the living room, drawn hypnotically toward the sound of the children’s voices. After a moment she looked out the window and stared at the falling snow. Finally she said, “So that’s your wife. You two don’t seem much alike.”
Parker laughed. What Lukas really meant was: How the hell did you end up with her?
A legitimate question and one he’d be happy to answer. But doing so would require a lot more time than they had right at the moment. And would also have to be part of a complicated ritual involving her sharing at least
some
of the answers to the puzzle of Margaret—or Jackie—Lukas.
And what a puzzle she was: Parker looked her over—the makeup, the jewelry. The softness of the white silk blouse, the delicate lace of the lingerie beneath it. And she was wearing perfume today, not just fragrant soap. What did it remind him of? He couldn’t tell.
She glanced at his perusing eyes.
Caught once again. He didn’t care.
Parker said, “You don’t look like an FBI agent.”
“Undercover,” Lukas said, finally laughing. “I used to be really good at it. I played a Mafia hit man’s wife once.”
“Italian? With that hair?”
“I had Miss Clairol for backup.” Neither said anything for a moment. “I’ll stay until she leaves. Thought a hint of a domestic life might help you out with the social worker.”
“It’s above and beyond the call,” he said.
She gave a shrug worthy of Cage.
“Look,” he said, “I know you said you had plans. But the Whos and I were going to do some yard work.”
“In the snow?”
“Right. Cut down some bushes in the backyard. Then we were going sledding? What it is, we don’t get much snow here?”
He stopped speaking. Ending declarative sentences with interrogatory inflection? And he actually began a
sentence with “What it is.” The forensic linguist within him was not pleased. Nervous, are we? He continued. “I don’t know if you’d be interested, but . . .” He stopped once again.
“Is that an invitation?” Lukas asked.
“Uhm. Yes, it is.”
“Those plans I had?” she said. “I was going to clean up my house and finish sewing a blouse for a friend’s daughter.”
“Is that an acceptance?”
A tentative smile. “I guess it is.” Silence for a moment. “Say, how’s the coffee? I don’t make it very often. Usually I just go to Starbucks.”
“Good,” he answered.
She was facing the window. But her eyes moved once more toward the door; she was listening to the sound of the children. She turned back to Parker. “Oh, I’ve figured it out.”
“What?”
“The puzzle.”
“Puzzle?”
“How many hawks were left on the roof. This morning, sitting here, I figured it out.”
“Okay. Go ahead.”
“It’s a trick question. There’s more than one answer.”
“That’s good,” Parker said, “but that doesn’t mean it’s a trick question. It just means you’re thinking the right way—you’ve realized that a legitimate answer is that there are several possible solutions. It’s the first thing that puzzle masters learn.”
“See,” she continued, “you tend to think that all the facts you need are given in the puzzle but there are some that aren’t stated.”
Absolutely right. He nodded.
“And those facts have to do with the nature of hawks.”
“Ah,” Parker said, “and what does a hawk’s nature have to do with the puzzle?”
“Because,” she said, pointing a finger at him and revealing a sliver of girlishness he hadn’t seen before, “hawks might be scared off by a gunshot. But they might not. Because—remember?—they were far apart on the roof. That was a clue, right?”
“Right. Keep going.”
“Okay, the farmer shoots one bird off the roof but we don’t know what the other two do. They both might stay. So then the answer’d be there’re two left. Or one might fly off and that’d leave one. Or both might fly off, which’d leave none. So. Those’re the three answers.”
“Well,” Parker responded, “you were right to consider implied facts.”
She frowned. “What does that mean? Am I right or not?”
“You’re wrong.”
“But,” Lukas protested, “I have to be right.”
“No, you don’t.” He laughed.
“Well, I’m at least partly right, aren’t I?”
“There’s no such thing as partly right when it comes to puzzles. You want to know the answer?”
A hesitation. “No. That’d be cheating. I’m going to keep working on it.”
It was a good moment to kiss her and he did, briefly, then, as Lukas poured more coffee, Parker returned to the living room to hug his children and tell them good morning on the first day of the year.
In trying to solve Parker’s puzzle, Jackie Lukas’s mistake was in making an assumption: that the hawk the farmer shot would fall off the roof. It might not have. The question didn’t ask how many “living hawks” were left on the roof, just how many “hawks.” So the answer is this: Three hawks would remain if the dead hawk didn’t fall off and the other two don’t fly away. Two hawks, if the dead hawk didn’t fall off and one flies away or if the dead hawk does fall off and the other two stay. One hawk, if the dead hawk falls and one of the others flies away or if the dead hawk doesn’t fall and the others fly away. No hawks, if the dead hawk falls off the roof and the others fly away.
The author would like to thank Vernon Geberth, whose excellent book
Practical Homicide Investigation
is a milestone work in police procedure and has provided invaluable information in researching this and the author’s other books. The puzzles described in this book are variations on several contained in
Perplexing Lateral Thinking Puzzles
by Paul Sloane and Des MacHale.