The bag had been placed in the field just where the note had instructed. All the agents had backed off. And the waiting began.
Lukas knew her basic criminal behavior. Extortionists and kidnappers often get cold feet just before a ransom
pickup. But anyone willing to murder twenty-three people wasn’t going to balk now. She couldn’t understand why the perp hadn’t even approached the drop.
She was sweating; the weather was oddly warm for the last day of the year and the air was sickly sweet. Like fall. Margaret Lukas hated autumn. She’d rather have been lying in the snow than waiting in this purgatory of a season.
“Where are you?” she muttered. “Where?” She rocked slightly, feeling the pain of pressure on her hipbones. She was muscular but thin, with very little padding to protect her from the ground. She compulsively scanned the field once more though Geller’s complex sensors would have picked up the unsub long before her blue-gray eyes could spot him.
“Hmm.” C. P. Ardell, a heavy-set agent Lukas worked with sometimes, squeezed his earphone and listened. Nodded his bald, pale head. He glanced at Lukas. “That was Charlie position. Nobody’s gone off the road in the woods.”
Lukas grunted. So maybe she was wrong. She’d thought the unsub would come at the money from the west—through a row of trees a half mile away from the expressway. She believed that he’d be driving a Hummer or a Range Rover. Would snag one of the bags—sacrificing the other for the sake of expediency—and disappear back into the woods.
“Bravo position?” she asked.
“I’ll check,” said C. P., who worked undercover often because of his unfortunate resemblance to a Manassas drug cooker or a Hell’s Angel charter member. He seemed to be the most patient of all the agents on the stakeout; he hadn’t moved his 250-pound frame an inch
since they’d been here. He made the call to the southernmost surveillance post.
“Nothing. Kids on a four-wheeler is all. Nobody older than twelve.”
“Our people didn’t chase ’em away, did they?” Lukas asked. “The kids?”
“Nup.”
“Good. Make sure they don’t.”
More time passed. Hardy jotted notes. Geller typed on his keyboard. Cage fidgeted and C. P. did not.
“Your wife mad?” Lukas asked Cage. “You working the holiday?”
Cage shrugged. It was his favorite gesture. He had a whole vocabulary of shrugs. Cage was a senior agent at FBI headquarters and though his assignments took him all over the country he was usually primary on cases involving the District; he and Lukas worked together often. Along with Lukas’s boss too, the special agent in charge of the Washington, D.C., field office. This week, though, SAC Ron Cohen happened to be in a Brazilian rainforest on his first vacation in six years and Lukas had stepped up to the case. Largely because of Cage’s recommendation.
She felt bad for Cage and Geller and C. P., working a holiday. They had dates for tonight or wives. As for Len Hardy she was happy he was here; he had some pretty good reasons to keep himself busy on holidays and this was one of the reasons that she had welcomed him to the METSHOOT team.
Lukas herself had a comfortable home in Georgetown, a place filled with antique furniture, needlepoints and embroideries and quilts of her own design, an erratic wine collection, nearly five hundred books, more than a
thousand CDs and her mixed-breed Labrador, Jean Luc. It was a very nice place to spend a holiday evening though in the three years she’d lived there Lukas had never once done so. Until her pager had signaled her ascension to the METSHOOT command she had planned to spend the night baby-sitting that Board of Education whistle-blower, Gary Moss, the one who’d broken the school construction kickback scandal. Moss had worn a wire and had picked up all sorts of good incriminating conversations. But his cover had been blown and the other day his house had been firebombed, his daughters nearly killed. Moss had sent his family to stay with relatives in North Carolina and he was spending the weekend in federal protection. Lukas had been in charge of his protection as well as handling the investigation into the firebombing. But then the Digger arrived and Moss was, at the moment, nothing more than a bored tenant in the very expensive apartment complex referred to among law enforcers as “Ninth Street”—FBI headquarters.
She now scanned the field again. No sign of the extortionist.
“He might be staking
us
out,” a tactical agent crouched behind a tree said. “You want a perimeter sweep?”
“No.”
“It’s standard procedure,” he persisted. “We could use five, six handoff cars. He’d never spot us.”
“Too risky,” she said.
“Uhm, you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Abrupt responses like this had earned Lukas a reputation in the Bureau for being arrogant. But she believed that arrogance is not necessarily a bad thing. It instills
confidence in those who work for you. It also gets you noticed by your bosses.
Her eyes flickered as a voice crackled in her earphone, speaking her name.
“Go ahead,” she said into the stalk mike, recognizing the voice of the deputy director of the Bureau.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said.
She hated dramatics. “What?” she asked, not caring a bit about the abrasion in her voice.
The dep director said, “There was a hit-and-run near City Hall a little while ago. White male. He was killed. No ID on him. Nothing at all, just an apartment key—no address—and some money. The cop who responded’d heard about the extortion thing and, since it was near City Hall, thought there might be a connection.”
She understood immediately. “They compared prints?” she asked. “His and the ones on the extortion note?”
“That’s right. The dead guy’s the one who wrote the note, the shooter’s partner.”
Lukas remembered part of the note. It went something like:
If you kill me, he will keep killing.
Nothing can stop the Digger . . .
“You’ve got to find the shooter, Margaret,” the deputy director said. There was a pause as, apparently, he looked at his watch. “You’ve got to find him in three hours.”
* * *
Is it real? Parker Kincaid wondered.
Bending over the rectangle of paper, peering through his heavy, ten-power hand glass. Joan had been gone for
several hours but the effect of her visit—the dismay—still lingered, trying though he was to lose himself in his work.
The letter he examined—on yellowing paper—was encased in a thin, strong poly sleeve but when he eased it closer to him he did so very carefully. The way you’d touch a baby’s red, fat face. He adjusted the light and swooped in on the loop of the lowercase letter
y
.
Is it real?
It
appeared
to be real. But in his profession Parker Kincaid never put great stock in appearances.
He wanted badly to touch the document, to feel the rag paper, made with so little acid that it could last as long as steel. He wanted to feel the faint ridge of the iron-gallide ink, which, to his sensitive fingers, would seem as raised as braille. But he didn’t dare take the paper from the sleeve; even the slightest oil from his hands would start to erode the thin letter. Which would be a disaster since it was worth perhaps $50,000.
If
it was real.
Upstairs, Stephie was navigating Mario through his surreal universe. Robby was at Parker’s feet, accompanied by Han Solo and Chewbacca. The basement study was a cozy place, paneled in teak, carpeted in forest-green pile. On the walls were framed documents—the less valuable items in Parker’s collection. Letters from Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Bobby Kennedy, the Old West artist Charles Russell. Many others. On one wall was a rogues’ gallery—forgeries Parker had come across in his work.
Parker’s favorite wall, though, was the one opposite the stool he sat on. This wall contained his children’s drawings and poems, going back over the past eight
years. From scrawls and illegible block letters to samples of their cursive writing. He often paused in his work and looked at them. Doing so had given him the idea about writing a book on how handwriting mirrors children’s development.
He now sat on the comfortable stool at an immaculate white examination table. The room was silent. Normally he’d have the radio on, listening to jazz or classical music. But there’d been a terrible shooting in the District and all the stations were having special reports on the slaughter. Parker didn’t want Robby to hear the stories, especially after the boy’s flashback to the Boatman.
He hunched over the letter, eagerly, the way a jeweler appraises a beautiful yellow stone, ready to declare it false if that’s how he saw it but secretly hoping that it will turn out to be rare topaz.
“What’s that?” Robby asked, standing and looking at the letter.
“It’s what came in the truck yesterday,” Parker said, squinting as he checked out an uppercase
K
, which can be written a number of different ways and therefore is very useful in handwriting analysis.
“Oh, the armored car. That was neat.”
It
was
neat. But it didn’t answer the boy’s question. Parker continued. “You know Thomas Jefferson?”
“Third president. Oh, and he lived in Virginia. Like us.”
“Good. This’s a letter that somebody thinks he wrote. They want me to check it and make sure.”
One of the more difficult conversations he’d had with Robby and Stephie was explaining what he did for a living. Not the technical part of being a questioned document examiner. But that people would forge letters and documents and try to claim they were real.
“What’s it say?” the boy asked.
Parker didn’t answer right away. Oh, answers were important to him. He was, after all, a puzzle master—his lifelong hobby was riddles and word games and brain-teasers. He believed in answers and he tried never to defer responding to his children’s questions. When a mother or father said, “Later,” it was usually for
their
convenience, hoping the child would forget the question. But the content of this letter made him hedge. After a moment he said, “It’s a letter Jefferson wrote to his oldest daughter.” This much was true. But Parker didn’t go on and tell the boy that the subject of the letter was Mary—his second daughter—who had died of complications from childbirth, as had Jefferson’s wife some years before. He read:
Back here in Washington I live under a sorrowful pall, haunted as I am by visions of Polly on horseback and running along the porch in good-natured defiance of my prescriptions to her to exercise more caution. . . .
Parker, certified document examiner, struggled to ignore the sadness he felt reading those words. Concentrate, he told himself, though the terrible image of a father being deprived of one of his children kept intruding.
A sorrowful pall . . .
Concentrate.
He observed that the girl’s nickname in the letter was what Jefferson would have used—born “Mary,” the girl was called “Polly” by her family—and that the punctuation-sparse style was typically Jeffersonian. These
attested to authenticity. So did some of the events that the letter referred to; they had in fact occurred in Jefferson’s life and had done so around the time the letter had purportedly been written.
Yes, textually at least, the letter seemed real.
But that was only half the game. Document examiners are not only linguists and historians, they are scientists too. Parker still had to perform the physical examination of the letter.
As he was about to slip it under one of his Bausch & Lomb compound microscopes the doorbell rang again.
Oh, no . . . Parker closed his eyes. It was Joan. He knew it. She’d picked up her dogs and returned to complicate his life further. Maybe she had the social worker with her now. A surprise commando raid . . .
“I’ll get it,” Robby said.
“No,” Parker said quickly. Too quickly. The boy was unnerved by his abrupt reaction.
Father smiled at son. “I’ll go.” And slid off the stool, climbed the stairs.
He was mad now. He was determined that the Whos would have a fun New Year’s Eve, despite their mother. He flung the door open.
Well . . .
“Hello, Parker.”
It took him a second to remember the name of the tall, gray-haired man. He hadn’t seen the agent for years. Then he recalled. “Cage.”
He didn’t recognize the woman standing beside him.
“How you doin’, Parker?
Never expected to see me in a month of blue Mondays, did you? Wait, I’m mixing up my expressions. But you get the picture.”
The agent had changed very little. A bit grayer. A little more gaunt. He seemed taller. Parker remembered that Cage was exactly fifteen years older than he. They shared June as a birth month. Gemini. Yin-yang.
From the corner of his eye Parker saw Robby appear in the hallway with his coconspirator, Stephie. Word of visitors spreads fast in a household of children. They edged closer to the door, gazing out at Cage and the woman.
Parker turned and bent down. “Don’t you two have something to do up in your rooms? Something
very
important?”
“No,” Stephie said.
“Uh-uh,” Robby confirmed.
“Well, I think you do.”
“What?”
“How many Legos are on the floor? How many Micro Machines?”
“A couple,” Robby tried.
“A couple of
hundred?
”
“Well,” the boy said, grinning.
“Upstairs now . . . Up, up, or the monster’ll take you up there himself. Do you want the monster?
Do
you?”
“No!” Stephie shrieked.
“Go on,” Parker said, laughing. “Let Daddy talk to his friend here.”
As they started up the stairs Cage said, “Oh, not hardly a friend. Right, Parker?”
He didn’t respond. He closed the door behind him and turned back, appraising the woman. She was in her thirties, with a narrow, smooth face. Pale, nothing like Joan’s relentless tan. She wasn’t looking at Parker but was watching Robby climb the stairs through the lace-curtained window beside the door. She then turned her attention to him and reached out a strong hand with long fingers. She shook his hand firmly. “I’m Margaret Lukas. ASAC at the Washington field office.”