The Devils Teardrop

Cage.”
    “I’m focused. You’re focused. He doesn’t know why you’re pissed at him.”
    “Very simple. He wasn’t being part of the team. I told him that. We settled it. End of story.”
    “He’s decent,” Cage offered. “A stand-up guy. And he’s smart—his mind’s a weird thing. You should see him with those puzzles of his.”
    “Yeah. I’m sure he’s great.”
    Focus .
    But she wasn’t focusing. She was thinking about Kincaid.
    So he had his own capital I Incidents—deaths and divorce. A hard wife and a struggle to raise the children by himself. That explained some of what she’d seen before.
    Kincaid . . .
    And thinking about him, the document examiner, she thought again about the postcard.
    Joey’s postcard.
    On the trip from which they’d never returned, Tom and Joey had been visiting her in-laws in Ohio. It was just before Thanksgiving. Her six-year-old son had mailed her a postcard from the airport before they boarded the doomed plane. Probably not a half hour before the 737 had crashed into the icy field.
    But the boy hadn’t known you needed a stamp to mail postcards. He must have slipped it into the mailbox before his father knew what he was doing.
    It arrived a week after the funeral. Postage due. She’d paid for it and for the next three hours carefully peeledoff the Postal Service sticker that had covered up part of her son’s writing.
    Were having fun mommy. Granma and
    I made cookys
    I miss you. I love you mommy . . .
    A card from the ghost of her son.
    It was in her purse right now, the gaudy picture of a sunset in the Midwest. Her wedding ring was stored in her jewelry box but this card she kept with her all the time and would until she died.
    Six months after the crash Lukas had taken a copy of the card to a graphoanalyst and had her son’s handwriting analyzed.
    The woman had said, “Whoever wrote this is creative and charming. He’ll grow up to be a handsome man. And brilliant, with no patience for deception. He also has a great capacity for love. You’re a very lucky woman to have a son like this.”
    For ten dollars more the graphoanalyst had tape-recorded her comments. Lukas listened to the tape every few weeks. She’d sit by herself in her dark living room, put a candle on, have a drink—or two—and listen to what her son would have been like.
    Then Parker Kincaid shows up at FBI headquarters and announces with that know-all voice of his that graphoanalysis is nonsense.
    People read tarot cards too and talk to their dear departed. It’s bogus.
    It’s not! she now raged to herself. She believed what the graphoanalyst had told her.
    She had to. Otherwise she’d go insane.
    It’s as if you lose a part of your mind when you have children. They steal it and you never get it back . . . Sometimes I’m amazed that parents can function at all.
    Dr. Evans’s observation. She hadn’t let on at the time but she knew it was completely true.
    And here was Cage trying to set her up. So, she and Kincaid were similar. They were smart (and, yes, arrogant). They were both missing parts of their lives. They both had their protective walls—his to keep the danger out, hers to keep herself from retreating inside, where the worst danger lay. Yet the same instincts that made her a good cop told her—for no reason that she could articulate—that there was no future between them. She had returned to a “normal” life as much as she ever could. She had her dog, Jean Luc. She had some friends. She had her CDs. Her runners’ club. Her sewing. But Margaret Lukas was emotionally “plateaued,” to use the Bureau term for an agent no longer destined for advancement.
    No, she knew she’d never see Parker Kincaid after tonight. And that was perfectly all right—
    The earphone crackled. “Margaret . . . Jesus Christ.” It was C. P. Ardell, stationed downstairs.
    Instantly she drew her weapon.
    “You have the subject?” she whispered fiercely into her lapel mike.
    “No,” the agent said. “But we’ve got a problem. It’s a mess down here.”
    Cage too was listening. His hand strayed to his own weapon as he looked at Lukas, frowning.
    C. P. continued. “It’s the mayor. He’s here with a dozen cops and, fuck, a camera crew too.”
    “No!” Lukas snapped, drawing the attention of a cluster of partyers nearby.
    “They got lights and everything. The shooter sees this, he’ll take off. It’s like a circus.”
    “I’ll be right there.”
    * * *
    “Your