The Devils Teardrop

around and looks at the boy some more. Tucks the blanket around his feet. He’s wearing tattered running shoes.
    A memory of someone speaking. Who? Pamela? William? The man who tells him things?
    “Sleep . . .”
    Click, click.
    Wait, wait, wait.
    “I want you to . . .” Click, click.
    Suddenly there is no Pamela, no Ruth with the glass in her neck, no man who tells him things. There is only Tye.
    “I want you to sleep well,” the Digger says to the boy’s still form. These are the words he wanted to say to him. He isn’t exactly sure what they mean. But he says them anyway.
    When I go to sleep at night,
    I love you all the more . . .
    He starts the car. He signals and checks his blind spot, then pulls out into traffic.

25
    The last location.
    . . . place I showed you—the black . . .
    Parker Kincaid stood in front of the blackboard in the Document Division lab. Hands on his hips. Staring at the puzzle in front of him . . . place I showed you—the black . . .
    “The black what?” Dr. Evans mused.
    Cage shrugged. Lukas was on the phone with the PERT crime scene experts on board the Ritzy Lady . She hung up and told the team that, as they’d expected, there were few solid leads. They’d found bullet casings with a few prints on them. They were being run through AFIS, and Identification was going to e-mail Lukas the results. There was no other physical evidence. Witnesses had reported a white man of indeterminate age in a dark coat. He carried a brown bag, which presumably held the machine gun. A bit of fiber had been recovered. Itwas from the bag, techs from PERT had decided, but was generic and provided no clues as to the source.
    Parker looked around, “Where’s Hardy?”
    Cage told him about the incident at the Ritz.
    “She fire him?” Parker asked, nodding toward Lukas.
    “No. Thought she should have but she gave him hell—and then a second chance. He’s in the research library downstairs. Trying to make amends.”
    Parker looked back at Geller. The young agent stared at the screen in front of him as the computer’s improvised anagram program vainly tried to assemble letters following the word “black.” The ash behind this word, however, was much more badly damaged than that in the Ritzy Lady notation.
    Parker paced for a moment then stopped. He stared up at the blackboard. He felt the queasy sense of nearly but not quite figuring out a clue. He sighed.
    He found himself standing next to Lukas. She asked him, “Your boy? Robby? Is he all right?”
    “He’s fine. Just a little scared.”
    She nodded. A computer nearby announced, “You’ve got mail.” She walked to it and read the message. Shook her head. “The prints on the shell casings’re from one of the passengers on the boat picking up souvenirs. He checks out.” She clicked the save button.
    Parker gazed at the screen. “That’s making me obsolete.”
    “What?”
    “E-mail,” he said. He looked at Lukas and added, “As a document examiner, I mean. Oh, people’re writing more than ever because of it, but—”
    “But there’s less handwriting nowadays,” she said, continuing his thought.
    “Right.”
    “That’ll be tough,” she said. “Lose a lot of good evidence that way.”
    “True. But for me that’s not what’s sad.”
    “Sad?” She looked at him. Her eyes were no longer stony but she seemed wary once again of an inartful term echoing in such an esteemed forensic lab.
    “For me,” he told her, “handwriting’s a part of a human being. Like our sense of humor or imagination. Think about it—it’s one of the only things about people that survives their death. Writing can last for hundreds of years. Thousands. It’s about as close to immortality as we can get.”
    “Part of the person?” she asked. “But you said graphoanalysis was bogus.”
    “No, I mean that whatever somebody wrote is still a reflection of who they are. It doesn’t matter how the words are made or what they say, even if they’re mistaken or nonsensical. Just the fact that someone thought of the words and their hands committed them to paper is what counts. It’s almost a miracle to me.”
    She was staring at the floor, her head down.
    Parker continued. “I’ve always thought of handwriting as a fingerprint of the heart and mind.” He laughed self-consciously at this, thinking that she might have another brusque reaction to a sentimental thought. But something odd happened. Margaret Lukas nodded and