The Devils Teardrop

do you recall it? The one Mr. Chabroux painted of them by the well? I meant to bring it with me that their faces might sustain me in my darker moments.
    He forced himself not to think about the context of the letter and examined a line of ink where it crossed a fold in the paper. He observed there was no bleeding into the gully of the crease. Which meant the letter had been written before it was folded. He knew that Thomas Jefferson was fastidious about his writing habits and would never have written a letter on a piece of paper that had been previously folded. Score another point for the document. . . .
    Parker looked up, stretched. He reached forward and clicked on the radio. National Public Radio was broadcasting another story about the Metro shootings.
    “ . . . report that the death toll has risen to twenty-four. Five-year-old LaVelle Williams died of a gunshot wound. Her mother was wounded in the attack and is listed in critical—”
    He shut the radio off.
    Looking at the letter, moving his hand glass over the document slowly. Swooping in on a lift—where the writer finishes a word and raises the pen off the surface of the paper. This lift was typical of the way Jefferson ended his strokes.
    And the feathering of the ink in the paper?
    How ink is absorbed can tell you many things about the type of materials used and when the document was made. Over the years ink is drawn more and more intothe paper. The feathering here suggested it had been written long ago—easily two hundred years. But, as always, he took the information under advisement; there were ways to fake feathering.
    He heard the thud of the children’s feet on the stairs. They paused, then there were louder bangs as first one then the other jumped down the last three steps to the floor.
    “Daddy, we’re hungry,” Robby called from the top of the basement stairs.
    “I’ll be right there.”
    “Can we have grilled cheese?”
    “Please!” Stephie added.
    Parker clicked out the brilliant, white examination light on his table. He replaced the letter in his vault. He stood for a moment in the dim study, lit only by a fake Tiffany lamp in the corner, beside the old couch.
    I meant to bring it with me that their faces might sustain me in my darker moments.
    He climbed the stairs.

5
    “The weapon,” Margaret Lukas called abruptly. “I want the deets on the shooter’s weapon.”
    “You want what?” Cage asked.
    “Deets. De-tails.” She was used to her regular staff, who knew her expressions. And idiosyncrasies.
    “Any minute now,” C. P. Ardell called back. “That’s what they’re tellin’ me.”
    They were in one of the windowless rooms in the Bureau’s new Strategic Information and Operations Center on the fifth floor of headquarters on Ninth Street. The whole facility was nearly as big as a football field and had recently been expanded to let the agency handle as many as five major crises at once.
    Cage walked past Lukas and as he did so he whispered, “You’re doing fine.”
    Lukas didn’t respond. She caught sight of her reflection in one of the five-by-fifteen-foot video screens on the wall, on which was displayed the extortion note. Thinking: Am I? Am I doing fine? She hoped so. Lord,how she hoped that. The legend that went around the Bureau was that every agent got one chance to strike gold in his or her career. One chance to get noticed, one chance to move up exponentially.
    Well, this sure as hell was hers. An ASAC running a case like this. It never happened. Not in a . . . what had Cage said? Not in a month of blue Mondays.
    Looking past her reflection at the note, which glowed white with spidery black letters on the huge screen. What am I not thinking of? Lukas wondered. In her mind she ran through what she had thought of. She’d sent the dead unsub’s fingerprints to every major friction ridge database in the world. She had two dozen District cops trying to find the delivery truck that hit him, on the chance the unsub uttered some dying words to the driver (and had had miracle-worker Cage secure an immunity-from-prosecution waiver on the hit-and-run charge to induce the driver to talk). She had two dozen agents tracking down wits. Hundreds of tag numbers were being checked out. Handlers were milking CIs all over the country. Phone records in and out of City Hall for the past two weeks were being checked. She was—
    A call came in. Len Hardy started to pick up the phone but Cage got to it first. Hardy