The Devils Teardrop

anguish, she knew he’d be all right. He’d survive this terrible time. Oh, he’d be changed, yes, but he’d be changed the way iron is changed into steel in a refinery’s white-hot coals.
    Changed . . .
    The way Lukas herself had.
    If you looked at Jacqueline Margaret Lukas’s birth certificate, the document would reveal that she’d been born on the last day of November 1963. But in her heart she knew she was just over five years old, having been born the day she graduated from the FBI Academy.
    She recalled a book she’d read a long time ago, a children’s story. The Wyckham Changeling. The picture of a happy elf on the cover didn’t hint at the eeriness of the story itself. The book was about an elf who’d sneak into homes in the middle of the night and switch babies—kidnap the human child and leave a changeling—an elfinbaby in its place. The story was about two parents who discover that their daughter had been switched and go on a quest to find her.
    Lukas remembered reading the book, curled up on a couch in her comfortable living room in Stafford, Virginia, near Quantico, postponing going to Safeway because of an unexpected blizzard. She’d been compelled to finish it—yes, the parents had found the girl and traded the elf baby back for her—but she had shivered at the unpleasant aftertaste of the book and had thrown it out.
    She’d forgotten about the story until she’d graduated from the Academy and been assigned to the Washington field office. Then one morning, walking to work, her Colt Python snug on her hip, a case file under her arm, she realized: That’s what I am—a changeling. Jackie Lukas had been a part-time librarian for the Bureau’s Quantico research facility, an amateur clothing designer who could whip up outfits for her friends and their children over a weekend. She’d been a quilter, needlepointer, wine collector (and drinker too), a consistently top finisher in local five-K races. But that woman was long gone, replaced by Special Agent Margaret Lukas, a woman who excelled in criminalistics, investigative techniques, the properties of C4 and Semtex explosives, the care and handling of confidential informants.
    “An FBI agent?” her perplexed father had asked during a visit to her parents’ Pacific Heights townhouse in San Francisco. She’d gone home to break the news to them. “You’re going to be an agent? Not like with a gun? You mean, you’ll work at a desk or something.”
    “With a gun. But I’ll bet they give me a desk too.”
    “I don’t get it,” the burly man, a retired loan officerfor Bank of America, said. “You were such a good student.”
    She laughed at the apparent non sequitur though she knew exactly what her father meant. An honor student at both St. Thomas High in Russian Hill and Stanford. The lean girl, who accepted dates too rarely and raised her hand in class too often, was destined for high places in academia or on Wall Street. No, no, he didn’t mind that Jackie was going to be toting guns and tackling killers; it was that she wouldn’t be using her mind .
    “But it’s the FBI, Dad. They’re the thinking cops.”
    “Yeah, I guess. But . . . is this what you want to do?”
    No, it was what she had to do. There was a gulf of a difference between the two verbs, wanted and had. But she didn’t know if he’d understand that. So she said a simple “Yes.”
    “Then that’s good enough for me.” Then he turned to his wife and said, “Our girl’s got mettle. You know what mettle is? M-e-t-t-l-e.”
    “I know,” Lukas’s mother called from the kitchen, “I do crosswords, remember. But you’ll be careful, Jackie? Promise me you’ll be careful.”
    As if she were about to cross a busy street.
    “I’ll be careful, Mom.”
    “Good. I made coq au vin for dinner. You like that, right?”
    And Jackie hugged her mother and her father and two days later flew back to Washington, D.C., to change into Margaret.
    After graduating she was assigned to the field office. She got to know the District, got to work with Cage, who was as good a changeling father as she could’ve asked for, and must have done something right because last yearshe was promoted to assistant special agent in charge. And now, with her boss photographing monkeys and lizards in a Brazilian rainforest, she was running the biggest case to hit Washington, D.C., in years.
    She now watched Len Hardy jotting his notes in the corner of the lab and thought, He’ll