The Devils Teardrop

began to think the handwriting didn’t look quite right. I bought a cheap magnifying glass and compared the writing with a known.”
    “And it was a fake?”
    “Right. I took it to a local document examiner and he analyzed it. Caused quite a stir—somebody slipping a forgery into the Jefferson archives, especially one like that. I got written up in the Post .”
    “Who’d done it?” Lukas asked.
    “Nobody knows. It was from the sixties—we could tell that because of the absorption of the ink. The archivists think that the forger was a right-winger who’d planted the letter to take some of the wind out of the civil rights movement. Anyway, from then on I was hooked.”
    Parker gave Lukas his curriculum vitae. He had an M.S. in forensics from George Washington University. And he was certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners in Houston. He was also in the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners,the National Association of Document Examiners and the World Association of Document Examiners.
    “I did free-lance work for a while but then I heard that the Bureau was looking for agent-examiners. Went to Quantico and the rest is history.”
    Lukas asked, “What appealed to you about Jefferson?”
    Parker didn’t even consider this. He responded, “He was a hero.”
    “We don’t see many of them nowadays,” Cage said.
    “Oh, people aren’t any different now than they ever were,” Parker countered. “There’ve never been many heroes. But Jefferson was.”
    “Because he was a renaissance man?” Lukas asked.
    “Because of his character, I think. His wife died in childbirth. Just about destroyed him. But he rose above it. He took over raising his daughters. He put the same amount of effort into deciding what kind of dress to buy Mary as he did in planning an irrigation system for the farm or interpreting the Constitution. I’ve read almost all of his letters. Nothing was too much of a challenge for him.”
    Lukas paused, looking at a window display of some chic clothes, a black dress. He noted she wasn’t admiring it; her eyes took in the outfit the way she’d looked at the extortion note, analytically.
    Parker was surprised something like this would distract her. But Cage said, “Margaret here’s one hell of a, whatta you call it, designer. Makes her own clothes. She’s great.”
    “Cage,” she chided absently.
    “You know anybody who does that?”
    No, Parker didn’t. He said nothing.
    She turned away from the window and they continueddown Pennsylvania Avenue, the stately Capitol ahead of them.
    Lukas asked him, “And you really turned down an SAC?”
    “Yep.”
    A faint laugh of disbelief.
    Parker remembered the day that Cage and the then deputy director came into the office to ask him if he’d leave the document department and run a field office. As Cage had observed on his front porch earlier that day Parker was not only good at analyzing documents; he was good at catching bad guys too.
    An agent or an assistant U.S. attorney would come to him with a simple question about a document. Maybe a suspected forgery, maybe a possible link between a perp and a crime scene. And sitting in his bonsai-tree-filled office in the lab Parker would relentlessly cross-examine the unfortunate law enforcer, who only wanted some technical information on the document. But that wasn’t enough for Parker.
    Where’d you find the letter? No, no—which drawer? Does the unsub have a wife? Where does she live? Did he have a dog? What were the circumstances of his last arrest?
    As one question led to another Parker Kincaid was soon talking less about whether the handwriting matched a signature in a DMV application and more about where the unsub would logically be hiding out. And he was nearly always right.
    But he’d had to turn the offer down. A special agent in charge works long hours and, at that time in his life, he needed to be home. For the children’s sake.
    But none of this he wanted to share with Lukas.
    He wondered if she’d ask more but she didn’t. She pulled out her cell phone and made a call.
    Parker was curious about the Topographic Archives they were headed for. He asked, “What exactly—?”
    “Quiet,” Lukas whispered abruptly.
    “What—?” he began.
    “Be quiet. Keep walking. And don’t turn around.”
    He realized that she wasn’t talking on the phone at all but merely pretending to.
    Cage asked her, “You got him too? I put him twenty yards