The Devils Teardrop

one Jackie had lived in—sitting in the living room, a fire burning in the fireplace, reading to them as they lay sprawled at his side.
    Lukas’s eyes happened to fall on a young Latino couple walking down the sidewalk toward the staging area. The wife bundled in a black scarf, the husband in a thin jacket with a Texaco logo on the chest. He pushed a baby carriage, inside of which Lukas caught sight of a tiny infant, packed in swaddling, only its happy face visible. She thought instinctively about what kind of flannel she’d buy to sew the child a pair of pajamas.
    Then the couple moved on.
    Okay, Parker, you like puzzles, do you?
    Well, here’s one for you. The riddle of the wife and the mother.
    How can you be a wife without a husband? How can you be a mother without a child?
    It’s a tricky one. But you’re smart, you’re arrogant, you’re the third hawk. You can figure it out, Parker.
    Lukas, alone on the nearly deserted street, leaned against a lamppost, curled her arm around it—her right arm, ignoring her own orders to keep shooting handsfree. She gripped the metal hard, she gripped it desperately. Struggled to keep from sobbing.
    A wife without a husband, a mother without a child . . .
    Give up, Parker?
    I’m the answer to the riddle. Because I’m the wife of a man lying in the cold ground in Alexandria Cemetery. Because I’m the mother of a child lying beside him.
    The riddle of the wife and mother . . .
    Here’s another: How can ice burn?
    When an airplane drops from the sky into a field on a dark November morning, two days before Thanksgiving, six days before your birthday, a hot autumn day, and explodes into a million fragile bits of metal and plastic and rubber.
    And flesh.
    That’s how ice can burn.
    And that’s how I became a changeling.
    Oh, puzzles are easy when you know the answer, Parker.
    So simple, so simple . . .
    Hold on, she thought, letting go of the lamppost. Taking a deep breath. Locking away the urge to cry. Enough of that.
    One thing Special Agent Lukas didn’t tolerate was distraction. She had two rules she repeated endlessly to new recruits in the field office. The first was “You can never have too many deets.” The second was “Focus.”
    And “focus” was what she now ordered herself to do.
    Another breath. She looked around. Saw some motion in a vacant lot nearby—a young kid, wearing gang colors. He stood over an oil drum, waiting for some of his homeys. He had a teenager’s attitude—which was a hell of a lot more dangerous than a thirty-year-old’s, she knew. He gave her the eyeball.
    Then up the street, a block away, she thought she saw a man in the alcove of a check-cashing store. She squinted. Was anybody there? Somebody hiding in the shadows?
    No, there was no more motion. It must’ve been her imagination. Well, this’s the place to get spooked.
    Gravesend . . .
    She tossed out the remains of the coffee and walked toward the teenager in the vacant lot to see if he knew anything about their mysterious unsub. Pulling the computer printout from her pocket, she wove easily around rusting auto parts and piles of trash—the same way Jackie Lukas used to maneuver through the perfume counters at Macy’s on her way to a drop-dead sale in women’s sportswear.
    * * *
    Parker stepped away from the thrift store, disappointed.
    The stationery he’d seen inside wasn’t the same as the extortion note or the envelope. He looked around the streets. He was shivering hard. He thought: Stephie’s outgrown her down jacket. I’ll have to get her a new one. And what about Robby? He had the fiberfill, the red one, but maybe Parker would get the boy a leather bomber jacket. He liked his father’s.
    He shivered again and rocked on his feet.
    Where the hell was that van? They needed the on-line service subscriber list. And the demolition and construction permit information. And the shrink. He wondered too what the tape of the shooting would show.
    Parker looked around once more at the devastated streets. No Lukas, no Cage. He watched a young couple—they looked Hispanic—wheeling a baby carriage toward him. They were about thirty feet away. Hethought about the times just after Robby was born when he and Joan would take after-dinner strolls like that.
    Again his eye caught the man huddling in the check-cashing alcove. Absently wondered why he was still there. He decided to be useful and fished in his pocket for a picture of the unsub. He’d do some