The Devils Teardrop

animosity of the proceedings. At times like this you fought on two fronts: You battled the enemy and you battled your own overwhelming desire to be a child yourself and share your pain with your children. But this you could never do.
    “Daddy,” Robby said suddenly, “you stopped reading.”
    “I thought you were asleep.” He laughed.
    “My eyelids were just resting. They got tired. But I’m not.”
    Parker glanced at the clock. Quarter to eight. Fifteen minutes until—
    No, don’t think about that now.
    He asked his son, “You have your shield?”
    “Right here.”
    “Me too.”
    He picked up the book and began to read once more.

22
    Margaret Lukas looked over the families at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
    She and Cage stood in the main entrance, where hundreds of people were gathering for parties and dinner. Lukas was wearing a navy-blue suit she’d designed and made herself. It was cut close to her body, made from expensive worsted wool, and it had a long, pleated skirt. She’d cut a special dart in the jacket to make certain that the Glock 10 on her hip did not ruin the stylish lines of the outfit. It would be perfect for the opera or a fancy restaurant but, as it happened, she had worn it only to weddings and funerals. She called it her married-buried suit.
    Fifteen minutes until eight.
    “Nothing, Margaret,” came the gruff voice in her headset. C. P. Ardell’s. He was downstairs at one entrance to the Ritz, the parking garage, pretending to be a slightly drunk holiday reveler. The big agent wore a considerably more mundane costume than Lukas’s—stained jeans and a black leather biker’s jacket. On his head was a Redskins hat, which he wore not because of the cold but because he had no hair to obscure the earphone wire of his radio. There were an additional sixty-five plainclothes agents in and around the hotel, armed with more weaponry than you’d find at an El Paso gun show.
    All looking for a man for whom they had virtually no description.
    Probably white, probably average build.
    Probably wearing a gold crucifix.
    In the lobby Lukas and Cage scanned the guests, the bellhops, the clerks. Nobody came close to matching their fragile description of the Digger. She realized they were standing with their arms crossed, looking just like well-dressed federal agents on stakeout.
    “Say something amusing,” she whispered.
    “What?” Cage asked.
    “We’re sticking out. Pretend we’re talking.”
    “Okay,” Cage said, smiling broadly. “So whatta you think of Kincaid?”
    The question threw her. “Kincaid? What do you mean?”
    “I’m making conversation.” A shrug. “Whatta you think of him?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Sure you do,” Cage persisted.
    “He’s perp smart, not street smart.”
    This time Cage’s shrug was one of concession. “That’s good. I like that.” He said nothing more for a moment.
    “What’re you getting at?” she asked.
    “Nothing. I’m not getting at anything. We’re pretending to talk is all.”
    Good, she thought.
    Focus . . .
    They studied a dozen other possible suspects. She dismissed them for reasons she knew instinctively but couldn’t explain.
    Street smart . . .
    A moment later Cage said, “He’s a good man. Kincaid.”
    “I know. He’s been very helpful.”
    Cage laughed in the surprised way of his—the way that meant: I’m on to you. He repeated, “Helpful.”
    More silence.
    Cage said, “He lost his parents just after college. Then there was that custody battle a few years ago. Wife was psycho.”
    “That’s hard,” she said and made a foray into the crowd. She brushed up against a guest with a suspicious bulge under his arm. She recognized a cell phone immediately and returned to Cage. Found herself asking impulsively, “What happened? With his folks?”
    “Car accident. One of those crazy things. His mother’d just been diagnosed with cancer and it looked like they caught it in time. But they got nailed by a truck on Ninety-five on the way to Johns Hopkins for chemo. Dad was a professor. Met him a couple times. Nice guy.”
    “Was he?” she muttered, distracted again.
    “History.”
    “What?”
    “That’s what Kincaid’s dad taught. History.”
    More silence.
    Lukas finally said, “I just need some phony conversation, Cage, not matchmaking.”
    He responded, “Am I doing that? Would I do that?I’m only saying you don’t meet a lot of people like Kincaid.”
    “Uh-huh. We’ve got to stay focused here,