She now scanned the field again. No sign of the extortionist.
"He might be staking us out," a tactical agent crouched behind a tree said. "You want a perimeter sweep?"
"No."
"It's standard procedure," he persisted. "We could use five, six handoff cars. He'd never spot us."
"Too risky," she said.
"Uhm, you sure?"
"I'm sure."
Abrupt responses like this had earned Lukas a reputation in the Bureau for being arrogant. But she believed that arrogance is not necessarily a bad thing. It instills confidence in those who work for you. It also gets you noticed by your bosses.
Her eyes flickered as a voice crackled in her earphone, speaking her name.
"Go ahead," she said into the stalk mike, recognizing the voice of the deputy director of the Bureau.
"We've got a problem," he said.
She hated dramatics. "What?" she asked, not caring a bit about the abrasion in her voice.
The dep director said, "There was a hit-and-run near City Hall a little while ago. White male. He was killed. No ID on him. Nothing at all, just an apartment key--no address--and some money. The cop who responded'd heard about the extortion thing and, since it was near City Hall, thought there might be a connection."
She understood immediately. "They compared prints?" she asked. "His and the ones on the extortion note?"
"That's right. The dead guy's the one who wrote the note, the shooter's partner."
Lukas remembered part of the note. It went something like:
If you kill me, he will keep killing.
Nothing can stop the Digger . . .
"You've got to find the shooter, Margaret," the deputy director said. There was a pause as, apparently, he looked at his watch. "You've got to find him in three hours."
*
Is it real? Parker Kincaid wondered.
Bending over the rectangle of paper, peering through his heavy, ten-power hand glass. Joan had been gone for several hours but the effect of her visit--the dismay--still lingered, trying though he was to lose himself in his work.
The letter he examined--on yellowing paper--was encased in a thin, strong poly sleeve but when he eased it closer to him he did so very carefully. The way you'd touch a baby's red, fat face. He adjusted the light and swooped in on the loop of the lowercase letter y.
Is it real?
It appeared to be real. But in his profession Parker Kincaid never put great stock in appearances.
He wanted badly to touch the document, to feel the rag paper, made with so little acid that it could last as long as steel. He wanted to feel the faint ridge of the iron-gallide ink, which, to his sensitive fingers, would seem as raised as braille. But he didn't dare take the paper from the sleeve; even the slightest oil from his hands would start to erode the thin letter. Which would be a disaster since it was worth perhaps $50,000.
If it was real.
Upstairs, Stephie was navigating Mario through his surreal universe. Robby was at Parker's feet, accompanied by Han Solo and Chewbacca. The basement study was a cozy place, paneled in teak, carpeted in forest-green pile. On the walls were framed documents--the less valuable items in Parker's collection. Letters from Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Bobby Kennedy, the Old West artist Charles Russell. Many others. On one wall was a rogues' gallery--forgeries Parker had come across in his work.
Parker's favorite wall, though, was the one opposite the stool he sat on. This wall contained his children's drawings and poems, going back over the past eight years. From scrawls and illegible block letters to samples of their cursive writing. He often paused in his work and looked at them. Doing so had given him the idea about writing a book on how handwriting mirrors children's development.
He now sat on the comfortable stool at an immaculate white examination table. The room was silent. Normally he'd have the radio on, listening to jazz or classical music. But there'd been a terrible shooting in the District and all the stations were having special reports on the slaughter. Parker didn't want Robby to hear the stories, especially after the boy's flashback to the Boatman.
He hunched over the letter, eagerly, the way a jeweler appraises a beautiful yellow stone, ready to declare it false if that's how he saw it but secretly hoping that it will turn out to be rare topaz.
"What's that?" Robby asked, standing and looking at the letter.
"It's what came in the truck yesterday," Parker said, squinting as he checked out an uppercase K, which can be written a number of different ways and therefore is very useful in handwriting analysis.
"Oh, the armored car. That was neat."
It was neat. But it didn't answer the boy's question. Parker continued. "You know Thomas Jefferson?"
"Third president. Oh, and he lived in Virginia. Like us."
"Good. This's a letter that somebody thinks he wrote. They want me to check it and make sure."
One of the more difficult conversations he'd had with Robby and Stephie was explaining what he did for a living. Not the technical part of being a questioned document examiner. But that people would forge letters and documents and try to claim they were real.
"What's it say?" the boy asked.
Parker didn't answer right away. Oh, answers were important to him. He was, after all, a puzzle master--his lifelong hobby was riddles and word games and brain-teasers. He believed in answers and he tried never to defer responding to his children's questions. When a mother or father said, "Later," it was usually for their convenience, hoping the child would forget the question. But the content of this letter made him hedge. After a moment he said, "It's a letter Jefferson wrote to his oldest daughter." This much was true. But Parker didn't go on and tell the boy that the subject of the letter was Mary--his second daughter--who had died of complications from childbirth, as had Jefferson's wife some years before. He read:
Back here in Washington I live under a sorrowful pall, haunted as I am by visions of Polly on horseback and running along the porch in good-natured defiance of my prescriptions to her to exercise more caution. . . .
Parker, certified document examiner, struggled to ignore the sadness he felt reading those words. Concentrate, he told himself, though the terrible image of a father being deprived of one of his children kept intruding.
A sorrowful pall . . .
Concentrate.
He observed that the girl's nickname in the letter was what Jefferson would have used--born "Mary," the girl was called "Polly" by her family--and that the punctuation-sparse style was typically Jeffersonian. These attested to authenticity. So did some of the events that the letter referred to; they had in fact occurred in Jefferson's life and had done so around the time the letter had purportedly been written.
Yes, textually at least, the letter seemed real.
But that was only half the game. Document examiners are not only linguists and historians, they are scientists too. Parker still had to perform the physical examination of the letter.
As he was about to slip it under one of his Bausch & Lomb compound microscopes the doorbell rang again.
Oh, no . . . Parker closed his eyes. It was Joan. He knew it. She'd picked up her dogs and returned to complicate his life further. Maybe she had the social worker with her now. A surprise commando raid . . .
"I'll get it," Robby said.
"No," Parker said quickly. Too quickly. The boy was unnerved by his abrupt reaction.
Father smiled at son. "I'll go." And slid off the stool, climbed the stairs.
He was mad now. He was determined that the Whos would have a fun New Year's Eve, despite their mother. He flung the door open.
Well . . .
"Hello, Parker."
It took him a second to remember the name of the tall, gray-haired man. He hadn't seen the agent for years. Then he recalled. "Cage."
He didn't recognize the woman standing beside him.
4
"How you doin', Parker? Never expected to see me in a month of blue Mondays, did you?
Wait, I'm mixing up my expressions. But you get the picture."
The agent had changed very little. A bit grayer. A little more gaunt. He seemed taller. Parker remembered that Cage was exactly fifteen years older than he. They shared June as a birth month. Gemini. Yin-yang.
From the corner of his eye Parker saw Robby appear in the hallway with his coconspirator, Stephie. Word of visitors spreads fast in a household of children. They edged closer to the door, gazing out at Cage and the woman.
Parker turned and bent down. "Don't you two have something to do up in your rooms? Something very important?"
"No," Stephie said.
"Uh-uh," Robby confirmed.
"Well, I think you do."
"What?"
"How many Legos are on the floor? How many Micro Machines?"
"A couple," Robby tried.
"A couple of hundred?"
"Well," the boy said, grinning.
"Upstairs now . . . Up, up, or the monster'll take you up there himself. Do you want the monster? Do you?"
"No!" Stephie shrieked.
"Go on," Parker said, laughing. "Let Daddy talk to his friend here."
As they started up the stairs Cage said, "Oh, not hardly a friend. Right, Parker?"
He didn't respond. He closed the door behind him and turned back, appraising the woman. She was in her thirties, with a narrow, smooth face. Pale, nothing like Joan's relentless tan. She wasn't looking at Parker but was watching Robby climb the stairs through the lace-curtained window beside the door. She then turned her attention to him and reached out a strong hand with long fingers. She shook his hand firmly. "I'm Margaret Lukas. ASAC at the Washington field office."
Parker recalled that within the Bureau assistant special agents in charge were referred to by the acronym, pronounced A-sack, while the heads of the offices were called S-A-C's. An aspect of his former life he hadn't thought about for years.
She continued, "Could we come inside for a minute?"
A parental warning alarm went off. He responded, "You mind if we stay out here? The children . . ."
Her eyes flickered and he wondered if she considered this a snub. But that was just too bad; the kids' exposure to the Bureau was limited to sneaking a look at Scully and Mulder on The X-Files when sleeping over at friends' houses. He planned on keeping it that way.
"Fine with us," Cage said for both of them. "Hey, last time I saw you . . . man, it was a while ago. We were at Jimmy's, you know, his thing on Ninth Street."
"That's right."
It was in fact the last time Parker Kincaid had been at the Bureau headquarters. Standing in the large courtyard surrounded by the somber stone building. A hot July day two years ago. He still got occasional e-mails about what a fine speech he'd delivered at the memorial service for Jim Huang, who was one of Parker's former assistants. He'd been gunned down on his first day as a field agent.
Parker remained silent.
Cage nodded after the kids. "They're growing."
"They do that," Parker answered. "What exactly is it, Cage?"
The agent gave a shrug toward Lukas.
"We need your help, Mr. Kincaid," she said quickly, before the stream of breath accompanying Parker's question evaporated.
Parker tilted his head.
"It's nice out here," Cage said, looking up. "Fresh air. Linda and I should move. Get some land. Maybe Loudon County. You watch the news, Parker?"
"I listen."
"Huh?"
"Radio. I don't watch TV."
"That's right. You never did." Cage said to Lukas, "'Wasteland,' he'd call TV. He read a lot. Words're Parker's domain. His bailiwick, whatever the hell a bailiwick is. You told me your daughter reads like crazy. She still do that?"
"The guy in the subway," Parker said. "That's what you're here about."
"METSHOOT," Lukas said. "That's what we've acronymed it. He killed twenty-three people. Wounded thirty-seven. Six children were badly injured. There was a--"
"What is it you want?" he interrupted, worried that his own children might hear this.
Lukas responded, "This's important. We need your help."
"What on earth could you possibly want from me? I'm retired."
Cage said, "Uh-huh. Sure. Retired."
Lukas frowned, looked from one to the other.
Was this rehearsed? A good cop/confused cop thing? It didn't seem to be. Still, another important rule in his invisible parental Handbook was: "Get used to being double-teamed." He was on his guard now.
"You still do document examination. You're in the Yellow Pages. And you've got a Web site. It's good. I like the blue wallpaper."
He said firmly, "I'm a civilian document examiner."
Lukas said, "Cage tells me you were head of the Document Division for six years. He says you're the best document examiner in the country."
What weary eyes she has, Parker thought. She's probably only thirty-six or thirty-seven. Great figure, trim, athletic, beautiful face. Yet what she's seen . . . Look at those eyes. Like blue-gray stones. Parker knew about eyes like that.
Daddy, tell me about the Boatman.
"I only do commercial work. I don't do any criminal forensics."
"He was also candidate for SAC Eastern District. Yeah, yeah, I'm not kidding." Cage said this as if he hadn't heard Parker. "Except he turned it down."
Lukas lifted her pale eyebrows.
"And that was years ago," Parker responded.
"Sure it was," Cage said. "But you're not rusty, are you, Parker?"
"Cage, get to the point."
"I'm trying to wear you down," the graying agent said.
"Can't be done."
"Ah, I'm the miracle worker. Remember?" To Lukas he said, "See, Parker didn't just find forgeries; he used to track people down because of what they wrote, where they buy writing paper, pens, things like that. Best in the business."
"She already said you said that," Parker said acerbically.
"Deja vu all over again," Cage observed.
Parker was shivering--but not from the cold. From the trouble these two people represented. He thought of the Whos. He thought of their party tonight. Thought of his ex-wife. He opened his mouth to tell lanky Cage and deadeye Lukas to get the hell out of his life. But she was there first. Bluntly she said, "Just listen. The unsub--"
Parker remembered: unknown subject. An unidentified perp.
"--and his partner, the shooter, have this extortion scheme. The shooter lights up a crowd of people with an automatic weapon every four hours starting at four this afternoon unless the city pays. Mayor's willing to and we drop the money. But the unsub never shows up. Why? He's dead."
"You believe the luck?" Cage said. "On his way to collect twenty million and he gets nailed by a delivery truck."
Parker asked, "Why didn't the shooter pick up the money?"
" 'Cause the shooter's only instructions're to kill," Lukas said. "He doesn't have anything to do with the money. Classic left-hand/right-hand setup." Lukas seemed surprised he hadn't figured it out. "The unsub turns the shooter loose with instructions to keep going if he doesn't get a call to stop. That way we'll hesitate to cap the perp in a tac operation. And if we collar the unsub he's got leverage to work out a plea bargain in exchange for stopping the shooter."
"So," Cage said. "We've gotta find him. The shooter."
The door behind him started to open.
Parker quickly said to Lukas, "Button your jacket."
"What?" she asked.
As Robby stepped outside Parker quickly reached forward and tugged her jacket closed, hiding the large pistol on her belt. She frowned at this but he whispered, "I don't want him to see your weapon."
He put his arm around his son's shoulders. "Hey, Who. How you doing?"
"Stephie hid the controller."
"I did not," she called. "Didn't, didn't!"
"I was winning and she hid it."
Parker said, frowning, "Wait, isn't it connected with a cord?"
; "She unplugged it."
"Stephie-effie. Is that controller going to appear in five seconds? Four, three, two . . ."
"I found it!" she called.
"My turn!" Robby cried and charged up the stairs again.
Once more Parker noticed Lukas's eyes follow Robby as he climbed to the second floor.
"What's his name?" Lukas asked.
"Robby."
"But what did you call him?"
"Oh. 'Who.' It's my nickname for the kids."
"After Wahoo?" she asked. "Your alma mater's team?"
"No. It's from a Dr. Seuss book." Parker wondered how she knew he'd gone to the University of Virginia. "Look, Cage, I'm sorry. But I really can't help you."
"You understand the problem here, boy?" Cage continued. "The only link we've got--the only clue at all--is the extortion note."
"Run it by PERT."
The Bureau's Physical Evidence Response Team.
Lukas's thin lips grew slightly thinner. "If we have to we will. And we'll get a psycholinguistic from Quantico. And I'll have agents check out every goddamn paper and pen company in the country. But--"
"--that's what we're hopin' you'd take over on," Cage filled in. "You can look at it, you can tell us what's what. Stuff nobody else can. Maybe where he lived. Maybe where the shooter's going to hit next."
Parker asked, "What about Stan?"
Stanley Lewis was the current head of the Bureau's Document Division. Parker knew the man was good; he'd hired Lewis years ago as an examiner. He recalled that they'd spent an evening drinking beer and trying to outdo each other forging John Hancock's signature. Lewis had won.
"He's in Hawaii for the Sanchez trial. Even in a Tomcat we can't get him back here before the next deadline."
"It's at four," Lukas repeated.
"It won't be like last time, Parker," Cage said softly. "That'll never happen again."
Lukas's head swiveled between the two men once again. But Parker didn't explain what Cage had meant. He wasn't talking about the past; he'd had enough past for one day.
"I'm sorry. Any other time, maybe. But I can't now." He was imagining what would happen if Joan found out he was working on an active investigation.
"Shit, Parker, what do I have to do?"
"We have nothing," Lukas said angrily. "No leads. We have a few hours until this crazy shoots up another crowd of people. There were children shot down--"