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C. P. said, "You mean you're just going to write 'em off? The victims?"
He paused. Then said, "I guess that's what I mean. Yes."
Cage asked Lukas, "Whatta you think?"
She glanced at Parker. Their eyes met. She said to Cage, "I agree with Parker. We stay here. We keep going."
9
From the corner of her eyes Lukas saw Len Hardy, standing motionless. After a moment he smoothed his hair, picked up his coat and walked over to her.
Right as rain…
"Let me go at least," he said to her. "To help with the hotels."
She looked at his earnest young face. He kneaded his trench coat in his large right hand, the nails perfectly trimmed and scrubbed. He was a man, she had concluded, who found comfort in details.
"I can't. I'm sorry."
"Agent Cage is right. They'll need everybody they can get."
Lukas glanced at Parker Kincaid but he was lost in the document once more, easing it carefully from its clear acetate shroud.
"Come on over here, Len," Lukas said, gesturing him into the corner of the document lab. Cage was the only one who noticed and he said nothing. In his long tenure at the Bureau the senior agent would have had plenty of talks with underlings and knew that the process was as delicate as interrogating suspects. More delicate-because these were people you had to live with day after day. And whom you might have to depend on to watch your back. Lukas was grateful Cage was giving her rein to handle Hardy the way she felt best.
"Talk to me," she said. "What's eating you?"
"I want to do something," the detective replied. "I know I'm second-string here. I'm from the District. I'm Research and Stats… But I want to help."
"You're only here as liaison. That's all you're authorized for. This is a federal operation. It's not task-forced."
He gave a sour laugh. "Liaison? I'm here as a stenographer. You and I both know that."
Of course she knew it. But that wouldn't have stopped Lukas from giving him a more active role if she thought he'd be valuable elsewhere. Lukas was not one who lived her life solely by regs and procedures and if Hardy had been the world's best sniper she'd kick him out the door and onto one of Jerry Baker's shooting teams in an instant, whatever the rules dictated. After a moment she said, "All right, answer me a question."
"Sure."
"Why are you here?" she asked.
"Why?" He frowned.
"You volunteered, didn't you?" Lukas asked.
"Yeah, I did."
"Because of your wife, right?"
"Emma?" He tried to look confounded but Lukas could see right through it. His eyes fell to the floor.
"I understand, Len. But do yourself a favor. Take your notes, kick around ideas with us and stay out of the line of fire. Then when this prick's tagged go on home."
"But it's… hard," he said, avoiding her eyes.
"Being home?"
He nodded.
"I know it is," Lukas answered sincerely.
He clung to the trenchcoat like a child's security blanket.
In fact if it had been anybody but Len Hardy who'd shown up as the District police liaison she would have kicked them right back to police headquarters. She had no patience with ass covering or interagency turf wars and no time to coddle employees of a corrupt, nearly bankrupt city. But she knew a secret of Hardy's life-that his wife was in a coma, the result of an accident when her Jeep Cherokee had skidded off the road in a rainstorm near Middleburg, Virginia, and hit a tree.
Hardy had been to the District field office several times to compile statistical data on crime in the metro area and had gotten to know Betty, Lukas's assistant. She'd thought at first that the man was trying to pick up the attractive woman but had then overheard him talking emotionally about his wife and her injury.
He didn't have many friends, it seemed, just like Lukas herself. She'd gotten to know him slightly and had learned more about Emma. Several times they'd had coffee in the Policemen's Memorial Park, next to the field office. He'd opened up slightly but, also like Lukas, he kept his emotions tightly packed away.
Knowing his tragedy, knowing how hard it would be for him to sit home alone on a holiday, she had welcomed him onto the team and resolved to cut him some slack tonight. But Margaret Lukas would never jeopardize an operation for the emotional health of anyone.
Right as rain…
He now told her, "I can't sit still. I want a piece of this guy."
No, she thought. What he wants is a piece of God or Fate or whatever force of nature broke Emma Hardy's life, and her husband's, into a thousand pieces.
"Len, I can't have somebody in the field who's…" She looked for a benign word. "Distracted." "Reckless" would have been closer and "suicidal" was what she meant.
Hardy nodded. He was angry. His lip trembled. But he dropped his coat on a chair and returned to a desk.
Poor man, she thought. But seeing how his intelligence, his sense of propriety and perfection shone through his personal 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 elfin baby 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 officer for 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.