"I'd feel really good about that, Mrs. Cavanaugh."

"I thought you might. That caller ID is a great invention, isn't it?"

"Wish I had the patent," he told her. "I'll call later."

They hung up.

Cage had overheard. He asked, "Your boy? He okay?"

Parker sighed. "He's fine. Just having some bad memories from… you know, a few years ago."

Evans lifted an eyebrow and Parker said to him, "When I was working for the Bureau a suspect broke into our house." He noticed Lukas was listening too.

"Your boy saw him?" Evans asked.

Parker said, "It was Robby's window the perp tried to break into."

"Jesus," C. P. muttered. "I hate bad stuff when it happens to kids. I fucking hate that."

"PTSD?" Lukas asked.

Posttraumatic stress disorder. Parker had been worried that the boy would suffer from the condition and had taken him to a specialist. The doctor, though, had reassured him that because Robby had been very young and hadn't actually been injured by the Boatman he probably wasn't suffering from PTSD.

Parker explained this and added, "But the incident happened just before Christmas. So this time of year he has more memories than otherwise. I mean, he's come through it fine. But…"

Evans said, "But you'd've given anything for it not to have happened."

"Exactly," Parker said softly, looking at Lukas's troubled face and wondering why she was familiar with the disorder.

The therapist asked, "He's all right, though. Tonight?"

"He's fine. Just got a little spooked earlier."

"I've got kids of my own," Evans said. He looked at Lukas, "You have children?"

"No," she said. "I'm not married."

Evans said to her, "It's as if you lose a part of your mind when you have children. They steal it and you never get it back. You're always worried that they're upset, they're lost, they're sad. Sometimes I'm amazed that parents can function at all."

"Is that right?" she asked, distracted once more.

Evans returned to the note and there was a long moment of silence. Geller typed on his keyboard. Cage bent over a map. Lukas toyed with a strand of her blond hair. The gesture would have been coy and appealing except for her stony eyes. She was someplace else.

Geller sat up slightly as his screen flashed. "Report back from Scottsdale…" He read the screen. "Okay, okay… P. D. knew about the gang, the Gravediggers, but they have no contact with anybody who was in it. Most of'em are retired. Family men now."

Yet another dead end, Parker thought.

Evans noticed another sheet of paper and pulled it toward him. The Major Crimes Bulletin-about Gary Moss and the firebombing of his house.

"He's the witness, right?" Evans asked. "In that school construction scandal."

Lukas nodded.

Evans shook his head as he read. "The killers didn't care if they murdered his children too… Terrible." He glanced at Lukas. "Hope they're being well looked after," the doctor said.

"Moss is in protective custody at headquarters and his family's out of state," Cage told him.

"Killing children," the psychologist muttered and pushed the memo away.

Then the case began to move. Parker remembered this from his law enforcement days. Hours and hours-sometimes days-of waiting; then all at once the leads begin to pay off. A sheet of paper flowed out of the fax machine. Hardy read it. "It's from Building Permits. Demolition and construction sites in Gravesend."

Geller called up a map of the area on his large monitor and highlighted the sites in red as Hardy called them out. There were a dozen of them.

Lukas called Jerry Baker and gave him the locations. He reported back that he was disbursing the teams there.

A few minutes later a voice crackled through the speaker in the command post. It was Bakers. "New Years Leader Two to New Years Leader One."

"Go ahead," Lukas said.

"One of my S &S teams found a convenience store. Mockingbird and Seventeenth."

Tobe Geller immediately highlighted the intersection on the map.

Please, Parker was thinking. Please…

"They're selling paper and pens like the kind you were describing. And the display faced the window. Some of the packs of paper're sun-bleached."

"Yes!" Parker whispered.

The team leaned forward, gazing at the map on Geller's screen.

"Jerry," Parker said, not bothering with the code names that the tactical agents were so fond of, "one of the demolition sites we told you about-it's two blocks east of the store. On Mockingbird. Get the canvassers going in that direction."

"Roger. New Year's Leader Two. Out."

Then another call came in. Lukas took it. Listened. "Tell him." She handed the phone to Tobe Geller.

Geller listened, nodding. "Great. Send it here-on MCP Fours priority fax line. You have the number? Good." He hung up and said, "That was Com-Tech again. They've got the ISP list for Gravesend."

"The what?" Cage asked.

"Subscribers to Internet service providers," Geller answered.

The fax phone rang and another sheet fed out. Parker glanced at it, discouraged. There were more on-line subscribers in Gravesend than he'd anticipated-about fifty of them.

"Call out the addresses," Geller said. "I'll type them in." Hardy did. Geller was lightning fast on the keyboard and as quickly as the detective could recite the addresses a red dot appeared on the screen.

In two minutes they were all highlighted. Parker saw that his concern had been unfounded. There were only four subscribers within a quarter-mile radius of the convenience store and the demolition site.

Lukas called Jerry Baker and gave him the addresses. "Concentrate on those four. We'll meet you at the convenience store. That'll be our new staging area."

"Roger. Out."

"Let's go," Lukas called to the driver of the MCP, a young agent.

"Wait," Geller called. "Go through the vacant lot there." He tapped the screen. "On foot. You'll get there faster than in cars. We'll drive over and meet you."

Hardy pulled his jacket on. But Lukas shook her head. "Sorry, Len… What we talked about before? I want you to stay in the MCP."

The young officer lifted his hands, looked at Cage and Parker. "I want to do something."

"Len, this could be a tactical situation. We need negotiators and shooters."

"He's not a shooter," Hardy said, nodding at Parker.

"He's forensic. He'll be on the crime scene team."

"So I'm just sitting here, twiddling my thumbs. Is that it?"

"I'm sorry. That's the way it's got to be."

"Whatever." Pulled his jacket off and sat down.

"Thank you," Lukas said. "C. P., you stay here too. Keep an eye on the fort."

Meaning, Parker guessed, make sure Hardy doesn't do anything stupid. The big agent got the message and nodded.

Lukas pushed open the door of the camper. Cage stepped outside. Parker pulled on his bomber jacket and followed the agent. As he climbed outside Lukas started to ask, "You have-?"

"It's in my pocket," he answered shortly, slapping the pistol to make sure, and caught up with Cage, who was moving through the smoky vacant lot at a slow trot.

Henry Czisman took a tiny sip of his beer.

He was certainly no stranger to liquor but he wanted at this particular moment to be as sober as possible. But a man in a bar in Gravesend on New Year's Eve had better be drinking or else incur the suspicion of everybody in the place.

The big man had nursed the Budweiser for a half hour.

Joe Higgins' was the name of the bar, Czisman noted. According to my training as a journalist, Czisman thought with irritation, this is wrong. Only plural nouns take just the s apostrophe to form the possessive. The name of the place should be Joe Higgins's.

Another sip of beer.

The door opened and Czisman saw several agents walk inside. He'd been expecting someone to come in here for the canvass and he'd been very concerned that it might be Lukas or Cage or that consultant, who would recognize him and wonder why he was dogging them. But these men he'd never seen before.