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Barrel grunts. “Oh, right. The one NYPD has to monitor.”

“There’s a series of live-televised challenges,” Burns adds. “Someone gets named Santa of the Year and wins a shit-ton of money. It’s a fifty-thousand-dollar cash prize.”

“Normally, yeah, but this year’s their fiftieth anniversary, so the prize money is being doubled,” I recall from the articles. Not even if it was being tripled would that amount of money be tempting for me to want to compete. Fifty Santa Clauses running around? Sounds like the stuff of my nightmares.

I reread the invite, this time stopping on the date. The twenty-third of December? That’s when I’m supposed to be in Taiwan. No way I’m missing yet another family trip, not when it might be my grandparents’ last Christmas. Yet something tells me I won’t have a choice here.

“Why is this addressed to you, Payne?” Barrel asks.

“Because my company is pleasurable, sir?” I guess, smiling innocently. “You know, I’ve never gotten a letter from Santa before. To be fair, I’ve never written one to him.”

He gives me a look.

“You don’t do this job without making a few enemies,” I say. Even undercover, once we catch our bad guys and have enough evidence to put them away, sometimes they learn that we aren’t who we said we were.

“It’s probably because she followed the tip,” Flores unhelpfully adds. “Glad I wasn’t monitoring the tip line.”

Was it random, and I just happened to be the lucky one to take this person’s tip seriously enough to walk into their trap? Or am I truly the target? And if I am, how’d they know I’d be the one to hear the tip and pursue it?

“They must know how relentless you are,” Barrel says, like he’s been having the same thought trail. He doesn’t look like he’s kidding, but I am picking up an essence of a compliment somewhere in there.

“Thank you,” I say genuinely, because “relentless” is just a less nice word for “persistent,” which is actually a valuable quality in special agents.

“Can we get the analysts in here?” Barrel asks an agent across the room.

“Mind if I take a stab at it first?” I ask. “When my oldest sister got married, I taught myself calligraphy to do her wedding invitations. There were people so much more experienced than me in the running for the gig. I was decent enough, and her most cost-effective option. Three hundred invitations wouldn’t have been cheap. I got the pens and cardstock, took some classes, and I crushed every single one of those invites.” I raise an eyebrow at Barrel. “I know what you’re thinking—who even knows three hundred people?”

Barrel shifts on his feet. “What I’m thinking is, what’s your point?”

“My point, sir, is that I know something about calligraphy. Santa could’ve used a standard pen, a brush pen, a fountain pen, or even a straight dip pen.” I analyze the invite from an angle. “But my money’s on the oblique dip pen.”

“And why’s that?” Barrel asks, and I can’t tell if he’s interested or just humoring me.

“Fits the Santa brand better,” I respond, imagining this person seated next to a crackling fireplace penning threatening riddles to law enforcement. Cozy. “See how the ink is smeared, just slightly, over here?” I point out the curls and loops. “Yet the words are written with a right-leaning letter slant, so this person probably had to hook their hand—their gloved hand, for all our mental imagery’s sake—like this.” I demonstrate with one of my ballpoint pens. “Our Santa’s most likely left-handed.”

“Huh,” is all Barrel says.

“I agree. With these smudges, I would’ve recommended a felt-tip pen to start. You lose the character and charm of the oblique pen, but it dries faster. Only if you use the right paper, though. I’m a straight dip pen girl myself—”

“Payne.”

I get to my other point. “A handwriting expert might be able to help if we can get this scanned and entered into evidence. Maybe Santa’s done some other naughty things and wrote about it.”

I’m secretly pleased that my squadmates laugh at that.

I stand to pace behind a row of filing cabinets, tapping the invitation against my palm. “This envelope isn’t posted,” I continue. “There’s no stamp, which means it was hand-delivered. But this person wouldn’t dare be caught around here, even in a solid Santa disguise, and risk being questioned by a guard, so they either have someone working with them or they have someone on the inside. My bet, though, is still on the mail. Get the letter into the right truck, the right postal worker’s bag, and you just got yourself free mail delivery.”

“Get in touch with whoever delivered the mail today,” Barrel says to Flores.

“We can use the pen to find Santa,” I say. “We need to find out where he purchased it. That might tell us something.”

Barrel looks confused. “The pen?”

“See that gold speckle in the paper? A high-end stationery store would sell this. And look at the way those letters curl,” I analyze. “The pen feels like a better lead than the paper, though.”

“You think we should track down where online, or in stores, Santa might’ve purchased a pen? That’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” my boss says.

“A needle in a pile of tinsel is probably a better metaphor—”