The Devil's Teardrop (25 page)

“Gross,” Hardy muttered.

“So the press called him the Digger—because of the tunnels. A London gang in the seventies took the name from him but they were strictly small change.”

“Any chance,” Lukas asked, “that either the unsub or the Digger himself had heard about Barnstall? Used him as a sort of role model.”

“I can’t really tell at this point. I need more information. We’d have to identify patterns in their behavior.”

Patterns, Parker reflected. Discovering consistent patterns in questioned documents was the only way to detect forgeries: the angle of the slant in constructing letters, penstroke starts and lifts, the shape of the descenders on lower case
y, g
and
q,
the degree of tremble. You could never judge a forgery in isolation. He told Evans, “One thing you should know—this might not be the first time the Digger and his accomplice have done this.”

Lukas said, “A free-lance writer contacted us. He’s convinced the shootings’re part of a pattern of similar crimes.”

“Where?”

“Boston, the New York suburbs and Philadelphia. Always the same—larceny or extortion were the main crimes with tactical murders to support them.”

Evans asked, “He was after money?”

“Right,” Parker said. “Well, jewelry once.”

“Then it doesn’t sound like there’s any connection with Barnstall. His diagnosis was probably paranoid schizophrenia, not generalized antisocial behavior—like your perpetrator here. But I’d like to know more about the crimes in the other cities. And find out some more about his MO today.”

Hardy said, “What we’re doing here is trying to find his safe house. It could have a lot of information in it.”

Lukas shook her head, disappointed. “I was hoping the name Digger meant something. I thought it might be the key.”

Evans said, “Oh, it still might—if we get more data. The good news is that the name isn’t more common. If the
accomplice
—the dead man—came up with the name Digger, that tells us something about
him.
If it was the
Digger’s
nickname for himself then that tells us something about
him
. See, naming—designating—is very important in arriving at psych profiling.”

He looked at Parker. “For instance, when you and I describe ourselves as ‘consultants’ there’re some psychological implications to that. We’re saying that we’re willing to abdicate some control over the situation in exchange for a certain insulation from responsibility and risk.”

That’s one hundred percent right, Parker thought.

“You know,” Evans said, “I’d be happy to hang around for a while.” He laughed again, nodded at the morgue picture. “I’ve never analyzed a corpse before. It’ll be quite a challenge.”

“We could sure use the help,” Lukas said. “I’d appreciate it.”

Evans opened his backpack and took out a very large metal thermos. He opened the lid and poured black coffee into the lid cup. “I’m addicted,” he said. Then he smiled. “Something a psychologist shouldn’t admit, I suppose. Anybody want some?”

They all declined and Evans put the thermos away. The doctor pulled out his cell phone and called his wife to let her know he’d be working late.

Which reminded Parker of the Whos and he took out his own phone and called home.

“Hello?” Mrs. Cavanaugh’s grandmotherly voice asked when she answered the phone.

“It’s me,” Parker said. “How’s the fort?”

“They’re driving me into bankruptcy. And all this
Star Wars
money. I can’t figure out what it is. They’re keeping me confused on purpose.” Her laugh included the children, who would be nearby.

“How’s Robby doing?” Parker asked. “Is he still upset?”

Her voice lowered. “He got sort of moody a few times but Stephie and I pulled him out of it. They’d love for you to be home by midnight.”

“I’m trying. Has Joan called?”

“No.” Mrs. Cavanaugh laughed. “And funny thing, Parker . . . But if she
were
to call and I happened to see her name on the caller ID, I might be too busy to answer. And she might think you were all at a movie or Ruby Tuesday for the salad bar. How would you feel about that?”

“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 Baker’s. “New Year’s Leader Two to New Year’s 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 Four’s 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.

The wiry old man beside Czisman continued. “So then I go, ‘The block’s cracked. What’m I gonna do with a cracked block? Tell me what am I gonna do?’ And he ain’ have no
answer for that. Gee willikers. The fuck he think I was gonna do, not see it?”

Czisman glanced at the scrawny guy, who was wearing torn gray pants and a dark T-shirt. December 31 and he didn’t have a coat. Did he live nearby? Upstairs. The man was drinking whiskey that smelled like antifreeze.

“No answer, hm?” Czisman asked, eyes on the agents, studying them.

“No. And I tell him I’ma fuck him up he don’t gimme a new block. You know?”

He’d bought the black guy a drink because it would look less suspicious to see a black guy and a white guy with their heads down over a beer and a slimy whiskey in a bar like Joe Higgins’, with or without the correct possessive case, rather than just a white guy by himself.

And when you buy somebody a drink you have to let them talk to you.

The agents were showing a piece of paper—probably the picture of the Digger’s dead accomplice—to a table of three local crones, painted like Harlem whores.

Czisman looked past them to the Winnebago parked across the street. Czisman had been staking out FBI headquarters on Ninth Street when he’d seen the three agents hurry outside, along with a dozen others. Well, they wouldn’t let him go for a ride-along—so he’d arranged for his own. Thank God there’d been a motorcade of ten or so cars and he’d just followed them—through the red lights, driving fast, flashing his brights, which is what you’re supposed to do as a cop when you’re in pursuit but don’t have a dashboard flasher. They’d parked in a cluster near the bar and, after a briefing, had fanned out to canvass for information. Czisman had parked up the street and had slipped into the bar. His digital camera was in his pocket and he’d
taken a few shots of the agents and cops being briefed. Then there was nothing to do but sit back and wait. He wondered how close they were to finding—what had he called it?—the Digger’s lair.