The Devil's Teardrop (30 page)

“There’re computer programs that solve anagram puzzles, aren’t there?”

“Anagrams, anagrams? What’re those again?”

It was tattooed C. P. Ardell who answered—a man whose most intellectual activity you’d guess would be comparing prices of discount beer. “Assembling different words out of a set of letters. Like n-o-w, o-w-n, w-o-n.”

Geller said, “Oh, sure there are. But then
you’d
never use software to help you solve a puzzle, would you, Parker?”

“No, that’d be cheating.” He smiled to Lukas. Whose stone face offered nothing more than a momentary glance and returned to the fragments of ash.

Parker continued, “After the sequence ‘. . . two miles. The R . . .’ See all those bits of letters on the ash? Can you put them back together?”

Geller laughed. “It’s brilliant,” he said. “We’ll scan a handwriting sample from the note. That’ll give us standards of construction for all of his letters. Then I’ll shoot the pieces of ash on the digital camera with an infrared filter, drop out the tonal value of the burnt paper. That’ll leave us with fragments of letters. And I’ll have the computer assemble them.”

“Will it work?” Hardy asked.

“Oh, it’ll work,” Geller assessed with confidence. “I just don’t know how long it’ll take.”

Geller hooked up the digital camera and took several pictures of the ash and one of the extortion note. He plugged the camera into a serial port on a computer and began to upload the images.

His fingers flew over the keys. Everybody remained silent.

Which made the braying sound of Parker’s phone a moment later particularly startling.

He jumped in surprise and opened his cell phone. He noted the caller ID was his home number.

“Hello?” he answered.

His heart froze as Mrs. Cavanaugh said in a taut voice, “Parker.”

In the background he heard Robby sobbing.

“What is it?” he asked, trying not to panic.

“Everybody’s okay,” she said quickly. “Robby’s fine. He just got a little scared. He thought he saw that man in the backyard. The Boatman.”

Oh, no . . .

“There was nobody there. I turned the outdoor lights on. Mr. Johnson’s dog got loose again and was jumping around in the bushes. That was all. But he’s scared. Really scared.”

“Put him on.”

“Daddy? Daddy!” The boy’s voice was limp with fear. Nothing upset Parker more than this sound.

“Hey, Robby!” Parker said brightly. “What happened?”

“I looked outside.” He cried for a moment more. Parker closed his eyes. His son’s fear was like his own. The boy continued. “And I thought I saw him. The Boatman. It was . . . I got scared.”

“Remember, it’s just the bushes. We’re going to cut them down tomorrow.”

“No, this was in the garage.”

Parker was angry with himself. He’d lazily left the garage door up and there was plenty of junk inside that could resemble an intruder.

Parker said to his son, “Remember what we do?”

No answer.

“Robby? Remember?”

“I’ve got my shield.”

“Good for you. How ’bout the helmet?” Parker glanced up and saw Lukas staring at him raptly. “You have your helmet?”

“Yes,” the boy answered.

“And what about the lights?”

“We’ll put them on.”

“How many lights?” Parker asked.

“Every last one,” the boy recited.

Oh, it was so hard, hearing his son’s voice . . . And knowing what he had to do now. He looked around the lab, at the faces of these people who had become his own band of brothers tonight. And he thought, You can—with luck and strength—pry yourself loose from wives or lovers or colleagues. But not from your children. Never from your children. They have your heart netted forever.

Into the phone he said, “I’ll be right home. Don’t worry.”

“Really?” the boy asked.

“As fast as I can drive.”

He hung up. Everyone was looking at him, motionless.

“I have to go,” he said, eyes on Cage. “I’ll be back. But I have to go now.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Hardy asked.

“No, thanks, Len,” Parker answered.

“Jesus, Parker,” Cage began, looking up at the clock. “I’m sorry he’s scared but—”

Margaret Lukas lifted her hand and silenced the older agent. She said, “There’s no way the Digger could know about you. But I’ll send a couple of agents to stay outside your house.”

He thought that she was saying this as a preface to
talking him into staying. But then she added quietly, “Your little boy? Go home. Make him happy. However long it takes.”

Parker held her eyes for a moment. Wondering: Had he found a clue to the maze of Special Agent Lukas?

Or was this only a false trail?

He started to thank her but he sensed suddenly that any show of gratitude, any response at all, would throw off this tenuous balance between them. So he simply nodded and hurried out the door.

As he left, the only sound in the lab was Geller’s raspy voice speaking to his computer. “Come on, come on, come on.” The way a desperate handicapper pleads with a losing horse at the track.

Pixel by pixel.

Watching the images fall into place on Tobe Geller’s screen. Still a jumble.

Margaret Lukas paced, thinking about anagrams, about ash. Thinking about Parker Kincaid.

When he got home how would he comfort his son? Would he hold him? Read to him? Watch TV with him? Would he be the sort of father who talked to him about problems? Or would he try to distract the boy, take his mind off his fear? Bring him a present to bribe away his sorrow?

She had no idea. All Margaret Lukas knew was that she wanted Kincaid back here now, standing close to her.

Well, part of her did. The other part of her wanted him never to come back, to stay hidden forever in his little suburban fortress. She could—

No, no . . . Come on. Focus.

Lukas turned to compact Dr. Evans, watched him examining the extortion note carefully, rubbing his hand
over his stubbly beard. His pale eyes were unsettling and she decided she wouldn’t want him to be
her
therapist. He poured more coffee from his thermos. Then he announced, “I’ve got some thoughts about the unsub.”

“Go ahead,” she told him.

“Take ’em with a grain of salt,” the doctor cautioned. “To do this right I’d need a ton more data and two weeks to analyze it.”

Lukas said, “That’s the way we work here. Kick around ideas. We’re not holding you to anything.”

“I think, from what we’ve seen, the Digger’s just a machine. We’d call him ‘profile-proof.’ It’s pointless to analyze him. It’d be like doing a profile of a gun. But the perp, the man in the morgue, he was a different story. You know organized offenders?”

“Of course,” Lukas said. Criminal psychology 101.

“Well, he was a
highly
organized offender.”

Lukas’s eyes strayed to the extortion note as Evans described the man who’d written it.

The doctor continued. “He planned everything out perfectly. Times, locations. He knew human nature cold—he knew the mayor was going to pay, for instance, even though most authorities wouldn’t have agreed to. He had backup plans upon backup plans. The firebomb at the safe house, I’m thinking of. And he found the perfect weapon—the Digger, a functioning human being who does nothing but kill. He took on an impossible task and he probably would’ve succeeded if he hadn’t been killed in that accident.”

“We had the bags rigged with tracers, so, no, he probably wouldn’t have gotten away,” Lukas pointed out.

“Oh,” Evans said, “I’ll bet he had some plan to counter that.”

Lukas realized that this was probably right.

The doctor continued. “Now, he asked for twenty million. And he was willing to kill hundreds of people to get it. He wasn’t a progressive offender but he
did
raise the stakes because he knew—well, he
believed—
he could get away. He believed he was good—but he
was
good. In other words his arrogance was backed up by talent.”

“Making the prick all the more dangerous,” C. P. grumbled.

“Exactly. No false sense of ego to trip him up. He was brilliant—”

“Kincaid said he was highly educated.” Lukas said, wishing again that the document examiner were here to kick these ideas around with. “He tried to disguise it in the note but Parker saw right through it.”

Evans nodded slowly at this information. Then asked, “What was he wearing when they brought him into the morgue?”

C. P. found the list and read it to the doctor.

Evans summarized, “So, cheap clothes.”

“Right.”

“Not exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from somebody with the intelligence to set this whole thing up and who was asking for twenty million dollars.”

“True,” Cage said.

“Which means what?” Lukas asked.

“I see a class issue here,” Evans explained. “I think he preferred to kill rich people, society people. He saw himself as better than them. Sort of a heroic common man.”

Hardy pointed out, “But in the first attack he had the Digger gun down everybody, not just the wealthy.”

Evans said, “But consider where. Dupont Circle. It’s Yuppieville there. Hardly Southeast. And the Mason
Theater? Tickets for the ballet must’ve been selling for sixty bucks each. And there was the third location too,” Evans reminded. “The Four Seasons. Even though he didn’t hit it he sent us there. He was familiar with it. And it’s very upscale.”

Lukas nodded. It seemed obvious to her now and she was upset she hadn’t realized it earlier. She thought again about Parker—how he approached puzzles. Thinking broadly. It was so hard sometimes, though.

Focus . . .

“I think he was angry at the rich. At society’s elite.”

“Why?” Cage asked.

“I don’t know yet. Not on the facts we have. But he did hate them. Oh, he was full of hate. And we should remember that when we’re trying to figure out what his next target will be.”

Lukas pulled the morgue shot of the unsub closer, stared at him.

What
had been
in his mind? What
were
his motives?

Evans glanced at her and gave a short laugh.

“What?” Lukas asked.

He nodded at the extortion note. “I feel like it’s the note I’ve been analyzing. Like
that’s
the perpetrator.”

She’d been thinking just the same.

Exactly what Parker Kincaid had said too.

Focus
 . . .

“Hold on, folks,” Geller said. “We’re getting something.” Everyone leaned toward the screen on which they could see the words “. . . two miles south. The R . . .”

Behind that phrase the computer was inserting combinations of the letters from the fragments of ash. It would reject them if the pen stroke of one letter didn’t match a stroke from the one to its left. But the system
had now added a letter
i
behind the
R.
Another one was forming behind that.

“It’s that funny
i
with a dot Parker was telling us about,” Geller said.

“The devil’s teardrop,” Lukas whispered.

“Right,” Geller said. “Then after that . . . a letter
t.
Is that a
t
? Damn tears, I can’t see
anything.
”

“Yep,” Lukas said. “Definitely a
t. R-i-t.
”

“What’s that next letter?” Hardy asked, leaning toward the screen.

“I can’t tell,” Lukas muttered. “It’s too fuzzy. A short letter—without any—what’d Parker call them?—ascenders or descenders.”

She leaned over the tech’s shoulders. The smell of smoke on him was strong. On the screen the letters were very faint, but, yes, there definitely was an
i
and a
t.
The next one though was just a blur.

“Damn,” Geller muttered. “The computer says that that’s the letter that fits. The strokes match. But I can’t make it out. Anybody see better than me?”

“Looks like a zigzag or something,” Lukas said. “An
a
or
x
maybe?”

Cage’s head shot up. “Zigzag? Could it be a
z
?”

“Ritz!” Hardy blurted. “Maybe the Ritz-Carlton?”

“That’s got to be it!” Lukas said, nodding at Evans. “He’s going after more rich people.”

“Sure!” Evans said. “And it makes sense—given his tendency to fool us—he’d figure we’d eliminate hotels because he used one before.”

In the office chair Geller rolled to a different computer. In five seconds he had a Yellow Pages telephone directory on the screen. “Two Ritzes in the area. One at Tysons Corner. And one in Pentagon City.”

Lukas said, “Parker said he’d stick to the District. I’m voting in Pentagon City.”

She called Jerry Baker and told him about the latest target. “I want every tactical agent in the District and Northern Virginia mobilized. And send skeleton crews to Tysons.” She added, “You’re not going to like it but no hoods and helmets.”

She meant: without Nomex hoods and Kevlar helmets—shorthand in the Bureau for going plainclothes.

“You sure?” Baker asked uncertainly. When officers dress for undercover surveillance they can’t wear as much body armor as in an overt tactical operation. It’s far riskier, especially with a perp armed with an automatic weapon.

“Has to be, Jerry. We’ve almost nailed this guy once and he’s gonna be skittish as a deer. He sees anything out of the ordinary he’s going to bolt. I’ll take responsibility.”

“Okay, Margaret. I’ll get on it.”

She hung up.

She found Len Hardy staring at her. His face suddenly seemed older, tougher. She wondered if he was going to confront her again about his being on a tactical team. But he asked, “You’re running the operation plainclothes?”

“Right. Is there a problem with that, Detective?”

“Does that mean you’re not going to evacuate the hotel?”

“No, I’m not,” she answered.

“But there’ll be a thousand people there tonight.”

Lukas said, “It’s got to be business as usual. The Digger can’t suspect a thing.”

“But if he gets past us . . . I mean, we aren’t even sure what he looks like.”