The Devil's Teardrop (22 page)

Twenty minutes with this killer—even staring down the barrel of that machine gun of his—would be enough. He’d work out some kind of arrangement.

“The way they’re describing him,” Hardy said, “I don’t think he’s the sort you can negotiate with.”

“You let me be the judge of that, Detective. Now, where’s his safe house?”

“I . . .”

“Tell me.”

The line hummed. Still, the detective said nothing.

Kennedy’s voice lowered. “You don’t owe the feds a thing, son. You know how they feel about you being on the task force. You’re a step away from fetching coffee.”

“That’s wrong, sir. Agent Lukas’s made me part of the team.”

“Has she?”

“Pretty much.”

“You don’t feel like a third wheel? I’m asking that ’cause
I
feel like one. If Lanier had his way—you know Congressman Lanier?”

“Yessir.”

“If he had his way my only job tonight’d be sitting in the
reviewing stand on the Mall watching fireworks. . . . You and me—the District of Columbia’s
our
city. So, come on, son, where’s that goddamn safe house?”

Kennedy watched Jefferies cross his fingers. Please . . . It would be perfect. I show up there, I try to talk the man into coming out with his hands up. Either he surrenders or they kill him. And either way, my credibility survives. Either way, I’m no longer the mayor who watched the murder of his city on CNN while he kicked back with a beer.

Kennedy heard voices from the other end of the line. Then Hardy was back. “I’m sorry, Mayor, I have to go. There’re people here. I’m sure Agent Lukas will be in touch.”

“Detective . . .”

The line went blank.

* * *

Gravesend.

The car carrying Parker and Cage bounded over gaping potholes and eased to a stop at a curb where trash and rubble spilled into the street. The burnt-out torso of a Toyota rested, ironically, against a fire hydrant.

They climbed out. Lukas had driven in her own car, a red Ford Explorer, and was already at the vacant lot that was the rendezvous point. She was standing with her hands on her trim hips, looking around.

The smells of urine and shit and burning wood and trash were very strong.

Parker’s parents, who became world travelers after his father had retired from teaching history, had once found themselves in a slum in Ankara, Turkey. Parker still could remember the letter he’d received from his mother, who
was an ardent correspondent. It was the last letter he’d received from them before they’d died. It was framed and up on the wall of his study downstairs, next to the Whos’ wall of fame.

They’re impoverished, the people here, and that, more than racial differences, more than culture, more than politics, more than religion, turns their hearts to stone.

He thought of her words now, as he looked over the desolation of the area.

Two black teenagers, who’d been leaning against a wall graffiti’d with gang colors, looked at the men and women arriving—obviously law enforcers—and walked away slowly, uneasiness and defiance on their faces.

Parker was troubled—though not by the danger; by the hugeness of the place. It was three or four square miles of slums and row houses and small factories and vacant lots. How could they possibly find the unsub’s safe house in this much urban sprawl?

There were some riddles that Parker had never been able to figure out.

Three hawks . . .

Smoke wafted past him. It was from fires in the oil drums where the homeless men and women and the gangstas burned wood and trash for warmth. He saw more hulks of stripped cars. Across the street was a building that seemed deserted; the only clue to habitation was a bulb burning behind a red towel covering a broken window.

Just past the Metro stop, over a tall, decaying brick wall, the chimney of the crematorium rose into the night sky. There was no smoke rising from it but the sky above the
muzzle rippled in the heat. Perhaps its fires always burned. Parker shivered. The sight reminded him of old-time pictures of—

“Hell,” Lukas muttered. “It looks like hell.”

Parker glanced at her.

Cage shrugged in agreement.

A car arrived. It was Jerry Baker, wearing a bulky windbreaker and body armor. Parker saw that, as befit a tactical agent, he was also wearing cowboy boots. Cage handed him the stack of computerized pictures of the unsub—the death mask portrait from the morgue. “We’ll use these for the canvas. At the bottom? That’s the only description we have of the Digger.”

“Not much.”

Another shrug.

More unmarked cars and vans began to pull up, their dashboard flashers reflecting in the bands of storefront windows. FBI government-issue wheels. White-and-teal District police cars too, their light bars revolving. There were about twenty-five men and women in total, half of them federal agents, half uniformed cops. Baker motioned to them and they congregated around Lukas’s truck. He distributed the printouts.

Lukas said to Parker, “Want to brief them?”

“Sure.”

She called, “If you could listen to Agent Jefferson here.”

It took a second before Parker recognized the reference to his stage name. He decided he would’ve been a failure at undercover work. He said, “The man in the picture you’ve got there was the perp responsible for the Metro and Mason Theater shootings. We think he was working out of a safe house somewhere here in Gravesend. Now, he’s dead but his accomplice—the shooter—is still at
large. So we need to find the safe house and find it fast.”

“You have a name?” one of the District cops called.

“The unsub—the dead one—is a John Doe,” Parker said, holding up the picture. “The shooter’s got a nickname. The Digger. That’s all.
His
description’s on the bottom of the handout.”

Parker continued. “You can narrow down the canvassing area some. The safe house is probably near a demolition or construction site and won’t be far from the cemetery. He also recently bought some paper like this—” Parker held up the clear sleeves holding the extortion note and the envelope. “Now, the paper was sun-bleached so it’s possible that he bought it in a store that displays their office supplies in or near a south-facing window. So hit every convenience store, drugstore, grocery store and newsstand that sells paper. Oh, and look for the type of pen he used too. It was an AWI black ballpoint. Probably cost thirty-nine or forty-nine cents.”

That was all he could think of. With a nod he handed off to Lukas. She stepped in front of the agents. Looked over them, silent, until she had everyone’s attention. “Now, listen up. Like Agent Jefferson said, the unsub’s dead but the shooter sure as hell isn’t. We don’t know if he’s in Gravesend and we don’t know if he’s living in the safe house. But I want everybody here to assume he’s ten feet behind you and has a clear path to target. He’s got no problem lighting up law enforcement personnel. So as you go through the neighborhood I want everyone to be looking for ambush positions. I want weapon hands free, I want jackets and coats unbuttoned, I want holster thongs unsnapped.”

She paused for a moment. She had their complete attention, this thin woman with silver-blond hair.

“At eight o’clock—yep, that’s right, just over two hours—our perp is going to find someplace that’s filled with people and he’s going to empty his weapon at them again. Now I do
not
want to work that crime scene and have to look into the eyes of someone who’s just lost a parent or a child. I do
not
want to have to tell them I’m sorry but we couldn’t find this beast before he killed again. That is
not
going to happen.
I’m
not going to let it. And
you’re
not.”

Parker found himself drawn into her words, delivered in a firm, even voice. He thought about the Band of Brothers speech from Shakespeare’s
Henry V,
which had been Robby’s introduction to theater. The boy had memorized the speech the day after they returned from Kennedy Center.

“All right,” Lukas said. “Any questions?”

“Anything more on his armament?”

“He’s been armed with a full-auto Uzi loaded with long clips and a suppressor. We have no further information.”

“How green-lighted are we?” one agent asked.

“To light up the shooter?” Lukas replied. “
Totally
green-lighted. Anything else?” No one raised a hand. “Okay. We’re on emergency frequency. I don’t want any chatter. Don’t report in that you
haven’t
found anything. I don’t care about that. You see the suspect, call for backup, clear your background and engage. Now go find me that safe house.”

Parker himself felt oddly moved by these words. It had been years since he’d fired a weapon but he suddenly wanted a piece of the Digger himself.

Lukas directed teams of agents and officers to those parts of Gravesend she wanted them to canvas. Parker was impressed; she had a remarkable sense of the geography
of this neighborhood. Some people, he reflected, are just natural-born cops.

Half of the agents started off on foot; the others climbed into their cars and sped away. Leaving Cage, Lukas and Parker standing on the curb. Cage made a call. He spoke for a moment. Hung up.

“Tobe’s got an MCP. They’re on their way. He’s analyzing the tape from the theater. Oh, and that psychologist from Georgetown’s on his way over here too.”

Most of the streetlights were out—some shattered from bullets, it looked like. Pale green illumination lit the street from the fluorescent lights of the few stores that were open. Two agents were canvassing across the street. Cage looked around and saw two young men rubbing their hands over an oil drum in which a fire burned. Cage said, “I’ll talk to them.” He walked into the vacant lot. It seemed that they wanted to leave but figured that would look more suspicious. Their eyes locked onto the fire as he approached and they fell silent.

Lukas nodded toward a pizza parlor half a block away. “I’ll take that,” she said to Parker. “You want to wait here for Tobe and the shrink?”

“Sure.”

Lukas started up the street, leaving Parker alone.

The temperature was continuing to fall. There was now a sharp edge to the air: that frostiness that he enjoyed so much in the autumn—evoking memories of driving the children to school while juggling mugs of hot chocolate, shopping for Thanksgiving dinner, picking pumpkins in Loudon County. But tonight he was aware only of the painful sting in his nostrils and on his ears and fingertips; the sensation was like a razor slash. He stuffed his hands in his pockets.

Maybe because most of the agents had left, the locals were returning to the streets. Two blocks away, a nondescript man in a dark coat stepped out of a bar and walked slowly up the street then stepped into the darkened alcove of a check-cashing outlet—to pee, Parker guessed.

A tall woman, or transvestite, obviously a hooker, walked out of the alley where she’d been waiting for the crowd to disburse.

Three young black men pushed out of an arcade and cracked open a bottle of Colt 45 malt liquor, laughing hard as they disappeared down an alley.

Parker turned away and happened to glance across the street.

He saw a thrift store. It was closed and at first he didn’t pay much attention to the place. But then he noticed boxed sets of cheap stationery on shelves near the cash register. Could this be where the unsub had bought the paper and envelope for the note?

He stepped to the window of the store and gazed through the greasy glass, cupping his hands against the glare of the one nearby streetlight that still worked and trying to see the packages of paper. His hands shook in the chill. Beside him a rat nosed through a pile of trash. Parker Kincaid thought, This is crazy. I have no business being here.

But, still, he lifted his sleeve and, using the fleece cuff of his bomber jacket, wiped the grimy glass in front of him as carefully as a diligent window cleaner so that he’d have a better view of the merchandise inside.

“Maybe I seen him
. Yeah, maybe.”

Margaret Lukas felt her heart pump faster. She pushed the picture of the unsub closer and the counterman at the Gravesend pizza place—a chubby Latino in tomato-sauce-stained whites—continued to study it carefully.

“Take your time,” she said. Please, she thought. Let’s have a break here . . .

“Maybe. I no so sure. What it is, we get tons ’n’ tons of people in here. You know?”

“It’s very important,” she said.

She’d remembered that the coroner had found steak in the belly of the unsub. There was no steak on the menu here. Still, it was the only twenty-four-hour restaurant on the street near the Metro stop and she figured that the unsub might have stopped in at some point in the past few weeks. Maybe he’d even planned the extortion scheme here—he might’ve sat under this sickly light at one of the chipped tables to draft the note as he
looked around at the sad people eating greasy food and thought, arrogantly, how much smarter he was than they. How much richer he was about to be.

She laughed to herself. Maybe he’d been as smart and arrogant as she was. As much as Kincaid.

Three of them, all alike.

Three hawks on a roof. One’s dead; that leaves two on the roof. You and me, Parker.

The clerk’s brown eyes lifted, gazed into her blue ones. They dropped bashfully to the paper again. It seemed to be a personal defeat when he finally shook his head. “No, I no think so. Sorry. Hey, you want a slice? The double cheese, it’s fresh. I just made it.”

She shook her head. “Anybody else working here?”

“No, just me tonight. I got the holiday. You did too, looks like.” He struggled for something to say. “You work many holidays?”

“Some,” she said. “Thanks.”

Lukas walked to the front door. She paused, looked outside.

The agents from the field office were canvassing across the street. Cage was talking to more gangstas in the vacant lot and Kincaid was ogling some thrift store as if the crown jewels were in the window.

The other agents were dispersed where she’d sent them. But had she been right? she wondered. Who knew? You can read all the books on investigative techniques ever written but the bottom line is improvisation. It
was
just like solving one of Kincaid’s puzzles. You had to look beyond the formulas and rules.