The Devil's Teardrop (29 page)

“She’s got a dog? What kind?”

“I don’t know. How do I know? Big black dog. Lemme finish. She makes sure her dog’s okay then, instead of calling it in, she goes back to her van, puts on body armor, takes her MP-5 and secures the house herself.”

Parker laughed. The thought of any other thin, attractive blonde stalking through a townhouse, armed with a laser-sighted machine gun, would have seemed absurd. But for some reason it was perfectly natural with Lukas. “Still don’t get your point, Cage.”

“No point. I’m only saying Lukas doesn’t need anybody to take care of her. People being together, Parker, you know, men and women, don’t you think it works out best that way? Nobody taking care of anybody else? That’s a rule. Write it down.”

Parker supposed the agent was talking about Joan. Cage had seen Parker and Joan together a number of times. And, sure, Parker had been drawn to his ex-wife because she
was
looking for someone to take care of her, and Parker—newly orphaned when they met—was desperate to nurture. Parker thought back several hours, Lukas addressing the troops in Gravesend. Maybe
that
was what had stirred him so much, listening to her: not so much her expertise as her independence.

They drove in silence for a moment.

“MP-5?” Parker asked, picturing the heavy black Heckler & Koch machine gun.

“Yep. Said her biggest worry was if she had to light up the perp she might ruin some of her wall decorations. She sews too. Makes these quilts you wouldn’t believe.”

“You told me that before. The perp—she bag him?”

“Naw. He’d booked.”

Parker recalled her anger in Gravesend. He asked Cage, “Then what do you think it is? Why she’s been on my case?”

After a moment the agent answered, “Maybe she envies you.”

“Envies me? What do you mean?”

But he wouldn’t answer. “That’s not for me to say. Just hold that thought and when she gives you any static cut her some slack.”

“You’re making no sense, Cage. She envies me?”

“Think of it like one of your puzzles. Either
you
figure
it out or she’ll tell you the answer. That’s up to her. But I’m not giving you any clues.”

“Why would I want to know the answer to Margaret Lukas?”

But Cage only skidded around another canyon of a pothole and said nothing.

Evans closed his phone, poured himself another cup of coffee from the thermos. It must have held a half gallon of coffee. This time Parker accepted the offered cup and drank several sips of the strong brew.

“How’s the family?” Parker asked him.

“I owe the kids big time.” The shrink smiled ruefully.

“How many do you have?”

“Two.”

“Me too,” Parker said. “How old?”

“In their teens. They’re a handful.” He didn’t give any details and didn’t seem to want to say anything more. He asked, “Yours?”

“Eight and nine.”

“Ah, you’ve got a few years of peace and quiet.”

Cage said, “Grandkids are the best. Take it from me. You play with ’em, get ’em all dirty, let ’em spill ice cream on themselves, spoil ’em crazy and then you send ’em home to their parents. You go have a beer and watch the game. How can you beat that?”

They drove for a few moments in silence and finally Evans asked, “That incident you mentioned. With your son? What happened?”

“You ever hear about the Boatman?” Parker asked.

Cage glanced at Parker warily. Then back to the road.

Evans said, “Remember something from the papers. But I’m not sure.”

Parker was surprised; the killer had been featured in
the news for months. Maybe the doctor was new to the area. “He was a serial killer in Northern Virginia, Southern Maryland. Four years ago. He’d kidnap a woman, rape and murder her and leave the body in a dinghy or rowboat. The Potomac a couple times. The Shenandoah. Burke Lake in Fairfax. We had leads to this guy who lived in Arlington but we couldn’t make a case. Finally I was able to connect him to one of the murders through a handwriting sample. SWAT arrested him. He was convicted but he escaped on the way to federal detention. Well, around that time I was in the middle of the custody battle with my ex. The court had awarded me temporary custody. The kids, the housekeeper and I were living in a house in Falls Church. Then one night, around midnight, Robby starts screaming. I run into his room. There’s the Boatman, trying to break in.”

Evans nodded, frowning in concentration. His eyes were pale and they studied Parker closely.

Even now, years later, Parker’s heart trembled at the memory: not only at the image of the square, glazed face looking through the bedroom window but at his son’s distilled terror. The tears streaming from his huge eyes, his shaking hands. He didn’t tell Evans and Cage about the five minutes—they seemed like hours—of absolute horror: shepherding his children into the housekeeper’s room, guarding the door while listening to the Boatman stalk through the house. Finally, with the Fairfax County cops still not there, he stepped into the hallway, his service revolver in hand.

He realized that Evans was looking at him even more closely. He felt like a patient. The doctor noted Parker’s expression and looked away. He asked, “And you shot him?”

“Yes. I did.”

The gun is too loud! Parker had thought manically, as he fired, knowing how the explosions were adding to Robby’s and Stephanie’s terror.

The gun is too loud!

As Cage pulled up to headquarters Evans shoved the thermos back into his backpack and put a hand on Parker’s arm. He gave the document examiner another close look. “Know what we’re gonna do?”

Parker lifted an eyebrow.

“We’re gonna catch this son of a bitch and both of us get back home to our families. Where we ought to be.”

Parker Kincaid thought: Amen.

* * *

Inside the document lab at headquarters the team was reassembled.

Margaret Lukas was on the phone.

Parker glanced at her. Her cryptic look toward him in return brought to mind Cage’s comments in the car.

Maybe she envies you . . .

She looked back down at the notes she was scribbling. He noticed her handwriting. The Palmer Method. Enviable precision and economy. No nonsense.

Hardy and C. P. Ardell stood nearby, also speaking on cell phones.

Parker set the glass sheets on the examination table.

Lukas shut off her phone. She looked at Cage and the others. “The safe house’s completely gone. PERT’s going through it but there’s nothing left. The computer and the disks were totaled.”

Cage asked, “How ’bout the building the Digger shot from?”

“As clean as the Texas Book Depository,” she said bitterly. “They got shell casings this time but he wore—”

“Latex gloves,” Parker said, sighing.

“Right. When he loaded the clips. And leather when he was in the apartment. Not a bit of trace.”

A phone rang and Lukas answered. “Hello? . . . Oh, okay.” She looked up. “It’s Susan Nance. She’s gotten more information back from Boston, White Plains and Philly about the other attacks Czisman was telling us about. I’ll put her on the speaker.”

She hit a button.

“Go ahead, Susan.”

“I’ve tracked down the case detectives. They tell me that just like here there were no solid forensics. No prints, no witnesses. All of the cases’re still open. They got the pictures of the unsub we sent and nobody recognizes him. But they all said something similar. Something odd.”

“Which was?” Parker asked. He was carefully cleaning the glass that held the burnt yellow sheets.

“Basically that the violence was way out of proportion to the haul. Boston, the jewelry store? All he took was a single watch.”

“Just
one
watch?” C. P. Ardell asked. “Was that all he had a chance to boost?”

“No. Looks like that was all he
wanted.
It was a Rolex but still . . . Worth only about two thousand. In White Plains he got away with thirty thousand. Philly, the bus murder scheme? The ransom was only for a hundred thousand.”

And he’s asking $20 million from D.C., Parker thought. The unsub was going for bigger and bigger hauls.

Lukas was apparently thinking the same. She asked Evans, “Progressive offender?”

Progressive offenders were serial criminals who committed successively more serious crimes.

But Evans was shaking his head. “No. He
seems
to be but progressives are always lust driven. Sadosexual murderers mostly.” He rubbed the back of his bony hand against his beard. The hairs were short—as if he’d only started to grow it recently—and his skin must have itched. “They become increasingly more violent because the crime doesn’t satisfy their need. But you rarely see progressive behavior in profit crimes.”

Parker sensed the puzzle here was much more complicated than it seemed.

Or much simpler.

Either way, he felt the frustration of not being able to see any possible solutions.

The farmer has just one bullet in his gun. . . .

Parker finished cleaning the glass and turned his attention to the evidence. He studied what was left of the two pages. He saw, to his dismay, that much of the ash had disintegrated. The fire damage was worse than he’d thought.

Still it would be possible to read some of the unsub’s writings on the larger pieces of ash. This is done by shining infrared light on the surface of the ash. Burnt ink or pencil marks reflect a different wavelength from that of the burnt paper and you usually can make out much of the writing.

Parker carefully set the glass panes holding the yellow sheets side by side in the infrared Foster + Freeman viewer. He crouched and picked up a cheap hand glass he found on the table (thinking angrily: The goddamn
Digger just destroyed my five-hundred-dollar antique Leitz).

Hardy glanced at the sheet of paper on the left. “Mazes. He drew mazes.”

Parker ignored that sheet, though, and examined the one with the reference to the Mason Theater. He guessed that the unsub had also written down the last two targets—the one at 8 p.m. and the one at midnight. But these pieces were badly jumbled and flaked.

“Well, I’ve got a few things visible,” he muttered. He squinted, trained the hand glass on another part of the sheet. “Christ,” he spat out. Shook his head.

“What?” C. P. asked.

“Oh, the targets the Digger’s already hit are perfectly legible. The Metro and the Mason Theater. But the next two . . . I can’t make them out. The midnight hit, the last one . . . that’s easier to read than the third. Write this down,” he said to Hardy.

The detective grabbed a pen and pad of yellow paper. “Go ahead.”

Parker squinted. “It looks like, ‘Place where I . . .’ Let’s see. ‘Place where I . . . took you.’ Then a dash. Then the word ‘black.’ No, ‘
the
black.’ Then there’s a hole in the sheet. It’s gone completely.”

Hardy read back, “‘Place where I took you, dash, the black . . .’”

“That’s it.”

Parker looked up. “Where the hell is he talking about?”

But no one had any idea.

Cage looked at his watch. “What about the eight o’clock hit? That’s what we oughta be concentrating on. We have less than an hour.”

Parker scanned the third line of writing, right below the Mason Theater reference. He studied it for a full minute, crouching. He dictated, “‘. . . two miles south. The R . . .’ That’s an uppercase
R.
But after that the ash is all jumbled. I can see a lot of marks but they’re fragmented.”

Parker took the transcription and walked to a chalkboard mounted on the wall of the lab. He copied the words for everyone to read:

. . . two miles south. The R . . .

. . . place where I took you—the black . . .

“What’s it mean?” Cage asked. “Where the hell was he talking about?”

Parker didn’t have a clue.

He turned away from the board and leaned over the glass sheets, as if he were staring down a bully in a schoolyard.

But the fragment of paper won the contest easily.

“Two miles south of what?” he muttered. “‘R.’ What’s ‘R’?”

He sighed.

The door to the documet lab swung open and Parker did a double take. “Tobe!”

Tobe Geller walked unsteadily into the room. The young man had changed clothes and seemed to have showered but he smelled smoky and was coughing sporadically.

“Hey, boy, you got no business being here,” Cage said.

Lukas said, “Are you crazy? Go home.”

“To my pathetic bachelor quarters? Having broken a New Year’s Eve date with undoubtedly my now-former girlfriend tonight? I don’t think so.” He started to laugh,
then the sound dissolved into a cough. He controlled it and breathed deeply.

“How you doing, buddy?” C. P. Ardell asked, hugging Geller firmly. In the huge agent’s face you could see the heartfelt,
mano-a-mano
concern that tactical agents have no trouble displaying.

“They don’t even make a degree for my burns,” Geller explained. “It’s like I got New England tan. I’m fine.” He coughed again. “Well, aside from the lungs. Unlike certain presidents I
did
inhale. Now. Where are we?”

“That yellow pad?” Parker said ruefully. “Hate to say it but we can’t make out very much.”

“Ouch,” the agent said.

“Yeah, ouch.”

Lukas walked to the examination table. Standing next to Parker. He couldn’t smell the scented soap any longer, only acrid smoke.

“Hm,” she said after a moment.

“What?”

She pointed to the fragments of jumbled ash. “Some of these little pieces might fit after the letter
R,
right?”

“They might.”

“Well, what’s that remind you of?”

Parker looked down. “A jigsaw puzzle,” he whispered.

“Right,” she said. “So—you’re the puzzle master. Can you put them back together?”

Parker surveyed the hundreds of tiny fragments of ash. It could take hours, if not days; unlike a real jigsaw puzzle the edges of the pieces of ash were damaged and didn’t necessarily match the adjoining pieces.

But Parker had a thought. “Tobe?”

“Yo?” The young agent coughed, dusted a burnt eyebrow.