The Devil's Teardrop

"He's dead," Cage muttered. "He's dead."

  Parker saw the killer's silhouette near the emergency exit in the back of the bus--where he had a perfect shot at Hardy, sprawled on the street.

  But before the Digger could fire, an agent rolled out from behind a car and crouched, firing a stream of bullets into the bus. Blood sprayed the inside windows. Then there was a sensuous whoosh and fire erupted inside the bus. A flaming stream of fuel flowed to the curb.

  Hardy struggled to his feet and ran for cover behind a District squad car.

  There was a heartrending scream from inside the bus as the interior disappeared in orange fire. Parker saw the Digger, a mass of boiling flames, rise once then fall into the aisle of the bus.

  There were soft snaps from inside--like the popcorn that Stephie had made earlier for her brother's surprise dessert--as the Digger's remaining bullets exploded in the fire. A tree on Constitution Avenue caught fire and illuminated the macabre spectacle with an incongruously cheerful glow.

  Slowly the agents rose from cover and approached the bus. They stood at a cautious distance as the last of the burning ammunition detonated and the fire trucks arrived and began pumping foam on the charred hulk of the vehicle.

  When the flames had died down, two agents in full body armor made their way to the door of the bus and looked inside.

  Suddenly a series of loud bangs shook the Mall.

  Every agent and cop nearby dropped into defensive positions, lifting their weapons.

  But the sounds were only the fireworks--orange spiders, blue star bursts, white concussion shells. The glorious finale of the show.

  The two agents stepped out of the doorway of the bus, pulled their helmets off.

  A moment later Parker heard one of the agent's staticky transmission in Cage's radio. "Vehicle is secure," he said. "Subject confirmed dead" was the unemotional epitaph for the killer.

  *

  As they walked back to the Vietnam Memorial Parker told Cage about Czisman, how the shooting had started.

  "He fired warning shots. He hadn't done that, the Digger would've killed a hundred people right here. Maybe me too."

  "What the hell was he up to?"

  In front of them a cop was covering Henry Czisman's body.

  Cage bent down, grimacing in pain. A medic had poked his abdomen and proclaimed that the fall had resulted in the predicted broken rib. The agent was taped then given some Tylenol 3. The most frustrating part of the injury seemed to be that shrugging was momentarily too painful for him.

  The agent pulled the yellow rubberized sheet away from the corpse. He went through the journalist's pockets. Took out his wallet. Then he found something else.

  "What's this?" He lifted a book out of the man's jacket pocket. Parker saw that it was a little gem of a book: Leather-bound, hand-stitched pages, not "perfect"--glued--binding as in mass-market books. The paper was vellum, which in Thomas Jefferson's day was smoothed animal skin but nowadays was very high-quality cloth paper. The edges of the paper were marbleized in red and gold.

  And inside, the calligraphic handwriting--presumably Czisman's--was as beautiful as an artist's. Parker couldn't help but admire it.

  Cage flipped through it, paused at several pages, read them, shaking his head. He handed it to Parker. "Check this out."

  Parker frowned, looking at the title, written in gold ink on the cover. A Chronicle of Sorrow.

  He opened it. Read out loud. "'To the memory of my wife, Anne, the Butcher's first victim.'"

  The book was divided into sections. "Boston." "White Plains." And photographs of crime scenes had been pasted inside. The first one was headed "Hartford." Parker turned the page and read, "'From the Hartford News-Times.'" Czisman had copied the text of the article. It was dated in November of last year.

  Parker read, "'Three Killed in Holdup . . . Hartford Police are still searching for the man who walked into the offices of the News-Times on Saturday and opened fire with a shotgun, killing three employees in the classified advertising department.

  "'The only description of the killer was that he was a male of medium build, wearing a dark overcoat. A police spokesman said that his motive may have been to divert law enforcement authorities while his accomplice robbed an armored truck making a delivery to a bank on the other side of town. The second gunman shot and killed the driver of the truck and his assistant. He escaped with $4,000 in cash.'"

  Cage muttered, "Killed three people for four G's. That's him all right."

  Parker looked up. "One of the clerks killed at the paper was Anne Czisman. She was his wife."

  "So he wanted the prick as much as we did," Cage said.

  "Czisman was using us to get to the unsub and the Digger. That's why he wanted to see the body in the morgue so much. And that's why he was following me."

  Revenge . . .

  "This book . . . it was his way of dealing with his grief." Parker crouched and reverently pulled the sheet back up over the man's face once more.

  "Let's call Lukas," he said to Cage. "Give her the news."

  *

  At FBI headquarters Margaret Lukas was in the employees' lobby on Pennsylvania Avenue, briefing the deputy director, a handsome man with a politician's trim graying hair. She'd heard the reports that the Digger was on the Mall and that there had been shooting. Lukas was desperately eager to get to the Mall herself but since she was primary on the case, protocol dictated that she keep the senior administrators in the Bureau informed.

  Her phone buzzed. And she answered fast, superstitiously not letting herself hope that they'd captured him.

  "Lukas here."

  "Margaret," Cage said.

  And she knew immediately from his tone that they'd nailed the killer. It was a sound in a cop's voice you learn early in your career.

  "Collared or tagged?"

  Arrested or dead, she meant.

  "Tagged," Cage responded.

  Lukas came as close to saying a prayer of Thanksgiving as she'd come in five years.

  "And, get this, the mayor winged him."

  "What?"

  "Yep, Kennedy. Got off a few shots. That saved some lives."

  She relayed this news to the deputy director.

  "You okay?" she asked Cage.

  "Fine," Cage responded. "Cracked a rib while I was covering my ass is all."

  But her gut tightened. She heard something else in his voice, a tone, a hollowness.

  Jackie, it's Tom's mother . . . Jackie, I have to tell you something. The airline just called . . . Oh, Jackie . . .

  "But?" she asked quickly. "What happened? Is it Kincaid?"

  "No, he's okay," the agent said softly.

  "Tell me."

  "He got C. P., Margaret. I'm sorry. He's dead."

  She closed her eyes. Sighed. The fury steamed through her again, fury that she herself hadn't had a chance to park a bullet in the Digger's heart.

  Cage continued. "Not even a firefight. The Digger shot toward where the mayor was sitting. C. P. just happened to be in the wrong place."

  And it was the place that I'd sent him to, she thought bitterly. Christ.

  She'd known the agent for three years . . . Oh, no . . .

  Cage was adding, "The Digger capped four other friendlies and we've got three injured. Looks like six civies wounded. Still a half-dozen reported missing but no bodies. They probably just scattered and their families haven't found them yet. Oh, and that Czisman?"

  "Who, the writer?"

  "Yeah. Digger got him."

  "What?"

  "He wasn't a writer at all. I mean, he was but that's not what he was doing here. The Digger'd killed his wife and he was using us to get him. The Digger took him out first though."

  So, it's been amateur night, she thought. Kincaid, the mayor. Czisman.

  "What about Hardy?"

  Cage told her that the young detective had made a one-man assault on the bus the Digger'd holed up in. "He got pretty close and had good firing position. Might've been his shots t
hat hit the Digger. Nobody could tell what was going on."

  "So he didn't shoot himself in the foot?" Lukas asked.

  Cage said, "I'll tell you, it looked like he was hell-bent on killing himself but when it came right down to it he backed off and went for cover. Guess he decided to stick around for a few years."

  Just like me, Lukas the changeling thought.

  "Is Evans there?" Cage asked.

  Lukas looked around. Surprised that the doctor wasn't here. Funny . . . She'd thought he was coming down to the lobby to meet her. "I'm not sure where he is," she answered. "Must be upstairs still. In the document lab. Or maybe the Crisis Center."

  "Find him and give him the good news. Tell him thanks. And tell him to submit a big bill."

  "Will do. And I'll call Tobe too."

  "Parker and I're gonna do crime scene with PERT then head back over there in forty-five minutes or so."

  When she hung up the dep director said, "I'm going down to the Mall. Who's in charge?"

  She nearly said, Parker Kincaid. But caught herself. "Special Agent Cage. He's near the Vietnam Memorial with PERT."

  "There'll have to be a press conference. I'll give the director a heads-up. He may want to make a statement too . . . Say, you miss a party tonight, Lukas?"

  "That's the thing about holidays, sir. There'll always be one next year." She laughed. "Maybe we ought to make up T-shirts with that saying on them."

  He smiled stiffly. Then asked, "How's our whistle-blower doing? Any more threats?"

  "Moss? I haven't checked on him lately," she said. "But I definitely have to."

  "You think there's a problem?" The dep director frowned.

  "Oh, no. But he owes me a beer."

  *

  In the deserted document lab Dr. John Evans folded up his cell phone. He clicked the TV set off.

  So they'd killed the Digger.

  The news reports were sporadic but as best Evans could tell there'd been minimal fatalities--not like the Metro shooting and not like the yacht. Still, from the TV images, Constitution Avenue looked like a war zone. Smoke, a hundred emergency vehicles, people hiding behind cars, trees, bushes.

  Evans pulled on his bulky parka and walked to the corner of the lab. He slipped the heavy thermos into his knapsack, slung it over his shoulder then pushed through the double doors and started down the dim corridor.

  The Digger . . . What a fascinating creature. One of the few people in the world who really was, as he'd told the agents, profile-proof.

  At the elevator he paused, looked at the building directory, trying to orient himself. There was a map. He studied it. FBI headquarters was much more complicated than he'd imagined.

  His finger hovered over the down button but before he could push it a voice called, "Hi." He turned. Saw somebody walking toward him from the second bank of elevators.

  "Hi, there, Doctor," the voice called again. "You heard?"

  It was that young detective. Len Hardy. His overcoat was no longer perfectly pressed. It was stained and sooty. There was a cut on his cheek.

  Evans pushed the down button. Twice. Impatient. "Just saw it on the news," he told Hardy. He shrugged the backpack off his shoulder. The doctor grunted as he caught the bag in the crook of his arm and began to unzip it.

  Hardy glanced absently at the stained backpack. He said, "Man, I'll tell you, I spoke a little too fast there, volunteering to go after that guy. I went a little crazy. Some kind of battlefield hysteria."

  "Uh-huh," Evans said. He reached inside the backpack and took out the thermos.

  Hardy continued, chatting away. "He nearly nailed me. Shook me up some. I was maybe thirty feet from him. Saw his eyes, saw the muzzle of his gun. Man . . . I was suddenly real happy to be alive."

  "That happens," Evans said. Where the hell was the elevator?

  Hardy glanced at the silver metal cylinder. "Say, you know where Agent Lukas is?" the detective asked, looking up the dark corridor.

  "I think she's downstairs," Evans said, unscrewing the lid to the thermos. "She had to brief somebody. The lobby on Ninth. Didn't you just come that way?"

  "I came in through the garage."

  The doctor pulled the top off the thermos. "You know, Detective, the way you told everybody about the Diggers and Levelers? You made it sound like you didn't trust me." He turned toward Hardy.

  Evans looked down. He saw the black, silenced pistol Hardy was pointing at his face.

  "Trust didn't have anything to do with it," Hardy said.

  Evans dropped the thermos. Coffee splashed onto the floor. He saw the flash of yellow light from the muzzle of the gun. And that was all he saw.

  IV

  The Puzzle Master

  That handwriting was the worstest thing against me.

  -BRUNO HAUPTMANN, REFERRING TO THE EVIDENCE IN HIS TRIAL FOR THE LINDBERGH BABY KIDNAPPING

  30

  The agent was young enough to still be thrilled at the idea of being an FBI employee. So he didn't mind one bit that he'd been assigned the midnight-to-8 shift New Year's Eve in the Bureau's Security Center on the third floor of headquarters.

  There was also the fact that Louise, the agent he was working with, wore a tight blue blouse and short black skirt and was flirting with him.

  Definitely flirting, he decided.

  Well, okay, she was talking about her cat. But the body language told him it was flirting. And her bra was black and visible through the blouse. Which was a message too.

  The agent continued to gaze at the ten TV monitors that were his responsibility. Louise, on his left, had another ten. They were linked to more than sixty security cameras located in and around headquarters. The scenes on the monitors changed every five seconds as the cameras sequenced.

  Louise of the black bra was nodding absently as he talked about his parents' place on the Chesapeake Bay. The intercom brayed.

  It couldn't have been Sam or Ralph--the two agents he and Louise had replaced a half hour ago; they had total-clearance entry cards and would've just walked inside.

  The agent hit the intercom button. "Yes?"

  "It's Detective Hardy. District P.D."

  "Who's Hardy?" the agent asked Louise.

  She shrugged and went back to her monitors.

  "Yes?"

  The voice crackled, "I'm working with Margaret Lukas."

  "Oh, on the Metro shooter case?"

  "Right."

  The legendary Margaret Lukas. The security agent hadn't been with the Bureau very long but even he knew that Lukas would someday be the first woman director of the FBI. The tech pushed the enter button, spun around to face the door.

  "Can I help you?"

  "I'm afraid I'm lost," Hardy said.

  "Happens around here." He smiled. "Where you headed?"

  "I'm trying to find the document lab. I got lost on the way to get some coffee."

  "Documents? That's the seventh floor. Turn left. Can't miss it."

  "Thanks."

  "What's this?" Louise said suddenly. "Hey, what is this?"

  The agent glanced at her as she hit a button to stop the video camera scan and pointed to one of the monitors. It showed a man lying on his back not far from where they were now, on this floor. The monitors were black and white but a large pool of what was obviously blood ran from his head.

  "Oh, Christ," she muttered and reached for the phone. "It looks like Ralph."

  From behind them came a soft thunk. Louise gave a sudden jerk and grunted as the front of her blouse disappeared in a mist of blood.

  "Oh," she gasped. "What--?"

  Another pop. The bullet struck the back of her head and she pitched forward.

  The young agent turned toward the doorway, lifting his hands, crying, "No, no."

  In a calm voice Hardy said, "Relax."

  "Please!"

  "Relax," he repeated. "I just have a few questions."

  "Don't kill me. Please--"

  "Now," Hardy asked matter-of-factly, "your computers're
running Secure-Chek software?"

  "I--"

  "I'll let you live if you tell me everything I ask."

  "Yes." He started crying. "Secure-Chek."

  "What version?"

  "Six oh."

  "And if you don't log in at regular intervals a Code Forty-two goes out over the Inter-Gov System?"

  "That's right . . . Oh, look, mister." He glanced at the body of the woman beside him, which twitched twice. Blood flowed into the control panel. "Oh, God . . ."

  Speaking slowly, Hardy asked, "You started your shift at midnight?"

  "Please, I . . ."

  "Midnight?" he repeated, a schoolteacher coaching a child.

  The agent nodded.

  "What was your first log-in time?"

  He was crying hard now. "Twelve twenty-one."

  "When's the next time you have to log in?"

  "One-oh-seven."

  Hardy glanced at the clock on the wall. He nodded.

  Panic in his voice, the young agent continued. "On holidays we use a pattern of increasing intervals, so after the second log-in we--"

  "That's all right," Hardy reassured the agent then shot him twice in the head and pushed the button to release the door.

  *

  The man who was not Detective Len Hardy, a fictional name, but was in reality Edward Fielding made his way to the elevator.

  He had until 1:07 before the automated alarm would go off.

  Plenty of time.

  The building was virtually deserted but still he walked the way he knew he should walk. With an aura not of urgency but of preoccupation. So if he were to run into one of the few remaining agents here they'd merely glance at his pass and, judging Fielding's demeanor, decide to let him continue on to wherever he was headed on his important business.

  He inhaled deeply, took in the smells of the laboratory, the offices, the morgue. Feeling a wrenching thrill to be here--in the center of the law enforcement universe. The corridors of FBI headquarters. He remembered, a year ago, the Digger muttering insistently about going to an art museum in Hartford. Fielding had agreed and the crazed man had stood for an hour in front of a Dore illustration from the Divine Comedy: Dante and Virgil about to descend into hell. This is just what Fielding felt now--as if he were on a tour of the underworld.

  As he walked through the hallways he spoke silently to his teammates. No, Agent Lukas and Parker Kincaid and Dr. John Evans . . . No, my motive isn't revenge for faded politics or terrorism. It's not exposing social injustice. Nor is it greed. Twenty million? Christ, I could've asked for ten times that.

  No, my motive is simply perfection.