The Devil's Teardrop

  He will kill again--at four, 8 and Midnight if you don't pay.

  "He also used a comma before 'which.'"

  I am wanting $20 million dollars in cash, which you will put into a bag . . .

  "That's a standard rule of grammar--a comma before the nonrestrictive 'which' and not before the restrictive 'that'--but generally only professional writers and people who've gone to good schools follow it anymore."

  "There oughta be a comma before 'which'?" C. P. grumbled. "Who cares?"

  Parker silently responded, We do. Because it's little things like this that lead us to the truth.

  Hardy said, "It looks like he tried to spell 'apprehend' and couldn't get it right. What do you make of that?"

  "Looks like it," Parker said. "But you know what's under the mark-out there? I scanned it with an infrared viewer."

  "What?"

  "Squiggles."

  "Squiggles?" Lukas asked.

  "A term of art," Parker said wryly. "He didn't write anything. He just wanted us to think he was having trouble spelling the word."

  "But why'd he go to all this trouble to make us think he's stupid?" Hardy asked.

  "To trick us into looking for either a stupid American or a slightly less stupid foreigner. It's another smokescreen." Parker added, "And to keep us underestimating him. Of course he's smart. Just look at the money drop."

  "The drop?" Lukas asked.

  C. P. asked, "You mean at Gallows Road? Why's that smart?"

  "Well . . ." Parker glanced up, then from one to the other of the agents. "The helicopters."

  "What helicopters?" Hardy asked.

  Parker frowned. "Aren't you checking out helicopter charters?"

  "No," Lukas said. "Why should we?"

  Parker remembered a rule from his days working at the Bureau. Never assume a single thing. "The field where he wanted the money dropped was next to a hospital, right?"

  Geller was nodding. "Fairfax Hospital."

  "Shit," Lukas spat out. "It has a helipad."

  "So?" Hardy asked.

  Lukas shook her head, angry with herself. "The unsub picked the place so a surveillance team would get used to incoming choppers. He'd chartered one himself and was going to set down, pick up the money and take off again. Probably fly at treetop level to a getaway car."

  "I never thought about that," Hardy said bitterly.

  "None of us did," C. P. said.

  Cage added, "I've got a buddy at the FAA. I'll have him check it out."

  Parker glanced at the clock. "No response from Kennedy's news conference?"

  Lukas made a call. She spoke to someone then hung up.

  "Six calls. All cranks. None of them knew anything about the painted bullets so they were bogus. We've got their names and numbers. Nail 'em later for interference with law enforcement activity."

  "You think the unsub wasn't from around here?" Hardy asked Parker.

  "Right. If there was any chance he thought we could compare his handwriting with public records in the area he would've disguised his writing or used cutout letters. Which he didn't. So he's not from the District, Virginia or Maryland."

  The door swung open. It was Timothy, the runner who'd brought the note. "Agent Lukas? I've got the results from the coroner."

  Parker thought, It's about time.

  She took the report and as she read it Cage asked, "Parker, you said he was a sociopath. How do you figure that?"

  "Because," Parker said absently, his eyes on Lukas, "who'd do something like this except a sociopath?"

  Lukas finished and handed it to Hardy. He asked, "You want me to read it?"

  "Go ahead," she answered.

  Parker noticed that the young man's sobriety had lifted, maybe because he was, for a moment, part of the team.

  The detective cleared his throat. "'White male approximately forty-five years old. Six foot two. One hundred eighty-seven pounds. No distinguishing. No jewelry except a Casio watch--with multiple alarms,'" Hardy looked up. "Get this. Set to go off at four, eight and midnight." Back to the report: "'Wearing unbranded blue jeans, well worn. Polyester windbreaker. JCPenney workshirt, also faded. Jockey underwear. Cotton socks, Wal-Mart running shoes. A hundred twelve dollars in cash, some change.'"

  Parker stared at the letters on the screen in front of them as if the words Hardy was reading described not the unsub but the note itself.

  "'Minor trace elements. Brick dust in hair, clay dust under nails. Stomach contents reveal coffee, milk, bread and beef--probably inexpensive grade of steak--consumed within the past eight hours.' That's it." Hardy read another METSHOOT memo, attached to the coroner's report. "No leads with the delivery truck--the one that hit him." Hardy glanced at Parker. "It's so frustrating--we've got the perp downstairs and he can't tell us a damn thing."

  Parker glanced at another copy of the Major Crimes Bulletin, the one he'd seen earlier. About the firebombing of Gary Moss's house. The austere description of the near deaths of the man's daughters had shaken Parker badly. Seeing that bulletin he'd very nearly turned around and walked out of the lab.

  Parker shut off the projector, put the note back on the examining table.

  Cage looked at his watch. He pulled on his coat. "Well, we've got forty-five minutes. We better get going."

  "What do you mean?" Lukas asked.

  The senior agent handed her her windbreaker and Parker his leather jacket. He took it without thinking.

  "Out there." He nodded toward the door. "To help Jerry Baker's team check out hotels."

  Parker was shaking his head. "No. We have to keep going here." He looked at Hardy. "You're right, Len. The unsub can't tell us anything. But the note still can. It can tell us a lot."

  "They need everybody they can get," Cage persisted.

  There was silence for a moment.

  Parker stood with his head down, opposite Lukas, across the brightly lit examining table, the stark white extortion note between them. He looked up, said evenly, "I don't think we'll be able to find him in time. Not in forty-five minutes. I hate to say it but this is the best use of our resources--to stay here. Keep going with the note."

  C. P. said, "You mean you're just going to write 'em off? The victims?"

  He paused. Then said, "I guess that's what I mean. Yes."

  Cage asked Lukas, "Whatta you think?"

  She glanced at Parker. Their eyes met. She said to Cage, "I agree with Parker. We stay here. We keep going."

  9

  From the corner of her eyes Lukas saw Len Hardy, standing motionless. After a moment he smoothed his hair, picked up his coat and walked over to her.

  Right as rain . . .

  "Let me go at least," he said to her. "To help with the hotels."

  She looked at his earnest young face. He kneaded his trench coat in his large right hand, the nails perfectly trimmed and scrubbed. He was a man, she had concluded, who found comfort in details.

  "I can't. I'm sorry."

  "Agent Cage is right. They'll need everybody they can get."

  Lukas glanced at Parker Kincaid but he was lost in the document once more, easing it carefully from its clear acetate shroud.

  "Come on over here, Len," Lukas said, gesturing him into the corner of the document lab. Cage was the only one who noticed and he said nothing. In his long tenure at the Bureau the senior agent would have had plenty of talks with underlings and knew that the process was as delicate as interrogating suspects. More delicate--because these were people you had to live with day after day. And whom you might have to depend on to watch your back. Lukas was grateful Cage was giving her rein to handle Hardy the way she felt best.

  "Talk to me," she said. "What's eating you?"

  "I want to do something," the detective replied. "I know I'm second-string here. I'm from the District. I'm Research and Stats. . . . But I want to help."

  "You're only here as liaison. That's all you're authorized for. This is a federal operation. It's not task-forced."

  He gave a sour
laugh. "Liaison? I'm here as a stenographer. You and I both know that."

  Of course she knew it. But that wouldn't have stopped Lukas from giving him a more active role if she thought he'd be valuable elsewhere. Lukas was not one who lived her life solely by regs and procedures and if Hardy had been the world's best sniper she'd kick him out the door and onto one of Jerry Baker's shooting teams in an instant, whatever the rules dictated. After a moment she said, "All right, answer me a question."

  "Sure."

  "Why are you here?" she asked.

  "Why?" He frowned.

  "You volunteered, didn't you?" Lukas asked.

  "Yeah, I did."

  "Because of your wife, right?"

  "Emma?" He tried to look confounded but Lukas could see right through it. His eyes fell to the floor.

  "I understand, Len. But do yourself a favor. Take your notes, kick around ideas with us and stay out of the line of fire. Then when this prick's tagged go on home."

  "But it's . . . hard," he said, avoiding her eyes.

  "Being home?"

  He nodded.

  "I know it is," Lukas answered sincerely.

  He clung to the trenchcoat like a child's security blanket.

  In fact if it had been anybody but Len Hardy who'd shown up as the District police liaison she would have kicked them right back to police headquarters. She had no patience with ass covering or interagency turf wars and no time to coddle employees of a corrupt, nearly bankrupt city. But she knew a secret of Hardy's life--that his wife was in a coma, the result of an accident when her Jeep Cherokee had skidded off the road in a rainstorm near Middleburg, Virginia, and hit a tree.

  Hardy had been to the District field office several times to compile statistical data on crime in the metro area and had gotten to know Betty, Lukas's assistant. She'd thought at first that the man was trying to pick up the attractive woman but had then overheard him talking emotionally about his wife and her injury.

  He didn't have many friends, it seemed, just like Lukas herself. She'd gotten to know him slightly and had learned more about Emma. Several times they'd had coffee in the Policemen's Memorial Park, next to the field office. He'd opened up slightly but, also like Lukas, he kept his emotions tightly packed away.

  Knowing his tragedy, knowing how hard it would be for him to sit home alone on a holiday, she had welcomed him onto the team and resolved to cut him some slack tonight. But Margaret Lukas would never jeopardize an operation for the emotional health of anyone.

  Right as rain . . .

  He now told her, "I can't sit still. I want a piece of this guy."

  No, she thought. What he wants is a piece of God or Fate or whatever force of nature broke Emma Hardy's life, and her husband's, into a thousand pieces.

  "Len, I can't have somebody in the field who's . . ." She looked for a benign word. "Distracted." "Reckless" would have been closer and "suicidal" was what she meant.

  Hardy nodded. He was angry. His lip trembled. But he dropped his coat on a chair and returned to a desk.

  Poor man, she thought. But seeing how his intelligence, his sense of propriety and perfection shone through his personal anguish, she knew he'd be all right. He'd survive this terrible time. Oh, he'd be changed, yes, but he'd be changed the way iron is changed into steel in a refinery's white-hot coals.

  Changed . . .

  The way Lukas herself had.

  If you looked at Jacqueline Margaret Lukas's birth certificate, the document would reveal that she'd been born on the last day of November 1963. But in her heart she knew she was just over five years old, having been born the day she graduated from the FBI Academy.

  She recalled a book she'd read a long time ago, a children's story. The Wyckham Changeling. The picture of a happy elf on the cover didn't hint at the eeriness of the story itself. The book was about an elf who'd sneak into homes in the middle of the night and switch babies--kidnap the human child and leave a changeling--an elfin baby in its place. The story was about two parents who discover that their daughter had been switched and go on a quest to find her.

  Lukas remembered reading the book, curled up on a couch in her comfortable living room in Stafford, Virginia, near Quantico, postponing going to Safeway because of an unexpected blizzard. She'd been compelled to finish it--yes, the parents had found the girl and traded the elf baby back for her--but she had shivered at the unpleasant aftertaste of the book and had thrown it out.

  She'd forgotten about the story until she'd graduated from the Academy and been assigned to the Washington field office. Then one morning, walking to work, her Colt Python snug on her hip, a case file under her arm, she realized: That's what I am--a changeling. Jackie Lukas had been a part-time librarian for the Bureau's Quantico research facility, an amateur clothing designer who could whip up outfits for her friends and their children over a weekend. She'd been a quilter, needlepointer, wine collector (and drinker too), a consistently top finisher in local five-K races. But that woman was long gone, replaced by Special Agent Margaret Lukas, a woman who excelled in criminalistics, investigative techniques, the properties of C4 and Semtex explosives, the care and handling of confidential informants.

  "An FBI agent?" her perplexed father had asked during a visit to her parents' Pacific Heights townhouse in San Francisco. She'd gone home to break the news to them. "You're going to be an agent? Not like with a gun? You mean, you'll work at a desk or something."

  "With a gun. But I'll bet they give me a desk too."

  "I don't get it," the burly man, a retired loan officer for Bank of America, said. "You were such a good student."

  She laughed at the apparent non sequitur though she knew exactly what her father meant. An honor student at both St. Thomas High in Russian Hill and Stanford. The lean girl, who accepted dates too rarely and raised her hand in class too often, was destined for high places in academia or on Wall Street. No, no, he didn't mind that Jackie was going to be toting guns and tackling killers; it was that she wouldn't be using her mind.

  "But it's the FBI, Dad. They're the thinking cops."

  "Yeah, I guess. But . . . is this what you want to do?"

  No, it was what she had to do. There was a gulf of a difference between the two verbs, wanted and had. But she didn't know if he'd understand that. So she said a simple "Yes."

  "Then that's good enough for me." Then he turned to his wife and said, "Our girl's got mettle. You know what mettle is? M-e-t-t-l-e."

  "I know," Lukas's mother called from the kitchen, "I do crosswords, remember. But you'll be careful, Jackie? Promise me you'll be careful."

  As if she were about to cross a busy street.

  "I'll be careful, Mom."

  "Good. I made coq au vin for dinner. You like that, right?"

  And Jackie hugged her mother and her father and two days later flew back to Washington, D.C., to change into Margaret.

  After graduating she was assigned to the field office. She got to know the District, got to work with Cage, who was as good a changeling father as she could've asked for, and must have done something right because last year she was promoted to assistant special agent in charge. And now, with her boss photographing monkeys and lizards in a Brazilian rainforest, she was running the biggest case to hit Washington, D.C., in years.

  She now watched Len Hardy jotting his notes in the corner of the lab and thought, He'll come through this okay.

  Margaret Lukas knew that it could happen.

  Just ask a changeling . . .

  "Hey," a man's voice intruded on her thoughts.

  She looked across the room and realized that Parker Kincaid was speaking to her.

  "We've done the linguistics," he said. "I want to do the physical analysis of the note now. Unless you've got something else in mind."

  "This's your inning, Parker," she said. And sat down beside him.

  *

  First, he examined the paper the note was written on.

  It measured 6 by 9 inches, the sort intended for bread-and-
butter notes. Paper size has varied throughout history but 81/2 by 11 has been standard in America for nearly two hundred years. Six by 9 was the second-most-common size. Too common. The size alone would tell Parker nothing about its source.

  As for composition of the paper he noted that it was cheap and had been manufactured by mechanical pulping, not the kraft--chemical pulping--method that produced finer-quality papers.

  "The paper won't help us much," he announced finally. "It's generic. Nonrecycled, high-acid, coarse pulp with minimal optical brighteners and low luminescence. Sold in bulk by paper manufacturers and jobbers to retail chains. They package it as a house brand of stationery. There's no watermark and no way to trace it back to a particular manufacturer or wholesaler and then forward to a single point of sale." He sighed. "Let's look at the ink."

  He lifted the note carefully and placed it under one of the lab's compound microscopes. He examined it first at ten-then at fifty-power magnification. From the indentation the tip of the pen made in the paper, the occasional skipping and the uneven color, Parker could tell that the pen had been a very cheap ballpoint.

  "Probably an AWI--American Writing Instruments. The bargain-basement thirty-nine-cent-er." He looked at his teammates. No one grasped the significance.

  "And?" Lukas asked.

  "That's a bad thing," he explained emphatically. "Impossible to trace. They're sold in just about every discount and convenience store in America. Just like the paper. And AWI doesn't use tags."

  "Tags?" Hardy asked.

  Parker explained that some manufacturers put a chemical tag in their inks to identify the products and to help trace where and when they'd been manufactured. American Writing Instruments, however, didn't do this.

  Parker started to pull the note out from under the microscope. He stopped, noticing something curious. Part of the paper was faded. He didn't think it was a manufacturing flaw. Optical brighteners have been added to paper for nearly fifty years and it's unusual, even in cheap paper like this, for there to be an unevenness in the brilliance.

  "Could you hand me the PoliLight?" he asked C. P. Ardell.

  "The what?"

  "There."

  The big agent picked up one of the boxy ALS units--an alternative light source. It luminesced a variety of substances that were invisible to the human eye.

  Parker pulled on a pair of goggles and clicked on the yellow-green light.

  "It gonna irradiate me or anything?" the big agent said, only partly joking, it seemed.