The Devil's Teardrop

by Jeffery Deaver

  "He was there and then he was gone," C. P. said.

  Hardy added, "Like a ghost." Parker glanced at the detective. He was clean-cut, trim, handsome. Wore a wedding ring. Had all the indicia of a contented life. But there seemed to be a melancholy about him. Parker recalled that when he was leaving the Bureau the exit counselor explained to him--unnecessarily--about the high incidence of depression among law enforcers.

  "Ghost," Lukas muttered cynically.

  Bending over the letter again, studying the cold paper and the black type. He read it several times.

  The end is night . . .

  Parker noted that there was no signature. Which might seem like a pointless observation, except that he'd assisted in several cases in which perps had actually signed ransom or robbery notes. One had been fake, intended to lead them off (though the scrawled signature provided handwriting samples that ultimately convicted the perp). In another case the kidnapper had actually signed his real name, perhaps jotted automatically in the confusion of the abduction. The perp was arrested seventeen minutes after the victim's family received the ransom demand.

  Parker moved the powerful examining light closer to the note. Bent over it. Heard a neckbone pop.

  Talk to me, he silently urged the piece of paper. Tell me your secrets. . . .

  The farmer has just one bullet in his gun and the hawks are so far apart that he can only hit one. . . .

  He wondered if the unsub had tried to doctor his handwriting. Many criminals--say, kidnappers writing ransom notes--will try to disguise their writing to make comparisons more difficult. They'll use odd slants and formations of letters. But usually they can't do this smoothly; it's very difficult to suppress our natural hand and document examiners can usually detect "tremble"--a shakiness in the strokes--when someone's trying to disguise his writing. But there was no tremble here. This was the unsub's genuine writing.

  Normally the next step in an anonymous-writing case would be to compare the suspect document with knowns by sending agents to public records offices with a copy of the extortion note and have them plough through files to find a match. Unfortunately for the team on the METSHOOT case, most writing in public records are in uppercase block, or "manuscript," style ("Please Print," the directions always admonish) and the extortion note had been written in a form of cursive. Even a document examiner with Parker Kincaid's skill couldn't compare printing with cursive writing.

  But there was one thing that might let them search public files. A person's handwriting includes both general and personal characteristics. General are the elements of penmanship that come from the method of handwriting learned in school. Years ago there were a number of different methods of teaching writing and they were very distinctive; a document examiner could narrow down a suspect's location to a region of the country. But those systems of writing--the flowery "Ladies Hand," for instance--are gone now and only a few methods of writing remain, notably the Zaner-Bloser System and the Palmer Method. But they're too general to identify the writer.

  Personal characteristics, though, are different. These are those little pen strokes that are unique to us--curlicues, mixing printing and cursive writing, adding gratuitous strokes--like a small dash through the diagonal stroke in the letter Z or the numeral 7. It was a personal characteristic that first tipped examiners off that the Hitler diaries "discovered" a few years ago were in fact fake. Hitler signed his last name with a very distinctive uppercase H but he used it only in his signature, not when writing in general. The forger had used the ornate capital H throughout the diary, which Hitler would not have done.

  Parker continued to scan the extortion note with his hand glass, looking to see if the unsub had had any distinctive personal characteristics in his handwriting.

  Daddy, you're funny. You look like Sherlock Holmes . . .

  Finally he noticed something.

  The dot above the lowercase letter i.

  Most dots above i's and j's are formed by either tapping the pen directly into the paper or, if someone is writing quickly, making a dash with a dot of ink to the left and a tail to the right.

  But the METSHOOT unsub had made an unusual mark above the lowercase i's--the tail of the dot went straight upward, so that it resembled a falling drop of water. Parker had seen a similar dot years before--in a series of threat letters sent to a woman by a stalker who eventually murdered her. The letters had been written in the killer's own blood. Parker had christened the unusual dot "the devil's teardrop" and included a description of it in one of his textbooks on forensic document examination.

  "Got something here," he said.

  "What?" Cage asked.

  Parker explained about the dot and how he'd named it.

  "Devil's teardrop?" Lukas asked. She didn't seem to like the name. He guessed she was more comfortable with science and hard data. He remembered that she'd had a similar reaction when Hardy had said that the Digger was like a ghost. She leaned forward. Her short blond hair fell forward and partially obscured her face. "Any connection with your perp?" she asked. "In that stalker case?"

  "No, no," Parker said. "He was executed years ago. But this"--he nodded toward the sheet--"could be the key to finding out where our boy lived."

  "How?" Jerry Baker asked.

  "If we can narrow down the area to a county or--even better--a neighborhood then we'll search public records."

  Hardy gave a short laugh. "You can actually find somebody that way?"

  "Oh, you bet. You know Michele Sindona?"

  C. P. shook his head.

  Hardy asked, "Who?"

  Lukas searched through her apparently vast mental file cabinet of criminal history and said, "He was the financier? The guy who handled the Vatican's money?"

  "Right. He was arrested for bank fraud but he vanished just before trial. He showed up a few months later and claimed he was kidnapped--thrown in a car and taken someplace. But there were rumors he hadn't been kidnapped at all but'd flown to Italy, then returned to New York. I think it was an examiner in the Southern District who got samples of Sindona's handwriting and found out he had this personal handwriting quirk--he made a dot inside the loop when he wrote the numeral nine. Agents went through thousands of customs declaration forms on flights from Italy to New York. They found a dot in the number nine in an address of a card filled in by a passenger who, it turned out, had used a fake name. They lifted one of Sindona's latents from it."

  "Man," C. P. muttered, "collared because of a dot. A little thing like that."

  "Oh," Parker said, "it's usually the little things that trip up the perps. Not always. But usually."

  He placed the note under the scanner of the VSC. This device uses different light sources--from ultraviolet to infrared--to let examiners see through obliterations and to visualize erased letters. Parker was curious about the cross-out before the word "apprehend." He scanned the entire note and found no erasures other than under the obliteration. He then tested the envelope and noticed no erasures.

  "What'd you find?"

  "Tell you in a minute. Don't breathe down my neck, Cage."

  "It's two-twenty," the agent reminded.

  "I can tell time, thanks," Parker muttered. "My kids taught me."

  He walked to the electrostatic detection apparatus. The ESDA is used to check documents for indented writing--words or markings pressed into the paper by someone writing on pages on top of the subject document. The ESDA was originally developed as a way to visualize fingerprints on documents. But the device turned out to be largely useless for that purpose because it also raised indented writing, which obscured any latent prints. In TV shows the detective rubs a pencil over the sheet to visualize the indented writing. In real life it would be malpractice for a document examiner to do this; it would probably destroy most indented writing. The ESDA machine, which works like a photocopier, reveals lettering that was written as many as ten sheets above the document being tested.

  No one quite knows why the ESDA works so efficiently bu
t no document examiner is without one. Once, after a wealthy banker died, Parker was hired to analyze a will that disinherited his children and left his entire estate to a young maid. Parker was very close to authenticating the document. The signatures looked perfect, the dates of the will and the codicils were logical. But his last test--the ESDA--revealed indented writing that said, "This one ought to fool the pricks." The maid confessed to hiring someone to forge the will.

  Parker now ran the unsub's note through the machine. He lifted a plastic sheet off the top and examined it.

  Nothing.

  He tried the envelope. He lifted off the thin sheet and held it up to the light. He felt a bang in his gut when he saw the delicate gray lines of writing.

  "Yes!" he said excitedly. "We've got something."

  Lukas leaned forward and Parker smelled a faint floral scent. Perfume? No. He'd known her for only an hour but he'd decided that she was not the perfume sort. It was probably scented soap.

  "We've got a couple of indentations," Parker said. "The unsub wrote something on a piece of paper that was on top of the envelope."

  Parker held the electrostatic sheet in both hands and moved it around to make the writing more visible. "Okay, somebody write this down. First word. Lowercase c-l-e, then a space. Uppercase M, lowercase e. Nothing after that."

  Cage wrote the letters on a yellow pad and looked at it. "What's it mean?" The agent gave a perplexed shrug.

  C. P. tugged a pierced earlobe and said, "Don't have a clue."

  Geller: "If it's not bits and bytes I'm helpless."

  Lukas too shook her head.

  But Parker took one look at the letters and knew immediately. He was surprised no one else could see it.

  "It's the first crime scene."

  "What do you mean?" Jerry Baker asked.

  "Sure," Lukas said. "Dupont C-i-r-c-l-e, capital M-- Metro."

  "Of course," Hardy whispered.

  Puzzles are always easy when you know the answer.

  "The first site," Parker mused. "But there's something written below it. Can you see it? Can you read it?" He jockeyed the sheet again, holding it out to Lukas. "Jesus, it's hard to see."

  She leaned forward and read. "Just three letters. That's all I can make out. Lowercase t-e-l."

  "Anything else?" Hardy asked.

  Parker squinted. "No, nothing."

  "t-e-l," Lukas pondered.

  "Telephone, telephone company, telecommunications?" Cage asked. "Television?"

  C. P. offered, "Maybe he's going to hit one of the studios--during a broadcast."

  "No, no," Parker said. "Look at the position of the letters in relation to the c-l-e M-e. If he's writing in fairly consistent columns then the t-e-l comes at the end of the word." Then Parker caught on. He said, "It's a--"

  Lukas blurted, "Hotel. The second target's a hotel."

  "That's right."

  "Or motel," Hardy suggested.

  "No," Parker said. "I don't think so. He's going for crowds. Motels don't have big facilities. All the events tonight will be in hotel banquet rooms."

  "And," Lukas added, "he's probably sticking to foot or public transportation. Motels're in outlying areas. Traffic's too bad tonight to rely on a car."

  "Great," Cage said then pointed out, "but there must be two hundred hotels in town."

  "How do we narrow it down?" Baker asked.

  "I'd say go for the bigger hotels. . . ." Parker nodded toward Lukas. "You're right--probably near public transportation and high population centers."

  With a loud bang Baker dropped the Yellow Pages on the table. "D.C. only?" He flipped them open. C. P. Ardell walked over to the table and began looking over the tactical agent's shoulder.

  Parker considered the question. "It's the District he's extorting, not Virginia or Maryland. I'd stick to D.C."

  "Agreed," Lukas said. "Also we should eliminate any place with 'Hotel' first in the name, like 'Hotel New York.' Because of the placement of the letters on the envelope. And no 'Inns' or 'Lodges.'"

  Cage and Hardy joined C. P. and Baker. They all bent over the phone book. They started circling possibilities, discussing whether this choice or that was logical.

  After ten minutes they had a list of twenty-two hotels. Cage jotted them down in his own precise handwriting and handed the list to Jerry Baker.

  Parker suggested, "Before you send anybody there, call and find out if any of the functions tonight are for diplomats or politicians. We can eliminate those."

  "Why?" Baker asked.

  Lukas responded, "Armed bodyguards, right?"

  Parker nodded. "And Secret Service. The unsub would've avoided those."

  "Right," Baker said and hurried out of the room, opening his cell phone.

  But even eliminating those, how many locations would remain? Parker wondered.

  A lot. Too many.

  Too many possible solutions . . .

  Three hawks have been killing a farmer's chickens. . . .

  7

  My fellow citizens . . .

  They powdered his forehead, they stuck a plug in his ear, they turned on the blinding lights.

  Through the glare, Mayor Jerry Kennedy could just make out a few faces in the blackness of the WPLT newsroom, located just off Dupont Circle.

  There was his wife, Claire. There was his press secretary. There was Wendell Jefferies.

  My fellow citizens, Kennedy rehearsed in his mind. I want to reassure you that our city's police force and the FBI, no, the federal authorities are doing everything in their power to find the perpetrators, no, the persons responsible for this terrible shooting.

  One of the station's senior producers, a thin man with a trim, white beard, came up to him and said, "I'll give you a seven-second countdown. I'll go silent after four and use my fingers. At one, look into the camera. You've done this before."

  "I've done this before."

  The producer glanced down and saw no papers in front of Kennedy. "You have anything for the TelePrompTer?"

  "It's in my head."

  The producer gave a brief chuckle. "Nobody does that nowadays."

  Kennedy grunted.

  . . . responsible for this terrible crime. And to that person out there, I am asking you please, please . . . no, just one please . . . I'm asking you please to reestablish contact so that we can continue our dialog. On this, the last day of a difficult year, let's put the violence behind us and work together so that there'll be no more deaths. Please contact me personally . . . no . . . Please call me personally or get a message to me . . .

  "Five minutes," the producer called.

  Kennedy waved aside the makeup artist and motioned Jefferies over to him. "You heard anything from the FBI? Anything?"

  "Nothing. Not a word."

  Kennedy couldn't believe it. Hours into the operation, the new deadline approaching, his only contact with the feds had been a fast phone call from some District detective named Len Hardy, who was calling on behalf of that agent, Margaret Lukas, to ask Kennedy to make this appeal to the killer over the air. Lukas, Kennedy reflected angrily, hadn't even bothered to call him herself. Hardy, a District cop who sounded intimidated by the feds he was supposed to be liaising with, hadn't known any details of the investigation--or, more likely, didn't have permission to give out any. He'd tried to call Lukas but she'd been too busy to take his call. Cage too. The mayor had spoken briefly with the head of the District's police department but short of providing cops to work under FBI supervision the chief had had nothing to do with the case.

  Kennedy was furious. "They don't take us seriously. Jesus. I want to do something. I mean, other than this." He waved his hand at the camera. "It's going to sound like I'm begging."

  "It's a problem," Wendy Jefferies conceded. "I've called the press conference but half the stations and papers aren't sending anybody. They're camped out at Ninth Street, waiting for somebody at the Bureau to talk to them."

  "It's like the city doesn't exist, it's like I'm sitting o
n my hands."

  "That's sort of what it's looking like."

  The producer started toward him but the mayor gave him a polite smile. "In a minute." The man veered back into the shadows.

  "So?" Kennedy asked his aide. He'd seen a cagey look behind the young man's Armani glasses.

  "Time to call in some markers," Jefferies whispered. "I can do it. Surgically. I know how to handle it."

  "I don't--"

  "I don't want to do it this way either," Jefferies said fiercely, never one to glove his advice to his boss, "but we don't have any choice. You heard the commentary on WTGN."

  Of course he had. The station, popular with about a half-million listeners in the metro area, had just aired an editorial about how, during his campaign, Kennedy had pledged to take back the streets of Washington from criminals and yet had been more than willing to pay terrorists a multimillion-dollar ransom today. The commentator, a surly, old journalist, had gone on to cite Kennedy's other campaign promise of cleaning up corruption in the District while being completely oblivious to, and possibly even participating in, the Board of Education school construction scandal.

  Jefferies repeated, "We really don't have any choice, Jerry."

  The mayor pondered this for a minute. As usual, the aide was right. Kennedy had hired the man because, as a white mayor, he needed a senior black aide. He didn't apologize for such tactical hiring. But he'd been astonished that the young man possessed a political sense that transcended grassroots community relations.

  His aide said, "This is the time for hardball, Jerry. There's too much at stake."

  "Okay, do what you have to." He didn't bother to add, Be careful. He knew Jefferies would.

  "Two minutes," came a voice from above.

  Kennedy thought to the Digger: Where are you? Where? He looked up at a darkened camera and stared at it as if he could see through the lens and cables to some TV set out there--see through the screen to the Digger himself. He thought to the killer, Who are you? And why did you and your partner pick my city to visit like the angel of death?

  . . . in the spirit of peace, on this last day of the year, contact me so that we might come to some understanding . . . Please . . .

  Jefferies bent close to the mayor's ear. "Remember," he whispered, waving his hand around the TV studio, "if he's listening, the killer, this might be the end of it. Maybe he'll go for the money and they'll get him."