The Devil's Teardrop

by Jeffery Deaver

  Parker and the team had pored over a map of Georgetown.

  Suddenly he'd looked at the clock and said, "Are there matinees today in the theaters?"

  Lukas had grabbed his arm. "Yes. I saw some in the Post this morning."

  Tobe Geller was a music fan and he mentioned the Mason Theater, which was only a five-minute walk from the Four Seasons.

  Parker ripped open a copy of the Washington Post and found that a performance of The Nutcracker had started at two and would be letting out around four. A crowded theater would be just the target for the Digger. He asked Lukas to call Jerry Baker and have him send all the troops there.

  "All of them?"

  "All of them."

  God help you if you're wrong, Kincaid . . .

  But he hadn't been wrong. Still, what a risk he'd taken. . . . And though many lives had been saved some had been lost. And the killer had escaped.

  Parker glanced at the extortion note. The man who'd written it was dead but the note itself felt very much alive. It seemed to be sneering at him. He felt a crazy urge to grab an examination probe and drive it into the note's heart.

  Cage's phone rang again and he answered it. Spoke for a few minutes--whatever the news was it seemed encouraging, to judge from his face. Then he hung up. "That was a shrink. Teaches criminal psychology at Georgetown. Says he's got some info about the name."

  "The 'Digger'?" Parker asked.

  "Yeah. He's on his way over."

  "Good," Lukas said.

  Cage asked, "What's next?"

  Lukas hesitated for a moment then asked Parker, "What do you think? You don't have to limit your thoughts to the document."

  He said, "Well, I'd find out if the box in the theater he shot from was empty and if it was, did the unsub buy out the whole box--so the Digger'd have a good shooting position? And then I'd find out if he used a credit card."

  Lukas nodded at C. P., who flipped open his phone and called Jerry Baker and posed the questions to him. He waited for a moment then listened to his response. C. P. disconnected. "Nice try." He rolled his eyes.

  "But," Parker speculated aloud, "he bought the tickets two weeks ago and paid cash."

  "Three weeks ago," the agent muttered, rubbing the shiny top of his head with a rough palm. "And paid cash."

  "Hell," Parker snapped in frustration. Nothing to do but move on. He turned to the notes he'd taken of Lincoln Rhyme's observations. "We'll need some maps. Good ones. Not like this." He tapped the street map that they'd used to try to figure out where the Digger had gone from the Four Seasons. Parker continued. "I want to figure out where the trace in the letter came from. Narrow down the part of town he was staying in."

  Lukas nodded at Hardy. "If we can do that we'll get Jerry's team and some of your people from District P.D. and do a canvass. Flash his pic and see if anybody's seen him at a house or apartment." She handed Geller a copy of the coroner's photo of the unsub in the morgue. "Tobe, make a hundred prints of this."

  "Will do."

  Parker looked over the list of trace Rhyme had identified. Granite, clay, brick dust, sulfur, ash . . . Where had the materials come from?

  The young clerk who'd brought them the note earlier--Timothy, Parker recalled--appeared in the doorway.

  "Agent Lukas?"

  "Yes?"

  "Couple things you ought to know about. First of all, Moss?"

  Gary Moss. Parker remembered the memo about the children who'd nearly been burned to death.

  "He's kind of freaked out. He saw a janitor and thought it was a hitman."

  Lukas frowned. "Who was it? One of our people?"

  "Yeah. One of the cleaning staff. We checked it out. But Moss's totally paranoid. He wants us to get him out of town. He thinks he'll be safer."

  "Well, we can't get him out of town. He's not one of our priorities at the moment."

  "I just thought I'd tell you," Timothy responded.

  She looked around and seemed to debate. She said to Len Hardy, "Detective, you mind holding his hand for a while."

  "Me?"

  "Would you?"

  Hardy didn't look happy. This was yet another subtle slap in the face. Parker recalled that the hardest part of his job when he was running the division was dealing not with elusive documents but with the delicate egos of his employees.

  "I guess," Hardy said.

  "Thanks." Lukas gave him a smile. Then she said to Timothy, "You said there was something else?"

  "Primary Security wanted me to tell you. There's a guy downstairs? A walk-in."

  "And?"

  "He says he knows something about the Metro shooter."

  Whenever there was a major crime like this, Parker recalled, the wackos crawled out of the woodwork--sometimes to confess to the crimes, sometimes to help. There were several "reception" rooms near the main entrance in headquarters for people like this. When anyone with knowledge of a crime dropped into the FBI the good citizen was taken into one of these visitor rooms and pumped for information by an expert interrogator.

  "Credentials?" Lukas asked.

  "Claims he's a journalist, writing about a series of unsolved murders. License and Social Security check out. No warrants. They didn't take it past a stage-two check."

  "What's he say about the Digger?"

  "All he said is that this guy's done it before--in other cities."

  "In other cities?" C. P. Ardell asked.

  "What he says."

  Lukas looked at Parker, who said, "I think we better talk to him."

  II

  The Changeling

  The first step in narrowing the field of suspects of a questioned writing is the identification of the national, class, and group characteristics. Further elimination of suspects is made when obvious individual characteristics are identified, tabulated and evaluated.

  -EDNA W. ROBERTSON, FUNDAMENTALS OF DOCUMENT EXAMINATION

  12

  "So he's in D.C. now, is he?" the man asked.

  They were downstairs in Reception Area B. Which is what the sign on the door reported in pleasant scripty type. Within the Bureau, however, it was called Interrogation Room Blue, after the shade of the pastel decor inside.

  Parker, Lukas and Cage sat across the battered table from him--a large man with wild, gray hair. From the linguistics of his sentence Parker knew the man wasn't from the area. Locals always call the city "the District," never "D.C."

  "Who would that be?" Lukas asked.

  "You know who," answered the man coyly. "I call him the Butcher. What do you call him?"

  "Who?"

  "The killer with a man's mind and the devil's heart," he said dramatically.

  This fellow might have been a nut but Parker decided that his words described the Digger pretty well.

  Henry Czisman was in clean but well-worn clothes. A white shirt, straining against his large belly, a striped tie. His jacket wasn't a sports coat but was the top of a gray pinstripe suit. Parker smelled the bitter scent of cigarettes in the clothes. A battered briefcase sat on the table. He cupped a mug of ice water on the table in front of him.

  "You're saying the man involved in the subway and theater shootings is called the Butcher?"

  "The one who actually did the shootings, yes. I don't know his accomplice's name."

  Lukas and Cage were silent for a moment. She was scrutinizing the man closely and would be wondering how Czisman knew the Digger had a partner. The news about the dead unsub had not been released to the press.

  "What's your interest in all this?" Parker asked.

  Czisman opened the briefcase and took out several old newspapers. The Hartford News-Times. They were dated last year. He pointed out articles that he'd written. He was--or had been--a crime reporter.

  "I'm on a leave of absence, writing a true-crime book about the Butcher." He added somberly, "I'm following the trail of destruction."

  "True crime?" Cage asked. "People like those books, huh?"

  "Oh, they love 'em. Best-sellers. Ann Rul
e. That Ted Bundy book . . . You ever read it?"

  "Might have," Cage said.

  "People just eat up real-life crime. Says something about society, doesn't it? Maybe somebody ought to do a book about that. Why people like it so much."

  Lukas prompted, "This Butcher you were mentioning . . ."

  Czisman continued. "That was his nickname in Boston. Earlier in the year. Well, I think one paper called him the Devil."

  The Devil's teardrop, Parker thought. Lukas was glancing at him and he wondered if she was thinking the same. He asked, "What happened in Boston?"

  Czisman looked at him. Glanced at his visitor's pass. It had no name on it. Parker had been introduced by Cage as a consultant, Mr. Jefferson.

  "There was a shooting at a fast-food restaurant near Faneuil Hall. Lucy's Tacos."

  Parker hadn't heard of it--or had forgotten, if the incident had made the news. But Lukas nodded. "Four killed, seven injured. Perp drove up to the restaurant and fired an automatic shotgun through the window. No motive."

  Parker supposed that she'd read all the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program bulletins.

  She continued, "If I recall, there was no description of that perp either."

  "Oh, he's the same. You bet he is. And, no, there was no description. Just guesses. He's probably white. But not necessarily. How old? Thirties or forties. Height? Medium. Build? Medium. He could be anybody. Not like those ponytailed bodybuilding bad guys in made-for-TV movies. Pretty easy to spot them. But the Butcher . . . He's just an average man on the street. Pretty scary, isn't it?"

  Lukas was about to ask a question but Czisman interrupted. "You said there was no motive in the restaurant shooting, Agent Lukas?"

  "Not according to VICAP."

  "Well, did you know that ten minutes after the Butcher finished lobbing rounds through the plate-glass window and killing the women and children, a jewelry store was robbed four miles away?"

  "No. That wasn't in the report."

  Czisman asked, "And did you know that every tactical officer for two miles around was at the restaurant? So even though the owner of the jewelry store hit the silent alarms the police couldn't get to the store in their normal response time of four minutes. It took twelve. In that time the thief killed the owner and a customer. They were the only witnesses."

  "He was the Butcher's accomplice? The thief?"

  Czisman said, "Who else would it be?"

  Lukas sighed. "We need any information you have. But I don't sense you're really here out of civic duty."

  Czisman laughed.

  She added, "What exactly do you want?"

  "Access," he said quickly. "Just access."

  "To information."

  "That's right. For my book."

  "Wait here," she said, rising. She gestured Parker and Cage after her.

  *

  Just off Room Blue on the first floor of headquarters Tobe Geller was sitting in a small, darkened room, in front of an elaborate control panel.

  On Lukas's orders he'd watched the entire interview with Henry Czisman on six different monitors.

  Czisman would have no idea he was being watched because the Bureau didn't use two-way mirrors in its interrogation rooms--the sort you see in urban police stations. Rather, on the walls of the room were three prints of Impressionist paintings. They happened to have been picked not by a GSA facilities planner or a civilian interior designer but by Tobe Geller himself and several other people from the Bureau's Com-Tech group. They were prints of paintings by Georges Seurat, who pioneered the pointillist technique. Six of the tiny dots in each of the three paintings were in fact miniature video camera lenses, aimed so precisely that every square inch of the interrogation room was covered.

  Conversations were also recorded--on three different digital recorders, one of which was linked to a computer programmed to detect the sequence of sounds of someone drawing a weapon. Czisman, like all interviewees, had been searched and scanned for a gun or knife but in this business you could never take too many precautions.

  Lukas had instructed Geller, though, that his main job was not so much security as data analysis. Czisman would mention a fact--the robbery in Boston, for instance--and Geller would instantly relay the information to Susan Nance, a young special agent standing by upstairs in Communications. She in turn would contact the field office and seek to verify the information.

  Czisman had never drunk from the mug of water Cage had placed in front of him but he did clutch it nervously, which is what everyone did when they sat in FBI interrogation rooms. The mug had a pressure-sensitive surface and a microchip, battery and transmitter in the handle. It digitized Czisman's fingerprints and transmitted them to Geller's computer. He in turn sent them to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System database for matching.

  One of the video cameras--in a print of Seurat's famous Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which was a complicated painting that every interviewee tended to look at frequently--was locked onto Czisman's eyes and was performing retinal scans for "veracity probability analysis"--that is, lie detection. Geller was also doing voice stress analysis for the same reason.

  Lukas now directed Cage and Kincaid into the observation room.

  "Anything yet?" Lukas asked Geller.

  "It's prioritized," he said, typing madly.

  A moment later his phone rang and Lukas slapped the speakerphone.

  "Tobe?" a woman's voice asked.

  "Go ahead," he said. "The task force is here."

  "Hi, Susan," Lukas said. "It's Margaret. Go ahead. Give us the deets. What've you got?"

  "Okay, prints came back negative on warrants, arrests, convictions. Name Henry Czisman is legit, address in Hartford, Connecticut. Bought his house twelve years ago. Property taxes are up to date and he paid off the mortgage last year. The image you beamed up matches his Connecticut driver's license photo ninety-five percent likely."

  "Is that good?" Kincaid interrupted.

  "My present picture matches ninety-two percent," Nance responded. "I've got longer hair now." She continued. "Employment record through Social Security Administration and IRS shows him working as a journalist since 1971 but some years he had virtually no income. Listed his job those years as free-lance writer. So he's taken plenty of time off. Not living on his wife's salary either; he used to be married but his filing status is single now. Paid no quarterly estimated this year, which he's done in the past. And that suggests he's got no reportable income at all this year. Ten years ago he had very high medical deductions. Looks like it was treatment for alcohol abuse. Became self-employed a year ago, quit a fifty-one-thousand-dollar-a-year job at the Hartford paper and is apparently living off savings."

  "Quit, fired or took a leave of absence?" Kincaid asked.

  "Not sure." Nance paused. She continued. "We couldn't get as many credit card records as we wanted, because of the holiday, but he's staying at the Renaissance under his name. And he checked in after a noon flight from Hartford. United Express. No advanced purchase. Made the reservation at ten A.M. this morning."

  "So he left just after the first shooting," Lukas mused.

  "One-way ticket?" Kincaid's question anticipated her own.

  "Yes."

  "What do we think?" Lukas asked.

  "Goddamn journalist is all, I'd say," Cage offered.

  "And you?" She glanced at Kincaid.

  He said, "What do I think? I say we deal with him. When I analyze documents I need every bit of information I can get about the writer."

  "If you know it's really the writer," Lukas said skeptically. She paused. Then said, "He seems like a crank to me. Are we that desperate?"

  "Yes," Kincaid said, glancing at the digital clock above Tobe Geller's computer monitor, "I think we are."

  *

  In the stuffy interrogation room once more, Lukas said to Czisman, "If we talk off the record now . . . and if we can bring this to a successful resolution . . ."

  Czisman laughed at
the euphemism, motioned for the agent to continue.

  "If we can do that then we'll give you access to materials and witnesses for your book. I'm not sure how much yet. But you'll have some exclusivity."

  "Ah, my favorite word. Exclusivity. Yes, that's all I'm asking for."

  "But everything we tell you now," Lukas continued, "will be completely confidential."

  "Agreed," Czisman said.

  Lukas nodded at Parker, who asked, "Does the name Digger mean anything to you?"

  "Digger?" Czisman shook his head. "No. As in gravedigger?"

  "We don't know. It's the name of the shooter--the one you call the Butcher," Lukas said.

  "I only call him the Butcher because the Boston papers did. The New York Post called him the Devil. In Philadelphia he was the Widow Maker."

  "New York? Philly too?" Lukas asked. Parker noticed that she was troubled by this news.

  "Jesus," Cage muttered. "A pattern criminal."

  Czisman said, "They've been working their way down the coast. Headed where, don't we wonder? To Florida for retirement? More likely the islands somewhere."

  "What happened in the other cities?" Parker asked.

  "The International Beverage case?" Czisman responded. "Ever hear of it?"

  Lukas was certainly current on her criminal history. "The president of the company, right? He was kidnapped."

  "Details?" Parker asked her, impressed at her knowledge.

  Czisman looked at Lukas, who nodded for him to continue. "The police had to piece it together but it looks like--nobody's exactly sure--but it looks like the Butcher took the president's family hostage. The wife told her husband to get some money together. He agreed--"

  "Was there a letter?" Parker asked, thinking there might be another document he could examine. "A note?"

  "No. It was all done by phone. Well, the president tells the kidnapper he'd pay. Then he calls the police and hostage rescue surrounds the house, yada yada yada, the whole nine yards, while the president goes to his bank to get the ransom. But as soon as they opened up the vault a customer pulls out a gun and begins shooting. Killed everyone in the bank: the International Beverage president, two guards, three customers, three tellers, two vice presidents on duty. The video camera shows another man, with him, walking into the vault and walking out with a bag of money."