The Devil's Teardrop

by Jeffery Deaver

  "It's me," Parker said. "How's the fort?"

  "They're driving me into bankruptcy. And all this Star Wars money. I can't figure out what it is. They're keeping me confused on purpose." Her laugh included the children, who would be nearby.

  "How's Robby doing?" Parker asked. "Is he still upset?"

  Her voice lowered. "He got sort of moody a few times but Stephie and I pulled him out of it. They'd love for you to be home by midnight."

  "I'm trying. Has Joan called?"

  "No." Mrs. Cavanaugh laughed. "And funny thing, Parker . . . But if she were to call and I happened to see her name on the caller ID, I might be too busy to answer. And she might think you were all at a movie or Ruby Tuesday for the salad bar. How would you feel about that?"

  "I'd feel really good about that, Mrs. Cavanaugh."

  "I thought you might. That caller ID is a great invention, isn't it?"

  "Wish I had the patent," he told her. "I'll call later."

  They hung up.

  Cage had overheard. He asked, "Your boy? He okay?"

  Parker sighed. "He's fine. Just having some bad memories from . . . you know, a few years ago."

  Evans lifted an eyebrow and Parker said to him, "When I was working for the Bureau a suspect broke into our house." He noticed Lukas was listening too.

  "Your boy saw him?" Evans asked.

  Parker said, "It was Robby's window the perp tried to break into."

  "Jesus," C. P. muttered. "I hate bad stuff when it happens to kids. I fucking hate that."

  "PTSD?" Lukas asked.

  Posttraumatic stress disorder. Parker had been worried that the boy would suffer from the condition and had taken him to a specialist. The doctor, though, had reassured him that because Robby had been very young and hadn't actually been injured by the Boatman he probably wasn't suffering from PTSD.

  Parker explained this and added, "But the incident happened just before Christmas. So this time of year he has more memories than otherwise. I mean, he's come through it fine. But . . ."

  Evans said, "But you'd've given anything for it not to have happened."

  "Exactly," Parker said softly, looking at Lukas's troubled face and wondering why she was familiar with the disorder.

  The therapist asked, "He's all right, though. Tonight?"

  "He's fine. Just got a little spooked earlier."

  "I've got kids of my own," Evans said. He looked at Lukas, "You have children?"

  "No," she said. "I'm not married."

  Evans said to her, "It's as if you lose a part of your mind when you have children. They steal it and you never get it back. You're always worried that they're upset, they're lost, they're sad. Sometimes I'm amazed that parents can function at all."

  "Is that right?" she asked, distracted once more.

  Evans returned to the note and there was a long moment of silence. Geller typed on his keyboard. Cage bent over a map. Lukas toyed with a strand of her blond hair. The gesture would have been coy and appealing except for her stony eyes. She was someplace else.

  Geller sat up slightly as his screen flashed. "Report back from Scottsdale . . ." He read the screen. "Okay, okay . . . P. D. knew about the gang, the Gravediggers, but they have no contact with anybody who was in it. Most of 'em are retired. Family men now."

  Yet another dead end, Parker thought.

  Evans noticed another sheet of paper and pulled it toward him. The Major Crimes Bulletin--about Gary Moss and the firebombing of his house.

  "He's the witness, right?" Evans asked. "In that school construction scandal."

  Lukas nodded.

  Evans shook his head as he read. "The killers didn't care if they murdered his children too . . . Terrible." He glanced at Lukas. "Hope they're being well looked after," the doctor said.

  "Moss is in protective custody at headquarters and his family's out of state," Cage told him.

  "Killing children," the psychologist muttered and pushed the memo away.

  Then the case began to move. Parker remembered this from his law enforcement days. Hours and hours--sometimes days--of waiting; then all at once the leads begin to pay off. A sheet of paper flowed out of the fax machine. Hardy read it. "It's from Building Permits. Demolition and construction sites in Gravesend."

  Geller called up a map of the area on his large monitor and highlighted the sites in red as Hardy called them out. There were a dozen of them.

  Lukas called Jerry Baker and gave him the locations. He reported back that he was disbursing the teams there.

  A few minutes later a voice crackled through the speaker in the command post. It was Baker's. "New Year's Leader Two to New Year's Leader One."

  "Go ahead," Lukas said.

  "One of my S&S teams found a convenience store. Mockingbird and Seventeenth."

  Tobe Geller immediately highlighted the intersection on the map.

  Please, Parker was thinking. Please . . .

  "They're selling paper and pens like the kind you were describing. And the display faced the window. Some of the packs of paper're sun-bleached."

  "Yes!" Parker whispered.

  The team leaned forward, gazing at the map on Geller's screen.

  "Jerry," Parker said, not bothering with the code names that the tactical agents were so fond of, "one of the demolition sites we told you about--it's two blocks east of the store. On Mockingbird. Get the canvassers going in that direction."

  "Roger. New Year's Leader Two. Out."

  Then another call came in. Lukas took it. Listened. "Tell him." She handed the phone to Tobe Geller.

  Geller listened, nodding. "Great. Send it here--on MCP Four's priority fax line. You have the number? Good." He hung up and said, "That was Com-Tech again. They've got the ISP list for Gravesend."

  "The what?" Cage asked.

  "Subscribers to Internet service providers," Geller answered.

  The fax phone rang and another sheet fed out. Parker glanced at it, discouraged. There were more on-line subscribers in Gravesend than he'd anticipated--about fifty of them.

  "Call out the addresses," Geller said. "I'll type them in." Hardy did. Geller was lightning fast on the keyboard and as quickly as the detective could recite the addresses a red dot appeared on the screen.

  In two minutes they were all highlighted. Parker saw that his concern had been unfounded. There were only four subscribers within a quarter-mile radius of the convenience store and the demolition site.

  Lukas called Jerry Baker and gave him the addresses. "Concentrate on those four. We'll meet you at the convenience store. That'll be our new staging area."

  "Roger. Out."

  "Let's go," Lukas called to the driver of the MCP, a young agent.

  "Wait," Geller called. "Go through the vacant lot there." He tapped the screen. "On foot. You'll get there faster than in cars. We'll drive over and meet you."

  Hardy pulled his jacket on. But Lukas shook her head. "Sorry, Len. . . . What we talked about before? I want you to stay in the MCP."

  The young officer lifted his hands, looked at Cage and Parker. "I want to do something."

  "Len, this could be a tactical situation. We need negotiators and shooters."

  "He's not a shooter," Hardy said, nodding at Parker.

  "He's forensic. He'll be on the crime scene team."

  "So I'm just sitting here, twiddling my thumbs. Is that it?"

  "I'm sorry. That's the way it's got to be."

  "Whatever." Pulled his jacket off and sat down.

  "Thank you," Lukas said. "C. P., you stay here too. Keep an eye on the fort."

  Meaning, Parker guessed, make sure Hardy doesn't do anything stupid. The big agent got the message and nodded.

  Lukas pushed open the door of the camper. Cage stepped outside. Parker pulled on his bomber jacket and followed the agent. As he climbed outside Lukas started to ask, "You have--?"

  "It's in my pocket," he answered shortly, slapping the pistol to make sure, and caught up with Cage, who was moving through the smo
ky vacant lot at a slow trot.

  *

  Henry Czisman took a tiny sip of his beer.

  He was certainly no stranger to liquor but he wanted at this particular moment to be as sober as possible. But a man in a bar in Gravesend on New Year's Eve had better be drinking or else incur the suspicion of everybody in the place.

  The big man had nursed the Budweiser for a half hour.

  Joe Higgins' was the name of the bar, Czisman noted. According to my training as a journalist, Czisman thought with irritation, this is wrong. Only plural nouns take just the s apostrophe to form the possessive. The name of the place should be Joe Higgins's.

  Another sip of beer.

  The door opened and Czisman saw several agents walk inside. He'd been expecting someone to come in here for the canvass and he'd been very concerned that it might be Lukas or Cage or that consultant, who would recognize him and wonder why he was dogging them. But these men he'd never seen before.

  The wiry old man beside Czisman continued. "So then I go, 'The block's cracked. What'm I gonna do with a cracked block? Tell me what am I gonna do?' And he ain' have no answer for that. Gee willikers. The fuck he think I was gonna do, not see it?"

  Czisman glanced at the scrawny guy, who was wearing torn gray pants and a dark T-shirt. December 31 and he didn't have a coat. Did he live nearby? Upstairs. The man was drinking whiskey that smelled like antifreeze.

  "No answer, hm?" Czisman asked, eyes on the agents, studying them.

  "No. And I tell him I'ma fuck him up he don't gimme a new block. You know?"

  He'd bought the black guy a drink because it would look less suspicious to see a black guy and a white guy with their heads down over a beer and a slimy whiskey in a bar like Joe Higgins', with or without the correct possessive case, rather than just a white guy by himself.

  And when you buy somebody a drink you have to let them talk to you.

  The agents were showing a piece of paper--probably the picture of the Digger's dead accomplice--to a table of three local crones, painted like Harlem whores.

  Czisman looked past them to the Winnebago parked across the street. Czisman had been staking out FBI headquarters on Ninth Street when he'd seen the three agents hurry outside, along with a dozen others. Well, they wouldn't let him go for a ride-along--so he'd arranged for his own. Thank God there'd been a motorcade of ten or so cars and he'd just followed them--through the red lights, driving fast, flashing his brights, which is what you're supposed to do as a cop when you're in pursuit but don't have a dashboard flasher. They'd parked in a cluster near the bar and, after a briefing, had fanned out to canvass for information. Czisman had parked up the street and had slipped into the bar. His digital camera was in his pocket and he'd taken a few shots of the agents and cops being briefed. Then there was nothing to do but sit back and wait. He wondered how close they were to finding--what had he called it?--the Digger's lair.

  "Hey," said the black guy, only now noticing the agents. "Who they? Cops?"

  "We're about to find out."

  A moment later one of them came up to the bar. "Evening. We're federal agents." The ID was properly flashed. "I wonder if either of you've seen this man around here?"

  Czisman looked at the photo of the dead man he'd seen in FBI headquarters. He said, "No."

  The black guy said, "He looks dead. He dead?"

  The agent asked, "You haven't seen anyone who might resemble him?"

  "No sir."

  Czisman shook his head.

  "There's somebody else we're looking for too. White male, thirties or forties. Wearing a dark coat."

  Ah, the Digger, thought Henry Czisman. Odd to hear somebody he'd come to know so well described from such a distant perspective. He said, "That could be a lot of people around here."

  "Yessir. The only identifying characteristic we know about him is that he wears a gold crucifix. And that he's probably armed. He might have been talking about guns, bragging about them."

  The Digger wouldn't ever do that, Czisman thought. But he didn't correct them and said merely, "Sorry."

  "Sorry," echoed the whiskey drinker.

  "If you see him could you please call this number?" The agent handed them both cards.

  "You bet."

  "You bet."

  When the agents left, Czisman's drinking buddy said, "What's that all about?"

  "Wonder."

  "Something's always going down 'round here. Drugs. Bet it's drugs. Anyway, so I gotta truck with a busted block. Wait. I tell you 'bout my truck?"

  "You started to."

  "I'ma tell you 'bout this truck."

  Suddenly Czisman looked at the man beside him carefully and felt that same tug of curiosity that'd driven him to journalism years ago. The desire to know people. Not to exploit them, not to use them, not to expose them. But to understand and explain them.

  Who was this man? Where did he live? What were his dreams? What sort of courageous things had he done? Did he have a family? What did he like to eat? Was he a closet musician or painter?

  Was it better, was it more just, for him to live out his paltry life? Or was it better for him to die now, quickly, before the pain--before the sorrow--sucked him down like an undertow?

  But then Czisman caught a glimpse of the Winnebago door opening and several men hurrying outside. That woman--Agent Lukas--stepped out a moment later.

  They were running.

  Czisman tossed money down on the bar and stood.

  "Hey, you don' wanna hear 'bout my truck?"

  Without a word the big man stepped quickly to the door, pushed outside and started after the agents as they jogged through the decimated lots of Gravesend.

  18

  By the time the team met up with Jerry Baker two of his agents had found the safe house.

  It turned out to be a shabby duplex two doors from an old building that was being torn down--one of the construction sites they'd found. Clay and brick dust were everywhere.

  Baker said, "Showed a couple across the street the unsub's picture. They've seen him three or four times over the past few weeks. Always looked down, walked fast. Never stopped or said anything to anybody."

  Two dozen agents and officers were deployed around the building.

  "Which apartment was his?" Lukas asked.

  "Bottom one. Seems to be empty. We've cleared the top floor."

  "You talk to the owner? Got a name?" Parker asked.

  "Management company says the tenant is Gilbert Jones," an agent called.

  Hell . . . The fake name again.

  The agent continued: "And the Social Security number was issued to somebody who died five years ago. The unsub signed up for the on-line service--name of Gilbert Jones again--with a credit card in that name but it's one of those credit-risk cards. You put money in a bank to cover it and it's only good as long as there's money there. Bank records show that this is his address. Priors were all fake."

  Baker asked, "Entry now?"

  Cage looked at Lukas. "Be my guest."

  Baker conferred with Tobe Geller, who was carefully monitoring the screen on his laptop. Several sensors were trained on the downstairs apartment.

  "Cold as a fish," Tobe reported. "Infrareds aren't picking up anything and the only sounds I'm registering are air in the radiator and the refrigerator compressor. Ten to one it's clean but you can screen body heat if you really want to. And some bad guys can be very, very quiet."

  Lukas added, "Remember--the Digger packs his own silencers so he knows what he's doing."

  Baker nodded, then pulled on his flak jacket and helmet and called five other tactical agents over to him. "Dynamic entry. We'll cut the lights and move in through the front door and the rear bedroom window simultaneously. You're green-lighted to neutralize if there's any threat risk at all. I'm primary through the door. Questions?"

  There were none. And the agents moved quickly into position. The only noise they made was the faint jingling of their equipment.

  Parker held
back, watching Margaret Lukas, in profile, staring intently at the front door. She turned suddenly and caught him watching her. Returned a cool look.

  Hell with her, Parker thought. He was angry at the dressing-down she'd given him about the gun. It'd been completely unnecessary, he thought.

  Then the lights went out in the duplex and there was a loud bang as the agents blew in the front door with 12-gauge Shok-Lok rounds. Parker watched the beams from the flashlights, hooked to the ends of their machine guns, illuminate the inside of the apartment.

  He expected to hear shouting at any minute: Freeze, get down, federal agents . . . ! But there was only silence. A few minutes later Jerry Baker walked outside, pulling his helmet off. "Clean."

  The lights went back on.

  "We're just checking for antipersonnel devices. Give us a few minutes."

  Finally an agent called out the front door, "Premises secure."

  As Parker ran forward he prayed a secular prayer: Please let us find something--some trace evidence, a fingerprint, a note describing the site of the next attack. Or at the very least something that gives us a hint where the unsub lived so we can search public records to find a devil's teardrop above an i or a j . . . Let us finish this hard, hard work and get back home to our families.

  Cage went in first, followed by Parker and Lukas. The two of them walked side by side. In silence.

  The apartment was cold. The lights were glaring. It was a depressing place, painted with pale green enamel. The floor was brown but much of the paint had flaked away. The four rooms were mostly empty. In the living room Parker could see a computer on a stand, a desk, a musty armchair shedding its stuffing, several tables. But to his dismay he could see no notes, scraps of paper or other documents.

  "We got clothes," an agent called from the bedroom.

  "Check the labels," Lukas ordered.

  A moment later: "Are none."

  "Hell," she spat out.

  Parker glanced at the living room window and wondered about the unsub's dietary habits. Cooling in the half-open window were four or five large jugs of Mott's apple juice and a battered cast-iron skillet filled with apples and oranges.

  Cage pointed to them. "Maybe the bastard was constipated. Hope it was real painful."

  Parker laughed.

  Lukas called Tobe Geller and asked him to come check out the computer and any files and e-mail the unsub had saved on the hard drive.

  Geller arrived a few minutes later. He sat down at the desk and ran his hand through his curly hair, examining the unit carefully. Then he looked up, around the room. "Place stinks," he said. "Why can't we get some upscale perps for a change? . . . What is that?"