Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

Still, Parker was examining it the way he approached any puzzle: with no assumptions, no preconceptions. When solving riddles the mind is like fast-drying plaster; first impressions last. He'd resist drawing any conclusions until he'd analyzed the note completely. Deferring judgment was one of the hardest parts of his job.

Three hawks have been killing a farmer's chickens…

"The bullets at the Metro?" he called. "You found some painted?"

"Yup," Jerry Baker said. "A dozen or so. Black paint."

Parker nodded. "Did I hear you say you'd ordered a psycholinguistic?"

"We did." Geller nodded at his computer screen. "Still waiting for the results from Quantico."

Parker looked at the envelope that had contained the note. It had been placed in an acetate sleeve to which was attached a chain-of-custody card headed with the word METSHOOT. On the front of the envelope was written, in the same handwriting as the note: To the Mayor-Life and Death.

He donned rubber gloves-not worried about fingerprints but rather about contaminating any trace materials that might be found on the paper. He unwrapped his Leitz hand glass. It was six inches across, with a rosewood handle and a glistening steel ring around the perfect glass lens. Parker examined the glue flap on the envelope.

"What've we got, what've we got, anything?" he muttered under his breath. He often talked to himself when he was analyzing documents. If the Whos were in his study while he was working they assumed his comments were directed at them and got a kick out being included in Daddy's job.

The faint ridges left by the glue application machine at the factory were untouched.

"No spit on the glue," he said, clicking his tongue angrily. DNA and serologic information can be lifted from saliva residue on envelope flaps. "He didn't seal it."

Lukas shook her head, as if Parker had missed something obvious. "But we don't need it, remember? We took blood from the corpse and ran it through the DNA database. Nothing."

"I figured you'd run the unsub's blood," Parker said evenly. "But I was hoping the Digger'd licked the envelope and we could run his spit through the computer."

After a moment she conceded, "Good point. I hadn't thought about that."

Not too full of herself to apologize, Parker noted. Even if she didn't seem to mean it. He pushed the envelope aside and looked at the note itself again. He asked, "And what exactly is this 'Digger' stuff?"

"Yeah," C. P. Ardell piped up. "We have a wacko here?"

Cage offered, "Another Son of Sam? That Leonard Bernstein guy?"

"David Berkowitz," Lukas corrected before she realized it was a joke. C. P. and Hardy laughed. You could never exactly tell when Cage was fooling with you, Parker recalled. The agent was often jokey when investigations were at their most grim. It was a type of invisible shield-like Robby's-to protect the man inside the agent. Parker wondered if Lukas had shields too. Maybe, like Parker himself, she sometimes wore her armor in full view, sometimes kept it hidden.

"Let's call Behavioral," Parker said, "and see if they have anything on the name 'Digger.'"

Lukas agreed and Cage made the phone call down to Quantico.

"Any description of the shooter?" Parker asked, looking over the note.

"Nope," Cage said. "It was spooky. Nobody saw a gun, saw muzzle flash, heard anything other than the slugs hitting the wall. Well, hitting the vics too."

Incredulous, Parker asked, "At rush hour? Nobody saw anything?"

"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 suspects 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 devils teardrop" and included a description of it in one of his textbooks on forensic document examination.