Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

Memories he had no desire to experience.

"Forensics?" he asked.

"PERT's going over the place with a microscope," Cage said. "But-I don't get it-he's firing an automatic weapon and there're no shell casings."

Parker said, "Oh, he's got the gun in a bag or something. Catches the casings."

"How do you know that?" Hardy asked.

"I don't. But it's what I'd do if I were him. Anybody at the hotel get a look at him leaving the bullets?"

"Nope," Cage muttered. "And they've canvassed everybody there. One kid said he saw the boogeyman. But he couldn't remember anything about him."

Boogeyman, Parker thought wryly. Just great.

And he reflected: what a photo finish.

Lukas had finally agreed to go along with Parker, saying icily, "All right, all right, well stop the response. But God help you if you're wrong, Kincaid." She'd ordered the teams to hold their positions. Then they spent a frantic few minutes trying to guess where the Digger might've gone. Parker had reasoned that he'd leave the bullets at the hotel not long before four-so he'd have ten minutes tops to get to the real target. The killer couldn't rely on getting a cab on a holiday afternoon and buses in the District were very unpredictable; he'd have to walk. That meant about a five-block radius.

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."

"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."