Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

"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 Rule. 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 visitors 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. "Its 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."