Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

Damn. The man had been smart, Parker reflected. A puzzle master in his own right.

Three hawks have been killing a farmer's chickens…

"Found something in the bedroom," a voice called. An agent wearing latex gloves walked into the living room. He was holding a yellow pad with writing and markings on it. Parker's heart sped up a few beats when he saw this.

He opened his attaché case and pulled on his own latex gloves. He took the pad and set it on the table next to Geller, bent the desk lamp over it. With his hand glass he studied the first page and noticed immediately that it had been written by the unsub-he'd stared at the extortion note so much that he knew the handwriting as well as his own and the Whos'.

The devils teardrop over a lowercase i…

Parker scanned the sheet. Much of it was doodlings. As a document examiner, Parker Kincaid believed in the psychological connection between our minds and our hands: personality revealed not by how we form letters (that graphoanalysis nonsense that Lukas seemed so fond of) but through the substance of what we write and draw when we're not really thinking about it. How we take notes, what little pictures we make in the margins when our minds are occupied elsewhere.

Parker had seen thousands of renderings on the documents he'd examined-knives, guns, hanged men, stabbed women, severed genitals, demons, bared teeth, stick figures, airplanes, eyes. But he'd never seen what their unsub had drawn here: mazes.

So he was a puzzle master.

Parker tried one or two. Most of them were very complicated. There were other notations on the page but he kept getting distracted by the mazes, his eye drawn to them. He felt the compulsion to solve them. This was Parker's nature; he couldn't control it.

He sensed someone nearby. It was Margaret Lukas. She was staring at the pad.

"They're intricate," she said.

Parker looked up at her, felt her leg brush against him. The muscles in her thigh were very strong. She'd be a runner, he guessed. Pictured her on Sunday mornings in her workout spandex, sweaty and flushed, walking through the front door after her three miles…

He turned back to the maze.

"Must've taken him a long time to make it," she said, nodding at the maze.

"No," Parker said. "Mazes are hard to solve but they're the easiest puzzles to make. You draw the solution path first and then once that's finished you just keep adding layer and layer of false routes."

Puzzles are always easy when you know the answer…

She glanced at him once more then walked away, helped a crime scene tech cut open the mattress, searching for more evidence.

Just like life, right?

Parker's eyes returned to the yellow pad. He lifted the top sheet and on the next page he found a dense page of notes, hundreds of words in the unsub's writing. Toward the bottom of the page he saw a column. The first two entries were:

Dupont Circle Metro, top of the escalator, 9 A.M.

George Mason Theater, box No. 58, 4 P.M.

My God, he thought, this's got the real targets on it. It's not a decoy! He looked up and called to Cage, "Over here!"

Just as Lukas stepped into the doorway and shouted, "I smell gas! Gasoline. Where's it coming from?"

Gas? Parker glanced at Tobe, who was frowning. He realized that, yes, that was the smell they'd detected earlier.

"Oh, Jesus." Parker looked at the bottles of apple juice.

It was a trap-in case the agents got into the safe house.

"Cage! Tobe! Everybody out!" Parker leapt to his feet. "The bottles!"

But Geller glanced at them and said, "It's okay… Look: there's no detonator. You can-"

And then the stream of bullets exploded through the window, tearing the table into shreds of blond wood, shattering the bottles and spraying rosy gasoline over the walls and floor.

A thousand invisible bullets, a million.

More bullets than Parker'd ever seen or heard in all his weeks on the range at Quantico.

Glass, wood, splinters of metal shot through the living room.

Parker huddled on the floor, the precious yellow pad still on the desk. He tried to grab it but a cluster of slugs pummeled the floor in front of him and he leapt back against the wall.

Lukas and Cage crawled out the front door and collapsed into the hallway, weapons drawn, looking for a target out the window. Shouting, calls for backup, cries for help. Tobe Geller pushed back from the desk but the chair legs caught on the uneven floor and he tumbled backward. The computer monitor imploded as a dozen slugs struck it. Parker went for the yellow pad again but dropped to his belly as a line of bullets snapped into the walls, heading straight for him. He dodged the volley and lay flat on the floor.

Thinking, as he had before tonight, that he was nearly as afraid of being wounded as he was of dying. He couldn't stand the thought of the Whos seeing him hurt, in the hospital. And he, unable to take care of them.

There was a pause in the fusillade and Parker started for Tobe Geller.

Then the Digger, somewhere outside, on a rooftop maybe, lowered his aim and fired toward the metal pan that the fruit rested in. It too had been placed there for a purpose. The bullets clanged off it and sparks shot into the gasoline. With a huge roar the pungent liquid ignited.

Parker was blown out the door into the hallway by the explosion. He lay on his side beside Cage and Lukas.

"No, Tobe!" Parker cried, trying to get back inside. But a wave of flame filled the doorway and forced him back.

They crouched in the windowless corridor. Lukas on one phone, Cage on another. "… maybe the roof! We don't know… Call D.C.F.D… One agent down. Make that two… He's still out there. Where the hell is he?"

And the Digger kept firing.

"Tobe!" Parker shouted again.

"Somebody!" Geller called. "Help me."

Parker caught a glimpse of the young man on the other side of the raging flames. He lay curled on the floor. The apartment was awash with fire but still the Digger kept shooting. Pumping round after round from the terrible gun into the flaming living room. Soon Geller was lost to sight. It seemed that the table where the yellow pad rested was consumed in flames. No, no! The clues to the last sites were burning to ash!

Voices from somewhere:

"… where is he?"

"… going on? Where? Silencer and flash suppressor. Can't find him… No visual, no visual!"

"Fuck no, he's still shooting! We've got somebody down outside! Jesus…"

"Tobe!" Cage shouted and he too tried to run back into the apartment, which was filled with swirling orange flames, mixed with black, black smoke. But the agent was driven back by the astonishing heat-and by yet another terrifying row of black bullet holes snapping into the wall near them.

More shooting. And still more.

"… that window… No, try the other one."

Cage cried, "Get the fire trucks here! I want 'em here now!"

Lukas called, "They're on their way!"

Soon the sound of the transmissions was lost in the roar of the fire.

Through the noise they could just make out poor Tobe Geller's voice. "Help me! Please! Help me…" Growing softer.

Lukas made one last attempt to get inside but got only a few feet before a ceiling beam came down and nearly crushed her. She gave a scream and fell back. Staggering, choking on smoke, Parker helped her toward the front door as a tornado of flames poured into the corridor and moved relentlessly toward them.

"Tobe, Tobe…" she cried, coughing fiercely. "He's dying…"

"We've gotta get out," Cage shouted. "Now!"

Foot by foot they made their way toward the front door.

In a madness of panic and hypoxia from the burning air Parker kept wishing he were deaf so he couldn't hear the cries from the apartment. Kept wishing he were blind so he couldn't see the loss and sorrow the Digger had brought them, all these good people, people with families, people with children like his.