Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

She hit a button.

"Go ahead, Susan."

"I've tracked down the case detectives. They tell me that just like here there were no solid forensics. No prints, no witnesses. All of the cases're still open. They got the pictures of the unsub we sent and nobody recognizes him. But they all said something similar. Something odd."

"Which was?" Parker asked. He was carefully cleaning the glass that held the burnt yellow sheets.

"Basically that the violence was way out of proportion to the haul. Boston, the jewelry store? All he took was a single watch."

"Just one watch?" C. P. Ardell asked. "Was that all he had a chance to boost?"

"No. Looks like that was all he wanted. It was a Rolex but still… Worth only about two thousand. In White Plains he got away with thirty thousand. Philly, the bus murder scheme? The ransom was only for a hundred thousand."

And he's asking $20 million from D.C., Parker thought. The unsub was going for bigger and bigger hauls.

Lukas was apparently thinking the same. She asked Evans, "Progressive offender?"

Progressive offenders were serial criminals who committed successively more serious crimes.

But Evans was shaking his head. "No. He seems to be but progressives are always lust driven. Sadosexual murderers mostly." He rubbed the back of his bony hand against his beard. The hairs were short-as if he'd only started to grow it recently-and his skin must have itched. "They become increasingly more violent because the crime doesn't satisfy their need. But you rarely see progressive behavior in profit crimes."

Parker sensed the puzzle here was much more complicated than it seemed.

Or much simpler.

Either way, he felt the frustration of not being able to see any possible solutions.

The farmer has just one bullet in his gun…

Parker finished cleaning the glass and turned his attention to the evidence. He studied what was left of the two pages. He saw, to his dismay, that much of the ash had disintegrated. The fire damage was worse than he'd thought.

Still it would be possible to read some of the unsub's writings on the larger pieces of ash. This is done by shining infrared light on the surface of the ash. Burnt ink or pencil marks reflect a different wavelength from that of the burnt paper and you usually can make out much of the writing.

Parker carefully set the glass panes holding the yellow sheets side by side in the infrared Foster + Freeman viewer. He crouched and picked up a cheap hand glass he found on the table (thinking angrily: The goddamn Digger just destroyed my five-hundred-dollar antique Leitz).

Hardy glanced at the sheet of paper on the left. "Mazes. He drew mazes."

Parker ignored that sheet, though, and examined the one with the reference to the Mason Theater. He guessed that the unsub had also written down the last two targets-the one at 8 P.M. and the one at midnight. But these pieces were badly jumbled and flaked.

"Well, I've got a few things visible," he muttered. He squinted, trained the hand glass on another part of the sheet. "Christ," he spat out. Shook his head.

"What?" C. P. asked.

"Oh, the targets the Diggers already hit are perfectly legible. The Metro and the Mason Theater. But the next two… I can't make them out. The midnight hit, the last one… that's easier to read than the third. Write this down," he said to Hardy.

The detective grabbed a pen and pad of yellow paper. "Go ahead."

Parker squinted. "It looks like, 'Place where I…' Let's see. 'Place where I… took you.' Then a dash. Then the word 'black.' No, 'the black.' Then there's a hole in the sheet. It's gone completely."

Hardy read back, "'Place where I took you, dash, the black…'"

"That's it."

Parker looked up. "Where the hell is he talking about?"

But no one had any idea.

Cage looked at his watch. "What about the eight o'clock hit? That's what we oughta be concentrating on. We have less than an hour."

Parker scanned the third line of writing, right below the Mason Theater reference. He studied it for a full minute, crouching. He dictated, "'… two miles south. The R…' That's an uppercase R. But after that the ash is all jumbled. I can see a lot of marks but they're fragmented."

Parker took the transcription and walked to a chalkboard mounted on the wall of the lab. He copied the words for everyone to read:

… two miles south. The R…

… place where I took you-the black…

"What's it mean?" Cage asked. "Where the hell was he talking about?"

Parker didn't have a clue.

He turned away from the board and leaned over the glass sheets, as if he were staring down a bully in a schoolyard.

But the fragment of paper won the contest easily.

"Two miles south of what?" he muttered. "'R.' What's 'R'?"

He sighed.

The door to the document lab swung open and Parker did a double take. "Tobe!"

Tobe Geller walked unsteadily into the room. The young man had changed clothes and seemed to have showered but he smelled smoky and was coughing sporadically.

"Hey, boy, you got no business being here," Cage said.

Lukas said, "Are you crazy? Go home."

"To my pathetic bachelor quarters? Having broken a New Year's Eve date with undoubtedly my now-former girlfriend tonight? I don't think so." He started to laugh, then the sound dissolved into a cough. He controlled it and breathed deeply.

"How you doing, buddy?" C. P. Ardell asked, hugging Geller firmly. In the huge agent's face you could see the heartfelt, mano-a-mano concern that tactical agents have no trouble displaying.

"They don't even make a degree for my burns," Geller explained. "It's like I got New England tan. I'm fine." He coughed again. "Well, aside from the lungs. Unlike certain presidents I did inhale. Now. Where are we?"

"That yellow pad?" Parker said ruefully. "Hate to say it but we can't make out very much."

"Ouch," the agent said.

"Yeah, ouch."

Lukas walked to the examination table. Standing next to Parker. He couldn't smell the scented soap any longer, only acrid smoke.

"Hm," she said after a moment.

"What?"

She pointed to the fragments of jumbled ash. "Some of these little pieces might fit after the letter R, right?"

"They might."

"Well, what's that remind you of?"

Parker looked down. "A jigsaw puzzle," he whispered.

"Right," she said. "So-you're the puzzle master. Can you put them back together?"

Parker surveyed the hundreds of tiny fragments of ash. It could take hours, if not days; unlike a real jigsaw puzzle the edges of the pieces of ash were damaged and didn't necessarily match the adjoining pieces.

But Parker had a thought. "Tobe?"

"Yo?" The young agent coughed, dusted a burnt eyebrow.

"There're computer programs that solve anagram puzzles, aren't there?"

"Anagrams, anagrams? What're those again?"

It was tattooed C. P. Ardell who answered-a man whose most intellectual activity you'd guess would be comparing prices of discount beer. "Assembling different words out of a set of letters. Like n-o-w, o-w-n, w-o-n."

Geller said, "Oh, sure there are. But then you'd never use software to help you solve a puzzle, would you, Parker?"

"No, that'd be cheating." He smiled to Lukas. Whose stone face offered nothing more than a momentary glance and returned to the fragments of ash.

Parker continued, "After the sequence '… two miles. The R…' See all those bits of letters on the ash? Can you put them back together?"

Geller laughed. "It's brilliant," he said. "Well scan a handwriting sample from the note. That'll give us standards of construction for all of his letters. Then I'll shoot the pieces of ash on the digital camera with an infrared filter, drop out the tonal value of the burnt paper. That'll leave us with fragments of letters. And I'll have the computer assemble them."