Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

He's behind one of them.

Here's a puzzle for you, Parker. Which door leads to our Judas?

Three hawks have been killing a farmer's chickens…

Holding the gun out in front of her, she eased forward, saw the silhouettes of the other agents at the far end of the corridor. Using hand signals, she motioned them aside, back around the corner. If Hardy burst from a doorway she'd have trouble acquiring a target with Ted and Nance in the background. They'd have the same trouble too and might hesitate to light up Hardy for fear of hitting her. Alone, she'd lose the cross-fire advantage but could shoot freely if he tried to make a run for it.

Lukas moved down the corridor.

Which door? she wondered.

Think… Come on! Think!

If Hardy had any sense of orientation he'd know that the five offices on her right were exterior ones; he wouldn't've picked any on the left because he'd risk getting trapped inside the building.

Okay, we'll narrow it down to those on the right.

Of these five, two were labeled RECEPTION-the euphemism for the interrogation rooms like the one in which they'd met with Czisman. Hardy might logically doubt that the FBI would have reception rooms and he might figure that they had something to do with security and would have no access to outside-which in fact they didn't; they were windowless.

The door in the middle was labeled MAINTENANCE. Lukas didn't know exactly where that one led but she supposed it was a janitor's closet with no other exit and concluded that Hardy would have made the same deduction.

That left two doors. Both unmarked and both, she happened to know, leading to small offices for temporary word-processor operators. Both rooms had windows facing the street. One was the office closest to the reception area. The other was closest to Ted and Nance.

But what's the hurry? she asked herself. Just wait for backup.

Yet Hardy could be trying to break out one of the windows right now, close to escaping. Lukas wouldn't risk that this man might get away.

Which door, which one?

She made her choice: The door nearest the lobby. It made sense. Hardy wouldn't have run thirty or forty feet down the corridor with an armed agent behind him before taking cover.

Once she made her decision she forgot all other options.

Puzzles are always easy when you know the answer. Just like life, right?

She tried the knob. But the door was locked.

Were they always locked? she wondered. Or had he locked it from the inside?

No, he'd locked it. He had to be in there. Where else could he have gone? She ran to the guard station, got the keys from Artie's belt, returned. She slipped the key in the hole as quietly as she could.

Turned the latch.

It clicked with an alarming sound.

Hell. May as well just shout out, Here I come!

One, two…

Breathe deep.

She thought about her husband, about her son.

I love you mommy!

And pushed through the door fast.

Crouching, weapon up, pressure on the sharp trigger of the Glock…

Nothing…

He wasn't here.

Wait… the desk… It was the only piece of furniture he could be hiding behind.

She stepped around it, swinging her weapon in front of her.

Nothing.

Hell, she'd gotten it wrong. He'd gone through the other door, the far one.

Then, from the corner of her eye, faint motion.

The door directly across the hallway from this one-another door marked MAINTENANCE-had opened slightly. The muzzle of a silenced gun was lowering toward her.

"Margaret!" Susan Nances voice came from the end of the corridor. Then the woman shouted, "Freeze, you!"

Lukas flung herself to the floor as Hardy's gun fired twice.

But he wasn't aiming at her. The bullets were meant for the plate-glass window. The glass shattered into a thousand pieces.

Nance fired a group of three as Hardy, who ran awkwardly because of a large knapsack on his back, stumbled through the corridor and into the office where Lukas crouched. The agent's shots missed. He fired blindly in Lukas's direction, forcing her under cover. She rolled to the floor. The slugs clanged into the desk and Hardy leapt through the empty window frame onto the deck overlooking Ninth Street. He jumped over the fence to street level. Lukas returned fire but she missed too.

She climbed to her feet and ran to the window.

Lukas understood what had happened: Hardy had tried the door on the window side of the building and found it locked. He'd waited in a janitor's closet across the hall, outguessing her-figuring she'd probably pick the door she did and get the key to open it. He'd used her.

She'd been dead wrong.

He aims at the hawk on the left and shoots and kills it…

Standing on the crisp broken glass on the deck, she looked up and down the street but could see no sign of Hardy.

The bullet doesn't ricochet…

All she saw was a huge crowd of people returning from the fireworks, staring in surprise at the shattered window that framed the attractive blonde with a gun in her hand.

How many hawks are left on the roof?…

Parker and Cage were in the document lab once more. Joined this time by the dep director.

"Six dead," the director muttered. "Lord almighty. Inside headquarters."

Dr. John Evans, shot twice in the face, had been found in a seventh-floor closet. Artie the guard was badly wounded but would live.

"Who the hell is he?" the director demanded.

The man pretending to be Hardy had left some good fingerprints and they were being run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System files right now. If his prints were on file anywhere in the country they'd know his identity soon.

Lukas pushed through the door. Parker was alarmed to see a peppering of blood on her cheek.

"You all right?" he asked.

"Artie's," she said in a low murmur, noticing his eyes on the blood. "Not mine." She looked at Parker then Cage for a moment. The stones in her eyes were gone but he couldn't tell what had replaced them. "How did you know?"

Cage glanced toward Parker. "It was him figured it out."

"Tremble," Parker answered. He held out the sheet of paper that he'd found in his pocket when he'd been looking for baby-sitter money. "I noticed there was tremble in his handwriting. That's what happens when somebody tries to disguise their writing. I remembered it was Hardy who'd written down what I dictated but why would he try to fake his writing? There was only one reason-because he'd written the extortion note. I checked the lowercase i in 'two miles' and the dot was a devil's teardrop. That confirmed it."

"What happened?" the deputy director asked. "The director wants to know. Immediately."

"It was all a setup," Parker said, pacing. Somewhere in his mind the entire plot was quickly falling into place in minute detail. He asked Lukas, "How did Hardy get involved in the case?"

"I knew him," she said. "He's been coming by the field office for the past few months. Just flashed a badge and said he needed some stats on felonies in the District for a congressional report. District P.D.'s Research and Statistics does it a couple times a year. It's all public information-not ongoing investigations-so nobody bothered to check. Today he showed up and said he's been assigned as liaison for the case."

"And it's one of those obscure departments," Parker pointed out. "So that if the mayor or the police chief really did send somebody from Major Crimes or Investigation over here for liaison he probably wouldn't have known there was no Len Hardy."

Lukas said, "So he's been planning this for two months." Sighing in disgust.

"Probably six," Parker muttered. "Planned every detail. He was a goddamn perfectionist. His shoes, his nails, his clothes… Flawless."