The Devils Teardrop

admire it.
    Cage flipped through it, paused at several pages, read them, shaking his head. He handed it to Parker. “Check this out.”
    Parker frowned, looking at the title, written in gold ink on the cover. A Chronicle of Sorrow.
    He opened it. Read out loud. “‘To the memory of my wife, Anne, the Butcher’s first victim.’”
    The book was divided into sections. “Boston.” “White Plains.” And photographs of crime scenes had been pasted inside. The first one was headed “Hartford.” Parker turned the page and read, “‘From the Hartford News-Times. ’” Czisman had copied the text of the article. It was dated in November of last year.
    Parker read, “‘Three Killed in Holdup . . . Hartford Police are still searching for the man who walked into the offices of the News-Times on Saturday and opened fire with a shotgun, killing three employees in the classified advertising department.
    “‘The only description of the killer was that he was amale of medium build, wearing a dark overcoat. A police spokesman said that his motive may have been to divert law enforcement authorities while his accomplice robbed an armored truck making a delivery to a bank on the other side of town. The second gunman shot and killed the driver of the truck and his assistant. He escaped with $4,000 in cash.’”
    Cage muttered, “Killed three people for four G’s. That’s him all right.”
    Parker looked up. “One of the clerks killed at the paper was Anne Czisman. She was his wife.”
    “So he wanted the prick as much as we did,” Cage said.
    “Czisman was using us to get to the unsub and the Digger. That’s why he wanted to see the body in the morgue so much. And that’s why he was following me.”
    Revenge . . .
    “This book . . . it was his way of dealing with his grief.” Parker crouched and reverently pulled the sheet back up over the man’s face once more.
    “Let’s call Lukas,” he said to Cage. “Give her the news.”
    * * *
    At FBI headquarters Margaret Lukas was in the employees’ lobby on Pennsylvania Avenue, briefing the deputy director, a handsome man with a politician’s trim graying hair. She’d heard the reports that the Digger was on the Mall and that there had been shooting. Lukas was desperately eager to get to the Mall herself but since she was primary on the case, protocol dictated that she keep the senior administrators in the Bureau informed.
    Her phone buzzed. And she answered fast, superstitiously not letting herself hope that they’d captured him.
    “Lukas here.”
    “Margaret,” Cage said.
    And she knew immediately from his tone that they’d nailed the killer. It was a sound in a cop’s voice you learn early in your career.
    “Collared or tagged?”
    Arrested or dead, she meant.
    “Tagged,” Cage responded.
    Lukas came as close to saying a prayer of Thanksgiving as she’d come in five years.
    “And, get this, the mayor winged him.”
    “What?”
    “Yep, Kennedy. Got off a few shots. That saved some lives.”
    She relayed this news to the deputy director.
    “You okay?” she asked Cage.
    “Fine,” Cage responded. “Cracked a rib while I was covering my ass is all.”
    But her gut tightened. She heard something else in his voice, a tone, a hollowness.
    Jackie, it’s Tom’s mother . . . Jackie, I have to tell you something. The airline just called . . . Oh, Jackie . . .
    “But?” she asked quickly. “What happened? Is it Kincaid?”
    “No, he’s okay,” the agent said softly.
    “Tell me.”
    “He got C. P., Margaret. I’m sorry. He’s dead.”
    She closed her eyes. Sighed. The fury steamed through her again, fury that she herself hadn’t had a chance to park a bullet in the Digger’s heart.
    Cage continued. “Not even a firefight. The Digger shot toward where the mayor was sitting. C. P. just happened to be in the wrong place.”
    And it was the place that I’d sent him to, she thought bitterly. Christ.
    She’d known the agent for three years . . . Oh, no . . .
    Cage was adding, “The Digger capped four other friendlies and we’ve got three injured. Looks like six civies wounded. Still a half-dozen reported missing but no bodies. They probably just scattered and their families haven’t found them yet. Oh, and that Czisman?”
    “Who, the writer?”
    “Yeah. Digger got him.”
    “What?”
    “He wasn’t a writer at all. I mean, he was but that’s not what he was doing here. The Digger’d killed his wife and he