The Devils Teardrop

a silenced gun was lowering toward her.
    “Margaret!” Susan Nance’s 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 deckoverlooking 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? . . .

33
    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 gonebut 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.”
    Cage asked, “But the guy in the morgue, the one we