The Devils Teardrop

me, he will keep killing. If you kill me, he will keep killing.
    If you don’t think I’m real, some of the Diggers bullets were painted black. Only I know that.
    Documents have personalities. The Jefferson letter sitting in Parker’s vault at home—whether a forgery ornot—was regal. Scripty, and rich as amber. But the extortion note sitting on the FBI examination table here in front of him was choppy and stark.
    Still, Parker was examining it the way he approached any puzzle: with no assumptions, no preconceptions. When solving riddles the mind is like fast-drying plaster; first impressions last. He’d resist drawing any conclusions until he’d analyzed the note completely. Deferring judgment was one of the hardest parts of his job.
    Three hawks have been killing a farmer’s chickens . . .
    “The bullets at the Metro?” he called. “You found some painted?”
    “Yup,” Jerry Baker said. “A dozen or so. Black paint.”
    Parker nodded. “Did I hear you say you’d ordered a psycholinguistic?”
    “We did.” Geller nodded at his computer screen. “Still waiting for the results from Quantico.”
    Parker looked at the envelope that had contained the note. It had been placed in an acetate sleeve to which was attached a chain-of-custody card headed with the word METSHOOT. On the front of the envelope was written, in the same handwriting as the note: To the Mayor—Life and Death.
    He donned rubber gloves—not worried about fingerprints but rather about contaminating any trace materials that might be found on the paper. He unwrapped his Leitz hand glass. It was six inches across, with a rosewood handle and a glistening steel ring around the perfect glass lens. Parker examined the glue flap on the envelope.
    “What’ve we got, what’ve we got, anything?” he muttered under his breath. He often talked to himself when he was analyzing documents. If the Whos were in hisstudy while he was working they assumed his comments were directed at them and got a kick out of being included in Daddy’s job.
    The faint ridges left by the glue application machine at the factory were untouched.
    “No spit on the glue,” he said, clicking his tongue angrily. DNA and serologic information can be lifted from saliva residue on envelope flaps. “He didn’t seal it.”
    Lukas shook her head, as if Parker had missed something obvious. “But we don’t need it, remember? We took blood from the corpse and ran it through the DNA database. Nothing.”
    “I figured you’d run the unsub’s blood,” Parker said evenly. “But I was hoping the Digger’d licked the envelope and we could run his spit through the computer.”
    After a moment she conceded, “Good point. I hadn’t thought about that.”
    Not too full of herself to apologize, Parker noted. Even if she didn’t seem to mean it. He pushed the envelope aside and looked at the note itself again. He asked, “And what exactly is this ‘Digger’ stuff?”
    “Yeah,” C. P. Ardell piped up. “We have a wacko here?”
    Cage offered, “Another Son of Sam? That Leonard Bernstein guy?”
    “David Berkowitz,” Lukas corrected before she realized it was a joke. C. P. and Hardy laughed. You could never exactly tell when Cage was fooling with you, Parker recalled. The agent was often jokey when investigations were at their most grim. It was a type of invisible shield—like Robby’s—to protect the man inside the agent. Parker wondered if Lukas had shields too. Maybe, like Parker himself, she sometimes wore her armor in full view, sometimes kept it hidden.
    “Let’s call Behavioral,” Parker said, “and see if they have anything on the name ‘Digger.’”
    Lukas agreed and Cage made the phone call down to Quantico.
    “Any description of the shooter?” Parker asked, looking over the note.
    “Nope,” Cage said. “It was spooky. Nobody saw a gun, saw muzzle flash, heard anything other than the slugs hitting the wall. Well, hitting the vics too.”
    Incredulous, Parker asked, “At rush hour? Nobody saw anything?”
    “He was there and then he was gone,” C. P. said.
    Hardy added, “Like a ghost.” Parker glanced at the detective. He was clean-cut, trim, handsome. Wore a wedding ring. Had all the indicia of a contented life. But there seemed to be a melancholy about him. Parker recalled that when he was leaving the Bureau the exit counselor explained to him—unnecessarily—about the high incidence of depression among law enforcers.
    “Ghost,”