The Devils Teardrop

Lukas muttered cynically.
    Bending over the letter again, studying the cold paper and the black type. He read it several times.
    The end is night . . .
    Parker noted that there was no signature. Which might seem like a pointless observation, except that he’d assisted in several cases in which perps had actually signed ransom or robbery notes. One had been fake, intended to lead them off (though the scrawled signature provided handwriting samples that ultimately convicted the perp). In another case the kidnapper had actually signed his real name, perhaps jotted automatically in the confusion of the abduction. The perp was arrested seventeenminutes after the victim’s family received the ransom demand.
    Parker moved the powerful examining light closer to the note. Bent over it. Heard a neckbone pop.
    Talk to me, he silently urged the piece of paper. Tell me your secrets. . . .
    The farmer has just one bullet in his gun and the hawks are so far apart that he can only hit one. . . .
    He wondered if the unsub had tried to doctor his handwriting. Many criminals—say, kidnappers writing ransom notes—will try to disguise their writing to make comparisons more difficult. They’ll use odd slants and formations of letters. But usually they can’t do this smoothly; it’s very difficult to suppress our natural hand and document examiners can usually detect “tremble”—a shakiness in the strokes—when someone’s trying to disguise his writing. But there was no tremble here. This was the unsub’s genuine writing.
    Normally the next step in an anonymous-writing case would be to compare the suspect document with knowns by sending agents to public records offices with a copy of the extortion note and have them plough through files to find a match. Unfortunately for the team on the METSHOOT case, most writing in public records are in uppercase block, or “manuscript,” style (“Please Print,” the directions always admonish) and the extortion note had been written in a form of cursive. Even a document examiner with Parker Kincaid’s skill couldn’t compare printing with cursive writing.
    But there was one thing that might let them search public files. A person’s handwriting includes both general and personal characteristics. General are the elements of penmanship that come from the method of handwritinglearned in school. Years ago there were a number of different methods of teaching writing and they were very distinctive; a document examiner could narrow down a suspect’s location to a region of the country. But those systems of writing—the flowery “Ladies Hand,” for instance—are gone now and only a few methods of writing remain, notably the Zaner-Bloser System and the Palmer Method. But they’re too general to identify the writer.
    Personal characteristics, though, are different. These are those little pen strokes that are unique to us—curlicues, mixing printing and cursive writing, adding gratuitous strokes—like a small dash through the diagonal stroke in the letter Z or the numeral 7. It was a personal characteristic that first tipped examiners off that the Hitler diaries “discovered” a few years ago were in fact fake. Hitler signed his last name with a very distinctive uppercase H but he used it only in his signature, not when writing in general. The forger had used the ornate capital H throughout the diary, which Hitler would not have done.
    Parker continued to scan the extortion note with his hand glass, looking to see if the unsub had had any distinctive personal characteristics in his handwriting.
    Daddy, you’re funny. You look like Sherlock Holmes . . .
    Finally he noticed something.
    The dot above the lowercase letter i.
    Most dots above i ’s and j ’s are formed by either tapping the pen directly into the paper or, if someone is writing quickly, making a dash with a dot of ink to the left and a tail to the right.
    But the METSHOOT unsub had made an unusual mark above the lowercase i ’s—the tail of the dot wentstraight upward, so that it resembled a falling drop of water. Parker had seen a similar dot years before—in a series of threat letters sent to a woman by a stalker who eventually murdered her. The letters had been written in the killer’s own blood. Parker had christened the unusual dot “the devil’s teardrop” and included a description of it in one of his textbooks on forensic document examination.
    “Got something here,” he said.
    “What?”