The Devils Teardrop

Cage asked.
    Parker explained about the dot and how he’d named it.
    “Devil’s teardrop?” Lukas asked. She didn’t seem to like the name. He guessed she was more comfortable with science and hard data. He remembered that she’d had a similar reaction when Hardy had said that the Digger was like a ghost. She leaned forward. Her short blond hair fell forward and partially obscured her face. “Any connection with your perp?” she asked. “In that stalker case?”
    “No, no,” Parker said. “He was executed years ago. But this”—he nodded toward the sheet—“could be the key to finding out where our boy lived.”
    “How?” Jerry Baker asked.
    “If we can narrow down the area to a county or—even better—a neighborhood then we’ll search public records.”
    Hardy gave a short laugh. “You can actually find somebody that way?”
    “Oh, you bet. You know Michele Sindona?”
    C. P. shook his head.
    Hardy asked, “Who?”
    Lukas searched through her apparently vast mental file cabinet of criminal history and said, “He was thefinancier? The guy who handled the Vatican’s money?”
    “Right. He was arrested for bank fraud but he vanished just before trial. He showed up a few months later and claimed he was kidnapped—thrown in a car and taken someplace. But there were rumors he hadn’t been kidnapped at all but’d flown to Italy, then returned to New York. I think it was an examiner in the Southern District who got samples of Sindona’s handwriting and found out he had this personal handwriting quirk—he made a dot inside the loop when he wrote the numeral nine. Agents went through thousands of customs declaration forms on flights from Italy to New York. They found a dot in the number nine in an address of a card filled in by a passenger who, it turned out, had used a fake name. They lifted one of Sindona’s latents from it.”
    “Man,” C. P. muttered, “collared because of a dot. A little thing like that.”
    “Oh,” Parker said, “it’s usually the little things that trip up the perps. Not always. But usually.”
    He placed the note under the scanner of the VSC. This device uses different light sources—from ultraviolet to infrared—to let examiners see through obliterations and to visualize erased letters. Parker was curious about the cross-out before the word “apprehend.” He scanned the entire note and found no erasures other than under the obliteration. He then tested the envelope and noticed no erasures.
    “What’d you find?”
    “Tell you in a minute. Don’t breathe down my neck, Cage.”
    “It’s two-twenty,” the agent reminded.
    “I can tell time, thanks,” Parker muttered. “My kids taught me.”
    He walked to the electrostatic detection apparatus. The ESDA is used to check documents for indented writing—words or markings pressed into the paper by someone writing on pages on top of the subject document. The ESDA was originally developed as a way to visualize fingerprints on documents. But the device turned out to be largely useless for that purpose because it also raised indented writing, which obscured any latent prints. In TV shows the detective rubs a pencil over the sheet to visualize the indented writing. In real life it would be malpractice for a document examiner to do this; it would probably destroy most indented writing. The ESDA machine, which works like a photocopier, reveals lettering that was written as many as ten sheets above the document being tested.
    No one quite knows why the ESDA works so efficiently but no document examiner is without one. Once, after a wealthy banker died, Parker was hired to analyze a will that disinherited his children and left his entire estate to a young maid. Parker was very close to authenticating the document. The signatures looked perfect, the dates of the will and the codicils were logical. But his last test—the ESDA—revealed indented writing that said, “This one ought to fool the pricks.” The maid confessed to hiring someone to forge the will.
    Parker now ran the unsub’s note through the machine. He lifted a plastic sheet off the top and examined it.
    Nothing.
    He tried the envelope. He lifted off the thin sheet and held it up to the light. He felt a bang in his gut when he saw the delicate gray lines of writing.
    “Yes!” he said excitedly. “We’ve got something.”
    Lukas leaned forward and Parker smelled a faint floral scent. Perfume? No. He’d known her for only an hour but he’d