The Devils Teardrop

Ohhhhhh, everyday people . . . The Digger calls his voice mail and punches in the code, one-two-two-five. The date of Christmas.
    The woman, who doesn’t sound like Pamela his wife but does sound like Ruth—before the glass went into her neck, of course—says that he has no new messages.
    Which means it’s time for him to do what the man who tells him things told him.
    If you do what people tell you to do, that’s a good thing. They’ll like you. They’ll stay with you forever.
    They’ll love you.
    Whatever love is.
    Merry Christmas, Pamela, I got this for you . . . And you got something for me! Oh my oh my . . . A present.
    Click click.
    What a pretty yellow flower in your hand, Pamela. Thank you for my coat. The Digger pulls this overcoat on now, maybe black, maybe blue. He loves his coat.
    He carries his soup bowl into the kitchenette and puts it in the sink.
    He wonders again why he hasn’t heard from the manwho tells him things. The man told him that he might not call but still the Digger feels a little ping in his mind and he’s sorry he hasn’t heard the man’s voice. Am I sad? Hmmmm. Hmmmm.
    He finds his leather gloves and they are very nice gloves, with ribs on the backs of the fingers. The smell makes him think of something in his past though he can’t remember what. He wears latex gloves when he loads the bullets into the clips of his Uzi. But the rubber doesn’t smell good. He wears his leather gloves when he opens doors and touches things that are near where he shoots the gun and watches people fall like leaves in a forest.
    The Digger buttons his dark coat, maybe blue, maybe black.
    He smells his gloves again.
    Funny.
    He puts the gun into the puppy bag and puts more bullets in the bag too.
    Walking out the front door of his motel, the Digger closes the door after him. He locks it carefully, the way you’re supposed to do. The Digger knows all about doing things you’re supposed to do.
    Put glass into a woman’s neck, for instance. Buy your wife a present. Eat your soup. Find a bright new shiny shopping bag. One with puppies on it.
    “Why puppies?” the Digger asked.
    “Just because,” said the man who tells him things.
    Oh.
    And that was the one he bought.

8
    Parker Kincaid, sitting in the same gray swivel chair he himself had requisitioned from GSA many years ago, did a test that too few questioned document examiners performed.
    He read the document.
    And then he read it again. And a half-dozen times more.
    Parker put much faith in the content of the document itself to reveal things about the author. Once, he was asked to authenticate a letter supposedly sent by Abraham Lincoln to Jefferson Davis, in which Lincoln suggested that if the Confederacy surrendered he would agree to allow certain states to secede.
    The shaken director of the American Association of Historians sent Parker the letter, which would have thrown U.S. history into turmoil. The scientists had already determined the paper had been manufactured in the 1860s and the ink used was iron gallide, contemporary to the era. The document showed time-appropriateabsorption of the ink into the paper fibers and was written in what clearly seemed to be Lincoln’s handwriting.
    Yet Parker didn’t even pull out his hand glass to check the starts and lifts of the penstrokes. He read it once and on his analysis report wrote, “This document is of dubious origin.”
    Which was the forensic document examiner’s equivalent of a Bronx cheer.
    The reason? The letter was signed “Abe Lincoln.” The sixteenth president abhorred the name Abe and would never let it be used in reference to him, let alone would he sign an important document with the nickname. The forger was arrested, convicted and—as is often the case with the crime of forgery—sentenced to probation.
    As he now read the extortion note yet again Parker took careful note of the unsub’s syntax—the order of the sentences and sentence fragments—and his grammar, the general constructions he’d used in composition.
    An image began to emerge of the soul of the man who’d written the note—the man lying cold and still six floors below them in the FBI morgue.
    Tobe Geller called, “Here we go.” He leaned forward. “It’s the psycholinguistic profile from Quantico.”
    Parker gazed at the screen. He’d often used this type of computer analysis when he’d overseen the Document Division. The entire text of a threatening document—sentences, fragments,