The Devils Teardrop

them was a German immigrant who’d been in the United States for probably two or three years—which described Hauptmann accurately. The analysis helped narrow the search for the kidnapper, who was convicted primarily on the basis of handwriting comparisons between a known of his writing and the ransom notes.
    “Well, let’s go through it,” Parker said and put the note on an old-fashioned overhead projector.
    “Don’t you want to scan it and put it on the video screen?” Tobe Geller asked.
    “No,” Parker answered peremptorily. “I don’t like digital. We need to be as close to the original as we can get.” He looked up and gave a fast smile. “We need to be in bed with it.”
    The note flashed onto a large screen mounted on one wall of the lab. The ashen document seemed to stand infront of them like a suspect under interrogation. Parker walked up to it, gazed at the large letters in front of him.
    Mayor Kennedy—
    The end is night. The Digger is loose and their is no way to stop him. He will kill again—at four, 8 and Midnight if you don’t pay.
    I am wanting $20 million dollars in cash, which you will put into a bag and leave it two miles south of Rt 66 on the West Side of the Beltway. In the middle of the Field. Pay to me the Money by 1200 hours. Only I am knowing how to stop The Digger. If you apprehend 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.
    As Parker spoke he pointed to parts of the note. “‘I am knowing’ and ‘pay to me’ sound foreign, sure. The form of the verb ‘to be’ combined with a present participle is typical in a Slavic or Germanic Indo-European-root language. German or Czech or Polish, say. But the use of the preposition ‘to’ with ‘me’ is not something you’d find in those languages. They’d say it the way we do. ‘Pay me.’ That construction is more common in an Asian language. I think he just threw in random foreign-sounding phrases. Trying to fool us into thinking he’s foreign. To lead us off.”
    “I don’t know,” Cage began.
    “No, no,” Parker persisted. “Look at how he tried to do it. Those quote foreign expressions are close together—asif he’d gotten the fake clues out of the way then moved on. If a foreign language was really his first he’d be more consistent. Look at the last sentence of the letter. He falls back to a typical English construction: ‘Only I know that.’ Not ‘Only I am knowing that.’ By the way, that’s also why I think he spent time on a computer. I’m on-line a lot, browsing through rare document dealers’ Web sites and newsgroups. A lot of them are foreign but they write in English. You see bastardizations of English just like these all the time.”
    “I agree with that, about computers,” Lukas told Parker. “We don’t know for sure but it’s likely that he learned how to pack silencers and rig the Uzi for full auto on the Web. That’s how everybody learns things like that nowadays.”
    “But what about the twenty-four-hour clock?” Hardy asked. “He demanded the ransom by ‘twelve hundred hours.’ That’s European.”
    “Another red herring. He doesn’t refer to it that way earlier—when he writes about when the Digger’s going to attack again. There, he says, ‘Four, eight and Midnight.’”
    “Well,” C. P. said, “if he’s not foreign he’s got to be stupid. Look at all the mistakes.” To Lukas he said, “Sounds just like those rednecks we took down in Manassas Park.”
    Parker responded, “All fake.”
    “But,” Lukas protested, “the very first line: ‘The end is night.’ He means ‘The end is nigh. ’ He—”
    “Oh,” Parker continued, “but that’s not a mistake you’d logically make. People say, ‘Once and a while,’ even though the correct expression is ‘Once in a while,’ because there’s a certain logic to using the conjunction ‘ and’ and not the preposition ‘ in. ’ But ‘The end is night’ makes no sense, whatever his level of education.”
    “What about the misspellings?” Hardy asked. “And the capitalization and punctuation mistakes?” The detective’s eyes were scanning the letter carefully.
    Parker said, “Oh, there’re plenty more mistakes than those. Look how he uses the dollar sign and the word ‘dollars.’ A redundancy. And when he’s talking about the money he’s got an improper object in the