The Devils Teardrop

sentence.” Parker touched a portion of the screen, moving his finger along the words:
    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.
    “See, he says, ‘leave it,’ but the object ‘it’ isn’t necessary. Only that isn’t the sort of mistake that makes sense—most grammatical errors are reflections of errors in speaking. And in everyday vernacular we just don’t add unnecessary direct objects. If anything we’re lazy—we tend to streamline our speech and leave out words.
    “And the misspellings?” Parker continued. He paced slowly in front of the projected note and the letters moved across his face and shoulder like black insects. “Look at the sentence ‘their is no way to stop him.’ ‘Their’ is a homonym—words that are spelled differently but are pronounced the same. It should be t-h-e-r-e. But most people only make those mistakes when they write quickly—usually when they’re on a computer. Their mind sends them the spelling phonetically not visually. The second-highest incident of homonymic mistakes is by people typing on typewriters. But with handwriting they’re rare.
    “The capitalizations?” He glanced at Hardy. “You only find erroneous uppercasing when there’s some logical basis for it—concepts like art or love or hate. Sometimeswith occupations or job titles. No, he’s just trying to make us think he’s stupid. But he isn’t.”
    “The note tells you that?” Lukas asked, staring as if she were seeing an extortion note entirely different from the one Parker was studying.
    “You bet,” the document examiner responded. He laughed. “His other mistake was not making some mistakes he should have. For instance, he uses a comma in adverbial clauses correctly. A clause beginning a sentence should end with a comma. The ‘if’ clause.” He touched it on the wall screen.
    If you kill me, he will keep killing.
    “But with a clause at the end of the sentence you don’t need one.”
    He will kill again—at four, 8 and Midnight if you don’t pay.
    “He also used a comma before ‘which.’”
    I am wanting $20 million dollars in cash, which you will put into a bag . . .
    “That’s a standard rule of grammar—a comma before the nonrestrictive ‘which’ and not before the restrictive ‘that’—but generally only professional writers and people who’ve gone to good schools follow it anymore.”
    “There oughta be a comma before ‘which’?” C. P. grumbled. “Who cares?”
    Parker silently responded, We do. Because it’s little things like this that lead us to the truth.
    Hardy said, “It looks like he tried to spell ‘apprehend’ and couldn’t get it right. What do you make of that?”
    “Looks like it,” Parker said. “But you know what’s under the mark-out there? I scanned it with an infrared viewer.”
    “What?”
    “Squiggles.”
    “Squiggles?” Lukas asked.
    “A term of art,” Parker said wryly. “He didn’t write anything. He just wanted us to think he was having trouble spelling the word.”
    “But why’d he go to all this trouble to make us think he’s stupid?” Hardy asked.
    “To trick us into looking for either a stupid American or a slightly less stupid foreigner. It’s another smokescreen.” Parker added, “And to keep us underestimating him. Of course he’s smart. Just look at the money drop.”
    “The drop?” Lukas asked.
    C. P. asked, “You mean at Gallows Road? Why’s that smart?”
    “Well . . .” Parker glanced up, then from one to the other of the agents. “The helicopters.”
    “What helicopters?” Hardy asked.
    Parker frowned. “Aren’t you checking out helicopter charters?”
    “No,” Lukas said. “Why should we?”
    Parker remembered a rule from his days working at the Bureau. Never assume a single thing. “The field where he wanted the money dropped was next to a hospital, right?”
    Geller was nodding. “Fairfax Hospital.”
    “Shit,” Lukas spat out. “It has a helipad.”
    “So?” Hardy asked.
    Lukas shook her head, angry with herself. “The unsub picked the place so a surveillance team would get used to incoming choppers. He’d chartered one himself and was going to set down, pick up the money and take off again. Probably fly at treetop level to a getaway car.”
    “I never thought about that,” Hardy said bitterly.
    “None of us did,” C. P. said.
    Cage added, “I’ve got a