The Devils Teardrop

beautiful , this hotel is nice.
    The Digger walks inside, with puppies on his shopping bag, and no one notices him.
    He walks into the bar and buys a sparkling water from the bartender. It tickles his nose. Funny . . . He drinks it down and leaves money and a tip, the way the man who tells him things told him to do.
    In the lobby the crowds are milling. There’re functions here. Office parties. Lots of decorations. More of those fat babies in New Year’s banners. My, aren’t they . . . aren’t they . . . aren’t they cute?
    And here’s Old Man Time, looking like the Grim Reaper.
    He and Pamela . . . click.  . . . and Pamela went to some parties in places like this.
    The Digger buys a USA Today. He sits in the lobby and reads it, the puppy bag at his side.
    He looks at his watch.
    Reading the articles.
    USA Today is a nice newspaper. It tells him many interesting things. The Digger notices the weather around the nation. He likes the color of the high-pressure fronts. He reads about sports. He thinks he used to do some sports a long time ago. No, that was his friend, William. His friend enjoyed sports. Some other friends too. So did Pamela.
    The paper has lots of pictures of nice basketball players. They look very big and strong and when they dunk balls they fly through the air like whirligigs. The Digger decides he must not have played sports. He isn’t sure why Pamela or William or anyone would want to. It’s more fun to eat soup and watch TV.
    A young boy walks past him and pauses.
    He looks down at the bag. The Digger pulls the top of the bag closed so the boy won’t see the Uzi that’s about to kill fifty or sixty people.
    The boy is maybe nine. He has dark hair and it’s parted very carefully. He’s wearing a suit that doesn’t fit well. The sleeves are too long. And a happy red Christmas tie bunches up his collar awkwardly. He’s looking at the bag.
    At the puppies.
    The Digger looks away from him.
    “If anybody looks at your face, kill them. Remember that.”
    I remember.
    But he can’t help looking at the boy. The boy smiles. The Digger doesn’t smile. (He recognizes a smile but he doesn’t know what it is exactly.)
    The boy, with his brown eyes and the little bit of a smile on his face, is fascinated with the bag and the puppies. Their happy ribbons. Like the ribbons the fat NewYear’s babies wear. Green and gold ribbons on the bag. The Digger looks at the bag too.
    “Honey, come on,” a woman calls. She’s standing beside a pot of poinsettias, as red as the rose Pamela wore on her dress at Christmas last year.
    The boy glances once again at the Digger’s face. The Digger knows he should look away but he just stares back. Then the boy walks to the crowd of people around tables filled with little dots of food. Lots of crackers and cheese and shrimps and carrots.
    No soup, the Digger notices.
    The boy walks up to a girl who is probably his sister. She’s about thirteen.
    The Digger looks at his watch. Twenty minutes to four. He takes the cell phone out of his pocket and carefully punches the buttons to call his voice mail. He listens. “You have no new messages.” He shuts the phone off.
    He lifts the bag onto his lap and looks out over the crowd. The boy is in a blue blazer and his sister is wearing a pink dress. It has a sash on it.
    The Digger clutches the puppy bag.
    Eighteen minutes.
    The boy is standing at the food table. The girl is talking to an older woman.
    More people enter the hotel. They walk right past the Digger, with his bag and his nice newspaper that shows the weather all across the nation.
    But no one notices him.
    * * *
    The phone in the document lab began ringing.
    As always, when a telephone chirped and he was someplace without the Whos, Parker felt an instant of low-voltagepanic though if one of the children had had an accident Mrs. Cavanaugh would of course have called his cell phone and not the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
    He glanced at the caller ID box and saw a New York number. He snagged the receiver. “Lincoln. It’s Parker. We’ve got fifteen minutes. Any clues?”
    The criminalist’s voice was troubled. “Oh, not much, Parker. Speaker me . . . Don’t you linguists hate it when people verb nouns?”
    Parker hit the button.
    “Somebody grab a pen,” Rhyme called. “I’ll tell you what I’ve got. Are you ready? Are you ready? ”
    “We’re ready, Lincoln,” Parker said.
    “The most prominent trace embedded in the letter