The Devils Teardrop

didn’t have nearly enough time to follow up on them. Not before 4 p.m. Maybe not even before eight.
    He pictured the shooter standing in a crowd of people, his gun ready. About to pull the trigger. How many would die this time?
    How many families?
    How many children like LaVelle Williams?
    Children like Robby and Stephie?
    Everyone in the half-darkened lab remained silent, as if paralyzed by their inability to see through the shroud obscuring the truth.
    Parker glanced at the note again and had a feeling that it was mocking him.
    Then Lukas’s phone rang. She listened and her mouth blossomed into the first genuine smile Parker had seen on her face that day.
    “Got him!” she announced.
    “What?” Parker asked.
    “Two of Jerry’s boys just found some rounds of the black-painted shells under a chair at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. Every available agent and cop’re on their way there.”

11
    “Is it crowded?”
    “The hotel?” Cage said in response to Parker’s question, looking up from his own cell phone. “Hell, yes. Our man says the lobby bar’s full—some kind of reception. Then in the banquet rooms downstairs there’re four New Year’s Eve parties going on. Lot of companies’re closing up early. Must be a thousand people there.”
    Parker thought of what an automatic weapon could do in a closed space like a banquet room.
    Tobe Geller had patched the operation radio frequency through speakers. In the lab the team could hear Jerry Baker’s voice. “This is New Year’s Leader Two to all units. Code Twelve at the Four Seasons on M Street. Code Twelve. Unsub is on premises, no description. Believed armed with a fully auto Uzi and suppressor. You are green-lighted. Repeat, you are green-lighted.”
    Meaning they were free to shoot without making a surrender demand.
    Dozens of troops would be inside the hotel in minutes.Would they catch him? Even if not, Parker figured, they might spook him into fleeing without harming anyone.
    But then they might catch him. Arrest him or, if he resisted, kill him. And the horror would be over; Parker could return home to his children.
    What were they doing now? he wondered.
    Was his son still troubled by the Boatman?
    Oh, Robby, how can I tell you not to worry? The Boatman’s been dead for years. But look here, now, tonight, we’ve got another Boatman, who’s even worse. That’s the thing about evil, son. It crawls out of its grave again and again and there’s no way to stop it . . .
    Silence from the radio.
    Waiting was the hardest. That’s what Parker had forgotten in his years of retirement. You never got used to waiting.
    “The first cars are just getting there,” Cage called out, listening to his cell phone.
    Parker bent over the extortion note again.
    Mayor Kennedy—
    The end is night. The Digger is loose and their is no way to stop him.
    Then he glanced at the envelope.
    He was looking at the smudges of trace evidence. Looking at the ESDA sheets again, the faint images of the indented writing: t-e-l.
    Rhyme’s words echoed.
    But the envelope tells us something else.
    There was more to him than meets the eye . . .
    And Parker heard himself earlier—telling Lukas that Quantico’s psycholinguistic profile was wrong, that the unsub was in fact brilliant.
    His head shot up. He looked at Lukas.
    “What?” she asked, alarmed at his expression.
    He said evenly, “We’re wrong. We’ve got it wrong. He’s not going to hit the Four Seasons.”
    The others in the room froze, stared at him.
    “Stop the response. The police, agents—wherever they are—stop them.”
    “What are you talking about?” Lukas asked.
    “The note—it’s lying to us.”
    Cage and Lukas looked at each other.
    “It’s leading us away from the real site.”
    “‘It’s’?” C. P. Ardell asked uncertainly. Looked at Lukas. “What does he mean?”
    Parker ignored him and cried, “Stop them!”
    Cage lifted his phone. Lukas motioned with her hand to stop.
    “Do it!” Parker shouted. “The response teams have to stay mobile. We can’t tie them up at the hotel.”
    Hardy said, “Parker, he’s there. They found the rounds. That can’t be a coincidence.”
    “Of course it’s not a coincidence. The Digger left them there. Then he went someplace else—to the real target. Someplace that’s not a hotel.” He looked at Cage. “Stop the cars!”
    “No,” Lukas said. Anger now blossomed in her thin face.
    But Parker, staring up at the note,