The Devils Teardrop

Maryland. Gave his name as Gilbert Jones.”
    “ Jones? ” C. P. asked sarcastically. “I mean, shit, that’s original.”
    Cage continued. “He paid cash. The pilot was supposed to pick up some cargo in Fairfax then there’d be another hour leg of the flight but Jones didn’t tell him where. Was supposed to call instructions in to the pilot atten-thirty this morning. But he never did. The pilot checks out okay.”
    “Did Jones give him an address or phone number?”
    Cage’s shrug said, He did but they were both fake.
    The door opened and a man in an FBI windbreaker nodded to Lukas.
    “Hi, Steve,” she said.
    “Agent Lukas. I’ve got Dr. Evans here. From George-town.”
    The psychologist.
    The man stepped inside. “Evening,” he said. “I’m John Evans.” He was shorter than his calm, deep voice suggested. His dark hair was shot with gray and he had a trim beard. Parker liked him immediately. He wore a smile as easy as his old chinos and gray cardigan sweater and he carried a heavy, battered backpack instead of a briefcase. His eyes were very quick and he examined everyone in the camper carefully before he was halfway through the door.
    “Appreciate your coming down,” Lukas said to him. “This is Agent Cage and Agent Geller. Agent Ardell’s over there. Detective Hardy. My name’s Lukas.” She glanced at Parker, who nodded his okay to mention his real name. “And this’s Parker Kincaid—he’s a document expert used to work for the Bureau.” She added, “He’s here confidentially and we’d appreciate your not mentioning his involvement.”
    “I understand,” Evans said. “I do a lot of anonymous work too. I was going to put up a Web site but I figured I’d get too many cranks.” He sat down. “I heard about the incident at the Mason Theater. What exactly’s going on?”
    Cage ran through a summary of the shootings, the death of the unsub, the extortion note and the killer.
    Evans looked at the death mask picture of the unsub. “So you’re trying to figure out where his partner’s going to hit next.”
    “Exactly,” Lukas said. “All we need is fifteen minutes and we can get a tactical team on the premises to take him out. But we need that fifteen minutes. We’ve got to get a leg up here.”
    Parker asked, “You’ve heard the name before? ‘The Digger’?”
    “I have a pretty big criminal data archive. When I heard about the case I did a search. There was a man in California in the fifties. Murdered four migrants. His nickname was the Gravedigger. He was killed in prison a few months after he went inside. Obispo Men’s Colony. Wasn’t part of a cult or anything like that. Now, some members of an acting troupe called the Diggers in San Francisco in the sixties were regularly arrested for petty larceny—basically just shoplifting. Nothing serious. Then there was a motorcycle gang in Scottsdale called the Gravediggers. They were involved in a number of felonious assaults. But they disbanded in the mid-seventies and I don’t have any record of any of the individual bikers.”
    Lukas said to Geller, “Call Scottsdale P. D. and see if there’s anything on them.”
    The agent made the call.
    Evans’s eyes carefully studied the equipment in the van, pausing on the morgue photo of the unsub. He looked up. “Now, the only reference to the Digger, singular, is a man in England in the 1930s. John Barnstall. He was a nobleman—a viscount or something like that. Lived in Devon. He claimed he had a family but he seemed to live alone. Turned out Barnstall’d killed his wife and children and two or three local farmers. He’ddug a series of tunnels under his mansion and kept the bodies down there. He embalmed them.”
    “Gross,” Hardy muttered.
    “So the press called him the Digger—because of the tunnels. A London gang in the seventies took the name from him but they were strictly small change.”
    “Any chance,” Lukas asked, “that either the unsub or the Digger himself had heard about Barnstall? Used him as a sort of role model.”
    “I can’t really tell at this point. I need more information. We’d have to identify patterns in their behavior.”
    Patterns, Parker reflected. Discovering consistent patterns in questioned documents was the only way to detect forgeries: the angle of the slant in constructing letters, penstroke starts and lifts, the shape of the descenders on lower case y, g and q, the degree of tremble. You could never judge a forgery in