The Devils Teardrop

aide.
    Jefferies adjusted his designer glasses and looked at the note. “Shit. He’s gonna do it again?”
    “So it seems,” the woman agent said.
    Kennedy studied the agents. Cage was from Ninth Street—FBI headquarters—and Lukas was the acting special agent in charge of the Washington, D.C., field office. Her boss was out of town so she was the person running the Metro shooting case. Cage was older and seemed well connected in the Bureau; Lukas was younger and appeared more cynical and energetic. Jerry Kennedy had been mayor of the District of Columbia for three years now and he had kept the city afloat not onexperience and connections but on cynicism and energy. He was glad Lukas was the one in charge.
    “Prick can’t even spell,” Jefferies muttered, lowering his sleek face to read the note again. His eyes were terrible, a malady shared by his siblings. A good portion of the young man’s salary went to his mother and her two other sons and two daughters in Southeast D.C. A good deed that Jefferies never mentioned—he kept it as quiet as the fact that his father had been killed on East Third Street while buying heroin.
    For Kennedy, young Wendell Jefferies represented the best heart of the District of Columbia.
    “Leads?” the aide asked.
    Lukas said, “Nothing. We’ve got VICAP involved, District police, Behavioral down in Quantico, and Fairfax, Prince William and Montgomery County police. But we don’t have anything solid.”
    “Jesus,” Jefferies said, checking his watch.
    Kennedy looked at the brass clock on his desk. It was just after 10 A.M .
    “Twelve hundred hours . . . noon,” he mused, wondering why the extortionist used twenty-four-hour European, or military, time. “We have two hours.”
    Jefferies said, “You’ll have to make a statement, Jerry. Soon.”
    “I know.” Kennedy stood.
    Why did this have to happen now? Why here?
    He glanced at Jefferies—the man was young but, Kennedy knew, had a promising political career ahead of him. He was savvy and very quick; Jefferies’s handsome face twisted into a sour expression and Kennedy understood that he was thinking exactly the same thing that the mayor was: Why now?
    Kennedy glanced at a memo about the special reviewing stand at the New Year’s Eve fireworks tonight on the Mall. He and Claire, his wife, would be sitting with Representative Paul Lanier and the other key congressional zookeepers of the District.
    Or they would have been if this hadn’t happened.
    Why now?
    Why my city?
    He asked them, “What’re you doing to catch him?”
    It was Lukas who answered and she answered immediately. “We’re checking CIs—confidential informants—and Bureau handlers who’ve got any contact with domestic or foreign terrorist cells. So far, nothing. And my assessment is this isn’t a terrorist profile. It smells like a by-the-book profit crime. Then I’ve got agents comparing past extortion schemes to try to find a pattern. We’re looking at any other threats the District or District employees have received in the past two years. No parallels so far.”
    “The mayor’s gotten some threats, you know,” Jefferies said. “About the Moss situation.”
    “What’s that?” Cage asked.
    Lukas answered, “The Board of Education whistle-blower. The guy I’ve been baby-sitting.”
    “Oh, him.” Cage shrugged.
    To Jefferies, Agent Lukas said, “I know about the threats. I’ve looked into them. But I don’t think there’s a connection. They were just your routine anonymous threats from pay phones. No money was involved and there were no other demands.”
    Your routine anonymous threats, Kennedy thought cynically.
    Except that they don’t sound so routine if your wifepicks up the phone at 3:00 in the morning and hears, “Don’t push the Moss investigation. Or you’ll be as fucking dead as he’s gonna be.”
    Lukas continued. “In terms of standard investigation I’ve got agents running license plates from every car parked around City Hall this morning. We’re also running the tags from cars around Dupont Circle. We’re checking out the drop area by the Beltway and all the hotels, apartments, trailers and houses around it.”
    “You don’t sound optimistic,” Kennedy grumbled.
    “I’m not optimistic. There’re no witnesses. No reliable ones anyway. A case like this, we need witnesses.”
    Kennedy examined the note once again. It seemed odd that a madman, a killer, should have such nice handwriting. To Lukas