The Devils Teardrop

monitoring the screen on his laptop. Several sensors were trained on the downstairs apartment.
    “Cold as a fish,” Tobe reported. “Infrareds aren’t picking up anything and the only sounds I’m registering are air in the radiator and the refrigerator compressor. Ten to one it’s clean but you can screen body heat if you really want to. And some bad guys can be very, very quiet.”
    Lukas added, “Remember—the Digger packs his own silencers so he knows what he’s doing.”
    Baker nodded, then pulled on his flak jacket and helmet and called five other tactical agents over to him. “Dynamic entry. We’ll cut the lights and move in through the front door and the rear bedroom window simultaneously. You’re green-lighted to neutralize if there’s any threat risk at all. I’m primary through the door. Questions?”
    There were none. And the agents moved quickly into position. The only noise they made was the faint jingling of their equipment.
    Parker held back, watching Margaret Lukas, in profile, staring intently at the front door. She turned suddenlyand caught him watching her. Returned a cool look.
    Hell with her, Parker thought. He was angry at the dressing-down she’d given him about the gun. It’d been completely unnecessary, he thought.
    Then the lights went out in the duplex and there was a loud bang as the agents blew in the front door with 12-gauge Shok-Lok rounds. Parker watched the beams from the flashlights, hooked to the ends of their machine guns, illuminate the inside of the apartment.
    He expected to hear shouting at any minute: Freeze, get down, federal agents . . . ! But there was only silence. A few minutes later Jerry Baker walked outside, pulling his helmet off. “Clean.”
    The lights went back on.
    “We’re just checking for antipersonnel devices. Give us a few minutes.”
    Finally an agent called out the front door, “Premises secure.”
    As Parker ran forward he prayed a secular prayer: Please let us find something —some trace evidence, a fingerprint, a note describing the site of the next attack. Or at the very least something that gives us a hint where the unsub lived so we can search public records to find a devil’s teardrop above an i or a j  . . . Let us finish this hard, hard work and get back home to our families.
    Cage went in first, followed by Parker and Lukas. The two of them walked side by side. In silence.
    The apartment was cold. The lights were glaring. It was a depressing place, painted with pale green enamel. The floor was brown but much of the paint had flaked away. The four rooms were mostly empty. In the living room Parker could see a computer on a stand, a desk, amusty armchair shedding its stuffing, several tables. But to his dismay he could see no notes, scraps of paper or other documents.
    “We got clothes,” an agent called from the bedroom.
    “Check the labels,” Lukas ordered.
    A moment later: “Are none.”
    “Hell,” she spat out.
    Parker glanced at the living room window and wondered about the unsub’s dietary habits. Cooling in the half-open window were four or five large jugs of Mott’s apple juice and a battered cast-iron skillet filled with apples and oranges.
    Cage pointed to them. “Maybe the bastard was constipated. Hope it was real painful.”
    Parker laughed.
    Lukas called Tobe Geller and asked him to come check out the computer and any files and e-mail the unsub had saved on the hard drive.
    Geller arrived a few minutes later. He sat down at the desk and ran his hand through his curly hair, examining the unit carefully. Then he looked up, around the room. “Place stinks,” he said. “Why can’t we get some upscale perps for a change? . . . What is that?”
    Parker smelled it too. Something sweet and chemical. Cheap paint on hot radiators, he guessed.
    The young agent gripped the computer’s electric cord and wound it around his left hand. He explained, “It might have a format bomb inside—if you don’t log on just right it runs a program and wipes the hard drive. All you can do then is unplug and try to override it later in the lab. Okay, let’s see . . .”
    He clicked on the power switch.
    The unit buzzed softly. Geller was ready to yank thecord from the socket but then he smiled. “Past the first hurdle,” he said, dropping the cord. “But now we need the password.”
    Lukas muttered, “Won’t it take forever to figure out?”
    “No. It’ll take . . .” Geller pulled the housing off the