The Devils Teardrop

computer, reached inside and took out a small computer chip. Suddenly the screen reported, Loading Windows 95. Geller said, “About that much time.”
    “That’s all you have to do to beat a password?”
    “Uh-huh.” Geller opened his attaché case and pulled out a dark blue Zip drive unit. He plugged this into a port on the computer and installed it. “I’m going to download his hard drive onto these.” He tossed a half-dozen Zip disks onto the desk.
    Lukas’s cell phone rang. She answered. Listened. Then she said, “Thanks.” She hung up, not pleased. “Pen registers from the phone line here. All he’s called is the connection for the on-line service. Nothing else coming in or going out.”
    Damn. The man had been smart, Parker reflected. A puzzle master in his own right.
    Three hawks have been killing a farmer’s chickens. . . .
    “Found something in the bedroom,” a voice called. An agent wearing latex gloves walked into the living room. He was holding a yellow pad with writing and markings on it. Parker’s heart sped up a few beats when he saw this.
    He opened his attaché case and pulled on his own latex gloves. He took the pad and set it on the table next to Geller, bent the desk lamp over it. With his hand glass he studied the first page and noticed immediately that it had been written by the unsub—he’d stared at the extortion note so much that he knew the handwriting as well as his own and the Whos’.
    The devil’s teardrop over a lowercase i  . . .
    Parker scanned the sheet. Much of it was doodlings. As a document examiner, Parker Kincaid believed in the psychological connection between our minds and our hands: personality revealed not by how we form letters (that graphoanalysis nonsense that Lukas seemed so fond of) but through the substance of what we write and draw when we’re not really thinking about it. How we take notes, what little pictures we make in the margins when our minds are occupied elsewhere.
    Parker had seen thousands of renderings on the documents he’d examined—knives, guns, hanged men, stabbed women, severed genitals, demons, bared teeth, stick figures, airplanes, eyes. But he’d never seen what their unsub had drawn here: mazes.
    So he was a puzzle master.
    Parker tried one or two. Most of them were very complicated. There were other notations on the page but he kept getting distracted by the mazes, his eye drawn to them. He felt the compulsion to solve them. This was Parker’s nature; he couldn’t control it.
    He sensed someone nearby. It was Margaret Lukas. She was staring at the pad.
    “They’re intricate,” she said.
    Parker looked up at her, felt her leg brush against him. The muscles in her thigh were very strong. She’d be a runner, he guessed. Pictured her on Sunday mornings in her workout spandex, sweaty and flushed, walking through the front door after her three miles . . .
    He turned back to the maze.
    “Must’ve taken him a long time to make it,” she said, nodding at the maze.
    “No,” Parker said. “Mazes are hard to solve but they’rethe easiest puzzles to make. You draw the solution path first and then once that’s finished you just keep adding layer and layer of false routes.”
    Puzzles are always easy when you know the answer.  . . .
    She glanced at him once more then walked away, helped a crime scene tech cut open the mattress, searching for more evidence.
    Just like life, right?
    Parker’s eyes returned to the yellow pad. He lifted the top sheet and on the next page he found a dense page of notes, hundreds of words in the unsub’s writing. Toward the bottom of the page he saw a column. The first two entries were:
    Dupont Circle Metro, top of the escalator, 9 A.M .
    George Mason Theater, box No. 58, 4 P.M .
    My God, he thought, this’s got the real targets on it. It’s not a decoy! He looked up and called to Cage, “Over here!”
    Just as Lukas stepped into the doorway and shouted, “I smell gas! Gasoline. Where’s it coming from?”
    Gas? Parker glanced at Tobe, who was frowning. He realized that, yes, that was the smell they’d detected earlier.
    “Oh, Jesus.” Parker looked at the bottles of apple juice.
    It was a trap—in case the agents got into the safe house.
    “Cage! Tobe! Everybody out!” Parker leapt to his feet. “The bottles!”
    But Geller glanced at them and said, “It’s okay . . . Look: there’s no detonator. You can—”
    And then the stream of bullets exploded through the