The Devils Teardrop

got shell casings this time but he wore—”
    “Latex gloves,” Parker said, sighing.
    “Right. When he loaded the clips. And leather when he was in the apartment. Not a bit of trace.”
    A phone rang and Lukas answered. “Hello? . . . Oh, okay.” She looked up. “It’s Susan Nance. She’s gotten more information back from Boston, White Plains and Philly about the other attacks Czisman was telling us about. I’ll put her on the speaker.”
    She hit a button.
    “Go ahead, Susan.”
    “I’ve tracked down the case detectives. They tell me that just like here there were no solid forensics. No prints, no witnesses. All of the cases’re still open. They got the pictures of the unsub we sent and nobody recognizes him. But they all said something similar. Something odd.”
    “Which was?” Parker asked. He was carefully cleaning the glass that held the burnt yellow sheets.
    “Basically that the violence was way out of proportion to the haul. Boston, the jewelry store? All he took was a single watch.”
    “Just one watch?” C. P. Ardell asked. “Was that all he had a chance to boost?”
    “No. Looks like that was all he wanted. It was a Rolex but still . . . Worth only about two thousand. In White Plains he got away with thirty thousand. Philly, the bus murder scheme? The ransom was only for a hundred thousand.”
    And he’s asking $20 million from D.C., Parker thought. The unsub was going for bigger and bigger hauls.
    Lukas was apparently thinking the same. She asked Evans, “Progressive offender?”
    Progressive offenders were serial criminals who committed successively more serious crimes.
    But Evans was shaking his head. “No. He seems to be but progressives are always lust driven. Sadosexual murderers mostly.” He rubbed the back of his bony hand against his beard. The hairs were short—as if he’d only started to grow it recently—and his skin must have itched. “They become increasingly more violent because the crime doesn’t satisfy their need. But you rarely see progressive behavior in profit crimes.”
    Parker sensed the puzzle here was much more complicated than it seemed.
    Or much simpler.
    Either way, he felt the frustration of not being able to see any possible solutions.
    The farmer has just one bullet in his gun. . . .
    Parker finished cleaning the glass and turned his attention to the evidence. He studied what was left of the two pages. He saw, to his dismay, that much of the ash had disintegrated. The fire damage was worse than he’d thought.
    Still it would be possible to read some of the unsub’s writings on the larger pieces of ash. This is done by shining infrared light on the surface of the ash. Burnt ink or pencil marks reflect a different wavelength from that of the burnt paper and you usually can make out much of the writing.
    Parker carefully set the glass panes holding the yellow sheets side by side in the infrared Foster + Freeman viewer. He crouched and picked up a cheap hand glass he found on the table (thinking angrily: The goddamnDigger just destroyed my five-hundred-dollar antique Leitz).
    Hardy glanced at the sheet of paper on the left. “Mazes. He drew mazes.”
    Parker ignored that sheet, though, and examined the one with the reference to the Mason Theater. He guessed that the unsub had also written down the last two targets—the one at 8 p.m. and the one at midnight. But these pieces were badly jumbled and flaked.
    “Well, I’ve got a few things visible,” he muttered. He squinted, trained the hand glass on another part of the sheet. “Christ,” he spat out. Shook his head.
    “What?” C. P. asked.
    “Oh, the targets the Digger’s already hit are perfectly legible. The Metro and the Mason Theater. But the next two . . . I can’t make them out. The midnight hit, the last one . . . that’s easier to read than the third. Write this down,” he said to Hardy.
    The detective grabbed a pen and pad of yellow paper. “Go ahead.”
    Parker squinted. “It looks like, ‘Place where I . . .’ Let’s see. ‘Place where I . . . took you.’ Then a dash. Then the word ‘black.’ No, ‘ the black.’ Then there’s a hole in the sheet. It’s gone completely.”
    Hardy read back, “‘Place where I took you, dash, the black . . .’”
    “That’s it.”
    Parker looked up. “Where the hell is he talking about?”
    But no one had any idea.
    Cage looked at his watch. “What about the eight o’clock hit? That’s what we oughta