The Devils Teardrop

be concentrating on. We have less than an hour.”
    Parker scanned the third line of writing, right below the Mason Theater reference. He studied it for a full minute, crouching. He dictated, “‘. . . two miles south. The R . . .’ That’s an uppercase R. But after that the ash is all jumbled. I can see a lot of marks but they’re fragmented.”
    Parker took the transcription and walked to a chalkboard mounted on the wall of the lab. He copied the words for everyone to read:
    . . . two miles south. The R . . .
    . . . place where I took you—the black . . .
    “What’s it mean?” Cage asked. “Where the hell was he talking about?”
    Parker didn’t have a clue.
    He turned away from the board and leaned over the glass sheets, as if he were staring down a bully in a schoolyard.
    But the fragment of paper won the contest easily.
    “Two miles south of what?” he muttered. “‘R.’ What’s ‘R’?”
    He sighed.
    The door to the documet lab swung open and Parker did a double take. “Tobe!”
    Tobe Geller walked unsteadily into the room. The young man had changed clothes and seemed to have showered but he smelled smoky and was coughing sporadically.
    “Hey, boy, you got no business being here,” Cage said.
    Lukas said, “Are you crazy? Go home.”
    “To my pathetic bachelor quarters? Having broken a New Year’s Eve date with undoubtedly my now-former girlfriend tonight? I don’t think so.” He started to laugh,then the sound dissolved into a cough. He controlled it and breathed deeply.
    “How you doing, buddy?” C. P. Ardell asked, hugging Geller firmly. In the huge agent’s face you could see the heartfelt, mano-a-mano concern that tactical agents have no trouble displaying.
    “They don’t even make a degree for my burns,” Geller explained. “It’s like I got New England tan. I’m fine.” He coughed again. “Well, aside from the lungs. Unlike certain presidents I did inhale. Now. Where are we?”
    “That yellow pad?” Parker said ruefully. “Hate to say it but we can’t make out very much.”
    “Ouch,” the agent said.
    “Yeah, ouch.”
    Lukas walked to the examination table. Standing next to Parker. He couldn’t smell the scented soap any longer, only acrid smoke.
    “Hm,” she said after a moment.
    “What?”
    She pointed to the fragments of jumbled ash. “Some of these little pieces might fit after the letter R, right?”
    “They might.”
    “Well, what’s that remind you of?”
    Parker looked down. “A jigsaw puzzle,” he whispered.
    “Right,” she said. “So—you’re the puzzle master. Can you put them back together?”
    Parker surveyed the hundreds of tiny fragments of ash. It could take hours, if not days; unlike a real jigsaw puzzle the edges of the pieces of ash were damaged and didn’t necessarily match the adjoining pieces.
    But Parker had a thought. “Tobe?”
    “Yo?” The young agent coughed, dusted a burnt eyebrow.
    “There’re computer programs that solve anagram puzzles, aren’t there?”
    “Anagrams, anagrams? What’re those again?”
    It was tattooed C. P. Ardell who answered—a man whose most intellectual activity you’d guess would be comparing prices of discount beer. “Assembling different words out of a set of letters. Like n-o-w, o-w-n, w-o-n.”
    Geller said, “Oh, sure there are. But then you’d never use software to help you solve a puzzle, would you, Parker?”
    “No, that’d be cheating.” He smiled to Lukas. Whose stone face offered nothing more than a momentary glance and returned to the fragments of ash.
    Parker continued, “After the sequence ‘. . . two miles. The R . . .’ See all those bits of letters on the ash? Can you put them back together?”
    Geller laughed. “It’s brilliant,” he said. “We’ll scan a handwriting sample from the note. That’ll give us standards of construction for all of his letters. Then I’ll shoot the pieces of ash on the digital camera with an infrared filter, drop out the tonal value of the burnt paper. That’ll leave us with fragments of letters. And I’ll have the computer assemble them.”
    “Will it work?” Hardy asked.
    “Oh, it’ll work,” Geller assessed with confidence. “I just don’t know how long it’ll take.”
    Geller hooked up the digital camera and took several pictures of the ash and one of the extortion note. He plugged the camera into a serial port on a computer and began to upload the images.
    His fingers flew over the keys.