The Devils Teardrop

wouldn’t want him to be her therapist. He poured more coffee from his thermos. Then he announced, “I’ve got some thoughts about the unsub.”
    “Go ahead,” she told him.
    “Take ’em with a grain of salt,” the doctor cautioned. “To do this right I’d need a ton more data and two weeks to analyze it.”
    Lukas said, “That’s the way we work here. Kick around ideas. We’re not holding you to anything.”
    “I think, from what we’ve seen, the Digger’s just a machine. We’d call him ‘profile-proof.’ It’s pointless to analyze him. It’d be like doing a profile of a gun. But the perp, the man in the morgue, he was a different story. You know organized offenders?”
    “Of course,” Lukas said. Criminal psychology 101.
    “Well, he was a highly organized offender.”
    Lukas’s eyes strayed to the extortion note as Evans described the man who’d written it.
    The doctor continued. “He planned everything out perfectly. Times, locations. He knew human nature cold—he knew the mayor was going to pay, for instance, even though most authorities wouldn’t have agreed to. He had backup plans upon backup plans. The firebomb at the safe house, I’m thinking of. And he found the perfect weapon—the Digger, a functioning human being who does nothing but kill. He took on an impossible task and he probably would’ve succeeded if he hadn’t been killed in that accident.”
    “We had the bags rigged with tracers, so, no, he probably wouldn’t have gotten away,” Lukas pointed out.
    “Oh,” Evans said, “I’ll bet he had some plan to counter that.”
    Lukas realized that this was probably right.
    The doctor continued. “Now, he asked for twenty million. And he was willing to kill hundreds of people to get it. He wasn’t a progressive offender but he did raise the stakes because he knew—well, he believed— he could get away. He believed he was good—but he was good. In other words his arrogance was backed up by talent.”
    “Making the prick all the more dangerous,” C. P. grumbled.
    “Exactly. No false sense of ego to trip him up. He was brilliant—”
    “Kincaid said he was highly educated.” Lukas said, wishing again that the document examiner were here to kick these ideas around with. “He tried to disguise it in the note but Parker saw right through it.”
    Evans nodded slowly at this information. Then asked, “What was he wearing when they brought him into the morgue?”
    C. P. found the list and read it to the doctor.
    Evans summarized, “So, cheap clothes.”
    “Right.”
    “Not exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from somebody with the intelligence to set this whole thing up and who was asking for twenty million dollars.”
    “True,” Cage said.
    “Which means what?” Lukas asked.
    “I see a class issue here,” Evans explained. “I think he preferred to kill rich people, society people. He saw himself as better than them. Sort of a heroic common man.”
    Hardy pointed out, “But in the first attack he had the Digger gun down everybody, not just the wealthy.”
    Evans said, “But consider where. Dupont Circle. It’s Yuppieville there. Hardly Southeast. And the MasonTheater? Tickets for the ballet must’ve been selling for sixty bucks each. And there was the third location too,” Evans reminded. “The Four Seasons. Even though he didn’t hit it he sent us there. He was familiar with it. And it’s very upscale.”
    Lukas nodded. It seemed obvious to her now and she was upset she hadn’t realized it earlier. She thought again about Parker—how he approached puzzles. Thinking broadly. It was so hard sometimes, though.
    Focus . . .
    “I think he was angry at the rich. At society’s elite.”
    “Why?” Cage asked.
    “I don’t know yet. Not on the facts we have. But he did hate them. Oh, he was full of hate. And we should remember that when we’re trying to figure out what his next target will be.”
    Lukas pulled the morgue shot of the unsub closer, stared at him.
    What had been in his mind? What were his motives?
    Evans glanced at her and gave a short laugh.
    “What?” Lukas asked.
    He nodded at the extortion note. “I feel like it’s the note I’ve been analyzing. Like that’s the perpetrator.”
    She’d been thinking just the same.
    Exactly what Parker Kincaid had said too.
    Focus  . . .
    “Hold on, folks,” Geller said. “We’re getting something.” Everyone leaned toward the screen on which they could see the words