The Devil's Teardrop

1

The Digger's in town.

The Digger looks like you, the Digger looks like me. He walks down the wintry streets the way anybody would, shoulders drawn together against the damp December air.

He's not tall and not short, he's not heavy and not thin. His fingers in dark gloves might be pudgy but they might not. His feet seem large but maybe that's just the size of his shoes.

If you glanced at his eyes you wouldn't notice the shape or the color but only that they don't seem quite human, and if the Digger glanced at you while you were looking at him, his eyes might be the very last thing you ever saw.

He wears a long, black coat, or a dark blue one, and not a soul on the street notices him pass by though there are many witnesses here-the streets of Washington, D.C., are crowded because it's morning rush hour.

The Digger's in town and it's New Year's Eve.

Carrying a Fresh Fields shopping bag, the Digger dodges around couples and singles and families and keeps on walking. Ahead, he sees the Metro station. He was told to be there at exactly 9 A.M. and he will be. The Digger is never late.

The bag in his maybe-pudgy hand is heavy. It weighs eleven pounds though by the time the Digger returns to his motel room it will weigh considerably less.

A man bumps into him and smiles and says, "Sorry," but the Digger doesn't glance at him. The Digger never looks at anybody and doesn't want anybody to look at him.

"Don't let anybody…" Click. "… let anybody see your face. Look away. Remember?"

I remember.

Click.

Look at the lights, he thinks, look at the… click… at the New Year's Eve decorations. Fat babies in banners, Old Man Time.

Funny decorations. Funny lights. Funny how nice they are.

This is Dupont Circle, home of money, home of art, home of the young and the chic. The Digger knows this but he knows it only because the man who tells him things told him about Dupont Circle.

He arrives at the mouth of the subway tunnel. The morning is overcast and, being winter, there is a dimness over the city.

The Digger thinks of his wife on days like this. Pamela didn't like the dark and the cold so she… click… she… What did she do? That's right. She planted red flowers and yellow flowers.

He looks at the subway and he thinks of a picture he saw once. He and Pamela were at a museum. They saw an old drawing on the wall.

And Pamela said, "Scary. Let's go."

It was a picture of the entrance to hell.

The Metro tunnel disappears sixty feet underground, passengers rising, passengers descending. It looks just like that drawing.

The entrance to hell.

Here are young women with hair cut short and briefcases. Here are young men with their sports bags and cell phones.

And here is the Digger with his shopping bag.

Maybe he's fat, maybe he's thin. Looking like you, looking like me. Nobody ever notices the Digger and that's one of the reasons he's so very good at what he does.

"You're the best," said the man who tells him things last year. You're the… click, click… the best.

At 8:59 the Digger walks to the top of the down escalator, which is filled with people disappearing into the pit.

He reaches into the bag and curls his finger around the comfy grip of the gun, which may be an Uzi or a Mac-10 or an Intertech but definitely weighs eleven pounds and is loaded with a hundred-round clip of.22 long-rifle bullets.

The Diggers hungry for soup but he ignores the sensation.

Because he's the… click… the best.

He looks toward but not at the crowd, waiting their turn to step onto the down escalator, which will take them to hell. He doesn't look at the couples or the men with telephones or women with hair from Supercuts, which is where Pamela went. He doesn't look at the families. He clutches the shopping bag to his chest, the way anybody would if it were full of holiday treats. One hand on the grip of whatever kind of gun it is, his other hand curled-outside the bag-around what somebody might think is a loaf of Fresh Fields bread that would go very nicely with soup but is in fact a heavy sound suppressor, packed with mineral cotton and rubber baffles.

His watch beeps.

Nine A.M.

He pulls the trigger.

There is a hissing sound as the stream of bullets begins working its way down the passengers on the escalator and they pitch forward under the fire. The hush hush hush of the gun is suddenly obscured by the screams.

"Oh God look out Jesus Jesus what's happening I'm hurt I'm falling." And things like that.

Hush hush hush.

And all the terrible clangs of the misses-the bullets striking the metal and the tile. That sound is very loud. The sounds of the hits are much softer.

Everyone looks around, not knowing what's going on.

The Digger looks around too. Everyone frowns. He frowns.

Nobody thinks that they are being shot. They believe that someone has fallen and started a chain reaction of people tumbling down the escalator. Clangs and snaps as phones and briefcases and sports bags fall from the hands of the victims.

The hundred rounds are gone in seconds.

No one notices the Digger as he looks around, like everyone else.

Frowning.

"Call an ambulance the police the police my God this girl needs help she needs help somebody he's dead oh Jesus my Lord her leg look at her leg my baby my baby…"

The Digger lowers the shopping bag, which has one small hole in the bottom where the bullets left. The bag holds all the hot, brass shells.

"Shut it off shut off the escalator oh Jesus look somebody stop it stop the escalator they're being crushed…"

Things like that.

The Digger looks. Because everybody's looking.

But it's hard to see into hell. Below is just a mass of bodies piling up, growing higher, writhing… Some are alive, some dead, some struggling to get out from underneath the crush that's piling up at the base of the escalator.

The Digger is easing backward into the crowd. And then he's gone.

He's very good at disappearing. "When you leave you should act like a chameleon," said the man who tells him things. "Do you know what that is?"

"A lizard."

"Right."

"That changes color. I saw it on TV."

The Digger is moving along the sidewalks, filled with people. Running this way and that way. Funny.

Funny…

Nobody notices the Digger.

Who looks like you and looks like me and looks like the woodwork. Whose face is white as a morning sky. Or dark as the entrance to hell.

As he walks-slowly, slowly-he thinks about his motel. Where he'll reload his gun and repack his silencer with bristly mineral cotton and sit in his comfy chair with a bottle of water and a bowl of soup beside him. He'll sit and relax until this afternoon and then-if the man who tells him things doesn't leave a message to tell him not to-he'll put on his long black or blue coat once more and go outside.

And do this all over again.

It's New Year's Eve. And the Digger's in town.

While ambulances were speeding to Dupont Circle and rescue workers were digging through the ghastly mine of bodies in the Metro station, Gilbert Havel walked toward City Hall, two miles away.

At the corner of Fourth and D, beside a sleeping maple tree, Havel paused and opened the envelope he carried and read the note one last time.

Mayor Kennedy -

The end is night. The Digger is loose and their is no way to stop him. He will kill again-at four, eight and Midnight if you don't pay.

I am wanting $20 million dollars in cash, which you will put into a bag and leave it two miles south of Rt 66 on the West Side of the Beltway. In the middle of the Field. Pay to me the money by 12:00 hours. Only I am knowing how to stop The Digger. If you xxxx apprehend me, he will keep killing. If you kill me, he will keep killing.

If you don't think I'm real, some of the Diggers bullets were painted black. Only I know that.

This was, Havel decided, about as perfect an idea as anybody could've come up with. Months of planning. Every possible response by the police and FBI anticipated. A chess game.

Buoyed by that thought, he replaced the note in the envelope, closed but didn't seal it and continued along the street. Havel walked in a stooped lope, eyes down, a pose meant to diminish his six-two height. It was hard for him, though; he preferred to walk tall and stare people down.

The security at City Hall, One Judiciary Square, was ridiculous. No one noticed as he walked past the entrance to the nondescript stone building and paused at a newspaper vending machine. He slipped the envelope under the stand and turned slowly, walking toward E Street.

Warm for New Year's Eve, Havel was thinking. The air smelled like fall-rotten leaves and humid wood smoke. The scent aroused a pang of undefined nostalgia for his childhood home. He stopped at a pay phone on the corner, dropped in some coins and dialed a number.

A voice answered, "City Hall. Security."

Havel held a tape recorder next to the phone and pressed PLAY. A computer-generated voice said, "Envelope in front of the building. Under the Post vending machine. Read it now. It's about the Metro killings." He hung up and crossed the street, dropping the tape recorder into a paper cup and throwing the cup into a wastebasket.

Havel stepped into a coffee shop and sat down in a window booth, where he had a good view of the vending machine and the side entrance to City Hall. He wanted to make sure the envelope was picked up-it was, before Havel even had his jacket off. He also wanted to see who'd be coming to advise the mayor. And whether reporters showed up.

The waitress stopped by his booth and he ordered coffee and, though it was still breakfast time, a steak sandwich, the most expensive thing on the menu. Why not? He was about to become a very wealthy man.

2

"Daddy, tell me about the Boatman."

Parker Kincaid paused. He set down the cast-iron skillet he was washing.

He'd learned never to be alarmed by anything the children asked-well, never to appear alarmed-and he smiled down at the boy as he dried his hands with paper towels.

"The Boatman?" he asked his nine-year-old son. "You bet. What do you want to know?"

The kitchen of Parker's house in Fairfax, Virginia, was fragrant with the smells of a holiday meal in the works. Onion, sage, rosemary. The boy looked out the window. Said nothing.

"Go ahead," Parker encouraged. "Tell me."

Robby was blond and had his mothers blue eyes. He wore a purple Izod shirt and tan pants, cinched at the waist with a Ralph Lauren belt. His floppy cowlick leaned to the starboard this morning.

"I mean," the boy began, "I know he's dead and everything…"

"That's right," Parker said. He added nothing more. ("Never tell the children more than they ask." This was one of the rules from Parker Kincaid's Handbook for the Single Parent-a guide that existed solely in his mind yet one he referred to every day.)

"It's just that outside… sometimes it looks like him. I mean, I looked outside and it's like I could see him."

"What do we do when you feel like that?"

"I get my shield and my helmet," the boy recited, "and if it's dark I put the lights on."

Parker remained standing. Usually, when he had serious conversations with his children, he subscribed to the eye-level approach. But when the subject of the Boatman arose a therapist had recommended that Parker stand-to make the boy feel safe in the presence of a strong, protective adult. And there was something about Parker Kincaid that induced a sense of security. Just forty, he was tall-a little over six feet-and was nearly in as good shape now as he'd been in college. Thanks not to aerobics or health clubs but to his two children-and their soccer scrimmages, basketball, Frisbee tourneys and the family's regular Sunday morning runs (well, Parker's run-he usually brought up the rear behind their bicycles as they looped around a local park).

"Let's take a look. Okay? Where you think you saw him."

"Okay."

"You have your helmet and your shield?"

"Right here." The boy patted his head and then held up his left arm like a knight's.

"That's a good one. I've got mine too." Parker mimicked the boy's gestures.

They walked to the back door.

"See, those bushes," Robby said.

Parker looked out over his half acre in an old development twenty miles west of Washington, D.C. His property was mostly grass and flower beds. But at the back of the land was a tangle of forsythia and kudzu and ivy he'd been meaning to cut back for a year. Sure enough, if you squinted, some of the vegetation did resemble a human form.

"That looks spooky," Parker conceded. "Sure does. But you know the Boatman was a long time ago." He wasn't going to minimize the boy's fear by pointing out that he'd been scared only by some scruffy bushes. But he wanted to give Robby a sense of distance from the incident.

"I know. But…"

"How long ago was it?"

"Four years," Robby answered.

"Isn't that a long time?"

"Pretty long, I guess."

"Show me." He stretched his arms out. "This long?"

"Maybe."

"I think it's longer." Parker stretched his arms out farther. "As long as that fish we caught at Braddock Lake?"

"That was this long," the boy said, starting to smile and holding his own arms out.

"Naw, it was this long." Parker gave an exaggerated frown.

"No, no, it was this long." The boy danced from one foot to the next, hands up high.

"It was longer!" Parker joked. "Longer."

Robby ran the length of the kitchen, lifting one arm. Then he ran back and lifted the other. "It was this long!"

"That's how long a shark is," Parker cried. "No, a whale, no, a giant squid. No, I know-a Tufted Mazurka!" A creature from If I Ran the Zoo. Robby and Stephie loved Dr. Seuss. Parker's nickname for the children was the "Whos"-after the creatures in Horton Hears a Who, which was their absolute favorite story of all time, beating even Pooh.

Parker and Robby played a game of indoor tag for a few minutes then he caught the boy in his arms for a brief tickle fest.

"Know what?" Parker asked, gasping.

"What?"

"How 'bout tomorrow we cut down all those bushes."

"Can I use the saw?" the boy asked quickly.

Oh, they're ready for any opportunity, he thought, laughing to himself. "We'll see," Parker said.

"All right!" Robby danced out of the kitchen, memories of the Boatman lost under euphoria at the promise of power tools. He ran upstairs and Parker heard some gentle bickering between brother and sister about which Nintendo game to play. Stephanie, it seemed, won and the infectious Mario Bros. theme wafted through the house.

Parker's eyes lingered on the brush in the backyard.

The Boatman… He shook his head.

The doorbell rang. He glanced into the living room but the children hadn't heard it. He walked to the door and swung it open.

The attractive woman offered a broad smile. Her earrings dangled below her sharp-edged hair, which was bleached blonder than usual by the sun (Robby's was her shade while Stephanie's was closer to Parker's brown). Her tan was scrupulous.

"Well, hello," Parker said tentatively.

He glanced past her and was relieved to see that the engine of the beige Cadillac parked in the driveway was still running. Richard was behind the wheel, reading the Wall Street Journal

"Hi, Parker. We just got in to Dulles." She hugged him.

"You were… where were you?"

" St. Croix. It was wonderful. Oh, relax. God, your body language… I just stopped by a minute."

"You look good, Joan."

"I feel good. I feel really good. I can't tell whether you look good, Parker. You look pale."

"The kids're upstairs-" He turned to call them.

"No, that's all right-" Joan started to say.

"Robby, Stephie! Your mommy's here."

Thuds on the stairs. The Whos turned the corner fast and ran up to Joan. She was smiling but Parker could see that she was miffed he'd called them.

"Mommy, you're all tan!" Stephie said, tossing her hair like a Spice Girl. Robby was a cherub; Stephanie had a long, serious face, which, Parker hoped, would start to look intimidatingly intellectual to boys by the time she turned twelve or thirteen.

"Where were you, Mommy?" Robby said, frowning.

"The Caribbean. Didn't Daddy tell you?" A glance at Parker. Yes, he'd told them. Joan didn't understand that what the children were upset about wasn't miscommunication about her travel plans but the fact she hadn't been in Virginia for Christmas.

"Did you have a nice holiday?" she asked.

"We got an air hockey and I beat Robby three games this morning."

"But I got the puck in four times in a row!" he said. "Did you bring us something?"

Joan looked in the direction of the car. "Of course I did. But, you know, I left them in the suitcase. I just stopped by for a minute now to say hi and to talk to your father. I'll bring your presents tomorrow when I come to visit."

Stephie said, "Oh, and I got a soccer ball and the new Mario Bros. and the whole set of Wallace & Gromit-"

Robby stepped on his sister's recitation. "And I got a Death Star and a Millennium Falcon. And tons of Micro Machines! And a Sammy Sosa bat. And we saw The Nutcracker."

"Did you get my package?" Joan asked.

"Uh-huh," Stephie said. "Thank you." The girl was impeccably polite but a Barbie doll in a pageant dress no longer held any interest for her. Eight-year-olds now were not the eight-year-olds of Joan's childhood.

"Daddy took back my shirt," Robby said, "and got one the right size."

"I told him to do that if it didn't fit," Joan said quickly. "I just wanted you to have something. "

"We didn't get to talk to you on Christmas," Stephie said.

"Oh," Joan replied to her daughter, "it was so hard to call from where we were staying. It was like Gilligan's Island. The phones were never working." She tousled Robby's hair. "And after all you weren't home."

She was blaming them. Joan had never learned that nothing was ever the children's fault, not at this age. If you did something wrong it was your fault; if they did something wrong it was still your fault.

Oh, Joan… It was subtle lapses like this-the slight shifting of blame-that were as bad as slaps in the face. Still, he said nothing. ("Never let the children see their parents argue.")

Joan stood. "Richard and I have to go now. We have to pick up Elmo and Saint at the kennel. The poor puppies have been in cages all week."

Robby was animated once more. "We're having a party tonight and we're going to watch the fireworks on TV and play Star Wars Monopoly."

"Oh, that'll be fun," Joan said. "Richard and I are going to Kennedy Center. For an opera. You like the opera, don't you?"

Stephie gave one of the broad, cryptic shrugs she'd been using a lot lately in response to adults' questions.

"That's a play where people sing the story," Parker said to the children.

"Maybe Richard and I'll take you to the opera sometime. Would you like that?"

"I guess," Robby said. Which was as good a commitment as a nine-year-old would ever make to high culture.

"Wait," Stephie blurted. She turned and pounded up the stairs.

"Honey, I don't have much time. We-"

The girl returned a moment later with her new soccer outfit, handed it to her mother.

"My," said Joan, "that's pretty." Holding the clothes awkwardly, like a child who's caught a fish and isn't sure she wants it.

Parker Kincaid, thinking: First, the Boatman, now Joan… How the past was intruding today. Well, why not? After all, it was New Year's Eve.

A time to look back…

Joan was obviously relieved when the children ran back to Stephie's bedroom, buoyed by the promise of more presents. Then suddenly her smile was gone. Ironically, at this age-she was thirty-nine-she looked her best with a sullen expression on her face. She touched her front teeth with the tip of her finger to see if they were dotted with lipstick. A habit of hers he remembered from when they were married. "Parker, I didn't have to do this…" She was reaching into her Coach purse.

Hell, she got me a Christmas present. And I didn't get her one. He thought quickly: Did he have any extra gifts he'd bought but hadn't yet given away? Something he could-

But then he saw her hand emerge from the purse with a wad of papers.

"I could've just let the process server take care of it on Monday." Process server?

"But I wanted to talk to you before you went off half-cocked."

The top of the document read: "Motion to Modify Child Custody Order."

He felt the blow deep in his stomach.

Apparently, Joan and Richard hadn't come directly from the airport but had stopped at her lawyer's first.

"Joan," he said, despairing, "you're not…"

"I want them, Parker, and I'm going to get them. Let's not fight about it. We can work something out."

"No," he whispered. "No." He felt the strength leach from his body as the panic swept through him.

"Four days with you, Fridays and weekends with me. Depending on what Richard and I have planned-we've been doing a lot of traveling lately. Look, it'll give you more time to yourself. I'd think you'd look forward to-"

"Absolutely not."

"They're my children…" she began.

"Technically." Parker had had sole custody for four years.

"Parker," she said reasonably, "my life is stable. I'm doing fine. I'm working out again. I'm married."

To a civil servant in county government, who, according to the Washington Post, just missed getting indicted for accepting bribes last year. Richard was just a bug-picking bird on the rump of Inside-the-Beltway politics. He was also the man Joan'd been sleeping with for the last year of her marriage to Parker.

Concerned the children would hear, he whispered, "You've been a stranger to Robby and Stephie practically from the day they were born." He slapped the papers and rage took him completely. "Are you thinking about them at all? About what this'll do to them?"

"They need a mother."

No, Parker thought, Joan needs another collectible. Several years ago it had been horses. Then championship weimaraners. Then antiques. Houses in fancy neighborhoods too: She and Richard moved from Oakton to Clifton to McLean to Alexandria. "Moving up in the world," she'd said, though Parker knew she'd simply grown tired of each previous house and neighborhood when she failed to make friends in the new locale. He thought of what uprooting the children that frequently would do to them.

"Why?" he asked.

"I want a family."

"Have children with Richard. You're young."

But she wouldn't want that, Parker knew. As much as she'd loved being pregnant-she was never more beautiful-she had fallen apart at the work involved with infants. You can hardly have children when, emotionally, you're one yourself.

"You're completely unfit," Parker said.

"My, you have learned how to take the gloves off, haven't you? Well, maybe I was unfit. But that's in the past."

No, that's in your nature.

"I'll fight it, Joan," he said matter-of-factly. "You know that."

She snapped, "I'll be by tomorrow at ten. And I'm bringing a social worker."

"What?" He was dumbfounded.

"Just to talk to the kids."

"Joan… On a holiday?" Parker couldn't imagine that a social worker would agree to this but then he realized that Richard must have pulled some strings.

"If you're as good a father as you think you are you won't have any trouble with them talking to her."

"I don't have any trouble. I'm thinking of them. Just wait until next week. How do you think they'll feel having some stranger cross-examining them on the holiday? It's ridiculous. They want to see you"

"Parker," she said, exasperated, "she's a professional. She's not going to cross-examine them. Look, I have to run. The kennel's closing soon because of the holiday. Those poor puppies… Oh, come on, Parker. It's not the end of the world."

But, yes, he thought, that's exactly what it is.

He began to slam the door but halfway through the gesture he stopped, knowing that the sound would upset the Whos.

He closed the door with a firm click. Turned the dead bolt, put the chain on, as if trying to lock this cyclone of bad news out. Folding the papers without looking at them, he walked into the den and stuffed them into the desk, left a message for his lawyer. He paced for a few minutes then climbed the stairs and stuck his head in Robby's room. The children were giggling and tossing Micro Machines at each other.

"No bombardiering on New Year's Eve," Parker said.

"So it's okay to bombardier tomorrow?" Robby asked.

"Very funny, young man."

"He started it!" Stephie sniped, then returned to her book. Little House on the Prairie.

"Who wants to help me in the study?" he called.

"I do," Robby cried.

Together, father and son disappeared down the stairs into his basement office. A few minutes later Parker heard the electronic music again as Stephie exchanged literature for computer science and sent intrepid Mario on his quest once more.

Mayor Gerald Kennedy-a Democrat, yes, but not that strain of Kennedys-looked at the piece of white paper on his desk.

Mayor Kennedy -

The end is night. The Digger is loose and their is no way to stop him.

Attached to the sheet was an FBI memo, which was headed, "Annexed document is a copy. METSHOOT case, 12/31."

METSHOOT, Kennedy thought. Metro shooting. The Bureau loved their labels, he recalled. Sitting hunched like a bear over the ornate desk in his Georgian office in the very un-Georgian Washington, D.C., City Hall, Kennedy read the note once more. Looked up at the two people seated across from him. A trim, attractive blond woman and a tall, lean gray-haired man. Balding Kennedy often thought of people in terms of their hair.

"You're sure he's the one behind the shooting?"

"What he said about the bullets," the woman said, "them being painted? That checked out. We're sure the note's from the perp."

Kennedy, a bulky man comfortable with his bulk, pushed the note around on his desk with his huge hands.

The door opened and a young black man in a double-breasted Italian suit and oval glasses walked inside. Kennedy gestured him to the desk.

"This is Wendell Jefferies," the mayor said. "My chief aide-de-camp,"

The woman agent nodded. "Margaret Lukas."

The other agent gave what seemed to Kennedy to be a shrug. "Cage." They all shook hands.

"They're FBI," Kennedy added.

Jefferies's nod said, Obviously.

Kennedy pushed the copy of the note toward the aide.

Jefferies adjusted his designer glasses and looked at the note. "Shit. He's gonna do it again?"

"So it seems," the woman agent said.

Kennedy studied the agents. Cage was from Ninth Street -FBI headquarters-and Lukas was the acting special agent in charge of the Washington, D.C., field office. Her boss was out of town so she was the person running the Metro shooting case. Cage was older and seemed well connected in the Bureau; Lukas was younger and appeared more cynical and energetic. Jerry Kennedy had been mayor of the District of Columbia for three years now and he had kept the city afloat not on experience and connections but on cynicism and energy. He was glad Lukas was the one in charge.

"Prick can't even spell," Jefferies muttered, lowering his sleek face to read the note again. His eyes were terrible, a malady shared by his siblings. A good portion of the young mans salary went to his mother and her two other sons and two daughters in Southeast D.C. A good deed that Jefferies never mentioned-he kept it as quiet as the fact that his father had been killed on East Third Street while buying heroin.

For Kennedy, young Wendell Jefferies represented the best heart of the District of Columbia.

"Leads?" the aide asked.

Lukas said, "Nothing. We've got VICAP involved, District police, Behavioral down in Quantico, and Fairfax, Prince William and Montgomery County police. But we don't have anything solid."

"Jesus," Jefferies said, checking his watch.

Kennedy looked at the brass clock on his desk. It was just after 10 A.M.

"Twelve hundred hours… noon," he mused, wondering why the extortionist used twenty-four-hour European, or military, time. "We have two hours."

Jefferies said, "You'll have to make a statement, Jerry. Soon."

"I know." Kennedy stood.

Why did this have to happen now? Why here?

He glanced at Jefferies-the man was young but, Kennedy knew, had a promising political career ahead of him. He was savvy and very quick; Jefferies's handsome face twisted into a sour expression and Kennedy understood that he was thinking exactly the same thing that the mayor was: Why now?

Kennedy glanced at a memo about the special reviewing stand at the New Year's Eve fireworks tonight on the Mall. He and Claire, his wife, would be sitting with Representative Paul Lanier and the other key congressional zookeepers of the District.

Or they would have been if this hadn't happened.

Why now?

Why my city?

He asked them, "What're you doing to catch him?"

It was Lukas who answered and she answered immediately. "We're checking CIs-confidential informants-and Bureau handlers who've got any contact with domestic or foreign terrorist cells. So far, nothing. And my assessment is this isn't a terrorist profile. It smells like a by-the-book profit crime. Then I've got agents comparing past extortion schemes to try to find a pattern. We're looking at any other threats the District or District employees have received in the past two years. No parallels so far."

"The mayor's gotten some threats, you know," Jefferies said. "About the Moss situation."

"What's that?" Cage asked.

Lukas answered, "The Board of Education whistle-blower. The guy I've been baby-sitting."

"Oh, him." Cage shrugged.

To Jefferies, Agent Lukas said, "I know about the threats. I've looked into them. But I don't think there's a connection. They were just your routine anonymous threats from pay phones. No money was involved and there were no other demands."

Your routine anonymous threats, Kennedy thought cynically.

Except that they don't sound so routine if your wife picks up the phone at 3:00 in the morning and hears, "Don't push the Moss investigation. Or you'll be as fucking dead as he's gonna be."

Lukas continued. "In terms of standard investigation I've got agents running license plates from every car parked around City Hall this morning. We're also running the tags from cars around Dupont Circle. We're checking out the drop area by the Beltway and all the hotels, apartments, trailers and houses around it."

"You don't sound optimistic," Kennedy grumbled.

"I'm not optimistic. There're no witnesses. No reliable ones anyway. A case like this, we need witnesses."

Kennedy examined the note once again. It seemed odd that a madman, a killer, should have such nice handwriting. To Lukas he said, "So. I guess the question is-should I pay?"

Now Lukas looked at Cage. He answered, "We feel that unless you pay the ransom or an informer comes forward with solid information about the Digger's whereabouts we won't be able to stop him by four P.M. We just don't have enough leads." She added, "I'm not recommending you pay. This's just our assessment of what'll happen if you don't."

"Twenty million," he mused.

Without a knock the office door opened and a tall man of about sixty, wearing a gray suit, stepped inside.

Oh, great, Kennedy thought. More cooks in the kitchen.

U.S. Representative Paul Lanier shook the mayor's hand and then introduced himself to the FBI agents. He ignored Wendell Jefferies.

"Paul," Kennedy told Lukas, "is head of the District Governance Committee."

Though the District of Columbia had some autonomy Congress had recently taken over the power of the purse and doled out money to the city like a parent giving a reckless child an allowance. Especially since the recent Board of Education scandal Lanier had been to Kennedy what an auditor is to a set of accounting books.

Lanier missed the disparaging tone in Kennedy's voice-though Lukas seemed not to-and the congressman asked, "Can you give me a heads-up on the situation?"

Lukas ran through her assessment once more. Lanier remained standing, all three buttons of his Brooks Brothers suit snugly secured.

"Why here?" Lanier asked. "Why Washington?"

Kennedy laughed to himself. The prick's even stolen my rhetorical questions.

Lukas answered, "We don't know."

Kennedy continued, "You really think he'd do it again?"

"Yes."

The congressman asked, "Jerry, you're not seriously thinking of paying."

"I'm considering all options."

Lanier was looking dubious. "Well, aren't you concerned with what it'll look like?"

"No, I don't care how it looks," Kennedy snapped.

But the congressman continued in his politician's perfect baritone. "It's going to send the wrong message. Kowtowing to terrorists."

Kennedy glanced at Lukas, who said, "It is something to think about. The floodgates theory. You give in to one extortionist there'll be others."

"But nobody knows about this, do they?" Kennedy nodded to the note.

"Sure, they do," Cage said. "And more'll know pretty soon. You can't keep something like this under wraps for long. Notes like this have wings. You bet they do."

"Wings," Kennedy repeated, disliking the expression intensely and all the happier that Lukas was running the show. He asked her, "What can you do to find him if we do pay?"

Lukas again responded. "Our tech people'll rig the drop bag-with a transmitter. Twenty million will weigh a couple hundred pounds," she explained. "It's not something you can just hide under the seat of a car. We'll try to track the perp to his hideout. If we're lucky, get both him and the shooter-this Digger."

"'Lucky,'" Kennedy said skeptically. She was a pretty woman, he thought, though the mayor-who'd been married to his wife for thirty-seven years and had never once considered cheating on her-knew that beauty is mostly expression of eye and mouth and posture, not God-given structure. And Margaret Lukas's face hadn't once softened since she'd walked into his office. No smile, no sympathy. Her voice was flinty now as she said, "We can't give you percentages."

"No. Of course you can't."

"Twenty million," mused Lanier, the controller of the purse strings.

Kennedy rose, pushed his chair back and stepped to a window. Looked out on the brown lawn and trees speckled with dead leaves. The winter in Northern Virginia had been eerily warm for the past several weeks. Tonight, the forecasters were predicting, would be the first big snow of the year but at the moment the air was warm and humid and the scent of decomposing vegetation wafted into the room. It was unsettling. Across the street was a park, in the middle of which was a big, dark, modern statue; it reminded Kennedy of a liver.

He glanced at Wendell Jefferies, who took the cue and joined him. The aide wore aftershave; he must have had twenty different scents. The mayor whispered, "So, Wendy, the pressure's on, huh?"

The aide, never known for his restraint, responded, "You got the ball, boss. Drop it and you and me both, we're gone. And more than that too."

And more than that too…

And Kennedy had thought things couldn't get any worse after the Board of Education scandal.

"And so far," Kennedy said, "no leads. Nothing."

So far twenty-three people dead.

So far all they knew was that this psychopath was going to try to kill more people at 4 o'clock and more after that and more after that.

Outside the window the eerily warm air stirred. Five lacy brown leaves twisted to the ground.

He turned back to his desk. Looked at the brass clock. The time was 10:25.

Lanier said, "I say we don't pay. I mean, it seems to me that when he finds out the FBI's involved he might just balk and head for the hills."

Agent Lukas offered, "Bet he had an idea the Bureau'd be involved before he started this."

Kennedy picked up on her sarcasm. Lanier, again, remained oblivious.

The congressman continued, speaking to her, "I didn't think you were in favor of paying."

"I'm not."

"But you also think he'll keep shooting if we don't pay."

"Yes," she answered.

"Well…" Lanier lifted his hands. "Isn't that inconsistent? You don't think we should pay… but he's going to keep killing."

"That's right."

"That doesn't give us much guidance."

Lukas said, "He's a man who's prepared to kill as many people as he needs to, just to make money. You can't negotiate with somebody like that."

"Will paying make your job harder?" Kennedy asked. "Harder to catch him?"

"No," she said. A moment later: "So," she asked, "are you going to pay or not?"

The desk lamp shone on the note. To Kennedy it seemed that the piece of paper glowed like white fire.

"No, we're not paying," Lanier said. "We're taking a hard line. We're standing tough on terrorism. We're-"

"I'm paying," said Kennedy.

"You sure?" Lukas asked him, not seeming to care one way or the other.

"I'm sure. Do your best to catch them. But the city's going to pay."

"Hold on," the congressman said, "not so fast."

"It's not fast at all," Kennedy snapped. "I've been considering it since I got this goddamn thing." He gestured at the fiery note.

"Jerry," Lanier began, laughing sourly, "you don't have the right to make that decision."

"Actually he does," said Wendell Jefferies, who could append the letters J.D. and LL.M. after his name.

"Congress has jurisdiction," Lanier said petulantly.

Cage said to Lanier, "No, it doesn't. It's exclusively the District's call. I asked the attorney general on my way over here."

"But we've got control of the money," Lanier snapped. "And I'm not going to authorize it."

Kennedy glanced at Wendy Jefferies, who thought for a moment. "Twenty million? We can draw on our line of credit for discretionary spending." He laughed. "But it'll have to come out of the Board of Education reserve. They're the only account that's majorly liquid."

"That's the only place?"

"That's it. It's debt or nickels and dimes everywhere else."

Kennedy shook his head. How goddamn ironic-the money to save the city was available only because someone had cut corners and landed the administration in the middle of a huge scandal.

"Jerry, this is ridiculous," Lanier said. "Even if they get these men somebody else could try the same thing next month. Never deal with terrorists. That's the rule in Washington. Don't you read Department of State advisories?"

"No, I don't," Kennedy said. "Nobody sends 'em to me. Wendy, get started on that money. And Agent Lukas… go catch this son of a bitch."

The sandwich was okay.

Not great.

Gilbert Havel decided that after he got the money he was going to the Jockey Club and having a real steak. A filet mignon. And a bottle of champagne.

He finished his coffee and kept his eye on the entrance to City Hall.

The chief of police of the District had come and gone quickly. A dozen reporters and camera crews had been turned away from the front door, directed toward an entrance on the side of the building. They hadn't looked happy Then a couple of what were clearly FBI agents had disappeared into City Hall some time ago, a man and a woman, and hadn't emerged. It was definitely a Bureau operation. Well, he'd known it would be.

So far no surprises.

Havel looked at his watch. Time to go to the safe house, call the helicopter charterer. There was a lot to get ready for. The plans for picking up the $20 million were elaborate-and the plans for getting away afterward were even more so.

Havel paid his check-with old, crumpled singles-and pulled his coat and cap on again. He left the coffee shop, turned off the sidewalk and walked quickly through an alley, eyes down. The Judiciary Square Metro stop was right beneath City Hall but he knew it would be watched by police or agents so he headed for Pennsylvania Avenue, where he'd get a bus down to Southeast D.C.

White man in a black man's 'hood.

Life sure is funny sometimes.

Gilbert Havel emerged from the alley and turned onto a side street that would take him to Pennsylvania. The light changed to green. Havel stepped into the intersection. Suddenly, a flash of dark motion from his left. He turned his head. Thinking: Shit, he doesn't see me! He doesn't see me he doesn't-

"Hey!" Havel cried.

The driver of the large delivery truck had been looking at an invoice and had sped through the red light. He glanced up, horrified. With a huge squeal of brakes the truck slammed directly into Havel. The driver screaming, "Christ, no! Christ…"

The truck caught Havel between its front fender and a parked car, crushing him. The driver leapt out and stared in shock. "You weren't looking! It wasn't my fault!" Then he looked around and saw that the light had been against him. "Oh, Jesus." He saw two people running toward him from the corner. He debated for a moment. But panic took over and he leapt into his truck. He gunned the engine and backed away then sped down the street, skidding around the corner.

The passersby, two men in their thirties, ran up to Havel. One bent down to check for a pulse. The other just stood over him, staring at the huge pool of blood.

"That truck," the standing one whispered, "he just took off! He just left!" Then he asked his friend, "Is he dead?"

"Oh, yeah," the other man said. "Oh, yeah, he's dead."

3

Where?

Margaret Lukas lay on her lean belly on a rise overlooking the Beltway.

Traffic sped past, an endless stream.

She looked at her watch again. And thought: Where are you?

Her belly hurt, her back hurt, her elbows hurt.

There'd been no way to get a mobile command post near the ransom drop zone-even a disguised MCP-and not be seen by the extortionist if he was anywhere near. So here she was, in jeans, jacket and cap turned backward, like a sniper or gangsta, lying on the rock-hard ground. Where they'd been for an hour.

"Sounds like water," Cage said.

"What?"

"The traffic."

He lay on his belly too, next to her, their thighs nearly touching-the way lovers might lie on a beach watching the sunset. They studied the field a hundred yards away. They were overlooking the money drop near Gallows Road -yes, "Gallows," an irony so rich that not one of the agents had bothered to comment on it.

"You know how that happens?" Cage continued. "Something gets under your skin and you try not to think about it. But you can't help it. I mean, it sounds like water."

It didn't sound like water to Lukas. It sounded like cars and trucks.

Where was the unsub? There's 20 million bucks there for the taking and he's not taking it.

"Where the hell is he?" muttered another voice. It belonged to a somber man of about thirty, with a military hairstyle and bearing. Leonard Hardy was with the District of Columbia police and was part of the team because, even though the Bureau was handling the operation, it would look bad not to have a District cop on board. Lukas would normally have protested having non-Bureau personnel on her team but she knew Hardy casually from his assignments at the Bureau's field office near City Hall and didn't mind his presence-as long as he kept doing what he'd done so far: sitting quietly by himself and not bothering the grown-ups.

"Why's he late?" Hardy mused again, apparently not expecting an answer. His immaculate hands, with perfectly trimmed nails, continued to jot notes for his report to the District chief of police and the mayor.

"Anything?" She turned her head, calling in a whisper to Tobe Geller, a curly-haired young agent also decked out in jeans and one of the same navy-blue, reversible windbreakers that Lukas wore.

Geller, in his thirties too, had the intensely cheerful face of a boy who finds complete contentment in any product filled with microchips. He scanned one of three portable video monitors in front of him. Then he typed on a laptop computer and read the screen. "Zip," he responded. If there was any living thing larger than a raccoon for a hundred yards around the ransom bags Geller's surveillance equipment would detect it.

When the mayor had given the go-ahead to pay the extortion money, the cash had made a detour en route to the drop. Lukas and Geller had had Kennedy's aide shepherd the money to an address on Ninth Street in the District-a small, unmarked garage that was up the street from FBI headquarters.

There, Geller had repacked the ransom into two huge Burgess Security Systems KL-19 knapsacks, the canvas of which looked like regular cloth but was in fact impregnated with strands of oxidized copper-a high-efficiency antenna. The transmitter circuitry was in the nylon handles, and batteries were mounted in the plastic buttons on the bottom. The bag transmitted a Global Positioning System beacon cleaner than CBS's main broadcast signal and couldn't be shielded except by several inches of metal.

Geller had also rewrapped forty bundles of hundred-dollar bills with wrappers of his own design-there were ultrathin transmitting wafers laminated inside them. Even if the perp transferred the cash from the canvas bag or it was split among accomplices Geller could still track down the money-up to a range of sixty miles.

The bag had been placed in the field just where the note had instructed. All the agents had backed off. And the waiting began.

Lukas knew her basic criminal behavior. Extortionists and kidnappers often get cold feet just before a ransom pickup. But anyone willing to murder twenty-three people wasn't going to balk now. She couldn't understand why the perp hadn't even approached the drop.

She was sweating; the weather was oddly warm for the last day of the year and the air was sickly sweet. Like fall. Margaret Lukas hated autumn. She'd rather have been lying in the snow than waiting in this purgatory of a season.

"Where are you?" she muttered. "Where?" She rocked slightly, feeling the pain of pressure on her hipbones. She was muscular but thin, with very little padding to protect her from the ground. She compulsively scanned the field once more though Geller's complex sensors would have picked up the unsub long before her blue-gray eyes could spot him.

"Hmm." C. P. Ardell, a heavy-set agent Lukas worked with sometimes, squeezed his earphone and listened. Nodded his bald, pale head. He glanced at Lukas. "That was Charlie position. Nobody's gone off the road in the woods."

Lukas grunted. So maybe she was wrong. She'd thought the unsub would come at the money from the west-through a row of trees a half mile away from the expressway. She believed that he'd be driving a Hummer or a Range Rover. Would snag one of the bags-sacrificing the other for the sake of expediency-and disappear back into the woods.

"Bravo position?" she asked.

"I'll check," said C. P., who worked undercover often because of his unfortunate resemblance to a Manassas drug cooker or a Hell's Angel charter member. He seemed to be the most patient of all the agents on the stakeout; he hadn't moved his 250-pound frame an inch since they'd been here. He made the call to the southernmost surveillance post.

"Nothing. Kids on a four-wheeler is all. Nobody older than twelve."

"Our people didn't chase 'em away, did they?" Lukas asked. "The kids?"

"Nup."

"Good. Make sure they don't."

More time passed. Hardy jotted notes. Geller typed on his keyboard. Cage fidgeted and C. P. did not.

"Your wife mad?" Lukas asked Cage. "You working the holiday?"

Cage shrugged. It was his favorite gesture. He had a whole vocabulary of shrugs. Cage was a senior agent at FBI headquarters and though his assignments took him all over the country he was usually primary on cases involving the District; he and Lukas worked together often. Along with Lukas's boss too, the special agent in charge of the Washington, D.C., field office. This week, though, SAC Ron Cohen happened to be in a Brazilian rainforest on his first vacation in six years and Lukas had stepped up to the case. Largely because of Cage's recommendation.

She felt bad for Cage and Geller and C. P., working a holiday. They had dates for tonight or wives. As for Len Hardy she was happy he was here; he had some pretty good reasons to keep himself busy on holidays and this was one of the reasons that she had welcomed him to the METSHOOT team.

Lukas herself had a comfortable home in Georgetown, a place filled with antique furniture, needlepoints and embroideries and quilts of her own design, an erratic wine collection, nearly five hundred books, more than a thousand CDs and her mixed-breed Labrador, Jean Luc. It was a very nice place to spend a holiday evening though in the three years she'd lived there Lukas had never once done so. Until her pager had signaled her ascension to the METSHOOT command she had planned to spend the night baby-sitting that Board of Education whistle-blower, Gary Moss, the one who'd broken the school construction kickback scandal. Moss had worn a wire and had picked up all sorts of good incriminating conversations. But his cover had been blown and the other day his house had been firebombed, his daughters nearly killed. Moss had sent his family to stay with relatives in North Carolina and he was spending the weekend in federal protection. Lukas had been in charge of his protection as well as handling the investigation into the firebombing. But then the Digger arrived and Moss was, at the moment, nothing more than a bored tenant in the very expensive apartment complex referred to among law enforcers as " Ninth Street "-FBI headquarters.

She now scanned the field again. No sign of the extortionist.

"He might be staking us out," a tactical agent crouched behind a tree said. "You want a perimeter sweep?"

"No."

"It's standard procedure," he persisted. "We could use five, six handoff cars. He'd never spot us."

"Too risky," she said.

"Uhm, you sure?"

"I'm sure."

Abrupt responses like this had earned Lukas a reputation in the Bureau for being arrogant. But she believed that arrogance is not necessarily a bad thing. It instills confidence in those who work for you. It also gets you noticed by your bosses.

Her eyes flickered as a voice crackled in her earphone, speaking her name.

"Go ahead," she said into the stalk mike, recognizing the voice of the deputy director of the Bureau.

"We've got a problem," he said.

She hated dramatics. "What?" she asked, not caring a bit about the abrasion in her voice.

The dep director said, "There was a hit-and-run near City Hall a little while ago. White male. He was killed. No ID on him. Nothing at all, just an apartment key-no address-and some money. The cop who responded'd heard about the extortion thing and, since it was near City Hall, thought there might be a connection."

She understood immediately. "They compared prints?" she asked. "His and the ones on the extortion note?"

"That's right. The dead guys the one who wrote the note, the shooter's partner."

Lukas remembered part of the note. It went something like:

If you kill me, he will keep killing.

Nothing can stop the Digger…

"You've got to find the shooter, Margaret," the deputy director said. There was a pause as, apparently, he looked at his watch. "You've got to find him in three hours."

Is it real? Parker Kincaid wondered.

Bending over the rectangle of paper, peering through his heavy, ten-power hand glass. Joan had been gone for several hours but the effect of her visit-the dismay-still lingered, trying though he was to lose himself in his work.

The letter he examined-on yellowing paper-was encased in a thin, strong poly sleeve but when he eased it closer to him he did so very carefully. The way you'd touch a baby's red, fat face. He adjusted the light and swooped in on the loop of the lowercase letter y.

Is it real?

It appeared to be real. But in his profession Parker Kincaid never put great stock in appearances.

He wanted badly to touch the document, to feel the rag paper, made with so little acid that it could last as long as steel. He wanted to feel the faint ridge of the iron-gallide ink, which, to his sensitive fingers, would seem as raised as braille. But he didn't dare take the paper from the sleeve; even the slightest oil from his hands would start to erode the thin letter. Which would be a disaster since it was worth perhaps $50,000.

If it was real.

Upstairs, Stephie was navigating Mario through his surreal universe. Robby was at Parker's feet, accompanied by Han Solo and Chewbacca. The basement study was a cozy place, paneled in teak, carpeted in forest-green pile. On the walls were framed documents-the less valuable items in Parker's collection. Letters from Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Bobby Kennedy, the Old West artist Charles Russell. Many others. On one wall was a rogues' gallery-forgeries Parker had come across in his work.

Parker's favorite wall, though, was the one opposite the stool he sat on. This wall contained his children's drawings and poems, going back over the past eight years. From scrawls and illegible block letters to samples of their cursive writing. He often paused in his work and looked at them. Doing so had given him the idea about writing a book on how handwriting mirrors children's development.

He now sat on the comfortable stool at an immaculate white examination table. The room was silent. Normally he'd have the radio on, listening to jazz or classical music. But there'd been a terrible shooting in the District and all the stations were having special reports on the slaughter. Parker didn't want Robby to hear the stories, especially after the boy's flashback to the Boatman.

He hunched over the letter, eagerly, the way a jeweler appraises a beautiful yellow stone, ready to declare it false if that's how he saw it but secretly hoping that it will turn out to be rare topaz.

"What's that?" Robby asked, standing and looking at the letter.

"It's what came in the truck yesterday," Parker said, squinting as he checked out an uppercase K, which can be written a number of different ways and therefore is very useful in handwriting analysis.

"Oh, the armored car. That was neat."

It was neat. But it didn't answer the boy's question. Parker continued. "You know Thomas Jefferson?"

"Third president. Oh, and he lived in Virginia. Like us."

"Good. This's a letter that somebody thinks he wrote. They want me to check it and make sure."

One of the more difficult conversations he'd had with Robby and Stephie was explaining what he did for a living. Not the technical part of being a questioned document examiner. But that people would forge letters and documents and try to claim they were real.

"What's it say?" the boy asked.

Parker didn't answer right away. Oh, answers were important to him. He was, after all, a puzzle master-his lifelong hobby was riddles and word games and brain-teasers. He believed in answers and he tried never to defer responding to his children's questions. When a mother or father said, "Later," it was usually for their convenience, hoping the child would forget the question. But the content of this letter made him hedge. After a moment he said, "It's a letter Jefferson wrote to his oldest daughter." This much was true. But Parker didn't go on and tell the boy that the subject of the letter was Mary-his second daughter-who had died of complications from childbirth, as had Jefferson 's wife some years before. He read:

Back here in Washington I live under a sorrowful pall, haunted as I am by visions of Polly on horseback and running along the porch in good-natured defiance of my prescriptions to her to exercise more caution…

Parker, certified document examiner, struggled to ignore the sadness he felt reading those words. Concentrate, he told himself, though the terrible image of a father being deprived of one of his children kept intruding.

A sorrowful pall…

Concentrate.

He observed that the girls nickname in the letter was what Jefferson would have used-born "Mary," the girl was called "Polly" by her family-and that the punctuation-sparse style was typically Jeffersonian. These attested to authenticity. So did some of the events that the letter referred to; they had in fact occurred in Jefferson 's life and had done so around the time the letter had purportedly been written.

Yes, textually at least, the letter seemed real.

But that was only half the game. Document examiners are not only linguists and historians, they are scientists too. Parker still had to perform the physical examination of the letter.

As he was about to slip it under one of his Bausch & Lomb compound microscopes the doorbell rang again.

Oh, no… Parker closed his eyes. It was Joan. He knew it. She'd picked up her dogs and returned to complicate his life further. Maybe she had the social worker with her now. A surprise commando raid…

"I'll get it," Robby said.

"No," Parker said quickly. Too quickly. The boy was unnerved by his abrupt reaction.

Father smiled at son. "I'll go." And slid off the stool, climbed the stairs.

He was mad now. He was determined that the Whos would have a fun New Year's Eve, despite their mother. He flung the door open.

Well…

"Hello, Parker."

It took him a second to remember the name of the tall, gray-haired man. He hadn't seen the agent for years. Then he recalled. "Cage."

He didn't recognize the woman standing beside him.

4

"How you doin', Parker? Never expected to see me in a month of blue Mondays, did you? Wait, I'm mixing up my expressions. But you get the picture."

The agent had changed very little. A bit grayer. A little more gaunt. He seemed taller. Parker remembered that Cage was exactly fifteen years older than he. They shared June as a birth month. Gemini. Yin-yang.

From the corner of his eye Parker saw Robby appear in the hallway with his coconspirator, Stephie. Word of visitors spreads fast in a household of children. They edged closer to the door, gazing out at Cage and the woman.

Parker turned and bent down. "Don't you two have something to do up in your rooms? Something very important?"

"No," Stephie said.

"Uh-uh," Robby confirmed.

"Well, I think you do."

"What?"

"How many Legos are on the floor? How many Micro Machines?"

"A couple," Robby tried.

"A couple of hundred?"

"Well," the boy said, grinning.

"Upstairs now… Up, up, or the monster'll take you up there himself. Do you want the monster? Do you?"

"No!" Stephie shrieked.

"Go on," Parker said, laughing. "Let Daddy talk to his friend here."

As they started up the stairs Cage said, "Oh, not hardly a friend. Right, Parker?"

He didn't respond. He closed the door behind him and turned back, appraising the woman. She was in her thirties, with a narrow, smooth face. Pale, nothing like Joan's relentless tan. She wasn't looking at Parker but was watching Robby climb the stairs through the lace-curtained window beside the door. She then turned her attention to him and reached out a strong hand with long fingers. She shook his hand firmly. "I'm Margaret Lukas. ASAC at the Washington field office."

Parker recalled that within the Bureau assistant special agents in charge were referred to by the acronym, pronounced A-sack, while the heads of the offices were called S-A-C's. An aspect of his former life he hadn't thought about for years.

She continued, "Could we come inside for a minute?"

A parental warning alarm went off. He responded, "You mind if we stay out here? The children…"

Her eyes flickered and he wondered if she considered this a snub. But that was just too bad; the kids' exposure to the Bureau was limited to sneaking a look at Scully and Mulder on The X-Files when sleeping over at friends' houses. He planned on keeping it that way.

"Fine with us," Cage said for both of them. "Hey, last time I saw you… man, it was a while ago. We were at Jimmy's, you know, his thing on Ninth Street."

"That's right."

It was in fact the last time Parker Kincaid had been at the Bureau headquarters. Standing in the large courtyard surrounded by the somber stone building. A hot July day two years ago. He still got occasional e-mails about what a fine speech he'd delivered at the memorial service for the Jim Huang, who was one of Parker's former assistants. He'd been gunned down on his first day as a field agent.

Parker remained silent.

Cage nodded after the kids. "They're growing."

"They do that," Parker answered. "What exactly is it, Cage?"

The agent gave a shrug toward Lukas.

"We need your help, Mr. Kincaid," she said quickly, before the stream of breath accompanying Parker's question evaporated.

Parker tilted his head.

"It's nice out here," Cage said, looking up. "Fresh air. Linda and I should move. Get some land. Maybe Loudon County. You watch the news, Parker?"

"I listen."

"Huh?"

"Radio. I don't watch TV."

"That's right. You never did." Cage said to Lukas, "'Wasteland,' he'd call TV. He read a lot. Words're Parker's domain. His bailiwick, whatever the hell a bailiwick is. You told me your daughter reads like crazy. She still do that?"

"The guy in the subway," Parker said. "That's what you're here about."

"METSHOOT," Lukas said. "That's what we've acronymed it. He killed twenty-three people. Wounded thirty-seven. Six children were badly injured. There was a-"

"What is it you want?" he interrupted, worried that his own children might hear this.

Lukas responded, "This's important. We need your help."

"What on earth could you possibly want from me? I'm retired."

Cage said, "Uh-huh. Sure. Retired."

Lukas frowned, looked from one to the other.

Was this rehearsed? A good cop/confused cop thing? It didn't seem to be. Still, another important rule in his invisible parental Handbook was: "Get used to being double-teamed." He was on his guard now.

"You still do document examination. You're in the Yellow Pages. And you've got a Web site. It's good. I like the blue wallpaper."

He said firmly, "I'm a civilian document examiner."

Lukas said, "Cage tells me you were head of the Document Division for six years. He says you're the best document examiner in the country."

What weary eyes she has, Parker thought. She's probably only thirty-six or thirty-seven. Great figure, trim, athletic, beautiful face. Yet what she's seen… Look at those eyes. Like blue-gray stones. Parker knew about eyes like that.

Daddy, tell me about the Boatman.

"I only do commercial work. I don't do any criminal forensics."

"He was also candidate for SAC Eastern District. Yeah, yeah, I'm not kidding." Cage said this as if he hadn't heard Parker. "Except he turned it down."

Lukas lifted her pale eyebrows.

"And that was years ago," Parker responded.

"Sure it was," Cage said. "But you're not rusty, are you, Parker?"

"Cage, get to the point."

"I'm trying to wear you down," the graying agent said.

"Can't be done."

"Ah, I'm the miracle worker. Remember?" To Lukas he said, "See, Parker didn't just find forgeries; he used to track people down because of what they wrote, where they buy writing paper, pens, things like that. Best in the business."

"She already said you said that," Parker said acerbically.

"Déjà vu all over again," Cage observed.

Parker was shivering-but not from the cold. From the trouble these two people represented. He thought of the Whos. He thought of their party tonight. Thought of his ex-wife. He opened his mouth to tell lanky Cage and deadeye Lukas to get the hell out of his life. But she was there first. Bluntly she said, "Just listen. The unsub-"

Parker remembered: unknown subject. An unidentified perp.

"-and his partner, the shooter, have this extortion scheme. The shooter lights up a crowd of people with an automatic weapon every four hours starting at four this afternoon unless the city pays. Mayor's willing to and we drop the money. But the unsub never shows up. Why? He's dead."

"You believe the luck?" Cage said. "On his way to collect twenty million and he gets nailed by a delivery truck."

Parker asked, "Why didn't the shooter pick up the money?"

"'Cause the shooters only instructions're to kill," Lukas said. "He doesn't have anything to do with the money. Classic left-hand/ right-hand setup." Lukas seemed surprised he hadn't figured it out. "The unsub turns the shooter loose with instructions to keep going if he doesn't get a call to stop. That way we'll hesitate to cap the perp in a tac operation. And if we collar the unsub he's got leverage to work out a plea bargain in exchange for stopping the shooter."

"So," Cage said. "We've gotta find him. The shooter."

The door behind him started to open.

Parker quickly said to Lukas, "Button your jacket."

"What?" she asked.

As Robby stepped outside Parker quickly reached forward and tugged her jacket closed, hiding the large pistol on her belt. She frowned at this but he whispered, "I don't want him to see your weapon."

He put his arm around his son's shoulders. "Hey, Who. How you doing?"

"Stephie hid the controller."

"I did not," she called. "Didn't, didn't!"

"I was winning and she hid it."

Parker said, frowning, "Wait, isn't it connected with a cord?"

"She unplugged it."

"Stephie-effie. Is that controller going to appear in five seconds? Four, three, two…"

"I found it!" she called.

"My turn!" Robby cried and charged up the stairs again.

Once more Parker noticed Lukas's eyes follow Robby as he climbed to the second floor.

"What's his name?" Lukas asked.

"Robby."

"But what did you call him?"

"Oh. 'Who.' It's my nickname for the kids."

"After Wahoo?" she asked. "Your alma mater's team?"

"No. It's from a Dr. Seuss book." Parker wondered how she knew he'd gone to the University of Virginia. "Look, Cage, I'm sorry. But I really can't help you."

"You understand the problem here, boy?" Cage continued. "The only link we've got-the only clue at all-is the extortion note."

"Run it by PERT."

The Bureau's Physical Evidence Response Team.

Lukas's thin lips grew slightly thinner. "If we have to we will. And we'll get a psycholinguistic from Quantico. And I'll have agents check out every goddamn paper and pen company in the country. But-"

"-that's what we're hopin' you'd take over on," Cage filled in. "You can look at it, you can tell us what's what. Stuff nobody else can. Maybe where he lived. Maybe where the shooter's going to hit next."

Parker asked, "What about Stan?"

Stanley Lewis was the current head of the Bureau's Document Division. Parker knew the man was good; he'd hired Lewis years ago as an examiner. He recalled that they'd spent an evening drinking beer and trying to outdo each other forging John Hancock's signature. Lewis had won.

"He's in Hawaii for the Sánchez trial. Even in a Tomcat we can't get him back here before the next deadline."

"It's at four," Lukas repeated.

"It won't be like last time, Parker," Cage said softly. "That'll never happen again."

Lukas's head swiveled between the two men once again. But Parker didn't explain what Cage had meant. He wasn't talking about the past; he'd had enough past for one day.

"I'm sorry. Any other time, maybe. But I can't now." He was imagining what would happen if Joan found out he was working on an active investigation.

"Shit, Parker, what do I have to do?"

"We have nothing," Lukas said angrily. "No leads. We have a few hours until this crazy shoots up another crowd of people. There were children shot down-"

Parker waved his hand abruptly to silence her. "I'll have to ask you to leave now. Good luck."

Cage shrugged, looked at Lukas. She handed Parker her card, with the gold-embossed seal of the Justice Department on it. Parker had once had cards just like these. The typeface was Cheltenham condensed. Nine-point.

"Cell phones on the bottom… Look, at least if we have any questions, you mind if we call?"

Parker hesitated. "No, I don't."

"Thank you."

"Goodbye," Parker said, stepping back into the house.

The door closed. Robby stood on the stairs.

"Who were they, Daddy?"

He said, "That was a man I used to work with."

"Did she have a gun?" Robby asked. "That lady?"

"Did you see a gun?" Parker asked him.

"Yeah."

"Then I guess she had one."

"Did you work with her too?" the boy asked.

"No, just the man."

"Oh. She was pretty."

Parker started to say, For a lady cop. But he didn't.

Back here in Washington I live under a sorrowful pall, haunted as I am by visions of Potty on horseback…

Parker, back in his basement study, alone now, found himself thinking of the letter in front of him as Ql. FBI document lab procedures dictated that questioned documents were called Q's. Authentic documents and handwriting samples-also called "knowns"-were referred to as K s. It had been years since he'd thought of the suspect wills and contracts he analyzed as Q's. This intrusion of police mindset into his personal life was unsettling. Nearly as troubling as Joan's appearance.

Forget about Cage, forget about Lukas.

Concentrate…

Back to the letter, hand glass in front of his face.

He now noted that the author-whether it had been Jefferson or not-had used a steel pen; he could see the unique flow of ink into fibers torn by the nib. Many forgers believe that all old documents were written with feather quills and use those exclusively. But by 1800 steel pen points were very popular and Jefferson did most of his corresponding with them.

One more tick on the side of authenticity.

I think of your Mother too at this difficult time and though my dear I do not want to add to your burden I wonder if I might impose on you to find that portrait of Polly and your Mother together, do you recall it? The one Mr. Chabroux painted of them by the well? I meant to bring it with me that their faces might sustain me in my darker moments.

He forced himself not to think about the context of the letter and examined a line of ink where it crossed a fold in the paper. He observed there was no bleeding into the gully of the crease. Which meant the letter had been written before it was folded. He knew that Thomas Jefferson was fastidious about his writing habits and would never have written a letter on a piece of paper that had been previously folded. Score another point for the document…

Parker looked up, stretched. He reached forward and clicked on the radio. National Public Radio was broadcasting another story about the Metro shootings.

"… report that the death toll has risen to twenty-four. Five-year-old LaVelle Williams died of a gunshot wound. Her mother was wounded in the attack and is listed in critical-"

He shut the radio off.

Looking at the letter, moving his hand glass over the document slowly. Swooping in on a lift-where the writer finishes a word and raises the pen off the surface of the paper. This lift was typical of the way Jefferson ended his strokes.

And the feathering of the ink in the paper?

How ink is absorbed can tell you many things about the type of materials used and when the document was made. Over the years ink is drawn more and more into the paper. The feathering here suggested it had been written long ago-easily two hundred years. But, as always, he took the information under advisement; there were ways to fake feathering.

He heard the thud of the children's feet on the stairs. They paused, then there were louder bangs as first one then the other jumped down the last three steps to the floor.

"Daddy, we're hungry," Robby called from the top of the basement stairs.

"I'll be right there."

"Can we have grilled cheese?"

"Please!" Stephie added.

Parker clicked out the brilliant, white examination light on his table. He replaced the letter in his vault. He stood for a moment in the dim study, lit only by a fake Tiffany lamp in the corner, beside the old couch.

I meant to bring it with me that their faces might sustain me in my darker moments.

He climbed the stairs.

5

"The weapon," Margaret Lukas called abruptly. "I want the deets on the shooters weapon."

"You want what?" Cage asked.

"Deets. De-tails." She was used to her regular staff, who knew her expressions. And idiosyncrasies.

"Any minute now," C. P. Ardell called back. "That's what they're tellin' me."

They were in one of the windowless rooms in the Bureaus new Strategic Information and Operations Center on the fifth floor of headquarters on Ninth Street. The whole facility was nearly as big as a football field and had recently been expanded to let the agency handle as many as five major crises at once.

Cage walked past Lukas and as he did so he whispered, "You're doing fine."

Lukas didn't respond. She caught sight of her reflection in one of the five-by-fifteen-foot video screens on the wall, on which was displayed the extortion note. Thinking: Am I? Am I doing fine? She hoped so. Lord, how she hoped that. The legend that went around the Bureau was that every agent got one chance to strike gold in his or her career. One chance to get noticed, one chance to move up exponentially.

Well, this sure as hell was hers. An ASAC running a case like this. It never happened. Not in a… what had Cage said? Not in a month of blue Mondays.

Looking past her reflection at the note, which glowed white with spidery black letters on the huge screen. What am I not thinking of? Lukas wondered. In her mind she ran through what she had thought of. She'd sent the dead unsub's fingerprints to every major friction ridge database in the world. She had two dozen District cops trying to find the delivery truck that hit him, on the chance the unsub uttered some dying words to the driver (and had had miracle-worker Cage secure an immunity-from-prosecution waiver on the hit-and-run charge to induce the driver to talk). She had two dozen agents tracking down wits. Hundreds of tag numbers were being checked out. Handlers were milking CIs all over the country. Phone records in and out of City Hall for the past two weeks were being checked. She was-

A call came in. Len Hardy started to pick up the phone but Cage got to it first. Hardy had shed the trench coat, revealing a white polyester shirt with thin brown stripes and razor-crease slacks and a brown tie. Despite lying in a Northern Virginia field for an hour his marine-officer hair was still perfectly in place and there was not a bit of dirt on him. He looked less like a detective than a clean-cut Jehovah's Witness about to offer you some brochures on salvation. Lukas, who wore a new Glock 10, thought the thin Smith & Wesson.38 revolver on Hardy's hip was positively quaint.

"You doing okay, Detective?" Lukas asked him, seeing his disgruntled expression as Cage swept the phone out from under his nose.

"Right as rain," he muttered, not too sardonically.

She gave a faint laugh at the expression, which she knew was an indigenous Midwestern phrase. She asked if he was from there.

"I grew up outside Chicago. Downstate. Well, that's what they call it-even though my hometown was northwest of the city."

He sat down. Her smile faded. Right as rain…

Cage hung up. "Got your deets. That was Firearms. Gun was an Uzi. About a year old and there was a lot of barrel spread. That weapon's seen some serious action. Mineral cotton in the silencer. Hand packed, it looked like. Not commercial. The shooter knows what he's doing."

"Good!" Lukas said. She called to C. P. Ardell, across the room, "Have somebody check out Web sites that give instructions for homemade silencers and converting Uzis to full auto. I want e-mail addresses of recent hits."

"Do they have to give up that info?" C. P. asked.

"Not without a warrant. But make 'em think they do. Be persuasive."

The agent made a call and spoke for a few minutes. He reported, "Com-Tech is on it." The Bureau's crack computer and communications unit, headquartered in Maryland.

To Cage, Lukas said, "Hey, got an idea."

The agent lifted an eyebrow.

She continued. "What we can do is get that guy, from Human Resources?"

"Who?" Cage asked.

Lukas continued. "That guy who examines applicants' handwriting and writes up their personality."

"The District does that too," Len Hardy said. "It's supposed to weed out the wackos."

"Whatta you mean?" C. P. asked Lukas. "We already sent it to Quantico."

The big agent was referring to a copy of the note that had been sent to the Bureau's Behavioral section for psycholinguistic profiling. Tobe Geller sat at a computer terminal nearby, waiting for the results.

"No, no, that's to link him to similar MOs and profile his education and intelligence," Lukas said. "I'm talking about profiling his personality. Graphoanalysis."

"Don't bother," a voice from behind them said.

Lukas turned and saw a man in jeans and a leather bomber jacket. He walked into the lab. He wore a visitor's badge around his neck and was carrying a large attaché case. It took a moment to recognize him.

Cage began to speak but stopped himself. Maybe afraid that he'd scare him off.

"Artie let me up," Parker Kincaid said. The Bureaus employee entrance night guard. "He still remembers me. After all these years."

This was a very different image of Kincaid, Lukas thought. He'd seemed frumpy at his house. It hadn't helped that he'd been wearing some god-awful sweater and baggy slacks. The gray crew-neck sweater he wore now, over a black shirt, seemed much more him.

"Mr. Kincaid," Lukas said, nodding a greeting. "Don't bother with what?"

"Graphoanalysis. You can't analyze personality from handwriting."

She was put off by his peremptory tone. "I thought a lot of people do it."

"People read tarot cards too and talk to their dear departed. It's bogus."

"I've heard it can be helpful," she persisted.

"Waste of time," he said matter-of-factly. "We'll concentrate on other things."

"Well. All right." Lukas pledged that she'd try not to dislike him too much.

Cage said, "Hey, Parker, you know Tobe Geller? Doubling as our computer and communications man tonight. We tracked him down on his way to a ski trip in Vermont."

"It was New Hampshire," the trim agent corrected, offering Kincaid one of his ready grins. "For holiday pay I'll do anything. Even break a date. Hi, Parker. I heard about you."

They shook hands.

Cage nodded to another desk. "This's C. P. Ardell. He's from the D.C. field office. Nobody knows what C. P. stands for but that's what he goes by. I don't think even he knows."

"Did a while ago," C. P. said laconically.

"And this is Len Hardy. He's our District P.D. liaison."

"Nice to meet you, sir," the detective said.

Kincaid shook his hand. "Don't really need the 'sir.'"

"Sure."

"You Forensic? Investigative?" Kincaid asked him.

Hardy seemed embarrassed as he said, "Actually I'm Research and Statistical. Everybody else was out in the field so I got elected to liaise."

"Where's the note?" he asked Lukas. "I mean, the original?"

"In Identification. I wanted to see if we could raise a few more prints."

Kincaid frowned but before he could say anything Lukas added, "I told them to use the laser only. No ninhydrin."

His eyebrows lifted. "Good… you've worked in forensics?"

She had a sense that, even though she was right about not using the chemical, he was challenging her. "I remember from the Academy," she told him coolly and picked up the phone.

"What's that?" Hardy asked. "Nin…"

As she punched in a number Lukas said, "Ninhydrin's what you usually use to image fingerprints on paper."

"But," Kincaid finished her thought, "it ruins indented writing. Never use it on suspect documents."

Lukas continued to make her phone call-to ID. The tech told her that there were no other prints on the document and that a runner would bring the note up to the Crisis Center stat. She relayed this to the team.

Kincaid nodded.

"Why'd you change your mind?" Cage asked him. "About coming here?"

He was silent for a moment. "You know those children you mentioned? The ones injured in the subway? One of them died."

With a solemnity that matched his, Lukas said, "LaVelle Williams. I heard."

He turned to Cage. "I'm here on one condition. Nobody except the immediate task force knows I'm involved. If there's a leak and my name gets out, whatever stage the investigation's in, I walk. And I deny I even know you people."

Lukas said, "If that's what you want, Mr. Kincaid, but-"

"Parker."

Cage said, "You got it. Can we ask why?"

"My children."

"If you're worried about security we can have a car put on your house. As many agents as you-"

"I'm worried about my ex-wife."

Lukas gave him a quizzical glance.

Kincaid said, "I've had custody of my children since my wife and I got divorced four years ago. And one of the reasons that it's me who has custody is that I work at home and I don't do anything that'd endanger them or me. That's why I only do commercial document work. Now it looks like my wife's reopening the custody case. She can't find out about this."

"Not a single problem in the world, Parker," Cage reassured him. "You'll be somebody else. Who d'you want to be?"

"I don't care if you make me John Doe or Thomas Jefferson as long as I'm not me. Joan's coming by the house tomorrow morning at ten with some presents for the kids. If she finds out I went off on New Year's Eve to work on a case… it'll be bad."

"What'd you tell them?" Lukas asked.

"That a friend of mine was sick and I had to go visit him in the hospital." He pointed a finger at Cage's chest. "I hated lying to them. Hated it."

Recalling his beautiful boy, Lukas said, "We'll do our best."

"It's not a question of best," Kincaid said to her, easily holding her eye. Which is something very few men could do. "It's either keep me out of the picture or I'm gone."

"Then well do it," she said simply, looking around the room. C. P., Geller and Hardy all nodded.

"All right." Kincaid took his jacket off, pitched it onto a chair. "Now, what's the plan?"

Lukas ran through the status of the investigation. Kincaid nodded, not saying anything. She tried to read his face, see if he approved of what she was doing. Wondered if she cared whether he did or not. Then she said, "The mayors going on the air soon to make a plea to the shooter. He's going to suggest that we'll pay the money to him. Not come right out and say it but hint at it. We're hoping he'll contact us. We've got the money downstairs in a couple of trace bags. We'll drop them wherever he wants."

Cage took over. "Then Tobe here'll track him back to his hidey-hole. Jerry Baker's tactical team's on call. We'll nail him when he gets back home. Or take him down on the road."

"How likely is it he'll go for the cash?"

"We don't know," Lukas said. "When you take a look at the note you'll see the unsub-the guy who got killed-was pretty slow. If his partner, this Digger, is just as dumb he might not go for it." She was thinking of the criminal psychology she'd learned at the Academy. Slower perps were far more suspicious than intelligent ones. They tended not to improvise even when circumstances changed. Lukas added, "Which means he might just keep on shooting the way he's been instructed to."

Cage added, "And we don't even know if the shooter'll hear Kennedy's broadcast. But we just don't have a single damn lead."

Lukas noticed Kincaid glance down at the Major Crimes Bulletin. It was about the firebombing of Gary Moss's house. Bulletins like these described the crime in detail and were used to brief subsequent officers on the specifics of a case. This one mentioned how Moss's two children had just escaped being burned to death.

Parker Kincaid stared at the bulletin for longer than he seemed to want to, apparently troubled by the stark report of the attempt to murder the family.

The two children of the Subject were able to effectuate an escape from the structure with only minor injuries.

Finally he pushed it away. Looked around the Center, taking in the banks of phones, computers, desks. His eyes ended up on the video monitor displaying the extortion note.

"Can we set up the ready-room someplace else?"

"This is the Crisis Center," Lukas said, watching him scan the note. "What's wrong with here?"

"We're not using most of the space," Kincaid pointed out. "And hardly any of the equipment."

Lukas considered this. "Where did you have in mind?"

"Upstairs," he said absently, still staring at the glowing note. "Let's go upstairs."

Parker walked through the Sci-Crime document lab, looking over the array of equipment he knew so well.

Two Leitz binocular stereo microscopes with a Volpi Intralux fiber optic light source, an old Foster + Freeman VSC4 video spectral comparator and the latest of their video spectral comparators-the VSC 2000, equipped with a Rofin PoliLight and running QDOS software through Windows NT. Also, sitting well-used in the corner were a Foster + Freeman ESDA-an electrostatic detection apparatus-and a thin-layer gas Chromatograph for ink and trace analysis.

He noticed the glass windows the tourists paraded past every day, nine to four, as part of the FBI headquarters tour. The corridor was now dark and ominous.

Parker watched the other members of the team find seats at desks and lab tables. The room was cluttered, smelly and uncomfortable, the way real working laboratories were. But he preferred to be here-rather than in the glitzy Crisis Center-because he firmly believed in something he'd learned from his father, a historian who specialized in the Revolutionary War. "Always fight your battles on familiar ground," the professor had told his boy. He'd chosen not to give this answer to Lukas; another thing William Kincaid had told his son was "You don't have to share everything with your allies."

He glanced into Stan Lewis's office again. Saw the books that he himself had used when this had been his department: Harrison 's Suspect Documents, Housely and Farmer's An Introduction to Handwriting Identification and Scientific Examination of Questioned Documents by Hilton. And the Bible of the profession: Questioned Documents by Albert S. Osborn. He looked at the credenza behind the office chair and recognized the four bonsai trees he'd cultivated then left for Lewis.

"Where's the note?" he asked Cage impatiently.

"On its way. On its way."

Parker turned on several of the instruments. Some hummed, some clicked. And some were silent, their dim indicator lights glowing like cautious eyes.

Waiting, waiting…

And trying not to think about his talk with the children an hour before-when he'd told them that their holiday plans were changing.

Both of the Whos had been in Robby's room, the floor still awash with Legos and Micro Machines.

"Hey, Whos."

"I got to the third level," Stephie'd said, nodding at the Nintendo. "Then I got bomped."

Robby'd had a full-scale invasion of his bed underway-with helicopters and landing craft.

Parker had sat on the bed. "You know those people who were here before?"

"The pretty lady you kept looking at," his son had said coyly.

("They're sharper than you'll ever guess," reports the Handbook.)

"Well, they told me that a friend of mine is sick and I have to go visit him for a little while. Who do you want to baby-sit?"

In addition to the standard cast of high-school and college sitters, Parker had a number of friends in the neighborhood-parents he socialized with-who'd gladly take the children for the evening. There was also his friend Lynne, who lived in the District. She would have driven to Fairfax to help him out but he was sure she'd have a date tonight (it was impossible to imagine Lynne without a date on New Year's Eve) and their relationship was no longer at the level where he could ask for a sacrifice like that.

"You have to go?" Robby'd asked. "Tonight?"

When he was disappointed, the boy would become very still, his expression remaining unchanged. He never pouted, never grumbled-which Parker would have preferred. He just froze, as if sadness threatened to overwhelm him. As Robby had looked up at him, unmoving, holding a tiny toy helicopter, Parker'd felt his son's disappointment in his own heart.

Stephie was less emotional and wore those emotions less visibly; her only response had been to toss her hair from her face and give him a frown, asking, "Is he going to be all right? Your friend?"

"I'm sure he'll be okay. But it would be a good thing for me to see him. So-do you want me to call Jennifer? Or Mrs. Cavanaugh?"

"Mrs. Cavanaugh!" they'd said, almost in unison, Robby coming out of his dolor. Mrs. Cavanaugh, the neighborhood grandmother, baby-sat on Tuesdays-when Parker sat in on a local poker game.

Parker had stood up, surrounded by the sea of toys.

"But you'll be back before midnight," Robby'd asked, "won't you?"

("Never make promises if there's any chance you can't keep them.")

"I'm going to try as hard as I can."

Parker had hugged both of the children and then walked to the door.

"Daddy?" Stephie had asked, pure innocence in her baggy black jeans and Hello Kitty T-shirt. "Would your friend like me to make him a get-well card?"

Parker had felt his betrayal as a physical blow. "That's okay, honey. I think he'd like it better if you just had fun tonight."

Now, intruding on these difficult thoughts, the door to the document lab swung open. A lean, handsome agent with swept-back blond hair walked into the room. "Jerry Baker," he announced, walking up to Parker. "You're Parker Kincaid."

They shook hands.

He looked across the lab. "Margaret," he called in greeting. Lukas nodded back.

"You're the tactical expert?" Parker asked him.

"Right."

Lukas said, "Jerry's got some S &S people lined up."

Search and Surveillance, Parker recalled.

"Some good shooters too," Baker said. "Just dying for a chance to light up this beast."

Parker sat down in the gray chair. He said to Lukas, "You've processed the unsub's body?"

"Yes," Lukas said.

"Do you have the inventory?"

"Not yet."

"No?" Parker was troubled. He had very definite ideas of running investigations and he could see Lukas would have definite ideas too. He wondered how much of a problem he'd have with her. Handle it delicately or not? Glancing at her tough face-pale as pale marble-Parker decided he had no time for niceties. In a case with so few leads they needed as many K's-known aspects of the unsub-as they could find. "We better get it," he said.

She responded coolly, "I've ordered it sent up here ASAP."

Parker would have sent somebody-Hardy maybe-to pick it up. But he decided not to fight this skirmish. He'd give it another few minutes. He looked at Baker. "How many good guys do we have?"

"Thirty-six of ours, four dozen District P.D."

Parker frowned. "We'll need more than that."

"That's a problem," Cage said. "Most actives are on alert because of the holiday. There're a couple hundred thousand people in town. And a lot of Treasury and Justice agents're on security detail, what with all the diplomatic and government parties."

Len Hardy muttered, "Too bad this happened tonight."

Parker gave a short laugh. "It wouldn't have happened at any other time."

The young detective gave him a quizzical look. "What do you mean?"

He was about to answer but Lukas said, "The unsub picked tonight because he knew we'd be shorthanded."

"And because of the crowds in town," Parker added. "The shooter's got himself a fucking firing range. He…"

He paused, listening to himself. He didn't like what he heard. Living with the children, working largely alone, he'd softened since he'd left the Bureau; the rough edges were gone. He never swore and he tempered everything he said with the Whos in mind. Now he found himself back in his former life, his hard life. As a linguist, Parker knew that the first thing an outsider does to adapt to a new group is to talk their talk.

Parker opened his attaché case-a portable document examination kit. It was filled with the tools of his trade. Also, it seemed, a Darth Vader action figure. A present from Robby.

"'The Force be with you,'" Cage said. "Our mascot for the night. My grandkids love those movies."

Parker propped it up on the examination table. "Wish it were Obi-Wan Kenobi."

"Who?" Lukas frowned, shook her head.

Hardy blurted out, "You don't know?" Then blushed when she glanced at him coldly.

Parker was surprised too. How could somebody not know about Star Wars?

"Just a character in a movie," C. P. Ardell told her.

Without a reaction she turned back to a memo she was reading.

Parker found his hand glass, which was wrapped in black velvet. It was a Leitz lens, twelve power, and was the essential tool of a document examiner. Joan had given it to him for their second anniversary.

Hardy noticed a book in Parker's attaché case. Parker saw the cop looking at it and handed it to him. Mind Twisters Volume 5. Hardy flipped through it then passed it to Lukas.

"Hobby," Parker explained, glancing at her eyes as she scanned the pages.

Cage said, "Oh, this man loved his puzzles. That was his nickname 'round here. The Puzzle Master."

"They're lateral thinking exercises," Parker said. He looked over Lukas's shoulder and read out loud, "'A man has three coins that total seventy-six cents. The coins were minted in the United States within the last twenty years, are in general circulation and one isn't a penny. What are the denominations of the coins?'"

"Wait, one of them has to be a penny," Cage said.

Hardy looked at the ceiling. Parker wondered if his mind was as orderly as his personal style. The cop reflected for a moment. "Are they commemorative coins?"

"No, remember-they're in circulation."

"Right," the detective said.

Lukas's eyes scanned the floor. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere. Parker couldn't tell what she was thinking.

Geller thought for a minute. "I'm not wasting my brain cells on that." He turned back to his computer.

"Give up?" Parker asked.

"What's the answer?" Cage asked.

"He has a fifty-cent piece, a quarter and a penny."

"Wait," Hardy protested, "you said he didn't have a penny."

"No, I didn't. I said one of the coins wasn't a penny. The half-dollar and the quarter aren't. But one of them is."

"That's cheating," Cage grumbled.

"It sounds so easy," Hardy said.

"Puzzles are always easy when you know the answer," Parker said. "Just like life, right?"

Lukas turned the page. She read, "'Three hawks have been killing a farmer's chickens. One day he sees all three sitting on the roof of his chicken coop. The farmer has just one bullet in his gun and the hawks are so far apart that he can only hit one. He aims at the hawk on the left and shoots and kills it. The bullet doesn't ricochet. How many hawks are left on the roof?'"

"It's too obvious," C. P. observed.

"Wait," Cage said, "maybe that's the trick. You think it should be complicated but the answer really is the obvious one. You shoot one and there're two left. End of puzzle."

"Is that your answer?" Parker asked.

Cage said uncertainly, "I'm not sure."

Lukas flipped to the back of the book.

" That's cheating," Parker said, echoing Cage.

She kept flipping. Then frowned. "Where are the answers?"

"There aren't any."

She asked, "What kind of puzzle book is that?"

"An answer you don't get on your own isn't an answer." Parker glanced at his watch. Where the hell was the note?

Lukas turned back to the puzzle, studied it. Her face was pretty. Joan was drop-dead beautiful, with her serpentine cheekbones and ample hips and buoyant breasts. Margaret Lukas, wearing a tight-fitting black sweater, was smaller on top and trimmer. She had thin, muscular thighs, revealed by tight jeans. At her ankle he caught a glimpse of sheer white stockings-probably those knee-highs that Joan used to wear under her slacks.

She was pretty, Daddy.

For a lady cop…

A slim young man in a too-tight gray suit walked into the lab. One of the young clerks who worked in the Mail and Memo Distribution Department, Parker guessed.

"Agent Cage," he said.

"Timothy, what've you got for us?"

"I'm looking for Agent Jefferson."

Parker was saved from asking "Who?" by Cage. "Tom Jefferson?"

"Yessir."

He pointed to Parker. "This's him."

Parker hesitated for only a moment then took the envelope and signed for it, carefully writing "Th. Jefferson" the same way the statesman had done, though with a much more careless hand.

Timothy left and Parker cocked an eyebrow at Cage, who said, "You wanna be anonymous. Poof. You're anonymous."

"But how-"

"I'm the miracle worker. I keep telling you."

The Digger is standing in the shadows outside his motel $39.99 a day kitchenette and free cable we have vacancies.

This is a lousy part of town. Reminds the Digger of… click… where, where?

Boston, no, White Plains… click… which is near New… New York.

Click

He's standing beside a smelly Dumpster and watching the front door to his comfy room.

He's watching people coming and going, the way the man who tells him things told him to do. Watching his front door. Watching the room through the open curtain.

Come and go.

Cars speed by on the lousy street, people walk past on the lousy sidewalk. The Digger looks like them, the Digger looks like no one. Nobody sees the Digger.

"Excuse me," a voice says. "I'm hungry. I haven't eaten-"

The Digger turns. The man looks into the Digger's blank eyes and can't finish his sentence. The Digger shoots the man with two silenced bullets. He falls and the Digger hefts the body into the big blue Dumpster, thinking the silencer needs repacking; it's not that… click… not that silent anymore.

But nobody's heard. Too much traffic.

He picks up the shell casings and puts them into his pocket.

The Dumpster is a pretty blue.

The Digger likes colors. His wife grew red flowers and his wife grew yellow flowers. But no blue flowers, he believes.

Looking around. Nobody else is nearby.

"If somebody looks at your face, kill them," said the man who tells him things. "Nobody can see your face. Remember that."

"I'll remember that," the Digger answered.

He listens to the Dumpster. Silence. Funny how when you're… click… when you're dead you don't make any noise.

Funny…

He goes back to watching the door, watching the window, watching the people on the sidewalk.

He checks his watch. He's waited for fifteen minutes.

Now it's okay to go inside.

Have some soup, reload his gun, repack the silencer. Which he learned how to do on a pretty fall day last year-was it last year? They sat on logs and the man told him how to reload his gun and repack the silencer and all around them were pretty colored leaves. Then he would practice shooting, spinning around like a whirligig, spinning around with the Uzi, as leaves and branches fell. He remembers the smell of hot, dead leaves.

He liked the forest better than here.

Opening the door, walking inside.

He calls his voice mail and methodically punches in his code. One two two five. There are no messages from the man who tells him things. He thinks he's a little sad that he hasn't heard from the man. He hasn't heard a word since this morning. He thinks he's sad. But he isn't sure what sad is.

No messages, no messages.

Which means he should repack the silencer and reload his clips and get ready to go out again.

But first he'll have some soup and put on the TV. Have some nice hot soup.

6

Mayor Kennedy -

The end is night. The Digger is loose and their is no way to stop him. He will kill again-at four, eight and Midnight if you don't pay.

I am wanting $20 million dollars in cash, which you will put into a bag and leave it two miles south of Rt 66 on the West Side of the Beltway. In the middle of the Field. Pay to me the money by 12:00 hours. Only I am knowing how to stop The Digger. If you xxxx apprehend me, he will keep killing. If you kill me, he will keep killing.

If you don't think I'm real, some of the Diggers bullets were painted black. Only I know that.

Documents have personalities. The Jefferson letter sitting in Parkers vault at home-whether a forgery or not-was regal. Scripty, and rich as amber. But the extortion note sitting on the FBI examination table here in front of him was choppy and stark.

Still, Parker was examining it the way he approached any puzzle: with no assumptions, no preconceptions. When solving riddles the mind is like fast-drying plaster; first impressions last. He'd resist drawing any conclusions until he'd analyzed the note completely. Deferring judgment was one of the hardest parts of his job.

Three hawks have been killing a farmer's chickens…

"The bullets at the Metro?" he called. "You found some painted?"

"Yup," Jerry Baker said. "A dozen or so. Black paint."

Parker nodded. "Did I hear you say you'd ordered a psycholinguistic?"

"We did." Geller nodded at his computer screen. "Still waiting for the results from Quantico."

Parker looked at the envelope that had contained the note. It had been placed in an acetate sleeve to which was attached a chain-of-custody card headed with the word METSHOOT. On the front of the envelope was written, in the same handwriting as the note: To the Mayor-Life and Death.

He donned rubber gloves-not worried about fingerprints but rather about contaminating any trace materials that might be found on the paper. He unwrapped his Leitz hand glass. It was six inches across, with a rosewood handle and a glistening steel ring around the perfect glass lens. Parker examined the glue flap on the envelope.

"What've we got, what've we got, anything?" he muttered under his breath. He often talked to himself when he was analyzing documents. If the Whos were in his study while he was working they assumed his comments were directed at them and got a kick out being included in Daddy's job.

The faint ridges left by the glue application machine at the factory were untouched.

"No spit on the glue," he said, clicking his tongue angrily. DNA and serologic information can be lifted from saliva residue on envelope flaps. "He didn't seal it."

Lukas shook her head, as if Parker had missed something obvious. "But we don't need it, remember? We took blood from the corpse and ran it through the DNA database. Nothing."

"I figured you'd run the unsub's blood," Parker said evenly. "But I was hoping the Digger'd licked the envelope and we could run his spit through the computer."

After a moment she conceded, "Good point. I hadn't thought about that."

Not too full of herself to apologize, Parker noted. Even if she didn't seem to mean it. He pushed the envelope aside and looked at the note itself again. He asked, "And what exactly is this 'Digger' stuff?"

"Yeah," C. P. Ardell piped up. "We have a wacko here?"

Cage offered, "Another Son of Sam? That Leonard Bernstein guy?"

"David Berkowitz," Lukas corrected before she realized it was a joke. C. P. and Hardy laughed. You could never exactly tell when Cage was fooling with you, Parker recalled. The agent was often jokey when investigations were at their most grim. It was a type of invisible shield-like Robby's-to protect the man inside the agent. Parker wondered if Lukas had shields too. Maybe, like Parker himself, she sometimes wore her armor in full view, sometimes kept it hidden.

"Let's call Behavioral," Parker said, "and see if they have anything on the name 'Digger.'"

Lukas agreed and Cage made the phone call down to Quantico.

"Any description of the shooter?" Parker asked, looking over the note.

"Nope," Cage said. "It was spooky. Nobody saw a gun, saw muzzle flash, heard anything other than the slugs hitting the wall. Well, hitting the vics too."

Incredulous, Parker asked, "At rush hour? Nobody saw anything?"

"He was there and then he was gone," C. P. said.

Hardy added, "Like a ghost." Parker glanced at the detective. He was clean-cut, trim, handsome. Wore a wedding ring. Had all the indicia of a contented life. But there seemed to be a melancholy about him. Parker recalled that when he was leaving the Bureau the exit counselor explained to him-unnecessarily-about the high incidence of depression among law enforcers.

"Ghost," Lukas muttered cynically.

Bending over the letter again, studying the cold paper and the black type. He read it several times.

The end is night…

Parker noted that there was no signature. Which might seem like a pointless observation, except that he'd assisted in several cases in which perps had actually signed ransom or robbery notes. One had been fake, intended to lead them off (though the scrawled signature provided handwriting samples that ultimately convicted the perp). In another case the kidnapper had actually signed his real name, perhaps jotted automatically in the confusion of the abduction. The perp was arrested seventeen minutes after the victim's family received the ransom demand.

Parker moved the powerful examining light closer to the note. Bent over it. Heard a neckbone pop.

Talk to me, he silently urged the piece of paper. Tell me your secrets…

The farmer has just one bullet in his gun and the hawks are so far apart that he can only hit one…

He wondered if the unsub had tried to doctor his handwriting. Many criminals-say, kidnappers writing ransom notes-will try to disguise their writing to make comparisons more difficult. They'll use odd slants and formations of letters. But usually they can't do this smoothly; it's very difficult to suppress our natural hand and document examiners can usually detect "tremble"-a shakiness in the strokes-when someone's trying to disguise his writing. But there was no tremble here. This was the unsub's genuine writing.

Normally the next step in an anonymous-writing case would be to compare the suspect document with knowns by sending agents to public records offices with a copy of the extortion note and have them plough through files to find a match. Unfortunately for the team on the METSHOOT case, most writing in public records are in uppercase block, or "manuscript," style ("Please Print," the directions always admonish) and the extortion note had been written in a form of cursive. Even a document examiner with Parker Kincaid's skill couldn't compare printing with cursive writing.

But there was one thing that might let them search public files. A person's handwriting includes both general and personal characteristics. General are the elements of penmanship that come from the method of handwriting learned in school. Years ago there were a number of different methods of teaching writing and they were very distinctive; a document examiner could narrow down a suspects location to a region of the country. But those systems of writing-the flowery "Ladies Hand," for instance-are gone now and only a few methods of writing remain, notably the Zaner-Bloser System and the Palmer Method. But they're too general to identify the writer.

Personal characteristics, though, are different. These are those little pen strokes that are unique to us-curlicues, mixing printing and cursive writing, adding gratuitous strokes-like a small dash through the diagonal stroke in the letter Z or the numeral 7. It was a personal characteristic that first tipped examiners off that the Hitler diaries "discovered" a few years ago were in fact fake. Hitler signed his last name with a very distinctive uppercase H but he used it only in his signature, not when writing in general. The forger had used the ornate capital H throughout the diary, which Hitler would not have done.

Parker continued to scan the extortion note with his hand glass, looking to see if the unsub had had any distinctive personal characteristics in his handwriting.

Daddy, you're funny. You look like Sherlock Holmes…

Finally he noticed something.

The dot above the lowercase letter i.

Most dots above i's and j's are formed by either tapping the pen directly into the paper or, if someone is writing quickly, making a dash with a dot of ink to the left and a tail to the right.

But the METSHOOT unsub had made an unusual mark above the lowercase i's-the tail of the dot went straight upward, so that it resembled a falling drop of water. Parker had seen a similar dot years before-in a series of threat letters sent to a woman by a stalker who eventually murdered her. The letters had been written in the killer's own blood. Parker had christened the unusual dot "the devils teardrop" and included a description of it in one of his textbooks on forensic document examination.

"Got something here," he said.

"What?" Cage asked.

Parker explained about the dot and how he'd named it.

"Devils teardrop?" Lukas asked. She didn't seem to like the name. He guessed she was more comfortable with science and hard data. He remembered that she'd had a similar reaction when Hardy had said that the Digger was like a ghost. She leaned forward. Her short blond hair fell forward and partially obscured her face. "Any connection with your perp?" she asked. "In that stalker case?"

"No, no," Parker said. "He was executed years ago. But this"-he nodded toward the sheet-"could be the key to finding out where our boy lived."

"How?" Jerry Baker asked.

"If we can narrow down the area to a county or-even better-a neighborhood then we'll search public records."

Hardy gave a short laugh. "You can actually find somebody that way?"

"Oh, you bet. You know Michele Sindona?"

C. P. shook his head.

Hardy asked, "Who?"

Lukas searched through her apparently vast mental file cabinet of criminal history and said, "He was the financier? The guy who handled the Vatican 's money?"

"Right. He was arrested for bank fraud but he vanished just before trial. He showed up a few months later and claimed he was kidnapped-thrown in a car and taken someplace. But there were rumors he hadn't been kidnapped at all but'd flown to Italy, then returned to New York. I think it was an examiner in the Southern District who got samples of Sindona's handwriting and found out he had this personal handwriting quirk-he made a dot inside the loop when he wrote the numeral nine. Agents went through thousands of customs declaration forms on flights from Italy to New York. They found a dot in the number nine in an address of a card filled in by a passenger who, it turned out, had used a fake name. They lifted one of Sindona's latents from it."

"Man," C. P. muttered, "collared because of a dot. A little thing like that."

"Oh," Parker said, "it's usually the little things that trip up the perps. Not always. But usually."

He placed the note under the scanner of the VSC. This device uses different light sources-from ultraviolet to infrared-to let examiners see through obliterations and to visualize erased letters. Parker was curious about the cross-out before the word "apprehend." He scanned the entire note and found no erasures other than under the obliteration. He then tested the envelope and noticed no erasures.

"What'd you find?"

"Tell you in a minute. Don't breathe down my neck, Cage."

"It's two-twenty," the agent reminded.

"I can tell time, thanks," Parker muttered. "My kids taught me."

He walked to the electrostatic detection apparatus. The ESDA is used to check documents for indented writing-words or markings pressed into the paper by someone writing on pages on top of the subject document. The ESDA was originally developed as a way to visualize fingerprints on documents. But the device turned out to be largely useless for that purpose because it also raised indented writing, which obscured any latent prints. In TV shows the detective rubs a pencil over the sheet to visualize the indented writing. In real life it would be malpractice for a document examiner to do this; it would probably destroy most indented writing. The ESDA machine, which works like a photocopier, reveals lettering that was written as many as ten sheets above the document being tested.

No one quite knows why the ESDA works so efficiently but no document examiner is without one. Once, after a wealthy banker died, Parker was hired to analyze a will that disinherited his children and left his entire estate to a young maid. Parker was very close to authenticating the document. The signatures looked perfect, the dates of the will and the codicils were logical. But his last test-the ESDA-revealed indented writing that said, "This one ought to fool the pricks." The maid confessed to hiring someone to forge the will.

Parker now ran the unsub's note through the machine. He lifted a plastic sheet off the top and examined it.

Nothing.

He tried the envelope. He lifted off the thin sheet and held it up to the light. He felt a bang in his gut when he saw the delicate gray lines of writing.

"Yes!" he said excitedly. "We've got something."

Lukas leaned forward and Parker smelled a faint floral scent. Perfume? No. He'd known her for only an hour but he'd decided that she was not the perfume sort. It was probably scented soap.

"We've got a couple of indentations," Parker said. "The unsub wrote something on a piece of paper that was on top of the envelope."

Parker held the electrostatic sheet in both hands and moved it around to make the writing more visible. "Okay, somebody write this down. First word. Lowercase c-l-e, then a space. Uppercase M, lowercase e. Nothing after that."

Cage wrote the letters on a yellow pad and looked at it. "What's it mean?" The agent gave a perplexed shrug.

C. P. tugged a pierced earlobe and said, "Don't have a clue."

Geller: "If it's not bits and bytes I'm helpless."

Lukas too shook her head.

But Parker took one look at the letters and knew immediately. He was surprised no one else could see it.

"It's the first crime scene."

"What do you mean?" Jerry Baker asked.

"Sure," Lukas said. "Dupont C-i-r-c-l-e, capital M-Metro."

"Of course," Hardy whispered.

Puzzles are always easy when you know the answer.

"The first site," Parker mused. "But there's something written below it. Can you see it? Can you read it?" He jockeyed the sheet again, holding it out to Lukas. "Jesus, it's hard to see."

She leaned forward and read. "Just three letters. That's all I can make out. Lowercase t-e-l."

"Anything else?" Hardy asked.

Parker squinted. "No, nothing."

"t-e-l," Lukas pondered.

"Telephone, telephone company, telecommunications?" Cage asked. "Television?"

C. P. offered, "Maybe he's going to hit one of the studios-during a broadcast."

"No, no," Parker said. "Look at the position of the letters in relation to the c-l-e M-e. If he's writing in fairly consistent columns then the t-e-l comes at the end of the word." Then Parker caught on. He said, "It's a-"

Lukas blurted, "Hotel. The second target's a hotel."

"That's right."

"Or motel," Hardy suggested.

"No," Parker said. "I don't think so. He's going for crowds. Motels don't have big facilities. All the events tonight will be in hotel banquet rooms."

"And," Lukas added, "he's probably sticking to foot or public transportation. Motels're in outlying areas. Traffic's too bad tonight to rely on a car."

"Great," Cage said then pointed out, "but there must be two hundred hotels in town."

"How do we narrow it down?" Baker asked.

"I'd say go for the bigger hotels…" Parker nodded toward Lukas. "You're right-probably near public transportation and high population centers."

With a loud bang Baker dropped the Yellow Pages on the table. "D.C. only?" He flipped them open. C. P. Ardell walked over to the table and began looking over the tactical agent's shoulder.

Parker considered the question. "It's the District he's extorting, not Virginia or Maryland. I'd stick to D.C."

"Agreed," Lukas said. "Also we should eliminate any place with 'Hotel' first in the name, like 'Hotel New York.' Because of the placement of the letters on the envelope. And no Inns' or 'Lodges.'"

Cage and Hardy joined C. P. and Baker. They all bent over the phone book. They started circling possibilities, discussing whether this choice or that was logical.

After ten minutes they had a list of twenty-two hotels. Cage jotted them down in his own precise handwriting and handed the list to Jerry Baker.

Parker suggested, "Before you send anybody there, call and find out if any of the functions tonight are for diplomats or politicians. We can eliminate those."

"Why?" Baker asked.

Lukas responded, "Armed bodyguards, right?"

Parker nodded. "And Secret Service. The unsub would've avoided those."

"Right," Baker said and hurried out of the room, opening his cell phone.

But even eliminating those, how many locations would remain? Parker wondered.

A lot. Too many.

Too many possible solutions…

Three hawks have been killing a farmer's chickens…

7

My fellow citizens…

They powdered his forehead, they stuck a plug in his ear, they turned on the blinding lights.

Through the glare, Mayor Jerry Kennedy could just make out a few faces in the blackness of the WPLT newsroom, located just off Dupont Circle.

There was his wife, Claire. There was his press secretary. There was Wendell Jefferies.

My fellow citizens, Kennedy rehearsed in his mind. / want to reassure you that our city's police force and the FBI, no, the federal authorities are doing everything in their power to find the perpetrators, no, the persons responsible for this terrible shooting.

One of the station's senior producers, a thin man with a trim, white beard, came up to him and said, "I'll give you a seven-second countdown. I'll go silent after four and use my fingers. At one, look into the camera. You've done this before."

"I've done this before."

The producer glanced down and saw no papers in front of Kennedy. "You have anything for the TelePrompTer?"

"It's in my head."

The producer gave a brief chuckle. "Nobody does that nowadays." Kennedy grunted.

… responsible for this terrible crime. And to that person out there, I am asking you please, please… no, just one please… I'm asking you please to reestablish contact so that we can continue our dialog. On this, the last day of a difficult year, let's put the violence behind us and work together so that there'll be no more deaths. Please contact me personally… no… Please call me personally or get a message to me…

"Five minutes," the producer called.

Kennedy waved aside the makeup artist and motioned Jefferies over to him. "You heard anything from the FBI? Anything?"

"Nothing. Not a word."

Kennedy couldn't believe it. Hours into the operation, the new deadline approaching, his only contact with the feds had been a fast phone call from some District detective named Len Hardy, who was calling on behalf of that agent, Margaret Lukas, to ask Kennedy to make this appeal to the killer over the air. Lukas, Kennedy reflected angrily, hadn't even bothered to call him herself. Hardy, a District cop who sounded intimidated by the feds he was supposed to be liaising with, hadn't known any details of the investigation-or, more likely, didn't have permission to give out any. He'd tried to call Lukas but she'd been too busy to take his call. Cage too. The mayor had spoken briefly with the head of the District's police department but short of providing cops to work under FBI supervision the chief had had nothing to do with the case.

Kennedy was furious. "They don't take us seriously. Jesus. I want to do something. I mean, other than this." He waved his hand at the camera. "It's going to sound like I'm begging."

"It's a problem," Wendy Jefferies conceded. "I've called the press conference but half the stations and papers aren't sending anybody. They're camped out at Ninth Street, waiting for somebody at the Bureau to talk to them."

"It's like the city doesn't exist, it's like I'm sitting on my hands."

"That's sort of what it's looking like."

The producer started toward him but the mayor gave him a polite smile. "In a minute." The man veered back into the shadows.

"So?" Kennedy asked his aide. He'd seen a cagey look behind the young man's Armani glasses.

"Time to call in some markers," Jefferies whispered. "I can do it. Surgically. I know how to handle it."

"I don't-"

"I don't want to do it this way either," Jefferies said fiercely, never one to glove his advice to his boss, "but we don't have any choice. You heard the commentary on WTGN."

Of course he had. The station, popular with about a half-million listeners in the metro area, had just aired an editorial about how, during his campaign, Kennedy had pledged to take back the streets of Washington from criminals and yet had been more than willing to pay terrorists a multimillion-dollar ransom today. The commentator, a surly, old journalist, had gone on to cite Kennedy's other campaign promise of cleaning up corruption in the District while being completely oblivious to, and possibly even participating in, the Board of Education school construction scandal.

Jefferies repeated, "We really don't have any choice, Jerry."

The mayor pondered this for a minute. As usual, the aide was right. Kennedy had hired the man because, as a white mayor, he needed a senior black aide. He didn't apologize for such tactical hiring. But he'd been astonished that the young man possessed a political sense that transcended grassroots community relations.

His aide said, "This is the time for hardball, Jerry. There's too much at stake."

"Okay, do what you have to." He didn't bother to add, Be careful. He knew Jefferies would.

"Two minutes," came a voice from above.

Kennedy thought to the Digger: Where are you? Where? He looked up at a darkened camera and stared at it as if he could see through the lens and cables to some TV set out there-see through the screen to the Digger himself. He thought to the killer, Who are you? And why did you and your partner pick my city to visit like the angel of death?

… in the spirit of peace, on this last day of the year, contact me so that we might come to some understanding… Please…

Jefferies bent close to the mayor's ear. "Remember," he whispered, waving his hand around the TV studio, "if he's listening, the killer, this might be the end of it. Maybe he'll go for the money and they'll get him."

Before Kennedy could respond the voice from on high called out, "One minute."

The Digger's got a new shopping bag.

All glossy red and Christmasy, covered with pictures of puppies wearing ribbons 'round their necks. The Digger bought the bag at Hallmark. It's the sort of bag he might be proud of though he isn't sure what proud means. He hasn't been sure of a lot of things since the bullet careened through his skull, burning away some of his spongy gray cells and leaving others.

Funny how that works. Funny how…

Funny…

The Digger's sitting in a comfy chair in his lousy motel, with a glass of water and the empty bowl of soup at his side.

He's watching TV.

Something is on the screen. It's a commercial. Like a commercial he remembers watching after the bullet tapped a hole above his eye and did a scorchy little dance in his crane crane cranium. (Somebody described the bullet that way. He doesn't remember who. Maybe his friend, the man who tells him things. Probably was.)

Something flickers on the TV screen. Brings back a funny memory, from a long time ago. He was watching a commercial-dogs eating dog food, puppies eating puppy food, like the puppies on the shopping bag. He was watching the commercial when the man who tells him things took the Digger's hand and they went for a long walk. He told him that when Ruth was alone… "You know Ruth?"

"I, uhm, know Ruth."

When Ruth was alone the Digger should break a mirror and find a piece of glass and put the glass in her neck.

"You mean-" The Digger stopped talking.

"I mean you should break the mirror and find a long piece of glass and you should put the glass in Ruth's neck. What do I mean?"

"I should break the mirror and find a long piece of glass and I should put the glass in her neck."

Some things the Digger remembers as if God Himself had written them on his brain.

"Good," said the man.

"Good," repeated the Digger. And he did what he was told. Which made the man who tells him things happy. Whatever that is.

Now the Digger is sitting with the puppy bag on his lap in his room at the motor lodge, kitchenettes free cable reasonable rates. Looking at his bowl of soup. The bowl is empty so he must not be hungry. He thinks he's thirsty so he takes a drink of water.

Another program comes on the TV. He reads the words, mutters them out loud, "'Special Report.' Hmm. Hmmm. This is…"

Click. This is…

Click.

A WPLT Special Report.

This is important. I should listen.

A man the Digger recognizes comes on the air. He's seen pictures of this man. It's…

Washington D.C. Mayor Gerald D. Kennedy. That's what it says on the screen.

The mayor's talking and the Digger listens.

"My fellow citizens, good afternoon. As you all know by now, a terrible crime was committed this morning in the Dupont Circle Metro station and a number of people tragically lost their lives. At this time the killer or killers are still at large. But I want to reassure you that our police force and the federal authorities are doing everything in their power to make sure there will be no recurrence of this incident.

"To the persons responsible for this carnage, I am asking you from my heart, please, please, contact me. We need to reestablish communication so that we can continue our dialog. On this, the last night of the year, let's put the violence behind us and work together so that there'll be no more deaths or injuries. We can-"

Boring…

The Digger shuts the TV off. He likes commercials for dog food with cute puppies much better. Car commercials too. Ohhhhhh, everyday people… The Digger calls his voice mail and punches in the code, one-two-two-five. The date of Christmas.

The woman, who doesn't sound like Pamela his wife but does sound like Ruth-before the glass went into her neck, of course-says that he has no new messages.

Which means it's time for him to do what the man who tells him things told him.

If you do what people tell you to do, that's a good thing. They'll like you. They'll stay with you forever.

They'll love you.

Whatever love is.

Merry Christmas, Pamela, I got this for you… And you got something for me! Oh my oh my… A present.

Click click.

What a pretty yellow flower in your hand, Pamela. Thank you for my coat. The Digger pulls this overcoat on now, maybe black, maybe blue. He loves his coat.

He carries his soup bowl into the kitchenette and puts it in the sink.

He wonders again why he hasn't heard from the man who tells him things. The man told him that he might not call but still the Digger feels a little ping in his mind and he's sorry he hasn't heard the man's voice. Am I sad? Hmmmm. Hmmmm.

He finds his leather gloves and they are very nice gloves, with ribs on the backs of the fingers. The smell makes him think of something in his past though he can't remember what. He wears latex gloves when he loads the bullets into the clips of his Uzi. But the rubber doesn't smell good. He wears his leather gloves when he opens doors and touches things that are near where he shoots the gun and watches people fall like leaves in a forest.

The Digger buttons his dark coat, maybe blue, maybe black.

He smells his gloves again.

Funny.

He puts the gun into the puppy bag and puts more bullets in the bag too.

Walking out the front door of his motel, the Digger closes the door after him. He locks it carefully, the way you're supposed to do. The Digger knows all about doing things you're supposed to do.

Put glass into a woman's neck, for instance. Buy your wife a present. Eat your soup. Find a bright new shiny shopping bag. One with puppies on it.

"Why puppies?" the Digger asked.

"Just because," said the man who tells him things.

Oh.

And that was the one he bought.

8

Parker Kincaid, sitting in the same gray swivel chair he himself had requisitioned from GSA many years ago, did a test that too few questioned document examiners performed.

He read the document.

And then he read it again. And a half-dozen times more. Parker put much faith in the content of the document itself to reveal things about the author. Once, he was asked to authenticate a letter supposedly sent by Abraham Lincoln to Jefferson Davis, in which Lincoln suggested that if the Confederacy surrendered he would agree to allow certain states to secede.

The shaken director of the American Association of Historians sent Parker the letter, which would have thrown U.S. history into turmoil. The scientists had already determined the paper had been manufactured in the 1860s and the ink used was iron gallide, contemporary to the era. The document showed time-appropriate absorption of the ink into the paper fibers and was written in what clearly seemed to be Lincoln's handwriting.

Yet Parker didn't even pull out his hand glass to check the starts and lifts of the penstrokes. He read it once and on his analysis report wrote, "This document is of dubious origin."

Which was the forensic document examiner's equivalent of a Bronx cheer.

The reason? The letter was signed "Abe Lincoln." The sixteenth president abhorred the name Abe and would never let it be used in reference to him, let alone would he sign an important document with the nickname. The forger was arrested, convicted and-as is often the case with the crime of forgery-sentenced to probation.

As he now read the extortion note yet again Parker took careful note of the unsub's syntax-the order of the sentences and sentence fragments-and his grammar, the general constructions he'd used in composition.

An image began to emerge of the soul of the man who'd written the note-the man lying cold and still six floors below them in the FBI morgue.

Tobe Geller called, "Here we go." He leaned forward. "It's the psycholinguistic profile from Quantico."

Parker gazed at the screen. He'd often used this type of computer analysis when he'd overseen the Document Division. The entire text of a threatening document-sentences, fragments, punctuation-is fed into a computer, which then analyzes the message and compares it with data in a huge "threat dictionary," which contains more than 250,000 words, and then a standard dictionary of millions of words. An expert, working with the computer, then compares the letter to others in the database and decides if they were written by the same person. Certain characteristics of the writer can also be determined this way.

Geller read, "'Psycholinguistic profile of unsub 12-31A (deceased), METSHOOT. Data suggest that above-referenced unknown subject was foreign-born and had been in this country for two to three years. He was poorly educated and probably spent no more than two years in what would correspond to an American high school. Probable IQ was 100, plus or minus 11 points. Threats contained in subject document do not match any known threats in current databases. However, the language is consistent with sincere threats made in both profit and terrorist crimes.'"

He printed out a copy and handed it to Parker.

"Foreign," Lukas said. "I knew it." She held up a crime scene photo of the unsub's body, taken at the scene where he'd been killed by the delivery truck. "Looks Middle European to me. Serb, Czech, Slovak."

"He called City Hall security," Len Hardy said. "Don't they tape incoming calls? We could see if he had an accent."

Parker said, "I'll bet he used a voice synthesizer, right?"

"That's right," Lukas confirmed. "It was just like the 'You've got mail' voice."

Geller said, "We should call IH."

The Bureau's International Homicide and Terrorism Division. But Parker crumpled up the psycholinguistic profile sheet and tossed it into a wastebasket.

"What-?" Lukas began.

From C. P. Ardell's fat throat came a sound that could only be called a guffaw.

Parker said, "The only thing they got right is that the threat is real. But we know that, don't we?"

Without looking up from the extortion note he said, "I'm not saying IH shouldn't be involved but I can say he wasn't foreign and he definitely was smart. I'd put his IQ at over one hundred sixty."

"Where do you get that?" Cage asked, waving at the note. "My grandkid writes better than that."

"I wish he had been stupid," Parker said. "It'd be a hell of a lot less scary." He tapped the picture of the unsub. "Sure, European descent but probably fourth generation. He was extremely smart, well educated, probably in a private school, and I think he spent a lot of time on a computer. His permanent address was someplace out of this area; he only rented here. Oh, and he was a classic sociopath."

Margaret Lukas's laugh was nearly a scoff. "Where do you get that?"

"It told me," Parker said simply. Tapping the note.

A forensic linguist, Parker had been analyzing documents without the benefit of psycholinguistic software for years-based on the phrases people chose and the sentences they constructed. Words alone can make all the difference in solving crimes. Some years ago Parker had testified at the trial of a young suspect arrested for murder. The suspect and his friend had been shoplifting beer in a convenience store when the clerk caught them and came at them with a baseball bat. The friend grabbed the bat and was threatening the clerk. The suspect-the boy on trial-had shouted, "Give it to him!" The friend had swung and killed the clerk.

The prosecutor claimed the sentence "Give it to him" meant "Hit him." The defense claimed the suspect had meant "Give the bat back." Parker had testified that "Give it to him" had, at one point in the history of American slang, meant to do harm-to shoot, stab or hit. But that usage had fallen by the wayside-along with words like "swell" and "hip." Parker's opinion was that the suspect was telling his friend to return the bat. The jury had believed Parker's testimony and though the boy was convicted of robbery he escaped the murder charge.

"But that's how foreigners talk," Cage pointed out. "'I am knowing.' 'Pay to me.' Remember the Lindbergh kidnapping? From the Academy?"

All FBI trainees at Quantico had heard the story in their forensic lectures. Before Bruno Hauptmann was arrested and charged with the Lindbergh baby abduction, document examiners in the Bureau deduced from the expressions in the ransom notes that the person who'd written them was a German immigrant who'd been in the United States for probably two or three years-which described Hauptmann accurately. The analysis helped narrow the search for the kidnapper, who was convicted primarily on the basis of handwriting comparisons between a known of his writing and the ransom notes.

"Well, let's go through it," Parker said and put the note on an old-fashioned overhead projector.

"Don't you want to scan it and put it on the video screen?" Tobe Geller asked.

"No," Parker answered peremptorily. "I don't like digital. We need to be as close to the original as we can get." He looked up and gave a fast smile. "We need to be in bed with it."

The note flashed onto a large screen mounted on one wall of the lab. The ashen document seemed to stand in front of them like a suspect under interrogation. Parker walked up to it, gazed at the large letters in front of him.

Mayor Kennedy -

The end is night. The Digger is loose and their is no way to stop him. He will kill again-at four, 8 and Midnight if you don't pay.

I am wanting $20 million dollars in cash, which you will put into a bag and leave it two miles south of Rt 66 on the West Side of the Beltway. In the middle of the Field. Pay to me the money by 12:00 hours. Only I am knowing how to stop The Digger. If you xxxx apprehend me, he will keep killing. If you kill me, he will keep killing.

If you don't think I'm real, some of the Diggers bullets were painted black. Only I know that.

As Parker spoke he pointed to parts of the note. "I am knowing' and 'pay to me' sound foreign, sure. The form of the verb 'to be' combined with a present participle is typical in a Slavic or Germanic Indo-European-root language. German or Czech or Polish, say. But the use of the preposition 'to' with 'me' is not something you'd find in those languages. They'd say it the way we do. 'Pay me.' That construction is more common in an Asian language. I think he just threw in random foreign-sounding phrases. Trying to fool us into thinking he's foreign. To lead us off."

"I don't know," Cage began.

"No, no," Parker persisted. "Look at how he tried to do it. Those quote foreign expressions are close together-as if he'd gotten the fake clues out of the way then moved on. If a foreign language was really his first he'd be more consistent. Look at the last sentence of the letter. He falls back to a typical English construction: 'Only I know that.' Not 'Only I am knowing that.' By the way, that's also why I think he spent time on a computer. I'm on-line a lot, browsing through rare document dealers' Web sites and newsgroups. A lot of them are foreign but they write in English. You see bastardizations of English just like these all the time."

"I agree with that, about computers," Lukas told Parker. "We don't know for sure but it's likely that he learned how to pack silencers and rig the Uzi for full auto on the Web. That's how everybody learns things like that nowadays."

"But what about the twenty-four-hour clock?" Hardy asked. "He demanded the ransom by 'twelve hundred hours.' That's European."

"Another red herring. He doesn't refer to it that way earlier-when he writes about when the Digger's going to attack again. There, he says, 'Four, eight and Midnight.'"

"Well," C. P. said, "if he's not foreign he's got to be stupid. Look at all the mistakes." To Lukas he said, "Sounds just like those rednecks we took down in Manassas Park."

Parker responded, "All fake."

"But," Lukas protested, "the very first line: The end is night. 'He means The end is nigh.' He-"

"Oh," Parker continued, "but that's not a mistake you'd logically make. People say, 'Once and a while,' even though the correct expression is 'Once in a while,' because there's a certain logic to using the conjunction 'and' and not the preposition ' in. ' But 'The end is night' makes no sense, whatever his level of education."

"What about the misspellings?" Hardy asked. "And the capitalization and punctuation mistakes?" The detective's eyes were scanning the letter carefully.

Parker said, "Oh, there're plenty more mistakes than those. Look how he uses the dollar sign and the word 'dollars.' A redundancy. And when he's talking about the money he's got an improper object in the sentence." Parker touched a portion of the screen, moving his finger along the words:

I am wanting $20 million dollars in cash, which you will put into a bag and leave it two miles south of Rt 66 on the West Side of the Beltway.

"See, he says, 'leave it,' but the object 'it' isn't necessary. Only that isn't the sort of mistake that makes sense-most grammatical errors are reflections of errors in speaking. And in everyday vernacular we just don't add unnecessary direct objects. If anything we're lazy-we tend to streamline our speech and leave out words.

"And the misspellings?" Parker continued. He paced slowly in front of the projected note and the letters moved across his face and shoulder like black insects. "Look at the sentence 'their is no way to stop him.' 'Their' is a homonym-words that are spelled differently but are pronounced the same. It should be t-h-e-r-e. But most people only make those mistakes when they write quickly-usually when they're on a computer. Their mind sends them the spelling phonetically not visually. The second-highest incident of homonymic mistakes is by people typing on typewriters. But with handwriting they're rare.

"The capitalizations?" He glanced at Hardy. "You only find erroneous uppercasing when there's some logical basis for it-concepts like art or love or hate. Sometimes with occupations or job titles. No, he's just trying to make us think he's stupid. But he isn't."

"The note tells you that?" Lukas asked, staring as if she were seeing an extortion note entirely different from the one Parker was studying.

"You bet," the document examiner responded. He laughed. "His other mistake was not making some mistakes he should have. For instance, he uses a comma in adverbial clauses correctly. A clause beginning a sentence should end with a comma. The 'if' clause." He touched it on the wall screen.

If you kill me, he will keep killing.

"But with a clause at the end of the sentence you don't need one."

He will kill again-at four, 8 and Midnight if you don't pay.

"He also used a comma before 'which.'"

I am wanting $20 million dollars in cash, which you will put into a bag…

"That's a standard rule of grammar-a comma before the nonrestrictive 'which' and not before the restrictive 'that'-but generally only professional writers and people who've gone to good schools follow it anymore."

"There oughta be a comma before 'which'?" C. P. grumbled. "Who cares?"

Parker silently responded, We do. Because it's little things like this that lead us to the truth.

Hardy said, "It looks like he tried to spell 'apprehend' and couldn't get it right. What do you make of that?"

"Looks like it," Parker said. "But you know what's under the mark-out there? I scanned it with an infrared viewer."

"What?"

"Squiggles."

"Squiggles?" Lukas asked.

"A term of art," Parker said wryly. "He didn't write anything. He just wanted us to think he was having trouble spelling the word."

"But why'd he go to all this trouble to make us think he's stupid?" Hardy asked.

"To trick us into looking for either a stupid American or a slightly less stupid foreigner. It's another smokescreen." Parker added, "And to keep us underestimating him. Of course he's smart. Just look at the money drop."

"The drop?" Lukas asked.

C. P. asked, "You mean at Gallows Road? Why's that smart?"

"Well…" Parker glanced up, then from one to the other of the agents. "The helicopters."

"What helicopters?" Hardy asked.

Parker frowned. "Aren't you checking out helicopter charters?"

"No," Lukas said. "Why should we?"

Parker remembered a rule from his days working at the Bureau. Never assume a single thing. "The field where he wanted the money dropped was next to a hospital, right?"

Geller was nodding. "Fairfax Hospital."

"Shit," Lukas spat out. "It has a helipad."

"So?" Hardy asked.

Lukas shook her head, angry with herself. "The unsub picked the place so a surveillance team would get used to incoming choppers. He'd chartered one himself and was going to set down, pick up the money and take off again. Probably fly at treetop level to a getaway car."

"I never thought about that," Hardy said bitterly.

"None of us did," C. P. said.

Cage added, "I've got a buddy at the FAA. I'll have him check it out."

Parker glanced at the clock. "No response from Kennedy's news conference?"

Lukas made a call. She spoke to someone then hung up.

"Six calls. All cranks. None of them knew anything about the painted bullets so they were bogus. We've got their names and numbers. Nail 'em later for interference with law enforcement activity."

"You think the unsub wasn't from around here?" Hardy asked Parker.

"Right. If there was any chance he thought we could compare his handwriting with public records in the area he would've disguised his writing or used cutout letters. Which he didn't. So he's not from the District, Virginia or Maryland."

The door swung open. It was Timothy, the runner who'd brought the note. "Agent Lukas? I've got the results from the coroner."

Parker thought, It's about time.

She took the report and as she read it Cage asked, "Parker, you said he was a sociopath. How do you figure that?"

"Because," Parker said absently, his eyes on Lukas, "who'd do something like this except a sociopath?"

Lukas finished and handed it to Hardy. He asked, "You want me to read it?"

"Go ahead," she answered.

Parker noticed that the young man's sobriety had lifted, maybe because he was, for a moment, part of the team.

The detective cleared his throat. "'White male approximately forty-five years old. Six foot two. One hundred eighty-seven pounds. No distinguishing. No jewelry except a Casio watch-with multiple alarms,'" Hardy looked up. "Get this. Set to go off at four, eight and midnight." Back to the report: "'Wearing unbranded blue jeans, well worn. Polyester windbreaker. JCPenney workshirt, also faded. Jockey underwear. Cotton socks, Wal-Mart running shoes. A hundred twelve dollars in cash, some change.'"

Parker stared at the letters on the screen in front of them as if the words Hardy was reading described not the unsub but the note itself.

"'Minor trace elements. Brick dust in hair, clay dust under nails. Stomach contents reveal coffee, milk, bread and beef-probably inexpensive grade of steak-consumed within the past eight hours.' That's it." Hardy read another METSHOOT memo, attached to the coroners report. "No leads with the delivery truck-the one that hit him." Hardy glanced at Parker. "It's so frustrating-we've got the perp downstairs and he can't tell us a damn thing."

Parker glanced at another copy of the Major Crimes Bulletin, the one he'd seen earlier. About the firebombing of Gary Moss's house. The austere description of the near deaths of the man's daughters had shaken Parker badly. Seeing that bulletin he'd very nearly turned around and walked out of the lab.

Parker shut off the projector, put the note back on the examining table.

Cage looked at his watch. He pulled on his coat. "Well, we've got forty-five minutes. We better get going."

"What do you mean?" Lukas asked.

The senior agent handed her her windbreaker and Parker his leather jacket. He took it without thinking.

"Out there." He nodded toward the door. "To help Jerry Bakers team check out hotels."

Parker was shaking his head. "No. We have to keep going here." He looked at Hardy. "You're right, Len. The unsub can't tell us anything. But the note still can. It can tell us a lot."

"They need everybody they can get," Cage persisted.

There was silence for a moment.

Parker stood with his head down, opposite Lukas, across the brightly lit examining table, the stark white extortion note between them. He looked up, said evenly, "I don't think we'll be able to find him in time. Not in forty-five minutes. I hate to say it but this is the best use of our resources-to stay here. Keep going with the note."

C. P. said, "You mean you're just going to write 'em off? The victims?"

He paused. Then said, "I guess that's what I mean. Yes."

Cage asked Lukas, "Whatta you think?"

She glanced at Parker. Their eyes met. She said to Cage, "I agree with Parker. We stay here. We keep going."

9

From the corner of her eyes Lukas saw Len Hardy, standing motionless. After a moment he smoothed his hair, picked up his coat and walked over to her.

Right as rain…

"Let me go at least," he said to her. "To help with the hotels."

She looked at his earnest young face. He kneaded his trench coat in his large right hand, the nails perfectly trimmed and scrubbed. He was a man, she had concluded, who found comfort in details.

"I can't. I'm sorry."

"Agent Cage is right. They'll need everybody they can get."

Lukas glanced at Parker Kincaid but he was lost in the document once more, easing it carefully from its clear acetate shroud.

"Come on over here, Len," Lukas said, gesturing him into the corner of the document lab. Cage was the only one who noticed and he said nothing. In his long tenure at the Bureau the senior agent would have had plenty of talks with underlings and knew that the process was as delicate as interrogating suspects. More delicate-because these were people you had to live with day after day. And whom you might have to depend on to watch your back. Lukas was grateful Cage was giving her rein to handle Hardy the way she felt best.

"Talk to me," she said. "What's eating you?"

"I want to do something," the detective replied. "I know I'm second-string here. I'm from the District. I'm Research and Stats… But I want to help."

"You're only here as liaison. That's all you're authorized for. This is a federal operation. It's not task-forced."

He gave a sour laugh. "Liaison? I'm here as a stenographer. You and I both know that."

Of course she knew it. But that wouldn't have stopped Lukas from giving him a more active role if she thought he'd be valuable elsewhere. Lukas was not one who lived her life solely by regs and procedures and if Hardy had been the world's best sniper she'd kick him out the door and onto one of Jerry Baker's shooting teams in an instant, whatever the rules dictated. After a moment she said, "All right, answer me a question."

"Sure."

"Why are you here?" she asked.

"Why?" He frowned.

"You volunteered, didn't you?" Lukas asked.

"Yeah, I did."

"Because of your wife, right?"

"Emma?" He tried to look confounded but Lukas could see right through it. His eyes fell to the floor.

"I understand, Len. But do yourself a favor. Take your notes, kick around ideas with us and stay out of the line of fire. Then when this prick's tagged go on home."

"But it's… hard," he said, avoiding her eyes.

"Being home?"

He nodded.

"I know it is," Lukas answered sincerely.

He clung to the trenchcoat like a child's security blanket.

In fact if it had been anybody but Len Hardy who'd shown up as the District police liaison she would have kicked them right back to police headquarters. She had no patience with ass covering or interagency turf wars and no time to coddle employees of a corrupt, nearly bankrupt city. But she knew a secret of Hardy's life-that his wife was in a coma, the result of an accident when her Jeep Cherokee had skidded off the road in a rainstorm near Middleburg, Virginia, and hit a tree.

Hardy had been to the District field office several times to compile statistical data on crime in the metro area and had gotten to know Betty, Lukas's assistant. She'd thought at first that the man was trying to pick up the attractive woman but had then overheard him talking emotionally about his wife and her injury.

He didn't have many friends, it seemed, just like Lukas herself. She'd gotten to know him slightly and had learned more about Emma. Several times they'd had coffee in the Policemen's Memorial Park, next to the field office. He'd opened up slightly but, also like Lukas, he kept his emotions tightly packed away.

Knowing his tragedy, knowing how hard it would be for him to sit home alone on a holiday, she had welcomed him onto the team and resolved to cut him some slack tonight. But Margaret Lukas would never jeopardize an operation for the emotional health of anyone.

Right as rain…

He now told her, "I can't sit still. I want a piece of this guy."

No, she thought. What he wants is a piece of God or Fate or whatever force of nature broke Emma Hardy's life, and her husband's, into a thousand pieces.

"Len, I can't have somebody in the field who's…" She looked for a benign word. "Distracted." "Reckless" would have been closer and "suicidal" was what she meant.

Hardy nodded. He was angry. His lip trembled. But he dropped his coat on a chair and returned to a desk.

Poor man, she thought. But seeing how his intelligence, his sense of propriety and perfection shone through his personal anguish, she knew he'd be all right. He'd survive this terrible time. Oh, he'd be changed, yes, but he'd be changed the way iron is changed into steel in a refinery's white-hot coals.

Changed…

The way Lukas herself had.

If you looked at Jacqueline Margaret Lukas's birth certificate, the document would reveal that she'd been born on the last day of November 1963. But in her heart she knew she was just over five years old, having been born the day she graduated from the FBI Academy.

She recalled a book she'd read a long time ago, a children's story. The Wyckham Changeling. The picture of a happy elf on the cover didn't hint at the eeriness of the story itself. The book was about an elf who'd sneak into homes in the middle of the night and switch babies-kidnap the human child and leave a changeling-an elfin baby in its place. The story was about two parents who discover that their daughter had been switched and go on a quest to find her.

Lukas remembered reading the book, curled up on a couch in her comfortable living room in Stafford, Virginia, near Quantico, postponing going to Safeway because of an unexpected blizzard. She'd been compelled to finish it-yes, the parents had found the girl and traded the elf baby back for her-but she had shivered at the unpleasant aftertaste of the book and had thrown it out.

She'd forgotten about the story until she'd graduated from the Academy and been assigned to the Washington field office. Then one morning, walking to work, her Colt Python snug on her hip, a case file under her arm, she realized: That's what I am-a changeling. Jackie Lukas had been a part-time librarian for the Bureau's Quantico research facility, an amateur clothing designer who could whip up outfits for her friends and their children over a weekend. She'd been a quilter, needlepointer, wine collector (and drinker too), a consistently top finisher in local five-K races. But that woman was long gone, replaced by Special Agent Margaret Lukas, a woman who excelled in criminalistics, investigative techniques, the properties of C4 and Semtex explosives, the care and handling of confidential informants.

"An FBI agent?" her perplexed father had asked during a visit to her parents' Pacific Heights townhouse in San Francisco. She'd gone home to break the news to them. "You're going to be an agent? Not like with a gun? You mean, you'll work at a desk or something."

"With a gun. But I'll bet they give me a desk too."

"I don't get it," the burly man, a retired loan officer for Bank of America, said. "You were such a good student."

She laughed at the apparent non sequitur though she knew exactly what her father meant. An honor student at both St. Thomas High in Russian Hill and Stanford. The lean girl, who accepted dates too rarely and raised her hand in class too often, was destined for high places in academia or on Wall Street. No, no, he didn't mind that Jackie was going to be toting guns and tackling killers; it was that she wouldn't be using her mind.

"But it's the FBI, Dad. They're the thinking cops."

"Yeah, I guess. But… is this what you want to do?"

No, it was what she had to do. There was a gulf of a difference between the two verbs, wanted and had. But she didn't know if he'd understand that. So she said a simple "Yes."

"Then that's good enough for me." Then he turned to his wife and said, "Our girl's got mettle. You know what mettle is? M-e-t-t-l-e."

"I know," Lukas's mother called from the kitchen, "I do crosswords, remember. But you'll be careful, Jackie? Promise me you'll be careful."

As if she were about to cross a busy street.

"I'll be careful, Mom."

"Good. I made coq au vin for dinner. You like that, right?"

And Jackie hugged her mother and her father and two days later flew back to Washington, D.C., to change into Margaret.

After graduating she was assigned to the field office. She got to know the District, got to work with Cage, who was as good a changeling father as she could've asked for, and must have done something right because last year she was promoted to assistant special agent in charge. And now, with her boss photographing monkeys and lizards in a Brazilian rainforest, she was running the biggest case to hit Washington, D.C., in years.

She now watched Len Hardy jotting his notes in the corner of the lab and thought, He'll come through this okay.

Margaret Lukas knew that it could happen.

Just ask a changeling…

"Hey," a man's voice intruded on her thoughts.

She looked across the room and realized that Parker Kincaid was speaking to her.

"We've done the linguistics," he said. "I want to do the physical analysis of the note now. Unless you've got something else in mind."

"This's your inning, Parker," she said. And sat down beside him.

First, he examined the paper the note was written on.

It measured 6 by 9 inches, the sort intended for bread-and-butter notes. Paper size has varied throughout history but 8½ by 11 has been standard in America for nearly two hundred years. Six by 9 was the second-most-common size. Too common. The size alone would tell Parker nothing about its source.

As for composition of the paper he noted that it was cheap and had been manufactured by mechanical pulping, not the kraft-chemical pulping-method that produced finer-quality papers.

"The paper won't help us much," he announced finally. "It's generic. Nonrecycled, high-acid, coarse pulp with minimal optical brighteners and low luminescence. Sold in bulk by paper manufacturers and jobbers to retail chains. They package it as a house brand of stationery. There's no watermark and no way to trace it back to a particular manufacturer or wholesaler and then forward to a single point of sale." He sighed. "Let's look at the ink."

He lifted the note carefully and placed it under one of the lab's compound microscopes. He examined it first at ten- then at fifty-power magnification. From the indentation the tip of the pen made in the paper, the occasional skipping and the uneven color, Parker could tell that the pen had been a very cheap ballpoint.

"Probably an AWI-American Writing Instruments. The bargain-basement thirty-nine-cent-er." He looked at his teammates. No one grasped the significance.

"And?" Lukas asked.

"That's a bad thing," he explained emphatically. "Impossible to trace. They're sold in just about every discount and convenience store in America. Just like the paper. And AWI doesn't use tags."

"Tags?" Hardy asked.

Parker explained that some manufacturers put a chemical tag in their inks to identify the products and to help trace where and when they'd been manufactured. American Writing Instruments, however, didn't do this.

Parker started to pull the note out from under the microscope. He stopped, noticing something curious. Part of the paper was faded. He didn't think it was a manufacturing flaw. Optical brighteners have been added to paper for nearly fifty years and it's unusual, even in cheap paper like this, for there to be an unevenness in the brilliance.

"Could you hand me the PoliLight?" he asked C. P. Ardell.

"The what?"

"There."

The big agent picked up one of the boxy ALS units-an alternative light source. It luminesced a variety of substances that were invisible to the human eye.

Parker pulled on a pair of goggles and clicked on the yellow-green light.

"It gonna irradiate me or anything?" the big agent said, only partly joking, it seemed.

Parker ran the PoliLight wand over the envelope. Yes, the right third was lighter than the rest. He did the same with the note and found there was a lighter L-shaped pattern on the top and right side of the paper.

This was interesting. He studied it again.

"See how the corner's faded? I think it's because the paper-and part of the envelope too-were bleached by the sun."

"Where, at his house or the store?" Hardy asked.

"Could be either," Parker answered. "But given the cohesion of the pulp I'd guess the paper was sealed until fairly recently. That would suggest the store."

"But," Lukas said, "it'd have to be a place that had a southern exposure."

Yes, Parker thought. Good. He hadn't thought of that.

"Why?" Hardy asked.

"Because it's winter," Parker pointed out. "There's not enough sunlight to bleach paper from any other direction."

Parker paced again. It was a habit of his. When Thomas Jefferson's wife died, his oldest daughter, Martha, wrote that her father paced "almost incessantly day and night, only lying down occasionally, when nature was completely exhausted." When Parker worked on a document or was wrestling with a particularly difficult puzzle the Whos often chided him for "walking in circles again."

The layout of the lab was coming back to him. He walked to a cabinet, opened it and pulled out an examining board and some sheets of collecting paper. Holding the note by its corner, he ran a camel-hair brush over the surface to dislodge trace elements. There was virtually nothing. He wasn't surprised. Paper is one of the most absorbent of materials; it retains a lot of substances from the places it's been but generally they remain firmly bound into the fibers.

Parker took a large hypodermic syringe from his attaché case and punched several small disks of ink and paper out of the note and the envelope. "You know how it works?" he asked Geller, nodding at the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer in the corner.

"Oh, sure," he said. "I took one apart once. Just for the fun of it."

"Separate runs-for the note and the envelope," Parker said, handing him the samples.

"You got it."

"What's it do?" C. P. asked again. Undercover and tactical agents generally don't have much patience for lab work and know little about forensic science.

Parker explained. The GC/MS separated chemicals found at crime scenes into their component parts and then identified them. The machine rumbled alarmingly-in effect it burned the samples and analyzed the resulting vapors.

Parker brushed more trace off the note and envelope and this time managed to collect some material. He mounted the slides on two different Leitz compound scopes. He peered into one, then the other, turned the focusing knobs, which moved with the slow sensuality of oiled, precision mechanisms.

He stared at what he saw then looked up, said to Geller, "I need to digitize images of the trace in here." Nodding at a microscope. "How do we do that?"

"Ah, piece of proverbial cake." The young agent plugged optical cables into the base of the microscopes. They ran to a large gray box, which sprouted cables of its own. These cables Geller plugged into one of the dozen computers in the lab. He clicked it on and a moment later an image of the particles of trace came on the screen. He called up a menu.

Said to Parker, "Just hit this button. They're stored as JPEG files."

"And I can transfer them on e-mail?"

"Just tell me who they're going to."

"In a minute-I'll have to get the address. First, I want to do different magnifications."

Parker and Geller captured three images from each microscope, stored them on the hard drive.

Just as he finished, the GC/MS beeped and data began to appear on the screen of the computer dedicated to the unit.

Lukas said, "I've got a couple of examiners standing by in Materials and Elemental." These were the Bureaus two trace evidence analysis departments.

"Send 'em home," Parker said. "There's somebody else I want to use."

"Who?" Lukas asked, frowning.

"He's in New York."

"N.Y.P.D.?" Cage asked.

"Was. Civilian now."

"Why not somebody here?" Lukas asked.

"Because," Parker answered, "my friend's the best criminalist in the country. He's the one set up PERT."

"Our evidence team?" C. P. asked.

"Right." Parker looked up a number and made a call.

"But," Hardy pointed out, "it's New Year's Eve. He's probably out."

"No," Parker said. "He hardly ever goes out."

"Not even on holidays?"

"Not even on holidays."

"Parker Kincaid," the voice in the speaker phone said. "I wondered if someone from down there might be calling in."

"You heard about our problem, did you?" Parker asked Lincoln Rhyme.

"Ah, I hear everything," he said, and Parker remembered that Rhyme could bring off dramatic delivery like no one else. "Don't I, Thom? Don't I hear everything? Parker, you remember Thom, don't you? Long-suffering Thom?"

"Hi, Parker."

"Hi, Thom. He giving you grief?"

"Of course I am," Lincoln said gruffly. "I thought you were retired, Parker."

"I was. Until about two hours ago."

"Funny about this business, isn't it? The way they never let us rest in peace."

Parker had met Rhyme once. He was a handsome man, about Parker's age, dark hair. He was also paralyzed from the neck down. He consulted out of his townhouse on Central Park West. "I enjoyed your course, Parker," Rhyme said. "Last year."

Parker remembered Rhyme, sitting in a fancy candy-apple-red wheelchair in the front row of the lecture hall at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The subject was forensic linguistics.

Rhyme continued, "Do you know we got a conviction because of you?"

"I didn't."

"There was a witness at a killing. He couldn't see the killer; he was hiding. But he heard the perp say something to the vic just before he shot him. He said, 'If I were you, you prick, I'd say my prayers.' Then-this is interesting, Parker, are you listening?"

"You bet." When Lincoln Rhyme spoke, you listened.

"Then during the interrogation at police HQ he said to one of the detectives, 'If I were going to confess it wouldn't be to you.' You know how we got him?"

"How, Lincoln?"

Rhyme laughed like a happy teenager. "Because of the subjunctive voice! 'If I were you.' Not 'If I was you.' 'If I were going to confess.' Statistically only seven percent of the general population uses the subjunctive voice anymore. Did you know that?"

"As a matter of fact I do," Parker said. "That was enough for a conviction?"

"No. But it was enough for a confession as part of a plea bargain," Rhyme announced. "Now let me guess. You've got this unsub shooting people in the subway and your only clue to him is the-what? A threat letter? An extortion note?"

"How's he know that?" Lukas asked.

"Another country heard from!" Rhyme called. "To answer the question: I know that there's a note involved because it's the only logical reason for Parker Kincaid to be calling me… Who-excuse me, Parker-whom did I just answer?"

"Special Agent Margaret Lukas," she said.

"She's ASAC at the District field office. She's running the case."

"Ah, the Bureau of course. Fred Dellray was just over here to visit," Rhyme said. "You know Fred? Manhattan office?"

"I know Fred," Lukas answered. "He ran some of our undercover people last year. An arms sale sting."

Rhyme continued. "So, an unsub, a note. Now, talk to me, one of you."

Lukas said, "You're right. It's an extortion scheme. We tried to pay but the primary unsub was killed. Now we're pretty sure his partner-the shooter-may keep going."

"Oh, that's tricky. That's a problem. You've processed the body?"

"Nothing," Lukas told him. "No ID, no significant trace."

"And my belated Christmas present is a piece of the case."

"I GC'd a bit of the envelope and the letter-"

"Good for you, Parker. Burn up the evidence. They'll want to save it for trial but you burn up what you have to."

"I want to send you the data. And some pictures of the trace. Can I e-mail it all to you?"

"Yes, yes, of course. What magnification?"

"Ten, twenty and fifty."

"Good. When's the deadline?"

"Every four hours, starting at four, going to midnight."

"Four P.M.? Today?"

"That's right."

"Lord."

She continued, "We have a lead to the four o'clock hit. We think he's going after a hotel. But we don't know anything more specific than that."

"Four, eight and twelve. Your unsub was a man with a dramatic flair."

"Should that be part of his profile?" Hardy asked, jotting more notes. Parker supposed the man would probably spend all weekend writing up a report for the mayor, the police chief and the City Council-a report that would probably go unread for months. Maybe forever.

"Who's that?" Rhyme barked.

"Len Hardy, sir. District P.D."

"You do psych profiling?"

"Actually I'm with Research. But I've taken profiling courses at the Academy and done postgraduate psych work at American University."

"Listen," Rhyme said to him, "I don't believe in psych profiles. I believe in evidence. Psychology is slippery as a fish. Look at me. I'm an oven of neuroses. Right, Amelia?… My friend here's not talking but she agrees. All right. We've got to move on this. Send me your goodies. I'll get back to you as soon as I can."

Parker took down Rhyme's e-mail address and handed it to Geller. A moment later, the agent had uploaded the images and the chemical profiles from the chromatograph/spectrometer.

"He's the best criminalist in the country?" Cage asked skeptically.

But Parker didn't respond. He was gazing at the clock. Somewhere in the District of Columbia those people that he and Margaret Lukas were willing to sacrifice had only thirty minutes left to live.

10

This hotel is beautiful, this hotel is nice.

The Digger walks inside, with puppies on his shopping bag, and no one notices him.

He walks into the bar and buys a sparkling water from the bartender. It tickles his nose. Funny… He drinks it down and leaves money and a tip, the way the man who tells him things told him to do.

In the lobby the crowds are milling. There're functions here. Office parties. Lots of decorations. More of those fat babies in New Year's banners. My, aren't they… aren't they… aren't they cute?

And here's Old Man Time, looking like the Grim Reaper.

He and Pamela… click… and Pamela went to some parties in places like this.

The Digger buys a USA Today. He sits in the lobby and reads it, the puppy bag at his side.

He looks at his watch.

Reading the articles.

USA Today is a nice newspaper. It tells him many interesting things. The Digger notices the weather around the nation. He likes the color of the high-pressure fronts. He reads about sports. He thinks he used to do some sports a long time ago. No, that was his friend, William. His friend enjoyed sports. Some other friends too. So did Pamela.

The paper has lots of pictures of nice basketball players. They look very big and strong and when they dunk balls they fly through the air like whirligigs. The Digger decides he must not have played sports. He isn't sure why Pamela or William or anyone would want to. It's more fun to eat soup and watch TV.

A young boy walks past him and pauses.

He looks down at the bag. The Digger pulls the top of the bag closed so the boy won't see the Uzi that's about to kill fifty or sixty people.

The boy is maybe nine. He has dark hair and it's parted very carefully. He's wearing a suit that doesn't fit well. The sleeves are too long. And a happy red Christmas tie bunches up his collar awkwardly. He's looking at the bag.

At the puppies.

The Digger looks away from him.

"If anybody looks at your face, kill them. Remember that."

I remember.

But he can't help looking at the boy. The boy smiles. The Digger doesn't smile. (He recognizes a smile but he doesn't know what it is exactly.)

The boy, with his brown eyes and the little bit of a smile on his face, is fascinated with the bag and the puppies. Their happy ribbons. Like the ribbons the fat New Year's babies wear. Green and gold ribbons on the bag. The Digger looks at the bag too.

"Honey, come on," a woman calls. She's standing beside a pot of poinsettias, as red as the rose Pamela wore on her dress at Christmas last year.

The boy glances once again at the Digger's face. The Digger knows he should look away but he just stares back. Then the boy walks to the crowd of people around tables filled with little dots of food. Lots of crackers and cheese and shrimps and carrots.

No soup, the Digger notices.

The boy walks up to a girl who is probably his sister. She's about thirteen.

The Digger looks at his watch. Twenty minutes to four. He takes the cell phone out of his pocket and carefully punches the buttons to call his voice mail. He listens. "You have no new messages." He shuts the phone off.

He lifts the bag onto his lap and looks out over the crowd. The boy is in a blue blazer and his sister is wearing a pink dress. It has a sash on it.

The Digger clutches the puppy bag.

Eighteen minutes.

The boy is standing at the food table. The girl is talking to an older woman.

More people enter the hotel. They walk right past the Digger, with his bag and his nice newspaper that shows the weather all across the nation.

But no one notices him.

The phone in the document lab began ringing.

As always, when a telephone chirped and he was someplace without the Whos, Parker felt an instant of low-voltage panic though if one of the children had had an accident Mrs. Cavanaugh would of course have called his cell phone and not the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He glanced at the caller ID box and saw a New York number. He snagged the receiver. "Lincoln. Its Parker. We've got fifteen minutes. Any clues?"

The criminalist's voice was troubled. "Oh, not much, Parker. Speaker me… Don't you linguists hate it when people verb nouns?"

Parker hit the button.

"Somebody grab a pen," Rhyme called. "I'll tell you what I've got. Are you ready? Are you ready?"

"We're ready, Lincoln," Parker said.

"The most prominent trace embedded in the letter is granite dust."

"Granite," Cage echoed.

"There's evidence of shaving and chiseling on the stone. And some polishing too."

"What do you think it's from?" Parker asked.

"I don't know. How would I know? I don't know Washington. I know New York."

"And if it were in New York?" Lukas asked.

Rhyme rattled off, "New building construction, old building renovation or demolition, bathroom, kitchen and threshold manufacturers, tombstone makers, sculptors' studios, landscapers… The list's endless. You need somebody who knows the lay of the land there. Understand? That's not you, is it, Parker?"

"Nope. I-"

The criminalist interrupted him. "-know documents. You know unsubs too. But not geography."

"That's true."

Parker glanced at Lukas. She was gazing at the clock. She looked back at him with a face devoid of emotion. Cage had mastered the shrug; Lukas's waiting state was the stony mask.

Rhyme continued. "There're also traces of red clay and dust from old brick. Then there's sulfur. And a lot of carbon-ash and soot, consistent with cooking meat or burning trash that has meat in it. Now-the data from the envelope showed a little of the same trace substances I found on the letter. But also something more-significant amounts of salt water, kerosene, refined oil, crude oil, butter-"

"Butter?" Lukas asked.

"That's what I said," Rhyme groused. He added sourly, "Don't know the brand. And there's some organic material not inconsistent with mollusks. So, all the evidence points to Baltimore."

"Baltimore?" Hardy asked.

From Lukas: "How do you figure that?"

"The seawater, kerosene, fuel oil and crude oil mean it's a port. Right, right? What else could it be? Well, the port nearest to D.C. that does major crude oil transfer is Baltimore. And Thom tells me-my man knows food-that there are tons of seafood restaurants right on the harbor. Berthas. He keeps talking about Berthas Mussels."

"Baltimore," Lukas muttered. "So he wrote the note at home, had dinner on the waterfront the night before. He came to D.C. to drop it off at City Hall. Then-"

"No, no, no," Rhyme said.

"What?" Lukas asked.

Parker, the puzzle master, said, "The evidence is fake. He staged it, didn't he, Lincoln?"

"Just like a Broadway play," Rhyme said, sounding pleased Parker had caught on.

"How do you figure?" Cage asked.

"There's a detective I've been working with-Roland Bell. N.Y.P.D. Good man. He's from North Carolina. He's got this expression. 'Seems a little kind of too quick and too easy.' Well, all that trace… There's too much of those elements. Way too much. The unsub got his hands on some trace and impregnated the envelope. Just to send us off track."

"And the trace on the letter?" Hardy asked.

"Oh, no, that's legit. The amount of material in the fibers was consistent with ambient substances. No, no, the letter'll tell us where he lived. But the envelope… ah, the envelope tells us something else."

Parker said, "That there was more to him than meets the eye."

"Exactly," the criminalist confirmed.

Parker summarized. "So, where he lived there's the granite, clay dust, brick dust, sulfur, soot and ash from cooking or burning meat."

"All that dust-might be a demolition site," Cage said.

"That seems the most likely," Hardy said.

"Likely? How could it be likely?" Rhyme asked. "It's a possibility. But then isn't everything a possibility until one alternative's proven true? Think about that…" Rhyme's voice faded slightly as he spoke to someone in the room with him, "No, Amelia, I'm not being pompous. I'm being accurate… Thom! Thom! Some more single-malt. Please."

"Mr. Rhyme," Lukas said, "Lincoln… This is all good and we appreciate it. But we've got ten minutes until the shooter's next attack. You have any thoughts about which hotel the unsub might've picked?"

Rhyme answered with a gravity that chilled Parker. "I'm afraid I don't," he said. "You're on your own there."

"All right."

Parker said, "Thank you, Lincoln."

"Good luck to all of you. Good luck." With a click the criminalist disconnected the phone.

Parker looked over the notes. Granite dust… sulfur… Oh, they were wonderful clues, solid clues. But the team didn't have nearly enough time to follow up on them. Not before 4 P.M. Maybe not even before eight.

He pictured the shooter standing in a crowd of people, his gun ready. About to pull the trigger. How many would die this time?

How many families?

How many children like LaVelle Williams?

Children like Robby and Stephie?

Everyone in the half-darkened lab remained silent, as if paralyzed by their inability to see through the shroud obscuring the truth.

Parker glanced at the note again and had a feeling that it was mocking him.

Then Lukas's phone rang. She listened and her mouth blossomed into the first genuine smile Parker had seen on her face that day.

"Got him!" she announced.

"What?" Parker asked.

"Two of Jerry's boys just found some rounds of the black-painted shells under a chair at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. Every available agent and cop're on their way there."

11

"Is it crowded?"

"The hotel?" Cage said in response to Parker's question, looking up from his own cell phone. "Hell, yes. Our man says the lobby bar's full-some kind of reception. Then in the banquet rooms downstairs there're four New Year's Eve parties going on. Lot of companies're closing up early. Must be a thousand people there."

Parker thought of what an automatic weapon could do in a closed space like a banquet room.

Tobe Geller had patched the operation radio frequency through speakers. In the lab the team could hear Jerry Baker's voice. "This is New Year's Leader Two to all units. Code Twelve at the Four Seasons on M Street. Code Twelve. Unsub is on premises, no description. Believed armed with a fully auto Uzi and suppressor. You are green-lighted. Repeat, you are green-lighted."

Meaning they were free to shoot without making a surrender demand.

Dozens of troops would be inside the hotel in minutes. Would they catch him? Even if not, Parker figured, they might spook him into fleeing without harming anyone.

But then they might catch him. Arrest him or, if he resisted, kill him. And the horror would be over; Parker could return home to his children.

What were they doing now? he wondered.

Was his son still troubled by the Boatman?

Oh, Robby, how can I tell you not to worry? The Boatman's been dead for years. But look here, now, tonight, we've got another Boatman, who's even worse. That's the thing about evil, son. It crawls out of its grave again and again and there's no way to stop it…

Silence from the radio.

Waiting was the hardest. That's what Parker had forgotten in his years of retirement. You never got used to waiting.

"The first cars are just getting there," Cage called out, listening to his cell phone.

Parker bent over the extortion note again.

Mayor Kennedy -

The end is night. The Digger is loose and their is no way to stop him.

Then he glanced at the envelope.

He was looking at the smudges of trace evidence. Looking at the ESDA sheets again, the faint images of the indented writing: t-e-l.

Rhyme's words echoed.

But the envelope tells us something else.

There was more to him than meets the eye…

And Parker heard himself earlier-telling Lukas that Quantico's psycholinguistic profile was wrong, that the unsub was in fact brilliant.

His head shot up. He looked at Lukas.

"What?" she asked, alarmed at his expression.

He said evenly, "We're wrong. We've got it wrong. He's not going to hit the Four Seasons."

The others in the room froze, stared at him.

"Stop the response. The police, agents-wherever they are-stop them."

"What are you talking about?" Lukas asked.

"The note-it's lying to us."

Cage and Lukas looked at each other.

"It's leading us away from the real site."

"It's'?" C. P. Ardell asked uncertainly. Looked at Lukas. "What does he mean?"

Parker ignored him and cried, "Stop them!"

Cage lifted his phone. Lukas motioned with her hand to stop.

"Do it!" Parker shouted. "The response teams have to stay mobile. We can't tie them up at the hotel."

Hardy said, "Parker, he's there. They found the rounds. That can't be a coincidence."

"Of course it's not a coincidence. The Digger left them there. Then he went someplace else-to the real target. Someplace that's not a hotel." He looked at Cage. "Stop the cars!"

"No," Lukas said. Anger now blossomed in her thin face.

But Parker, staring up at the note, continued. "It's too smart to leave a reference to the hotel accidentally. It tried to fool us with the trace on the envelope. The same's true with the indented writing. The t-e-l"

"We hardly even found the indented writing," Lukas countered. "We wouldn't have if you hadn't been helping us."

"It knows-" The talk of the note personified seemed to make them uncomfortable. He said, "The unsub knew what he'd be up against. Remember my linguistic profile?" He tapped the picture of the dead unsub. "He was brilliant. He was a strategist. He had to make the evidence subtle. Otherwise we wouldn't believe it. No, no, we have to stop the tactical teams. Wherever they are. And wait until we can figure out where the real target is."

"Wait?" Hardy said, exasperated, lifting his hands.

C. P. whispered, "It's five minutes to four!"

Cage shrugged, glanced at Lukas. It was her call.

"You have to," Parker snapped.

He saw Lukas lift her stony eyes to the clock on the wall. The minute hand advanced one more notch.

The hotel was nicer than this place.

The Digger looks around him and there's something about this theater he doesn't like.

The puppy bag seemed… seemed right when he was in the nice hotel.

It doesn't look right here.

This is the… this is the… click… is the Mason Theater, just east of Georgetown. The Digger is in the lobby and he's looking at the wood carvings. He sees flowers that aren't yellow or red but are wood, dark like dark blood. Oh, and what's this? Snakes. Snakes carved in the wood. And women with big breasts like Pamelas.

Hmmm.

But no animals.

No puppies here. No, no.

He'd walked into the theater without anybody stopping him. The performance was nearly over. You can walk into most theaters toward the end of a show, said the man who tells him things, and nobody notices you. They think you're there to pick up somebody.

All the ushers here ignore him. They're talking about sports and restaurants and New Year's Eve parties.

Things like that.

It's nearly four.

The Digger hasn't been to a concert or a play for several years. Pamela and he went… click… went to someplace to hear music. Not a play. Not a ballet. What was it? Someplace where people were dancing. Listening to music… People in funny hats like cowboys wear. Playing guitar, singing. The Digger remembers a song. He hums to himself.

When I try to love you less,

I just love you all the more.

But nobody's singing today. This show is a ballet. A matinee.

They rhyme, he thinks. Funny. Ballet… matinee…

The Digger looks at the wall-at a poster. A scary picture he doesn't like. Scarier than the picture of the entrance to hell. It's a picture of a soldier with a huge jaw and he's wearing a tall blue hat. Weird. No… click… no, no, I don't like that at all.

He walks through the lobby, thinking that Pamela would rather see men in cowboy hats than soldiers with big jaws like this one. She'd get dressed up in clothes bright as flowers and go out to see the men in cowboy hats sing. The Digger's friend William wore hats like that sometime. They all went out together. He thinks they had fun but he's not sure.

The Digger eases to the lobby bar-which is now closed-and finds the service door, steps through and makes his way up the stairs that smell like spilled soda. Past cardboard boxes of plastic glasses and napkins and Gummi Bears and Twizzlers.

I love you all the more…

Upstairs, at the door that says BALCONY, the Digger steps into the corridor and walks slowly over the thick carpet.

"Go into box number fifty-eight," said the man who tells him things. "I bought all the seats in the box so it'll be empty. It's on the balcony level. Around the right side of the horseshoe."

"Shoe?" the Digger asked. What does he mean, shoe?

"The balcony is curved like a horseshoe. Go to a box."

"I'll go…" Click. "… go to a box. What's a box?"

"It'll be behind the curtains. A little room overlooking the stage."

"Oh."

Now, nearly 4 P.M., the Digger walks slowly toward the box and nobody notices him.

A family is walking past the concession stand; the father is looking at his watch. They're leaving early. The mother is helping her daughter put her coat on as they walk and they both look upset. There's a flower in the girls hair but it's not yellow or red; it's white. Their other child, a young boy of about five, glances at the concession stand and stops. He reminds the Digger of the boy in the nice hotel. "No, it's closed," the father says. "Let's go. We'll miss our dinner reservation."

And the boy looks like he's going to cry and he's led away by his father without Gummi Bears or Twizzlers.

The Digger is alone in the corridor. He thinks he feels bad for the boy but he isn't sure. He walks to the side of the horseshoe. There's a young woman in a white blouse walking toward him. She holds a flashlight.

"Hello," she says. "Lost?"

She looks at his face.

The Digger nuzzles the side of the puppy bag against her breast.

"What-?" she starts to ask.

Phut, phut…

He shoots her twice and when she drops to the carpet he grabs her hair and drags her inside the empty box.

He stops just on the other side of the curtain.

My, this is… click… this is nice. Hmmm.

He looks out over the theater. The Digger doesn't smile but he now decides that he likes this place after all. Dark wood, flowers, plaster, gold and a chandelier. Hmmm. Look at that. Nicer than the nice hotel. Though he thinks it's not the best place for him to shoot. Concrete or cinderblock walls would be better; that way the bullets would ricochet more and the sharp bits of lead would rattle around inside the skull of the theater and cause oh so much more damage.

He watches people dancing on the stage. Listens to the music from the orchestra. But he doesn't really hear it. He's still humming to himself. Can't get the song out of his cranium.

The Digger pushes the body of the woman against the velvet curtain. He's hot and he undoes his coat even though the man who tells him things told him not to. But he feels better.

He reaches into the puppy bag and wraps his fingers around the grip of the gun. Takes the suppressor in his left hand.

He looks down over the crowds. At the girls in pink satin, boys in blue blazers, women with skin showing in V's at their necks, bald men and men with thick hair. People aim little binoculars at the people on the stage. In the middle of the theaters ceiling is that huge chandelier, a million lights. The ceiling itself is painted with pictures of fat angels flying through yellow clouds. Like the New Year's baby…

There aren't that many doors and that's good. Even if he doesn't shoot more than thirty or forty people, others will die crushed in the doorway. That's good.

That's good…

Four o'clock. His watch beeps. He steps forward, grips the suppressor through the crinkly bag, glances at a puppy's face. One puppy has a pink ribbon, one has a blue. But no red and no yellow, the Digger thinks as he starts to pull the trigger.

Then he hears the voice.

It's behind him in the corridor, through the pretty velvet curtain. "Jesus Christ," the man's voice whispers. "We got him! He's here." And the man pulls the curtain aside as he lifts his black pistol.

But the Digger heard him just in time and he throws himself against the wall and when the agent fires, the shot misses. The Digger cuts him nearly in half with a one-second burst from the Uzi. Another agent, behind the first one, is wounded by the stream of bullets. He looks at the Digger's face and the Digger remembers what he has to do. So he kills that agent too.

The Digger doesn't panic. He never panics. Fear isn't even a piece of dust to him. But he knows some things are good and other things are bad and not doing what he's been told to do is bad. He wants to shoot into the crowd but he can't. There are more agents rushing onto the balcony floor. The agents have FBI windbreakers on, bulletproof vests, some have helmets, some have machine guns that probably shoot just as fast as his Uzi.

A dozen agents, two dozen. Several turn the corner and run toward where the bodies of their friends lie. The Digger sticks the bag out through the curtain into the lobby and holds the trigger down for a moment. Glass breaks, mirrors shatter, Twizzlers and Gummi Bears fly through the air.

He should… click… should shoot into the audience. That's what he's supposed to…

Supposed to do… He…

For a moment his mind goes blank.

He should… click.

More agents, more police. Shouting.

There's so much confusion… Dozens of agents will soon be in the corridor outside the box. They'll throw a hand grenade at him and stun him and maybe shoot him to death and the bullets won't rattle around-they'll go straight through his heart and it will stop beating.

Or they'll take him back to Connecticut and shove him through the entrance to hell. He'll stay there forever this time. He'll never see the man who tells him things ever again.

He sees people jumping from the balcony onto the crowds below. It's not far to fall.

Shouting, the agents and the policemen.

They're everywhere.

The Digger unscrews the suppressor and aims the gun at the chandelier. He pulls the trigger. A roar like a buzzsaw. The bullets cut the stem and the huge tangle of glass and metal tumbles to the floor, trapping people underneath. A hundred screams. Everyone is panicked.

The Digger eases over the balcony and drops onto the shoulders of a large man, fifteen feet below. They fall to the floor and the Digger springs to his feet. Then he's being rushed through the fire door with the rest of the crowd. He still clutches the shopping bag.

Outside, into the cool air.

He's blinded by the spotlights and flashing lights from the fifty or sixty police cars and vans. But there aren't many police or agents outside. They're mostly in the theater, he guesses.

He jogs with a middle-aged couple through an alley away from the theater. He's behind them. They don't notice him. He wonders if he should kill them but that would mean mounting the suppressor again and the threads are hard to align. Besides, they don't look at his face so he doesn't need to kill them. He turns into another alley and in five minutes is walking along a residential street.

The bag tucked neatly under the arm of his black or blue coat.

His dark cap snug over his ears.

I'd love you if you're sick.

I'd love you if you're poor.

The Digger's humming.

Even when you're miles away

I love you all the more…

"Man, Parker," Len Hardy said, shaking his head with youthful admiration. "Good job. You nailed it."

C. P. Ardell meant the same when he said, "Don't fuck around with this man, no how, no way."

Margaret Lukas, listening to her phone, said nothing to Parker. Her face was still emotionless but she glanced at him and nodded. It was her form of thanks.

Yet Parker Kincaid didn't want gratitude. He wanted facts. He wanted to know how bad the shooting had been.

And if the body count included the Digger's.

On a console, speakers clattered with static as Jerry Baker and the emergency workers stepped on each others transmissions. Parker could understand very little of what they said.

Lukas cocked her head as she listened to her phone. She looked up and said, "Two agents dead, two wounded. An usher killed and one man in the audience was killed by the chandelier, a dozen injured, some serious. Some kids were hurt bad in the panic. Got trampled. But they'll live."

They'll live, Parker thought grimly. But their lives'll never be the same.

Daddy, tell me about the Boatman…

Parker asked, "And he got away?"

"He did, yes," Lukas said, sighing.

"Description?"

She shook her head and looked at Cage, who was on his phone too. He muttered, "Nope, nobody got a damn look at him. Well, two people did. Two of ours. But they're the ones he capped."

Parker closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the gray padding of the office chair. It had to have been the one he'd ordered years ago; there was a certain musty, plasticky smell about it that brought back memories-some of the many that were surfacing tonight.

Memories he had no desire to experience.

"Forensics?" he asked.

"PERT's going over the place with a microscope," Cage said. "But-I don't get it-he's firing an automatic weapon and there're no shell casings."

Parker said, "Oh, he's got the gun in a bag or something. Catches the casings."

"How do you know that?" Hardy asked.

"I don't. But it's what I'd do if I were him. Anybody at the hotel get a look at him leaving the bullets?"

"Nope," Cage muttered. "And they've canvassed everybody there. One kid said he saw the boogeyman. But he couldn't remember anything about him."

Boogeyman, Parker thought wryly. Just great.

And he reflected: what a photo finish.

Lukas had finally agreed to go along with Parker, saying icily, "All right, all right, well stop the response. But God help you if you're wrong, Kincaid." She'd ordered the teams to hold their positions. Then they spent a frantic few minutes trying to guess where the Digger might've gone. Parker had reasoned that he'd leave the bullets at the hotel not long before four-so he'd have ten minutes tops to get to the real target. The killer couldn't rely on getting a cab on a holiday afternoon and buses in the District were very unpredictable; he'd have to walk. That meant about a five-block radius.

Parker and the team had pored over a map of Georgetown.

Suddenly he'd looked at the clock and said, "Are there matinees today in the theaters?"

Lukas had grabbed his arm. "Yes. I saw some in the Post this morning."

Tobe Geller was a music fan and he mentioned the Mason Theater, which was only a five-minute walk from the Four Seasons.

Parker ripped open a copy of the Washington Post and found that a performance of The Nutcracker had started at two and would be letting out around four. A crowded theater would be just the target for the Digger. He asked Lukas to call Jerry Baker and have him send all the troops there.

"All of them?"

"All of them."

God help you if you're wrong, Kincaid…

But he hadn't been wrong. Still, what a risk he'd taken… And though many lives had been saved some had been lost. And the killer had escaped.

Parker glanced at the extortion note. The man who'd written it was dead but the note itself felt very much alive. It seemed to be sneering at him. He felt a crazy urge to grab an examination probe and drive it into the note's heart.

Cage's phone rang again and he answered it. Spoke for a few minutes-whatever the news was it seemed encouraging, to judge from his face. Then he hung up. "That was a shrink. Teaches criminal psychology at Georgetown. Says he's got some info about the name."

"The 'Digger'?" Parker asked.

"Yeah. He's on his way over."

"Good," Lukas said.

Cage asked, "What's next?"

Lukas hesitated for a moment then asked Parker, "What do you think? You don't have to limit your thoughts to the document."

He said, "Well, I'd find out if the box in the theater he shot from was empty and if it was, did the unsub buy out the whole box-so the Digger'd have a good shooting position? And then I'd find out if he used a credit card."

Lukas nodded at C. P., who flipped open his phone and called Jerry Baker and posed the questions to him. He waited for a moment then listened to his response. C. P. disconnected. "Nice try." He rolled his eyes.

"But," Parker speculated aloud, "he bought the tickets two weeks ago and paid cash."

"Three weeks ago," the agent muttered, rubbing the shiny top of his head with a rough palm. "And paid cash."

"Hell," Parker snapped in frustration. Nothing to do but move on. He turned to the notes he'd taken of Lincoln Rhyme's observations. "We'll need some maps. Good ones. Not like this." He tapped the street map that they'd used to try to figure out where the Digger had gone from the Four Seasons. Parker continued. "I want to figure out where the trace in the letter came from. Narrow down the part of town he was staying in."

Lukas nodded at Hardy. "If we can do that we'll get Jerry's team and some of your people from District P.D. and do a canvass. Flash his pic and see if anybody's seen him at a house or apartment." She handed Geller a copy of the coroner's photo of the unsub in the morgue. "Tobe, make a hundred prints of this."

"Will do."

Parker looked over the list of trace Rhyme had identified. Granite, clay, brick dust, sulfur, ash… Where had the materials come from?

The young clerk who'd brought them the note earlier-Timothy, Parker recalled-appeared in the doorway.

"Agent Lukas?"

"Yes?"

"Couple things you ought to know about. First of all, Moss?"

Gary Moss. Parker remembered the memo about the children who'd nearly been burned to death.

"He's kind of freaked out. He saw a janitor and thought it was a hitman."

Lukas frowned. "Who was it? One of our people?"

"Yeah. One of the cleaning staff. We checked it out. But Moss's totally paranoid. He wants us to get him out of town. He thinks he'll be safer."

"Well, we can't get him out of town. He's not one of our priorities at the moment."

"I just thought I'd tell you," Timothy responded.

She looked around and seemed to debate. She said to Len Hardy, "Detective, you mind holding his hand for a while."

"Me?"

"Would you?"

Hardy didn't look happy. This was yet another subtle slap in the face. Parker recalled that the hardest part of his job when he was running the division was dealing not with elusive documents but with the delicate egos of his employees.

"I guess," Hardy said.

"Thanks." Lukas gave him a smile. Then she said to Timothy, "You said there was something else?"

"Primary Security wanted me to tell you. There's a guy downstairs? A walk-in."

"And?"

"He says he knows something about the Metro shooter."

Whenever there was a major crime like this, Parker recalled, the wackos crawled out of the woodwork-sometimes to confess to the crimes, sometimes to help. There were several "reception" rooms near the main entrance in headquarters for people like this. When anyone with knowledge of a crime dropped into the FBI the good citizen was taken into one of these visitor rooms and pumped for information by an expert interrogator.

"Credentials?" Lukas asked.

"Claims he's a journalist, writing about a series of unsolved murders. License and Social Security check out. No warrants. They didn't take it past a stage-two check."

"What's he say about the Digger?"

"All he said is that this guy's done it before-in other cities."

"In other cities?" C. P. Ardell asked.

"What he says."

Lukas looked at Parker, who said, "I think we better talk to him."