The Devil's Teardrop (9 page)

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 Parker’s 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 of 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 suspect’s 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 devil’s 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.

“Devil’s 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.