The Devil's Teardrop

by Jeffery Deaver

  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 1200 hours. Only I am knowing how to stop The Digger. If you 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."