“
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.
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. It’s 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, kerosine, 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, kerosine, 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. Bertha’s. He keeps talking about Bertha’s 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.”
“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
.”