"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 Pamela's.
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 thi
s 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 girl's 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 horsehoe. 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.
I look into the future.
I wonder what's in store.
I think about our life,
and I love you all the more.
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 theater's 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 other's 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, we'll 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.