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"

"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.