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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 Hauptma

"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 Ke

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 12:00 hours. Only I am knowing how to stop The Digger. If you xxxx 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 sca

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.