By Blood Written (20 page)

“Oh yeah, over near that huge, obnoxious mall.”

“The Fashion Center at Pentagon City,” Sallie said. “And it’s no more obnoxious than any other mall. There’s a Borders Books across the street.”

“Great, the traffic should be wonderful right about now,”

Hank muttered.

Sallie crossed her legs and planted her elbows on her desk.

“Okay,” she said, “what’s going on?”

Hank checked his watch. It was nearly four. “I think I’m going to cut out a little early today. I’ll have my cell phone if anything comes up.”

The first fifteen minutes after arriving home from work were always the worst. The house was so quiet, the undis-turbed air within so heavy and still. Hank had considered getting a dog, but he wasn’t home enough to take care of one.

Ordinarily, silence didn’t bother Hank. In fact, when Jackie was a baby, he’d often wished for a little silence.

Now, with Anne gone, it seemed that was all he had.

He set the plastic bag full of books down on the coffee table in the living room, then hung up his overcoat in the hall closet. With Hank getting home early, the computerized thermostat hadn’t had a chance to warm the house up.

He walked over to the keypad and overrode the program-ming, the gas heater in the basement clicking on as he did so. Within seconds, he felt warm air wafting up out of the vents.

He went upstairs to the master bedroom and changed into a pair of jeans and a sweater, then made up the bed and folded some laundry from the night before. There was a time when Hank’s bed was made as soon as he got out of it and the clothes folded and hung up as soon as they came out of the dryer, but that was before the seventy-hour weeks and the sleepless nights the Alphabet Man had brought into his life.

He finished his chores and went back downstairs. It was almost six, and Hank decided, with a twinge of guilt, to go ahead and have his dry vodka martini. He wasn’t hungry; it was too early to eat, anyway. He went through the martini ritual and walked back into the living room, settling into an overstuffed chair next to the sofa. He decided it was too quiet and reached over for the remote. He turned on the local CBS

affiliate and sat staring for a few seconds at the local news broadcast. Apparently it had been a slow news day because the coiffed blond anchorperson with the Hollywood white teeth was blathering on about a dog show over in Shawsburg that had been disrupted by a group of PETA protesters.

Bored and tired, he took his first sip of the icy martini and, as always, marveled at the shock of the cold combined with the searing of the alcohol. Hank had never been a daily drinker before and sometimes wondered if he was on his way to having a problem. Then he decided to cut himself some slack; given what he’d been through the past four or five years, it was a wonder he wasn’t a falling-down drunk screaming obscenities on a street corner.

He surfed around for a few moments and found that there was nothing on that caught his attention. Even his favorite classic movie station didn’t offer anything of interest.

Hank took another sip of the martini, then set it down on the end table. He reached over and pulled the plastic bag with the Borders Books logo on it over to him and dropped it on the floor at his feet. He reached in, shuffled through the five books—four paperbacks and one hardcover—and pulled out a copy of
The First Letter
.

The book was expensively printed for a paperback, the large letters on the cover embossed, the ink brightly colored in a kind of neon red. The author’s name, Michael Schiftmann, appeared above the title in letters nearly an inch high.

Hank turned the book over and gazed at the author’s picture. The photo was that of a handsome man, still young, but with the beginnings of age lines in the corners of his mouth and around his eyes. His face could be called rugged, his eyes a deep and piercing blue. His nose was not unduly sharp and narrow, and his cheekbones were prominent and high. He wore a double-breasted navy-blue jacket, white dress shirt, and tie.

He was, Hank concluded, a poster boy for Handsome Best-Selling Authors Month.

He opened the book and read the first few lines. It was not as if Hank read much in the way of any fiction, let alone murder mysteries. It was as Bransford had said: A homicide investigator or an FBI agent passing his spare time reading murder mysteries made about as much sense as a fry cook coming home and reading a novel set in a fast-food restaurant.

Hank forced himself to read the first few paragraphs. The first book opened with a murder, a brutal, sadistic murder told from the killer’s point of view. The writing was simple and well-crafted, but evocative and powerful. But as Hank Powell read the first few paragraphs and then the first few pages, he found himself being drawn further and further into the story. There was a plot there, he realized, but it wasn’t the plot that pulled you into the story; it was the voice, the voice of the protagonist, a stone-cold killer utterly without conscience.

As he read past the first few chapters, the forgotten vodka martini on the table next to him gradually warming to room temperature, Hank began to lose himself in the story. This guy Schiftmann, he realized, knew how to hook a reader.

At the end of every chapter, something happened that made it impossible to put the book down. You
had
to keep reading. Hank read on, despite himself, his blood going colder with each scene. How could someone write this stuff? he wondered.

Then he remembered the young salesgirl in the Borders who’d looked at him strangely when he piled five books by the same author on the counter in front of her. He’d asked her if she read Schiftmann, if he was any good.

“Oh yeah,” she’d said tensely. “He’s good. But I can’t read him. This stuff creeps me out.”

“But people seem to like it,” Hank had countered.

“Yeah,” the young girl had said. “We sell a ton of his stuff.

Go figure.”

Go figure.
The young girl’s words came back to him as he neared the climactic end of the book, when the protagonist/

serial killer, called Chaney in the book, was cornered by the corrupt female homicide investigator in the basement of an abandoned porno theater. Chaney managed to break free of her, to turn the tables, and now he had her. In a scene that was as shocking as it was graphic, Chaney had slowly, exquisitely murdered the woman in a way that turned Hank’s stomach and at the same time kept him reading.

Hank turned the last page of the book and closed it. He looked up; it was dark outside. Hank looked over at the clock. It was almost ten.

“Jesus,” he muttered. He stood up, rolling his head around on his shoulders to loosen the tension in his neck, and walked over to the front window to close the shutters. Then he walked into the kitchen in a kind of daze and pulled out a microwave meal. He felt drained, pummeled after reading the book, and wondered what it was in the makeup of the human psyche that was attracted to such pure, unadulterated evil. This Schiftmann guy, Hank concluded, had gotten rich by appealing to the very worst, the most ignoble and bottom-feeding instincts in all of us.

He popped his frozen Salisbury steak dinner into the microwave and punched some numbers into the keypad. The microwave began humming as Hank walked back into the living room and picked up his drink. The glass had been sitting there so long, the condensation on the side had dried.

Hank took a small sip and winced.

As he took the glass into the kitchen, he realized that something else was bothering him about the book. It was gruesome and graphic, hard to read yet impossible to put down. But there was something else.

Something else …

Something about the description of the murder. Some element of the scene, something that stuck, buried, deep in his mind. But what?

What was it?

Frustrated, Hank picked up the book, opened it to the first page, and began rereading chapter one. The first murder took place in a small town in Ohio, a place called Middletown.

The victim was a young girl, a college student, working at a fast-food place over the summer. She worked the breakfast shift and arrived early one day, before the manager got there to unlock the doors.

Chaney was sitting in the parking lot, waiting for the place to open. As he stared out the windshield, an elderly man with the air of homelessness about him approached the young girl and spare-changed her. Chaney watched as the girl went off on the homeless man, finally swatting at him with her heavy handbag, almost knocking him over.

As the man stumbled away, Chaney got out of his car and walked up to the girl. Sad state of affairs, he said to her, when a young girl working an honest job can’t wait outside her place of employment without being accosted by bums.

The girl smiled, agreed, and the conversation continued.

When the manager arrived twenty minutes later, there was no sign of the girl. A week later, she was found in a rental storage unit—raped, tortured, and set out on display.

On the wall above her body, the block letter “A” had been painted in her own blood.

“Middletown,” he said out loud. “Where the hell is Middletown?”

Hank walked into his study and pulled an atlas off the bookshelf. He turned to Ohio and began scanning. Then, in the southern part of the state, near the Kentucky border, he found Middletown, Ohio, which was close enough to Cincinnati to be a suburb.

Cincinnati.

Hank felt his heart catch in his chest. The Alphabet Man’s first murder had been in Cincinnati, and the victim had worked at a fast-food place.

“No,” he said out loud. “It can’t be. It’s crazy.”

In the background, the microwave timer dinged. Hank walked into the kitchen, grabbing the second installment of the Chaney series off the coffee table and taking it with him. He carefully pulled the lid off his steaming microwaved dinner and sat down at the kitchen table. For the next hour, he halfheartedly picked at his meal as he read
The Second Letter.

When he finished that book just after one in the morning, the grease on his uneaten Salisbury steak dinner had congealed into a whitish-gray paste. He threw the box into the garbage, poured himself a snifter of brandy, then turned off all the lights downstairs. He took
The Third Letter
to bed with him. He shaved and showered, put on a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt and slid into bed, the drink on the nightstand, the book next to him.

The night slipped by effortlessly as Hank, almost beyond exhausted, read on and on. When he closed
The Third Letter
and dropped it on the floor next to the bed, it was just past three-thirty in the morning.

And like Maria Chavez, Hank Powell now knew who the Alphabet Man was. As crazy as it seemed, as insane a theory as this would appear to most people who heard it, Hank knew. He was as sure as he was that the sun would rise in another two hours. Only one question remained.

How the hell was he going to prove it?

Tuesday afternoon, Manhattan

Taylor Robinson was so engrossed in her reading she almost didn’t hear the phone in her office buzz. On the third ring, she lifted the handset.

“Yes,” she said blankly, still staring at the contract in front of her.

Jennifer, the new receptionist, laughed. “Did I wake you up?”

“No,” Taylor said, smiling. “I was just off in the zone.”

“Well, come back to Earth. I’ve got Mr. Schiftmann holding for you on line three.”

“Oh, great,” Taylor said, punching the blinking button for line three. “Hello,” she continued.

“Hi, you,” Michael answered. “How are you?”

“Fine. I was just going over the last of the foreign contracts. Did you know you’re going to be published in Por-tuguese?”

Michael sounded surprised. “Really? Where?”

“Brazil. It’s not much money, only twenty-five thousand a book, but it’s a lot of money for foreign.”

“I can remember when I’d kill for a twenty-five-grand contract. Now it’s just side money. I think I see a Rio de Janeiro book tour in my future. What do you think?”

“I think that’s quite doable. And I think you’ll need a competent guide.”

“You’ve been to Rio?”

“Couple of times. One of my favorites. So where are you?”

“Cleveland,” Michael answered.

“Ah, Cleveland. Not one of my favorites.”

“Well, I won’t be here much longer. I closed on the condo today. The movers are coming first thing in the morning, and then I’m out of here.”

Taylor frowned, grateful that Michael couldn’t see the look on her face. “Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked. “Moving to Manhattan is a pretty big step.”

“Of course I’m sure,” he said. “Look, it’s a long way from the slums of Barberton to the Cleveland lakefront. And when I bought this place a year ago, I thought I’d use it as a base for the rest of my life. But things change. We’ve changed.

I want to be with you, and I certainly don’t expect you to move to Cleveland.”

There was a moment’s silence as Taylor tried once again to take all this in. “Okay, if you’re sure. I want us to have a chance, too, and I guess we need to at least be in the same zip code if we’re going to give it a go.”

“And that’s what we’re going to give it,” Michael said brightly. “Besides, I sold out just at the right time. I made a tidy little bundle off that condo.”

Taylor laughed. “Does everything you touch turn to money?”

“Everything I touch since I met you turns into money.”

“That’s sweet.”

“No, Taylor, I mean it. When I walked into your office that day, I had enough cash to my name for one more night’s stay in a fleabag hotel and a Greyhound bus ticket back home.

Meeting you turned everything around.”

Taylor smiled now and held the phone tightly to her ear.

“It’s pretty well rocked my world too, buster. So when’re you coming home?”

“I’m flying out tomorrow night after the movers leave. I’ll be at LaGuardia about ten. I’ll just take a cab in, if it’s okay for me to stay with you awhile longer.”

“I’d be heartbroken if you stayed anywhere else,” she teased.