By Blood Written Read online

  “Reading a book …” Bransford said slowly. Murray nodded. Bransford turned and headed down the hall to the lobby.

  Reading … Lying on a couch … In the middle of the day …

  This was just weird enough to arouse Bransford’s curiosity. He walked down to the main lobby, then climbed the staircase to the second story. He ran his ID through the card reader outside the second-floor main entrance, then opened the heavy metal doors. He went down one hallway, turned left, then went down another hallway past the Fingerprint Division. He stopped at an open door, his bulk filling the doorway.

  Inside the small room, on a couch against the far wall, Maria Chavez reclined with her head on the armrest facing away from the door. She held a paperback book open between her hands. On the floor next to her was a stack of file folders, a legal pad covered in scribbles, and an open felt-tipped pen.

  Bransford cleared his throat loudly, which elicited no response at all from Chavez. Bransford cleared his throat again and took two steps toward the couch. Chavez bent her head while still lying down and looked over her shoulder.

  She spied Bransford, quickly raised up on her hips, and put both feet on the floor.

  “Oh, hi, Lieutenant,” she said. Maria still held the book open on her knees. Bransford looked at the spine of the book and read the words: The Third Letter. Bransford thought she looked a little zoned out, almost in a trance.

  “Hello, Maria,” Bransford said calmly. “You want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  Maria Chavez stared ahead for a second, as if still someplace far away. Then she looked back up, directly into Max Bransford’s eyes, and he saw an intensity and a clarity that he’d seen in another person’s eyes only a few times in his life. It was the look of epiphany.

  “What was that FBI agent’s name?” she asked.

  Bransford studied her for a few moments. “Powell,” he said finally. “Hank Powell.”

  She looked away. “Yes, Powell …” Then she turned and looked back at Bransford. “We have to call him. Now.”

  “But why?” Bransford asked.

  “Sit down, Max,” Maria said, motioning with her head to the chair next to her. “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  PART II

  THE INVESTIGATION

  CHAPTER 15

  Monday afternoon, Washington, D.C.

  Hank Powell stepped out of the director’s office, strode quickly past the receptionist without speaking and through the doors into the outer office, then through that room and out into the hallway. His face was set in stone, which belied the churning in his gut. His temples throbbed. The back of his neck burned as if he’d been too long in the sun. His right hand clenched the black leather portfolio like someone was without warning going to mug him for it. His left fist was a knot of muscle and bone.

  Once out in the main hallway, he took a deep breath as he walked to the elevators, trying to center himself, trying not to give anything away to the other starched and suited robots passing him in the opposite direction. All he wanted was out of there, back to the safety and relative quiet of his office at Quantico.

  Behind him, a voice called out: “Hank! Wait.”

  Damn it, he thought. He recognized the voice, though, and turned.

  A flushed and winded Lawrence Dunlap burst past the doors of the director’s office and almost trotted to catch up with him.

  “Wait,” he said, puffing as he stopped next to Hank. The air in the Hoover Building, Hank thought, suddenly felt even more stale and suffocating.

  “Yes, sir?” Hank asked.

  Deputy Assistant Director Dunlap stopped a moment, catching his breath, then reached out and touched Hank gently on his left elbow.

  “C’mon,” he said, “let’s step over here, out of the way of all this traffic.”

  The wall across from the bank of elevators had an alcove to one side, which led to a door where janitorial supplies and equipment were kept. Dunlap walked over, Hank following, then stopped in the shadows and turned to him.

  “Look, for what it’s worth, I think the old man was a little out of line in there,” Dunlap said.

  “I don’t appreciate being talked to like that,” Hank said after a moment. “But I’ve been around long enough not to let it get to me.”

  “Yeah, well,” Dunlap said, slowly shaking his head as if trying to figure something out, “go ahead and let it get to you. He was wrong. But you know how he hates this kind of publicity.”

  “And I don’t?” Hank demanded. “You think this makes my job any easier? I’ve got to worry about not only this son of a bitch going around slicing up girls practically my own daughter’s age, but now I’ve got the director of the FBI crawling up my ass screaming about a press leak.”

  “Hank, don’t lose your detachment here. You’ve always been a pro. I need you to hold on to that for me.”

  Hank took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I know,” he said after a moment. “He’s under a lot of pressure.”

  “We all are on this one,” Dunlap said. “We’ve gotten a lot of bad publicity the last few years. The old man wants it stopped. We find this guy and nail his ass, people might forget some of the other cluster fucks that have gone around here.”

  Hank was silent for a few seconds, then looked up directly into his superior’s eyes. “Is he going to pull me off this?”

  Hank asked. “If he’s going to yank me, I want to know. I’ve got my twenty. The old man relieves me, I’m putting in for early retirement. I mean it. I won’t fall on my sword for him.

  Not when I’ve done my job as well as anyone could.”

  Dunlap stared at Hank Powell and realized he meant every word of what he’d just said. “No,” he answered. “There’s no talk of relieving you. You’re still the SAC of this investigation.”

  Hank’s jaw relaxed just enough for him to feel it, but not enough for Dunlap to see it. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you, sir. Now if that’s all, I have a lot of work to do.”

  Dunlap nodded.

  The thirty-five miles that separated the FBI main headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., from the three hundred and eighty-five acres that contained the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, might as well have been the distance between two planets at opposite ends of the solar system.

  The back of Hank’s neck still burned on the long ride back. As he left I-395 South and merged onto I-95, he saw that the traffic was even thicker than usual. Normally the drive would take between forty-five minutes and an hour, but it had already taken him nearly that long just to hit the freeway. It didn’t matter; he barely noticed. In his long career at the Bureau, no one had ever talked to him like he’d just been spoken to. It was all he could do to keep himself under control.

  Hank kept a stack of books on tape in his car for long drives and had popped in a tape as soon as he pulled out into traffic. He soon realized, though, that there was no way he could focus on the reading and flicked off the tape player.

  Hank Powell also felt bad for the way he had talked to Dunlap back at FBI headquarters. Threatening to resign was no way to gain the support of your superiors, he knew, but in this case he had to do and say something strong enough to let Dunlap know they had pushed him about as far as he was willing to be pushed.

  So Hank felt bad for being dressed down in the director’s office and for copping an attitude with Dunlap, but what he felt worst of all about was his inability to make any progress on this case at all. The material that had been found in Nashville had yielded a DNA profile, but whose? And nothing else of any use had been gleaned from the Alphabet Man’s garbage.

  This guy’s got to screw up somewhere, he thought over and over again. But when? Where?

  Hank couldn’t remember the last time he felt so low. Even when Anne got sick, it hadn’t been quite like this. He’d been saddened, grieving, had felt frustrated and helpless as she became sicker and sicker. But he’d never questioned his own actions, his
own worth. He knew he’d done his best for her, had done everything possible.

  And, he realized, it was different now because he was so alone. If this had happened years earlier, before he lost her, he’d have gone home at the end of the day and talked to her-never in specifics, but enough to let her know how troubled he was. She would have listened, as she always did, and been savvy enough not to tell him what to do or to med-dle in his business. She was his sounding board, and by processing his thoughts with her and through her, he would find something he hadn’t seen before, some insight he’d missed, some element that had bypassed him.

  Now there was no one.

  Almost an hour later, Hank barely nodded to the Marine guard at the gated entrance to Quantico. He wound his way around until he found his parking space outside an office building behind Hogan’s Alley, the mock small town made up entirely of facades that was used in training. In the distance, he heard rhythmic gunfire snapping from one of the outdoor ranges.

  The air was cold and dry, the sun beginning its slide toward the horizon in a cloudless, blue winter sky. Hank pulled his overcoat tightly around him as the cutting wind from the east chilled him.

  Sallie Richardson, the division’s longtime administrative assistant, looked up from her desk as Hank entered. She tried to smile, but as soon as she saw the look on his face, her smile disappeared.

  “That bad?” she asked.

  Hank stopped at her desk and nodded his head. “Hasn’t been my best day.”

  “Sorry, Hank,” she offered. “It’ll get better.”

  He shrugged. “Sure.” He walked down the hall to his office.

  “Oh,” Sallie called to him. “Check your voice mail. Max Bransford in Nashville called.”

  “Thanks.”

  Hank opened the door to his small office, with the one window that looked out onto the woods that surrounded the academy. He hung up his coat, sat down at his desk, and punched the buttons to retrieve his voice mail. There were four other messages ahead of Bransford’s, but none had the urgency that was in Bransford’s voice.

  “Agent Powell,” the recording began. “This is Lieutenant Bransford with the Nashville Murder Squad. I need to talk to you ASAP. Can you give me a call at 615 …”

  Hank scribbled down the number, then punched the buttons to leave voice mail and get an outside line. Within ten seconds, the phone in Max Bransford’s office was ringing. A female voice with a deep Southern accent answered.

  “Lieutenant Bransford’s office,” she piped. “May I help you?”

  “This is Agent Powell at the FBI, returning Lieutenant Bransford’s call.”

  “Oh, hi, Agent Powell. This is Bea Shuster. Good to hear from you. The lieutenant’s been waiting for your call. Just hold on a second.”

  Hank smiled. How can these people be so damn friendly?

  Bransford came on the line before the thought could completely leave his head. “Hank?”

  “Yes, Max, how are you?”

  “Up to my nether regions in amphibious reptiles. Listen, I won’t take up too much of your time but I had to call. You got a minute?”

  “Sure.” Hank opened a notebook and grabbed a pen.

  “Talk to me.”

  The voice on the other end of the line hesitated. “I’m going to ask you to reserve judgment on this one until I finish, okay? This is going to sound kind of crazy at first.”

  Hank felt his brow furrow. Curious …

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “You remember Maria Chavez?”

  “Yes, of course. The young Hispanic woman. Quite sharp, if I recall.”

  “Very,” Bransford said. “Top-notch. Smart as a whip. If this had come from anyone else, I’d have blown ‘em off. But she’s convinced and I thought it was worth a call to you.”

  “Okay,” Hank said. “My curiosity’s running wild. Let me have it.”

  “About the butt crack of dawn this morning, Maria Chavez comes in to catch up on some paperwork and have a little quiet time. Only she gets a call that there’s this old lady out front who claims to know who the Alphabet Man is. Maria figures she’s a nutcase. We get a few of those from time to time, you know.”

  “Like every other day,” Hank interrupted.

  “Yeah. So anyway, Maria offers to give her five minutes, and the old lady says she knows who our guy is. He’s this famous writer, right? The old lady reads all his books and claims he bases the plots to his novels on murders he’s committing himself.”

  “What?” Hank asked. “That’s crazy.”

  “But she’s brought in the New York Times article and a stack of paperbacks by the guy and she starts spouting off details of the books that sound an awful lot like some of the shit our killer’s doing. She convinces Maria to at least take a look at the books. So Maria ushers the old lady out and disappears for a few hours to look over the novels.”

  The line went silent for a few moments. “And?” Hank asked.

  Hank heard Bransford sigh on the other end of the line, the long, weary sigh of a longtime cop who’s close enough to retirement to taste and smell it.

  “And I find Chavez curled up on a couch in the break room practically in a fetal position. She’s read the books and is convinced the old lady’s right.”

  Hank leaned back in his chair and stared out the window for a moment. For that moment, his mind seemed more still than it had been all day, as if it had settled into a sweet, sub-lime, and welcome silence.

  “You there?” Bransford asked.

  “Yeah,” Hank said, forcing himself back to reality. “Max, this is crazy.”

  “I know, it’s insane. Completely loony tunes. But what if it’s true?”

  “Who’s the writer? I mean, who the hell is this guy?”

  Hank felt his own voice rise from the tension.

  Hank heard some paper shuffle in the background as Bransford flipped through some notes. “His name’s Michael Schiftmann-”

  Hank scribbled down the name as Bransford spelled it for him.

  “The guy’s apparently famous. On the New York Times best-seller list, big bucks, movie deals, all that celebrity crap. Personally, I never heard of him, but I get too much of the real thing to go home and read about murder.”

  “Me, too,” Hank agreed. “Who’s got time? And what books are these?”

  “Chavez made me a list, although it’s pretty easy to remember. The first one’s called The First Letter, the second one’s The Second Letter, then The Third Letter, and so on.”

  The mention of letters caused the already tense muscles in Hank’s neck to contract even further. “Letters?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Fuckin’ creepy, you ask me. And the hero, protagonist, whatever the hell you call him of the novels is like this crusader, vigilante type who goes around killing bad girls in cold blood, like an executioner or something.”

  “Or a serial killer,” Hank offered.

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “This is crazy,” Hank said again. “What do we do with this?”

  “Well, I’ve given Chavez twenty-four hours to write this up as a full report and make her case. Knowing her, I’ll have it tomorrow morning. I’ll fax it to your office.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Beyond that, we’re just going to sit tight. But there is one other thing that’s kind of a raise-the-hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck thing …”

  “Yeah?”

  “That night those two girls were murdered over on Church Street, that night Howard Hinton from Hamilton County called you?”

  “Sure, I remember.”

  “This famous author guy was in Nashville,” Bransford said. “He did a book signing at the Davis-Kidd bookstore over in Green Hills. Something like three hundred people showed up.”

  “Three hundred? It was snowing like hell that night.

  Must’ve been about twenty degrees.”

  “Yeah,” Bransford answered. “Like I said, the guy’s real popular.”

  Hank f
inished the call by promising to hook back up with Bransford as soon as he’d had a chance to read Maria Chavez’s report. Then he walked out of his office and back down the hall to Sallie Richardson’s desk.

  “You know where I live in Arlington, right?” he asked.

  “Well, I know about where,” she answered, looking up from her computer screen.

  “Is there a bookstore on the way home? A pretty good one?”

  Sallie gazed up at Hank, questioning. “Hmm, let me think. Yeah, you know where Army-Navy Drive is, where it crosses-what is it?-Hayes, I think?”

  “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.