By Blood Written Page 16

  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 ki
tchen 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?

  CHAPTER 16

  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.

  “I’ve got an appointment with a broker Thursday morning. She’s got about six places for me to look at, including a house on Hudson Street.”

  “Hudson Street?” Taylor asked, surprised. Hudson Street was prime Greenwich Village real estate. Very few co-ops ever came up for sale in that area, let alone a whole house.

  “Great location. Very pricey, though.”

  “More than I ever thought I’d be able to spend. But hey, who’s counting?”

  “Wow, the Village. You’ll love living there, but it’s going to be an adjust-”

  “I want you,” Michael interrupted.

  “What?”

  “I want you. Right now, this minute. I want to be inside you, as far as I can be. I want my mouth on you, my hands on you.”

  Taylor felt her skin flush as a wave of energy went through her. “Yeah?” she whispered. “And then what would you do?”

  “I’d roll you over onto your back and hold your legs up in the air and I’d pull almost all the way out of you, almost, and just stay there for a few seconds. And then I’d pull you onto me as hard as I could.”

  Taylor moaned. “I miss you,” she said quietly, hoping no one else was listening in on line three.

  “I miss you, too,” he said. “This’s driving me nuts. Will you wait up for me?”

  “I think I can stay awake that long.”

  “And when I get there, can we have a glass of wine and snuggle up on the couch for just a bit, just enough time to decompress, maybe? Talk, catch up …”

  “Sure, I’d like that.”

  “And then can we just go to bed and fuck our brains out?”

  Taylor gasped. She’d never before been with a man who so freely and spontaneously and so naturally used the F-word.

  Most of her other lovers, if they referred to the sex act by name at all, talked about “making love” and “being together” or some other new-age, sensitive-guy euphemism.

  She had never talked about sex this way before with a lover.

  There was something deliciously naughty about it.

  “Only,” she whispered, “if you do me really hard.”

  “Oh,” Michael laughed, “you keep talking like that, we might not make it to the bed.”

  “And that would be a problem?”

  “Not for me,” he said. There was a moment’s silence. “I really do miss you.”

  “Me, too.”

  “What’s the weather like over there?”

  “Oh, God,” Taylor snapped. “Now we’re going to switch to the weather?”

  “No, I’m asking for a reason.”

  “Okay, you got it. It’s dark and gray and cold and icy. The wind’s picked up. They say it might snow. And how about Cleveland?”

  “This is the Lake Erie snow belt in early March, baby. Use your imagination.”

  “I’d prefer to save my imagination for other things. So why were you asking?”

  “You packed?”

  “Oh, that. Haven’t even started. But we don’t leave until Saturday morning.”

  “Well, you just walk outside in the sleet and the cold and imagine yourself on a beach, the two of us alone, lying on the hot sand practically naked.”

  “I won’t spend too much time on that one, as I have a lot more work to do today.”

  “Clear everything with Joan?”

  “Well,” Taylor answered, drawing the word out, “I don’t think she was real happy with my being gone for the whole week. But now that I’m representing a guy who’s probably going to have five books on The List at one time before it’s all over, I’ve got a little more jui
ce than I used to.”

  “That’s right,” Michael said. “You just tell her your star client insists on taking you to Bonaire for an entire seven days of sun, diving, and incredible sex, not necessarily in that order.”

  Taylor groaned. She had never before thought of herself as-she could barely bring herself to say the word- horny, but ever since she and Michael got together, she thought about sex and needs and drives more than she ever had.

  “You’ve got to stop talking that way,” she said breathily.

  “You know how much I miss you.”

  “If it’s anywhere near as much as I miss you, then we’re going to fry the entire northeastern power grid. It’ll be the next great blackout.”

  “Will you please, please, please hurry home?”

  “As fast as I can, my darling. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  “Yeah,” Taylor said. “Yeah, you will.”

  Michael hung up, and Taylor sat there for a moment holding the phone. She stared out the grimy window of her office to the top floor of the discount camera store across the street. Below her, the Manhattan street noises-taxis honking, brakes squealing, loud voices yelling in a hundred different languages, the squall of far-off sirens-seemed muted now, as if there were a fog between her and the rest of the world.

  She had never felt this way before. She had been in love and she had been in lust, but never both at the same time. Her stomach knotted and her face flushed as she relived some of the past times in bed with Michael. She tightened her hips as she felt herself getting wet. He was the best lover she’d ever had, by far, and he had brought out something in her that she didn’t even know was there. Something deep within her had been freed, and she wondered just how wild and scary and crazy this was all going to get before it was over.

  Four days later almost to the hour, Taylor gripped the armrest of her window seat on the starboard side of the ancient twin-engine DeHavilland Otter and squeezed until her knuckles turned white. Next to her, in the aisle seat, Michael sat calmly reading a book as the plane went into what felt like about an eighty-degree bank. Their side of the plane was on the downside of the turn, and Taylor, her throat tight and dry, squatted down to look out the tiny window.