By Blood Written Read online

  “Wait up!” Cowan called, racing to catch up.

  The two agents crossed the side street and walked hurriedly up to the main entrance. Powell already had his badge and credentials out when they got to the main reception desk. He fidgeted nervously as the desk officer phoned upstairs. Less than a minute later, the metal entrance door to the police offices buzzed and Maria Chavez stepped out.

  She waved Hank and Cowan past security and held the door for them as they entered the long hallway.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Hank said.

  “Don’t worry, we haven’t started yet. C’mon, this way.”

  Maria Chavez wore jeans and boots, with a long-sleeved white cotton shirt. She looked like a clean, freshly scrubbed farmhand, with the exception of the nine-millimeter Glock Model 19 attached to her belt.

  “Maria, I’ve got to tell you,” Hank said as the three walked quickly down the hallway, “that report you did was sensa-tional. I can’t believe you put all this together.”

  Maria turned, smiling broadly, her white teeth glistening in the harsh fluorescent light. “Thanks, Agent Powell. I appreciate it. But it was really that daffy old lady who convinced me.”

  “Please, Maria, it’s Hank.”

  “Thanks, Hank.”

  Maria came to a bank of three elevators and pushed the up button. Hank leaned down and glanced at his watch, which read one-twelve. Twelve minutes late …

  As if reading his mind, Maria chimed in. “Don’t worry, Howard Hinton just got here, too. There’s road construction all the way down I-24 to Smyrna. Took him an hour and a half to make the last twenty miles.”

  Cowan grinned. “I hear the legislature’s thinking about making the orange traffic barrel the state bird.”

  Chavez chuckled. “Good one.”

  Hank secretly wished Cowan would shut the hell up. He was a bit too relaxed and jovial for the circumstances, or maybe it was just that Hank was unable to be relaxed or jovial about any of this. If this meeting went the way he thought it would, then Maria Chavez’s theory was the break in this case they’d been needing for years.

  Hank had spent the entire week reading the rest of Michael Schiftmann’s work and analyzing Maria’s report. He now believed that Maria was right, but he also knew that if she was right, this was going to be the biggest media fire-storm since the O. J. case. Hank wasn’t even ready to begin thinking about the consequences of charging a celebrity like Michael Schiftmann with being a serial murderer, with the corroborating theory being that he was basing the plots of his own best-selling novels on murders he committed himself.

  As Maria Chavez led Hank and Cowan into the small conference room that was already crowded with Murder Squad investigators, the voice in his head was still warning that even though he believed it, no one else was going to.

  Max Bransford sat at the head of a long table and rose when Hank entered the room. He looked like he’d gained ten pounds and lost a year’s sleep since that cold February night of the Exotica Tans murders. In fact, Hank noticed, looking around the room, they all looked tired.

  “Hello, Hank,” Bransford said, extending a hand as Hank approached him. “It’s good to see you again. Thanks for coming down.”

  “Thanks for inviting me,” Hank said.

  “Here,” Bransford motioned, “sit next to me.”

  Hank took a seat to Bransford’s left, then nodded and leaned across the table to shake hands with Howard Hinton of the Chattanooga Police Department’s Homicide Squad.

  The two exchanged comments about the terrible Nashville traffic as the rest of the investigators took seats in an informal, but recognizable, seating by rank. Fred Cowan took a side chair near the end of the table where Gary Gilley, lead investigator on the case, sat anchoring the group.

  “Let’s get to work, ladies and gentlemen,” Bransford intoned, as people began shifting in their chairs, shuffling paperwork, and opening notebooks in front of them. “We’ve got a lot to cover today, a lot of thinking to do. Has everyone had a chance to read Maria’s report?”

  All heads nodded with the exception of Cowan, who held up an index finger. “I’m sorry. I just got it this morning.

  Haven’t had a chance to get to it.”

  Hank clenched his jaw. If Cowan had mentioned that to him, he would have brought him up to speed on the long drive down West End Avenue. Instead, the two made tense chitchat as Hank maneuvered his way downtown.

  “Don’t worry,” Bransford said. “Just hang with us. You’ll catch up.”

  There was a moment’s silence as all the investigators turned to Bransford. “I guess the first thing we should do is have a show of hands. Is there anyone in this room who actually believes this cockamamie theory of Detective Chavez’s that a famous, rich, best-selling writer comes into town for a book signing and, just for shits and grins, decides to butcher two young girls?”

  A few hands went up, including Maria Chavez’s and Hank’s, with Gary Gilley at the other end of the table holding his hand out over the table, palm down, wiggling it back and forth.

  “Okay, Gary, what’s that mean?”

  “It means Maria put together a helluva report that reads like it oughta be on the best-seller list itself-”

  A couple of investigators laughed as Gilley paused for effect. “-but the question is can we prove it to anyone’s satisfaction, especially a jury. Personally, I think the DA’s gonna laugh us out of town.”

  “What other theories have you got, Detective Gilley?”

  Hank asked.

  Gilley shook his head. “Not much. We’ve gone all through these two girls’ backgrounds. Deep stuff. There’s nothing there. The closest is that the Burnham girl was dating a soldier out of Fort Campbell, a paratrooper with the 101st Air-borne. These guys are trained in close combat, especially with knives, bayonets, machetes, shit like that. Also, this guy supposedly had a real temper. Maybe he didn’t know his girlfriend was working in a massage parlor and went apeshit when he found out. That was our best bet, but we went up this guy’s ass with a very bright light and we didn’t see anything up there that shouldn’t have been there. He had an alibi for that weekend. And he just got shipped out to downtown Baghdad.”

  Hank turned to Max Bransford. “What about the forensic evidence from the Dumpster?”

  “Yeah, that,” Gilley answered. “The soldier boyfriend voluntarily gave us a swab and we typed him against the DNA on the overalls and the rags. Nothing.”

  “So he’s clear,” Maria said.

  “Anything else from the Dumpster?” Hank asked.

  “Oh, yeah, we got blood and tissue matches to both girls.

  The stuff definitely came from the murder scene. And we got a bunch of stuff we were able to profile, but were unable to match.”

  Hank nodded to Gilley. “That means we’ve probably got blood, saliva, scrapings, something from the killer.”

  Jack Murray, near the end of the table across from Cowan, raised his hand. “So why can’t we just get this famous guy to give us a DNA sample and type it.”

  “Because,” Bransford said, “if this guy’s got a brain in his head, he’ll tell us to go fuck ourselves. And I wouldn’t blame him.”

  “That’s putting the cart ahead of the horse,” Hank agreed.

  “We’d have to build a case for subpoenaing the sample and we’re not there yet.”

  Bransford turned to Howard Hinton, the homicide investigator who had raised his hand. “So you buy into this crazi-ness, Howard? Wanta tell us why?”

  Hinton, who had been silent before now, leaned his heavy bulk over the table and planted his elbows on the hard wood.

  He rested his chin on his right palm and sat there for a moment.

  “At first, I thought it was crazy, too. Then I went back and did a little checking. The night he did the two murders, the L

  and the M killings, he was in Nashville at a book signing.”

  “Yeah?” Bransford said after a moment.

  “Almost two years
ago, when Laurie Metzger, the twenty-two-year-old blond who worked out of that strip club, Deja View, became the J murder?”

  Hank felt his neck tighten.

  “Yes?” Bransford said again, his voice tense.

  “Michael Schiftmann was in Chattanooga as the keynote speaker at the Chattanooga Mountain Writers’ Conference.

  Schiftmann arrived on a Thursday afternoon. She was murdered Friday night. Schiftmann didn’t leave until Sunday morning.”

  Hank wondered how Bransford could deliver a bombshell like this in such an offhanded manner. For a few moments, there was complete silence in the room. Then, from down the table to Hank’s left, a voice muttered: “Holy shit …”

  Bransford turned to Hank. “Did you know this?”

  “No, but I would have eventually. I’ve e-mailed every field office where the Alphabet Man has hit and asked them to cross-check against Schiftmann’s book signings and travel.”

  “This is insane! Do you guys have any idea how crazy this sounds?” Gilley, his voice shrill with tension, shouted.

  “Of course it’s insane,” Chavez said loudly. “But it’s insane to butcher two MTSU coeds, too! That’s the whole thing with serial killers, Gary, they’re nuts! Get it? Serial killer-”

  Chavez held her hand out and drew an equal sign in the air.

  “-nuts! It comes with the territory.”

  “But he’s not nuts,” Hank interrupted. “We have to remember that, he’s not crazy. He’s a sociopath, he’s ruthless and relentless, and he’s evil, but he’s not crazy. And so far he’s gotten away with this, so he’s careful and he’s smart.

  And we have to be just as careful and just as smart or we blow this.”

  Again, there was a tense silence in the room. After a few moments, Max Bransford spoke up. “So, let’s strategize.

  How do we reel this guy in and nail him?”

  Hank looked around the room, scanning the face of each one of the investigators. “A couple of observations. If we’ve learned anything about high-profile celebrity murder cases in the past dozen years or so, it’s that the police and the prosecutors usually lose by shooting off their mouths. The first thing we have to do is lock this thing down, tight. If that reporter down in Chattanooga-”

  Hank looked over at Howard Hinton, questioning.

  “Yeah,” Hinton said, “Andy Parks.”

  “Andy Parks gets this and then it goes to the New York Times and the Washington Post like that last story did, then we’re in deep trouble.”

  “Everybody got that?” Bransford asked. “If this leaks, we know it came from this room.”

  “And we don’t have to even begin to discuss the world of shit the leaker will be in when I find out who he or she is,”

  Gilley added.

  “The second thing is,” Hank added, “we’ve got to coordinate and work together. You guys have to treat this as a local homicide, but I have to deal with it on a much larger scale, even an international scale. Once word gets out that we’ve got a suspect in these killings, I’ve got police departments from Macon, Georgia, to Vancouver, Canada, who are going to want everything we’ve got.”

  Gary Gilley shook his head wearily. “Jesus, this is going to be one huge cluster fuck if we’re not careful.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Hank answered.

  “So where do we start?” Maria Chavez asked.

  Max Bransford eased back in his chair and laced his fingers together behind his head. “To a certain extent, we treat it like any other homicide. We have to establish method, put the guy at the scene, look for witnesses …”

  “And prove a motive,” Gary Gilley said from the other end of the table. “That’s going to be a tough one. We know why this sicko did what he did, but making it real for a jury might be a bitch.”

  “Will be,” Bransford said. “But let’s get started. Gary, you’ll coordinate. Get the search warrants and subpoenas under way. I want this guy’s credit card records, travel records, hotel registrations. I want the bookstore people interviewed, the hotel people. If this guy rented a car, I want to know which car and what he left behind in it.”

  “In the meantime,” Hank added, “I’ve got a complete, full-blown background check going on this guy. We’ve already run his name through NCIC and came up with squat.

  As far as I can tell, he’s never even spit on the sidewalk before. But we’re still digging. And later on down the road, if we have to, we’ll dive under the Patriot Act umbrella and pull a sneak ‘n peek.”

  “Okay,” Gilley said. “Maria and Jack, you’ll work with me on assigning areas. We’ll split everything up and everybody into teams. After this meeting, we’ll huddle in the bullpen and get going right now.”

  “You know the weirdest thing about all this?” Maria Chavez asked.

  “What?” Bransford answered.

  “This whole thing broke because some silly old lady stays up all night reading paperback mysteries.”

  “If she were here right now,” Hank offered, “I’d kiss her on the mouth and give her a medal.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Friday afternoon, Barberton, Ohio

  Special Agent David Kelly smiled as he took the exit ramp off I-76 West and turned south toward Barberton, Ohio, one of the dozens of small towns that cluster around the Cleveland/Akron hub. Kelly, at twenty-eight, was the youngest agent in the Cleveland Field Office of the FBI. He’d been with the Bureau less than two years and still approached each assignment with the kind of eagerness and excitement that the older agents seldom exhibited.

  Agent Kelly didn’t know why he’d been sent to Barberton, Ohio, in pursuit of a deep background check on Michael Schiftmann. He knew who Schiftmann was, being a regular reader of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.

  But he’d never read one of his novels. And when the e-mail came through from Quantico to start digging, he took his orders like the good soldier he was and went out into the field armed with his file folder full of report pages.

  He already knew that Michael Schiftmann had been born in Barberton, Ohio, in 1969, during the height of the Vietnam war. Just over a year after Schiftmann’s birth, four students would be shot down by the Ohio National Guard just up the road in Kent. Michael’s father, a burned-out Vietnam combat veteran with an ever-growing and intrusive drug problem, would desert the infant and his mother and never be heard from again.

  And, Kelly discovered from a check of the Summit County public assistance database, Michael’s mother, Virginia, still lived in the same two-bedroom project house in South Barberton that she’d raised him in.

  Kelly looked down at his notes, then turned left into Fourth Street South, a narrow street clogged with parked cars-mostly run-down-on both sides of the curb. Even though the street was two-way, it would have been tough for two oncoming cars to maneuver around each other. He leaned over the steering wheel, looking out the windshield for house numbers. Most of the houses looked to be from the thirties, he thought, maybe early forties. They were identical shotgun duplexes, two narrow houses jammed together into one, with a narrow driveway between it and the house next door. Most needed a coat of paint. Random shutters hung askew, dotted by the occasional cracked window. There seemed to be no one around, not even kids or stray dogs.

  One empty lot was marked by a rusted fifty-five-gallon oil drum set up as a stove and a couple of ratty sofas next to it.

  Kind of like his old neighborhood, Kelly thought. Depressing.

  He passed the Schiftmann house, but there was nowhere to park. He cruised most of the block before he found an empty slot, then pulled his government-issue Ford Taurus over and cut the engine. He sat there a moment, organizing his thoughts, then opened the car door. The dry, cold Ohio wind hit him hard in the face. He tucked his chin into his neck, slammed the car door behind him, and pulled his overcoat tighter as he walked up the street against the wind.

  Virginia Schiftmann lived six houses up on the left, number 232-B. He turned off the cracked sidewal
k onto another cracked walk that led up to the house. There was a door-bell button, but when he pushed it, Kelly heard nothing. He tried again, then knocked. From somewhere in the house, he heard the faint sound of a television. He knocked again, louder. His hands were so cold, it hurt to rap them against the wood. He wished he’d brought gloves, but the use of gloves was discouraged because it made the rapid drawing of a weapon difficult.

  He raised his hand to knock again when the door opened a crack. An older woman, heavy, with ruddy red cheeks, wearing a gray housecoat, looked suspiciously out the door.

  “What?” she said, her voice a monotone.

  “Mrs. Schiftmann,” Kelly said, pulling his credentials out of his coat pocket, “I’m Special Agent Kelly of the FBI. I work out of the Cleveland Field Office. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  The old lady peered out through the crack in the door, the light dim behind her, the flickering of an old, seventies-era color television in the background. She examined his ID and his badge, then looked up into his face. Then, slowly, she opened the door wider.

  Kelly stepped in, the casual smile on his face designed to be as nonthreatening as possible. He stepped into the small entrance alcove and was hit by a wave of hot, musty air. Michael Schiftmann’s mother kept the furnace going full blast.

  “I won’t take up much of your time,” he offered as she closed the door behind him. She motioned toward the living room and he turned to walk.

  “I got nothing but time,” she muttered.

  As they entered the living room, the light got better and Kelly was able to examine the surroundings. Genteel poverty was a stretch, he realized. The carpet was worn and threadbare, with the faint odor of pet urine wafting up in the heat. The furniture was old, and even when new was pretty basic and bare. A framed photo of the pope hung on one wall over the television, partially hidden by a green vase full of ragged, dusty silk flowers.

  “Have a seat,” she said, walking slowly over to the television and turning down the soap opera she’d been watching.

  “Thank you,” Kelly said, pulling off his overcoat and draping it over the back of an overstuffed, tired chair. Tufts of white stuffing poked through the material in the corners of the seat pillow.