By Blood Written Page 2

  “Guy took souvenirs off this one,” Bransford said, staring over Hinton’s shoulder into the killing room. “We’ve searched the whole area, can’t find her nipples anywhere.”

  Hinton gritted his teeth and exhaled sharply through his nostrils to control the waves that he felt rising within him.

  He forced his eyes to travel up the walls, to where a foot-high letter L had been painted neatly on the wall in blood.

  He winced slightly, turned to the heavy man blocking his way down the hall, away from the hellish scene.

  “The ME’ll find ‘em,” he whispered.

  Bransford looked down at the man, confused.

  Hinton raised his upper lip in disgust. “They’re in her stomach.”

  The blood seemed to drain from Bransford’s face. “You mean-? I mean, how do you know?”

  Hinton ignored the question. “You’re going to have to leave the two of ‘em here,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his down ski jacket and pulling out a cell phone.

  “For how long?” Bransford demanded.

  Hinton extended the short antenna and punched a speed dial code into the phone, which began a series of high-pitched beeps. He turned back to Bransford with the phone to his ear.

  “As long as it takes,” he said.

  “As long as what takes?” Bransford asked irritably. “The families are going to want the bodies as soon as the ME

  finishes with-”

  Hinton made a shushing sound and held the cell phone to his ear. “Hank?” he said as a voice on the other end crackled with static.

  “Hank, this is Howard Hinton, Hamilton County, Tennessee, Sheriff’s Department, Homicide Squad. You need to book a flight to Nashville ASAP. We got two more for you.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Late Saturday night, Manhattan Taylor Robinson stepped out of the tiny kitchen just off the main room of her renovated SoHo loft and surveyed her guests. Against the exposed brick wall across from Taylor, her boss, Joan Delaney, leaned forward in rapt conversation with Michael Schiftmann’s editor, Brett Silverman. Taylor frowned, hoping that Joan wasn’t off on another of her dia-tribes about the sad state of the publishing industry.

  Taylor decided a rescue was in order, so began weaving her way through the crowded room. Eighties dance music played at a volume just below the level that would make conversation difficult, but loud enough to keep the party’s energy level up. In one corner, a small group of editorial assistant types-the ink on their honors degrees in English and com-parative lit still wet-danced away on that thin line between professionally cool and unprofessionally out-of-control.

  Taylor slid gracefully around two men engaged in a heated discussion over the upcoming New York senatorial race, smiling and nodding amiably at them but never losing her momentum so as not to get trapped, and made her way over to the wall.

  “Frankly, I don’t care what happens to the independent booksellers anymore,” Joan spouted, her mass of tangled, dyed black hair vibrating in time to her words. She’d propped her glasses up on her head, a move that Taylor knew meant Joan Delaney was itching to get in a good fight with someone, anyone. It was important to stop her before she started talking with her hands. That, Taylor knew, meant the plug had been pulled.

  “The world’s changing,” Joan shouted over the music,

  “and the independents are dinosaurs who’ve refused to adapt to an evolving marketplace. If Amazon.com sells more of my clients’ books, then they deserve to beat out the mom-and-pop bookstores.”

  Good God! Taylor thought. Brett Silverman’s father owns a bookstore in Hartford!

  Taylor sidled up to the two women just as the color was rising in Brett Silverman’s pale, drawn face. Brett was in her late thirties, a couple of years older than Taylor, and had been around long enough to gain the kind of confidence necessary to deal with the likes of Joan Delaney, but not long enough to let Joan’s over-the-top opinions slide off her without leaving skid marks.

  “Hello, ladies,” Taylor interjected. “Has anyone seen the star of the evening?”

  “Yeah, where is he anyway?” Joan demanded, her already shrill voice rising a notch.

  “No,” Brett said quietly. “He disappeared a while ago.”

  “Well, he was upstairs powdering his nose earlier,” Taylor said, “and said he’d be down in just a few. I wondered if you’d had a chance to ask him how this latest leg of the tour was going.”

  Brett turned, plainly relieved to steer the conversation in another direction. “I talked to Carol Gee yesterday afternoon. He drew a good crowd at Davis-Kidd. People lined up for hours.”

  “How about Birmingham and Atlanta?” Taylor asked.

  “We were speculating on whether the deep South was ready for Michael Schiftmann.”

  Brett shrugged her shoulders, her sheer silk blouse sliding loosely across her freckled skin. “Not so good. Atlanta, maybe twenty. The Little Professor in Birmingham was a bust, though. Less than ten …”

  Taylor grimaced. “Jeez, and the Times list was already out.”

  Brett smiled. “Maybe once you get west of the Hudson, the New York Times best-seller list doesn’t carry as much weight.”

  “Bite your tongue, girl!” Joan snapped. “We live and die by The List.”

  Taylor took Brett’s left elbow softly in her right hand.

  “Maybe we need to make some adjustments before the last leg of the tour kicks off. Why don’t you and I step into the kitchen for a moment and make some notes.”

  “Yes,” Brett said, her eyes thanking Taylor in advance.

  “Good idea.”

  “Would you excuse us, boss?”

  “Sure,” Joan said, holding up her empty glass. “If you need anything, just call me. I’ll be at the bar.”

  Taylor leaned in close to Brett as the two strode arm-in-arm across the room toward the kitchen.

  “You’ll have to excuse her,” Taylor said soothingly. “You don’t get to be head of one of the top half-dozen literary agencies in the city by being a shrinking violet.”

  “Shrinking violet’s one thing,” Brett said as they stepped through the swinging door into the kitchen. “Dragon lady’s quite another …”

  “Yes, she’s abrasive and in-your-face and loud and vul-gar,” Taylor said. “And she also fights like a pit bull for her clients and everyone who works for her.”

  Brett held up a hand, palm-out, toward Taylor. “Hold on, girlfriend. You’re preaching to the choir. Remember? I’ve been up against her.”

  “Then you understand why her clients are desperately loyal to her, and so are her employees.”

  “Yourself included, I guess,” Brett commented.

  Taylor smiled. “Yes. And now that we’re away from the crowds and the music, why don’t you tell me what’s really going on with Michael’s tour.”

  Brett sighed and leaned against the refrigerator. There was barely room for both women in the cramped kitchen at the same time.

  “Well, it’s kind of weird, really,” Brett said slowly. “I can’t quite figure it out, and I’m not sure it’s anything serious.”

  Brett paused, crossed her arms, and lifted an eyebrow.

  “You’ve seen how women react to him?”

  Taylor pursed her lips, thinking of the situation she’d just encountered upstairs. “Yes,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to miss.”

  “I mean, the guy’s really good-looking!” Brett said. “Am I right or am I right?”

  Taylor nodded. “You’re right, Brett. When you’re right, you’re right.”

  “And he’s funny and he’s warm and he’s sexy and he’s personable and he’s smart and-” Brett hesitated for a moment.

  “God! Why can’t I find a man like that!”

  Taylor laughed softly. “Don’t forget, he’s very close to rich and famous as well.”

  “Yes!” Brett exclaimed, her arms flapping out to her sides in an exaggerated gesture. “That, too! I want to say the guy’s a hunk, but that word doesn�
��t quite fit, does it?”

  Taylor thought for a moment. “No, it really doesn’t and I’m not sure why.”

  “Half the time I want to jump his bones and the other half of the time I want to take him home and make him dinner,”

  Brett said. “Forget that he’s one of my authors.”

  “Don’t forget that,” Taylor warned. “Never forget that.

  Don’t even think of it.”

  “I can’t help but think of it!” Brett placed her hands on her hips and slouched even harder against the refrigerator door. “Besides, I’m only half serious. I’m a lot of things, my friend, but deluded isn’t one of them. I haven’t got a chance with him …”

  “Brett,” Taylor said, feeling like she was interrupting a reverie that really wasn’t much of her business. “What are you trying to tell me? Out there, you sounded like there was some kind of problem.”

  “I can’t figure it out,” Brett said. “Given what an attractive, charming, sexy man he is-”

  “Yes?” Taylor asked after a moment.

  “How come Carol Gee hates him so much?”

  Audrey Carlisle was the first to spot Michael Schiftmann as he carefully made his way down the spiral staircase from the second floor of Taylor’s loft. The black wrought iron bent and squeaked as he descended, but the din of party chatter and music covered what would otherwise have been an annoy-ing sound. Audrey, a short, severe woman in her late fifties who’d been the

  Times

  main reviewer of crime fiction for more than two decades, had managed to solidify a comfortable and safe niche for herself. The more academic and literary critics stayed away from popular fiction, especially mysteries and crime novels, while the less accomplished reviewers of pop culture novels had been beaten into submission.

  Crime fiction was Audrey Carlisle’s turf, and she guarded it zealously. She’d made careers and she’d torpedoed them.

  Writers respected her and feared her, the savvy ones anyway.

  But in all her years of dealing with writers and authors-the distinction between the two being very real, she thought, authors considering themselves officers while writers were enlisted personnel who worked for a living-she had never encountered anyone like Michael Schiftmann.

  He was what she considered a workmanlike writer. Audrey had briefly reviewed his first two novels and found them perfectly competent but less than outstanding. She worked in a couple of paragraphs about his first book in a column that reviewed a dozen other first novels as a favor to an editor. Schiftmann’s first book had been published as a mass-market paperback, had spent its customary six weeks on the shelves, and then faded quietly into obscurity.

  A year later, Audrey found in the basket of review copies that inundated her office every day Michael Schiftmann’s second book. It, too, had been designed, published, and marketed in a completely forgettable fashion and, once again, got a cursory two-paragraph mention in Audrey’s regular column. When a third book landed on her desk eight months after the second, it wound up in a canvas bag jammed full of other review copies and bound galleys and shipped off to the VA hospital in Queens.

  That was the last Audrey Carlisle heard of Michael Schiftmann for several years. She vaguely remembered seeing more paperbacks come across her desk, but in the avalanche of paper that gushed in and out of her office on an annual basis-enough to stretch from Manhattan to Tokyo every year-she couldn’t be completely sure.

  Audrey continued to eye Michael as he took the last step off the spiral staircase and was immediately sandwiched between two young women in tight sheath dresses, martini glasses in hand. The pouty-lipped brunette to his right leaned in close as she talked to him, wrapping a curl of hair around her left index finger as she spoke in what Audrey knew was classic body-language come-on. Audrey felt her brow tighten as she watched the two young women fawn over Michael, who seemed to be politely enduring the attention. The short blond in the red vinyl said something apparently considered funny. Michael laughed, and the lines of his jaw shifted under his skin. His teeth were white and straight; Audrey wondered if he’d had them bleached.

  She felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if she couldn’t figure out which was more alluring; the brunette with the sexy, thick lips or the warmth radiating from Michael Schiftmann as he stood next to her pretending-Audrey hoped-to listen.

  Audrey felt her face redden and turned away, heading toward the bar with her empty glass. It was always this way for her at parties. Never successfully forcing herself to be comfortable, she often found herself standing alone with an empty glass in hand. No one ever offered to fill it for her. No man ever chatted her up. The small talk others made with her varied, depending on the place the other person occupied on the publishing feeding chain. Writers clawing their way up the ladder were either sycophantic, deferential, and fawning, or they were too intimidated to talk to her at all.

  The established authors whose careers were already made condescended to her, patronized her, now that she was no longer essential to their success.

  In either case, Audrey realized, none of them really knew her or gave a damn about her. As her turn at the bar came, Audrey decided to have one more Scotch and soda, then call it a night. Parties always brought her down. At least, she thought, that dreadful music had stopped momentarily.

  “Excuse me,” a masculine voice behind her said. The voice was low, a smooth baritone, confident and relaxed.

  She turned.

  “You’re Audrey Carlisle, aren’t you?” Michael Schiftmann stared over the top of her glass, making direct eye contact and offering her his right hand.

  “Yes,” Audrey said. She switched the glass from her right hand to her left, then took his outstretched hand before realizing her palms were wet with condensation from the glass.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Audrey said, pulling her hand away and wiping it on the side of her corduroy jacket.

  “No problem,” Michael said, smiling. Audrey realized, suddenly, that the black-and-white picture that took up the entire back cover of his latest hardcover didn’t do him justice. His blue eyes were clear and penetrating, and the deep lines around his eyes seemed to bring an age and maturity to a face that would have otherwise perhaps been too boyish.

  “I was hoping we’d get to meet,” Michael said, taking her arm and gently escorting her away from the bar. “Taylor told me she’d invited you. I’m so glad you came.”

  As the two crossed the large room, the music started up again. Audrey winced.

  “Wish they wouldn’t play that so loud.”

  “Here,” Michael said loudly, motioning toward the far wall, “we can get away from most of it.”

  A moment later, Audrey noticed the room’s acoustics did seem to direct the music away from the corner where she now found herself in intimate conversation with Michael.

  Suddenly it seemed as if they were the only two in the room, that he was devoting his entire focus and attention to her. Audrey Carlisle felt warm and hoped she wasn’t too visibly flushed.

  “This is probably totally inappropriate,” Michael said, leaning in close to her, “but I wanted to thank you for the piece that’s coming out tomorrow.”

  Audrey smiled. “Why would that be inappropriate?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging slightly, “professional detachment, that sort of thing. Maybe in this business it’s just not cool to admit that you’re in someone else’s debt.”

  Audrey had convinced her editor to run a full-length piece on Michael’s latest book, The Fifth Letter, and to time it with the book’s first appearance on The List. As was the paper’s practice, she’d sent an advance copy of the review to Brett Silverman as a courtesy, and obviously Michael had been given the chance to read it. It had been the first of Michael’s new series that she had reviewed personally. After reading the latest, she did something she had rarely done before in her career: She went back and read the first four installments before writing her review.

  “I guess I just wante
d you to know how grateful I am,”

  Michael offered.

  “You know,” Audrey said, sipping her drink, “I almost tracked you down to interview you for the piece, but I was up against deadline, and Brett Silverman said you were somewhere down in South Carolina or someplace like that.”

  “I did three signings in South Carolina,” Michael said.

  “One in Charleston, one in Hilton Head, and the other in-”

  He hesitated a moment. “Jeez, I can’t remember. Colum-bia, maybe? I’m two-thirds of the way through a forty-city tour, and they’re all starting to run together.”

  “I’ll bet,” Audrey said.

  “So,” Michael asked, lowering his voice, “what would you have asked me if you’d been able to track me down?”

  Audrey took another sip of the drink, this one longer and fuller, and felt the bubble of warmth in her stomach pulsate back and forth as the Scotch hit.

  “I think the thing I’m most curious about is the disparity,”

  she said after a few moments.

  “Disparity?”

  “Yes, the disparity. The incongruousness of someone who seems so nice, so pleasant, so normal, writing novels that clearly reflect an imagination so-”

  “So what?” Michael asked.

  “Deviant,” she said after a moment’s hesitation.

  Michael’s forehead seemed to tense, the blue eyes darken.

  “What do you mean by that, Audrey?”

  “Other writers have written books featuring assassins, hit men, as protagonists. Larry Block, Andrew Vachss, Elmore Leonard, for instance. But your books are the only books I’ve ever read that authentically, realistically capture the mind of a sociopath, a serial killer, a human being totally without conscience or sense of ethics or morality, and do it in such a way that you’re so drawn into the story that before you even realize it, you’re cheering for evil.”

  Michael Schiftmann stared at Audrey Carlisle for a few beats, then looked uncomfortably down at his drink.

  “Tell me, Mr. Schiftmann,” Audrey said, “do you have a moral compass?”