By Blood Written Page 20

  Michael Schiftmann, Taylor thought, had done it. It was the culmination of a life’s dream. The Fifth Letter was the number one book on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, and four of the fifteen slots on the paperback list were Michael’s as well.

  Taylor wondered what lay in front of him. But then the champagne came, and the thought left her head.

  One bottle of champagne was followed by another, and part of a third. By the end of the evening, Michael and Taylor had hooked up with the people at another couple of tables, and soon there was a party going on. They laughed and drank and danced and, in the end, went home with one copy of the complete Sunday Times and nineteen copies of the book review, the rest of the newspapers dumped in a wire litter basket on the sidewalk.

  Taylor realized as they got to her co-op that she was dizzy from a combination of fatigue, excitement, and champagne.

  Michael was still wired, still animated. All she wanted was sleep.

  And now, at nearly noon on Sunday, she rolled over in bed, faced a sleeping Michael, and smiled at the thought of what he had wanted. The act of smiling, though, made her head hurt even more. She hadn’t had a pounding head like this in years.

  “You’re insatiable,” she whispered. He stirred, moaned, and shifted beneath the sheets. She eased herself out of bed, slipped into the bathroom, peed, and swallowed three Ad-vils. She threw on her thick bathrobe and slippers and padded downstairs without waking Michael.

  She started a pot of coffee and, while waiting, managed to down half a glass of cranberry juice. She didn’t drink much, ordinarily, but if there was ever a reason to celebrate, this was it. She opened the Sunday Times book review and turned to the best-seller page again. She stared down at it, almost wistfully, and realized that this was as big a day for her as it was for Michael. That night in Bonaire, the night he proposed, he said that finding her had been the thing that turned everything around in his life. Taylor realized, as she stood there staring down at the pages, finding him had been the biggest break she’d ever had as well. She was already the star agent at Joan Delaney’s agency. Now this would elevate her several notches further.

  Maybe, she mused, it was time to open her own agency, hang out her own shingle. Maybe she could use this as a stepping stone to lure even more heavy hitters to her own shop. At this moment, standing in her chilly New York kitchen on a cold day in March, it seemed to Taylor as if her options were unlimited.

  The world had opened for her.

  The shrill chirp of the cordless phone brought her out of her reverie. She picked the phone up quickly and hit the talk button.

  “Hello.”

  “Hey, beautiful! You’re back!”

  Taylor smiled. “Good morning, Brett.”

  “Morning, hell, there’s precisely ten minutes of morning left.”

  Taylor glanced over at the clock on the microwave, which read eleven fifty-three.

  “Not even that much,” Taylor said. “And I’m just getting out of bed. I should be ashamed.”

  Brett Silverman laughed. “That depends on what you were doing in bed.”

  “You’re terrible,” Taylor teased. “So what’s up?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you got my message and picked up the Times.”

  “Twenty copies,” Taylor said. “I thought we were going to have to hire a car to bring them home.”

  “You could buy the car now,” Brett said. “A whole fleet of them. So tell me, girl, how was the Caribbean?”

  “Unbelievable. Incredible. It was warm, balmy, sunny, romantic. We scuba dived-or is it scuba dove?-and ate and drank and slept late.”

  “Either one, I think. Dived or dove. And what else did you do?”

  Taylor hesitated. “What?”

  “You know … Lots of?”

  Taylor felt herself blushing. “Yes, plenty of that as well.

  In fact, I’ve got a little surprise for you. Word’s going to get around anyway, so you may as well be the first. We’re engaged.”

  Taylor jerked the phone away from her ear as Brett shrieked on the other end. The screeching went on for a full five seconds, and then evolved into an almost maniacal laugh.

  “I don’t believe it!” she squealed after returning to the English language. “That’s awesome! Incredible!”

  “Yeah, that was kind of the way I took it. It’s crazy, but I think we’re going to go through with it.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Upstairs,” Taylor answered, cradling the phone in the crook of her neck so she could pour a mug of coffee. “Still knocked out.”

  “That’s unbelievable,” Brett said again. “Have you set a date?”

  “Haven’t gotten that far.”

  “I’m really happy for you, Taylor,” Brett said, her voice suddenly serious. “I wish you nothing but happiness. Always.”

  “I appreciate that. Really.” Taylor raised the mug to her lips and took a sip of the coffee without even adding her usual sugar and cream. The coffee was hot, strong, and she needed it now.

  “So is this a big secret? Can I tell?”

  “Sure. I’ll make the announcement at the office tomorrow.”

  “Awesome … I mean, I can’t even find the words. But I do wish you luck. Marriage is hard, you know. I’ve been there three times.”

  “Three?” Taylor asked. “I thought it was two.”

  “Nope, there’s another one back there somewhere. I forget exactly where. I was young. It didn’t last long.”

  “Wow,” Taylor said softly. “The truth is, I’m scared. I never saw myself getting married. Just didn’t think it was in the cards.”

  “This was pretty sudden, wasn’t it?”

  Taylor was silent for a moment, thinking. “Yeah, maybe a bit too sudden. But we’ll take it slow from here on out.”

  “Good move, good thinking. Now, you got time for a little business?”

  “Sure, shoot.”

  “Okay,” Brett said. “First, Jack Hamlett from ICM called last week trying to find you. They’ve got the option terms worked out. They’re ready to go to contract.”

  “I hope that means the higher figure we were talking about. You know my motto: ‘No cheap options.’”

  “Got you covered there,” Brett agreed. “We’re not giving these guys shit. They’re paying top dollar. And he’s got a package he wants to present to you and Michael. He didn’t give me all the details, but he’s got George Melford set to produce and Jack Holt to star as Chaney.”

  “Jack Holt,” Taylor said, impressed. “Damn, he’s good.

  Sexy, too.”

  “He’ll draw the chick demographic, that’s for sure.”

  “So this is all looking good,” Taylor offered. “I can let Michael know.”

  “Tell him to get his signing pen ready.”

  “He’ll be locked and loaded, I’m sure.”

  “And there’s one other thing, Taylor. This one’s a little weird. But have you heard anything from Carol Gee?”

  Taylor frowned, set the coffee mug down on the counter.

  “The publicist?”

  “Yeah, have you heard anything from her?”

  “No, nothing. Why should I?”

  “Just wondered,” Brett said, pausing. “She’s sort of disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Taylor asked, surprised.

  “Yeah. Out of nowhere. She was set to take some vacation after the last tour ended. She was flying from San Diego to somewhere. Hell, I forget where. But apparently she never showed up. And when her vacation was over, she never came back to work.”

  “Well, has anyone gone by her apartment or tried to call?”

  “Kim over in publicity tracked down her roommates. She lives with three other girls in a two-bedroom apartment over in Woodside. They haven’t heard from her, either. Big mystery.”

  “She got a boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody exactly knows how to handle this.

  Human resources is taking the point
on this, but they sent around an e-mail asking all of us who knew her to keep an eye out.”

  Taylor shrugged. “I haven’t heard a word. But if I do hear anything, I’ll let you know. When’s the last time anyone saw her?”

  “The last person we’ve been able to track down is the bookstore manager at Michael’s San Diego signing. The next morning, she did the automatic checkout from the hotel and no one’s seen her since.”

  Taylor glanced upstairs in the direction of her bedroom.

  “I’ll ask Michael when he wakes up. Maybe he knows something.”

  “Yeah, do that. And are we still on for lunch Tuesday?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Taylor answered. “See you at one.”

  The two exchanged good-byes, then hung up. Taylor poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down with the rest of the Sunday Times. She drank the coffee and scanned the front page, but in the back of her mind, she kept wondering what had happened to Carol Gee.

  CHAPTER 20

  Tuesday morning, two weeks later FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia Hank Powell closed the door to his office, set a fresh cup of coffee on his desk, and opened the window blinds. Outside, the trees that had been so tired and barren all winter were beginning to bud. Another few weeks and the view outside his window would be a palette of bursting greens, whites, and reds as spring broke through and brought everything back to life.

  This was one winter Hank Powell was not sorry to see go.

  It had been a rough one.

  But, he thought, smiling, things were looking up. He turned his back on the window and sat down at his desk.

  In front of him was a stack of file folders that had come in from all over the U.S. and Canada. Eleven FBI field offices, twelve police departments, nine sheriff’s departments, and the Forensic Laboratory Services Directorate of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had all contributed to what had evolved into an extraordinary effort to stop the Alphabet Man.

  Everything had come together, and now Hank Powell’s job was to sift through several pounds of paper and try to make sense of it all. If he could do that, then the slow, cum-bersome, but unstoppable machinery of justice would go to work. The parents, friends, and families of the thirteen murdered girls they knew about could-if not find peace-at least begin to put this behind them. No one knew how many young women who might have been future victims would now be spared.

  And no one knew if there were other victims, other murdered girls who just hadn’t been found, who hadn’t been part of the pattern.

  Hank felt weighed down by the responsibility, but somehow elated at the same time. He’d been living with this so long that to finally see an end in sight made the weight somehow more bearable.

  He set a legal pad and pen on his desk to the right of the folders, then opened the first one. He had stacked the folders by order of the murders; the A murder had been committed in Cincinnati, so the reports from the Cincinnati Police Department’s Homicide Squad and the Cincinnati FBI Field Office were first in the pile. Hank began reading and making notes.

  Then he worked his way, over the next five hours, through the reports from Macon, Georgia, then Scottsdale, Arizona, followed by Seattle, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New York City, Vancouver, Omaha, Chattanooga, Dallas, and finally, Nashville.

  Twelve cities: thirteen brutal, senseless murders.

  He took a quick break for a late lunch, then went back to work on the files, this time going over the extensive background material on Michael Schiftmann. The agent out of the Cleveland Field Office, a young guy named Kelly, had done an outstanding job of compiling a biography of Michael Schiftmann. Hank read the interview with Schiftmann’s mother and got about as much out of it as Kelly did, but it was the interview with the neighbor that caught his attention.

  Schiftmann’s mother had painted a portrait of a lonely, mistreated kid who was smarter than the other children, worked harder, was fiercely devoted to books and his stud-ies, and was ashamed of his impoverished background.

  “Okay,” Hank muttered out loud. “Lots of lonely, weird, nerdy kids don’t grow up to be serial killers, though.”

  But the interview with the neighbor, an eighty-one-year-old disabled WWII veteran named Stan Walonsky, painted an entirely different picture. Walonsky had used terms like

  “psycho” and “bastard” in describing Schiftmann. This, in and of itself, would have very little credibility. Sometimes people simply dislike each other. But Walonsky had specific examples to back up his claims.

  When Michael Schiftmann was eleven, for instance, Walonsky caught him in an outbuilding that he used for a workshop and for storage, masturbating to a pornographic magazine. Walonsky told on the boy, and apparently his mother administered a pretty severe whipping.

  “I really didn’t mean for the boy to take a beating like that,” Kelly quoted Walonsky as saying. “I just thought maybe the kid needed some help.”

  In any case, Walonsky added, two days later the building burned down in the middle of the night. As the firemen were fighting the fire, trying to keep it from spreading to the nearby houses, Walonsky caught a glimpse of Michael Schiftmann in an upstairs bedroom window, looking down on the scene and smiling.

  Walonsky had told the arson investigators about the kid, but his mother had covered for him, insisting he’d never been out of his bedroom that night.

  A year later, Walonsky’s wife’s cat was found dead, the body horribly mutilated. Somebody had obviously tortured the cat to death. Hank grimaced as he read the details. But he also knew that in the details lay the truth.

  Hank had twenty years in with the FBI, but he’d come to VICAP in the mid-nineties, long after the pioneer FBI profiler Robert Ressler had retired. He’d never met Ressler, but he’d read all his books and studied his work intensely.

  Ressler discovered that serial killers often, in fact commonly, shared three traits from childhood. They enjoyed torturing animals, enjoyed setting fires, and were chronic bed wetters.

  If Walonsky was telling the truth, Hank mused, Michael Schiftmann was batting .666.

  But as he read on, he realized that there were even other indicators. Michael Schiftmann’s academic records were revealing. In ninth grade, he tested out on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Survey as having an IQ of 156-genius level and then some. A sympathetic guidance counselor apparently became interested in the young boy and helped him get a scholarship to the Benton Academy, an exclusive private school on the lakeshore near Oberlin. There, Hank read, Schiftmann apparently learned the art of getting in trouble without getting caught with his hand too far in the cookie jar. His file from the Benton Academy indicated that he was constantly in and out of minor scrapes. He got caught smoking a few times, but always cigarettes, never pot. He got caught drinking beer in his senior year, but not hard liquor.

  And in every instance, it seemed, he had an explanation. It was always somebody else’s booze, somebody else brought the cigarettes, it was somebody else’s idea to take that sneak Saturday night.

  Schiftmann, Hank noted, did graduate from the academy.

  But his grades were chronically low-skating along in the low C, high D range-and he actually attended graduation under disciplinary probation. With his brains, he could’ve aced every course in school without cracking a book. But he was, one teacher noted, “a chronic underachiever.”

  There were also notes in his Benton file from guidance counselors and teachers who struggled to get a handle on this kid. He had problems with authority, with women, with appropriate social behavior. Of course, Hank realized, he’d just read descriptions of the majority of adolescent males in the country. But this was different. The tone of the guidance counselor reports was serious, foreboding, as if the counselors could see there was something at work here besides adolescent rebellion.

  After private school, Schiftmann actually managed to put in two semesters at the University of Virginia, paying with a combination of scholarships and student loans. But his grades here were equally di
smal and there were numerous disciplinary problems as well, including one incident when Michael got in a fight at a drunken frat party and actually broke a guy’s arm. He left college at the end of his freshman year.

  After that, Michael Schiftmann’s life became a blur. He apparently worked menial jobs and switched them often.

  His social security records revealed he rarely made over ten grand a year for a decade-long stretch. He was living in a one-bedroom apartment in a run-down complex in a down-scale section of Cleveland, paying less than four hundred a month in rent and probably barely scraping that up.

  Somewhere along the way, and God only knew how, Michael Schiftmann switched from being an inveterate reader to an aspiring writer. The first publication anyone could find was a science-fiction short story in an obscure fanzine published out of Cleveland. Then, a few years later, he published his first novel, a mystery that was brought out in paperback by a small house and was nominated for a couple of awards, but went nowhere. Some copies of reviews were included in the file. Hank read them and was surprised to find them overwhelmingly glowing. Words and phrases like “liter-ate,” “compelling,” “involving and complex” were used to describe his work.

  By then, Michael Schiftmann had gotten a job as a proofreader with a small publisher of religious and archaeological texts. And according to the report, he kept the job from his mid-twenties until he was thirty-four.

  Hank scanned the field office report, which listed his next four books as well. Again, good reviews, a couple of nominations, one small award, the name of which Hank didn’t recognize …

  Yet, Hank thought, he couldn’t afford to give up his day job. Five books, reviews, awards, and can’t afford to quit the day job.

  Hank was glad he had no impulse whatsoever to be a writer.

  There was almost a four-year lapse in Schiftmann’s publishing history. During that time, he held his job, but published nothing. Was this a long dry spell, Hank wondered, or was there something else going on?