By Blood Written Read online

  “Holy shit,” Andy muttered. “Who’re they charging?”

  “Well, there hasn’t been an indictment issued yet, but the DA wants them to charge … Are ya ready for this?”

  Andy gritted his teeth. “C’mon, don’t tease me.”

  “Ever heard of a best-selling author named Michael Schiftmann?”

  Andy felt his forehead scrunching up involuntarily. “Uh, yeah, I think so. Never read his books, but-wait? Are you telling me-?”

  Andy shook his head, hard, as if trying to clear out the cobwebs.

  “He’s got a series of books that are all, like, letters and stuff, you know? Like The First Letter, The Second Letter, and so on, right? And the guys over in the Murder Squad think this best-selling writer guy is, like, killing chicks and then writing about it. Freaky, huh?”

  Andy leaned against the cold granite of the building and pressed his back into it. “Can you get me details?”

  “I’ve got a CD with the transcript,” the voice said, in an almost singsong fashion.

  Andy’s head whirled. He hadn’t read any of Michael Schiftmann’s books, but he’d read reviews, scanned the best-seller lists, had heard of the guy. He was famous. He was rich.

  And he was a murderer.

  Not only that, a serial killer.

  If Andy could break this story, he’d be so out of Chattanooga, they wouldn’t even see his dust. He could see himself on MSNBC, CNN, Fox, maybe even one of the majors.

  “Lydia, you are so yummy. I just want to put you in my mouth and let you melt.”

  “That could be arranged, you know.”

  “When can we get together?”

  “How about eight tonight? The Blue Moon?”

  The Blue Moon Cafe was a wonderful, yet out-of-the-way restaurant where Andy often went when he didn’t want to be seen with someone. It was on the river, the restaurant actually built on a dock in the water. You could eat outside, at dimly lit tables, and never be noticed by anyone except the person bringing your drinks and food.

  “I’ll be there. Probably an hour early.”?

  “Oh, and Andy?”?

  “Yeah?”?

  “This one’s going to cost you,” the voice said. “Five hun?-

  dred, cash.”

  Andy smiled. It was cheap at the price. He’d have paid ten times that. Dumb bitch, he thought.

  “Sure, baby,” he said sweetly. “Cash.”

  Max Bransford was trying to get his desk in order before leaving for home, even though he felt that making sense of the piles of paper in his office was a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Suddenly the door to his outer office slammed open and Gary Gilley burst past the secretary and into his office.

  “They found it!” Gilley announced.?

  “What?”?

  “The rental. Schiftmann’s rental car. It was turned in by?

  a client at the New Orleans airport. NOPD’s impounded the car.”

  Max stood up. “Their forensic guys had a look at it?”

  Gilley nodded. “They found some staining in the trunk carpet. They took a Hemident swab. It showed positive.”

  “Hemident,” Bransford said.

  “I know, I know, it’s just a field test. Doesn’t even distin-guish between human and animal blood, but unless some guy carried his groceries home in the trunk and his pot roast leaked all over the place, there was something bloody in the back of that car.”

  Bransford stood there for a moment, and then a broad grin spread across his face. “Get on the horn to NOPD and tell

  ‘em to keep the car. We’re on our way to get it. I’ll call Collier and let him know. And then I’ll call the TBI lab and tell them to get ready. Oh, and I’ll call Hank Powell at Quantico and Howard Hinton down in Chattanooga.”

  Gilley grinned back, then lifted his hand in the air. Max shook his head. “No high-fives, Gary. We’ll high-five when we find out the car Michael Schiftmann rented in February has bloodstains in the trunk that match what we found in the Mapco Express Dumpster and that it all came from those two girls.”

  Gilley nodded. “Okay, Loot. If I’m gonna head to New Orleans, I guess I need to haul some ass.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Thursday afternoon, Nashville

  Andy Parks went over his notes one last time before making the call. He got up, locked the door to the press room in Legislative Plaza, then made the call from his cell phone. As far as he knew, he was the only reporter in town who had an inkling of the story that was about to break out of the Metro courthouse.

  He intended to keep it that way.

  “You’ve reached the office of the District Attorney General,” the computerized voice announced. “If you know your party’s three-digit extension, you may dial it at any time.”

  Andy pulled the phone away from his ear and pressed the 0 key.

  “Please hold,” the voice announced. A few moments of silence followed that soon stretched into almost a minute.

  Finally, a human voice came on.

  “District Attorney’s office. How may I direct your call?”

  “General Collier’s office, please.”

  “Please hold.”

  This had been easier than he expected. Only two gate-keepers, with one to go.

  “General Collier’s office,” a second female voice said.

  “Yes, this is Andy Parks of the Chattanooga News-Free Press. I’d like to speak to General Collier, please.”

  “I’ll see if he’s available. Please hold.”

  Please hold, he thought. Like I have any choice.

  These sorts of calls always made Andy just a bit anxious.

  Even though he had the requisite amount of self-assurance, ego, and arrogance required of most journalists, there was something in his personality that dreaded confronting people in high places with things he knew they would not want to talk about.

  “I’m sorry,” the female voice said. “General Collier is very busy right now. If you need any information, he says feel free to contact the DA press liaison at extension 7436.”

  “Great,” Andy said. “Would you mind asking General Collier if the press liaison can give me some information about the impending indictment of a New York Times best-selling author in the Exotica Tans murders? Because if he can’t, I’m going to run with what I’ve got in tomorrow’s paper.”

  A long, leaden silence followed from the other end. Andy sat there, waiting for the next move. The voice on the other end was the first to flinch.

  “Could you hold a moment, Mr. Parks?”

  Andy smiled. “Glad to.”

  Andy looked down at his watch and counted the seconds before Collier came on the line. It took just under fifteen.

  “Goddamn it!” Collier’s voice was barely under control.

  “Parks, are you aware that grand jury proceedings are by law secret and protected. It’s illegal for you to even know what they’re discussing, let alone the details!”

  “You can take that up with my anonymous source,” Andy said evenly. “In the meantime, I’ve got more than enough to run with this. It’ll be in tomorrow’s edition, and all I want from you is comment and reaction.”

  “I’ll file charges,” Collier sputtered. “I’ll seek an injunction …”

  “Remember the First Amendment?” Andy asked. “Last time I checked, it was still in force.”

  “Who’s your source?” Collier demanded. “You have to tell me.”

  Andy laughed.

  “I’ll go before a judge. I’ll have you held in contempt.”

  “Go ahead,” Andy said. “I can’t imagine better publicity.”

  Collier made a noise on the other end of the phone. Andy could swear he was growling.

  “Would you be willing to deal?” Collier asked finally, his voice softer.

  “What’ve you got?” Andy asked.

  “This is off the record, okay?”

  “Wait a minute, you can’t sucker me into-”

  “I’m not
trying to sucker you into anything. I’m just trying to see what it’ll take to convince you to hold off for just a little while.”

  Andy thought for a few moments, letting Collier sweat.

  “Okay,” he offered. “Off the record.”

  “And in return, you hold off on the story for forty-eight hours. Two days, that’s all I want. You hold off publishing the story until Saturday morning at the earliest. By then, we’ll know if there’s even anything worth publishing.”

  “Intriguing,” Andy said. “Deal.”

  “We found his car.”

  “What?”

  “The rental car. Schiftmann was in town for a book signing at Davis-Kidd the night of the Exotica Tans murders.”

  “I knew that,” Andy said. “I’ve already confirmed that.”

  “And he rented a car, or rather the publisher rented a car for him.”

  “Okay.”

  “We found it. Tracked it down.”

  “All right. And?”

  “There was blood in the trunk.”

  Andy felt a knot in his gut. “What?”

  “The car was found in New Orleans. We impounded it, brought it back to Nashville. It’s out at the TBI lab right now.

  They’re typing and cross-matching the bloodstain in the car with the blood we found at Exotica Tans and on some other evidence that I really can’t talk about right now.”

  “How long’s that going to take?”

  “They got the car to the lab about ten last night. We’re waiting for preliminary tests now. DNA tests will take a few days, maybe a week, but we can get a type fairly quickly.”

  “So if the blood in Michael Schiftmann’s rental car matches the blood found at the murder scene, then-”

  “The grand jury will issue an indictment no later than Monday. If you hold off, I’ll let you know the lab results in time for you to break the story over the weekend.”

  “What if the blood in the trunk doesn’t match the scene?”

  “Then,” Collier said, his voice somber, “you have no story and we have no case.”

  “When do you expect the results?” Andy asked, scribbling on his notepad.

  “They moved this one to the front of the line. I expect to hear something no later than noon tomorrow. Maybe even today.”

  “Okay, we’ve got a deal. I do nothing on this until I hear from you. But I expect to hear something from you one way or the other by five o’clock Friday. Grab a pencil and I’ll give you my cell phone number. I’ll have it with me. Call anytime.”

  The news that Schiftmann’s rental car had been found in New Orleans pushed Hank Powell into high gear. He sent out an e-mail to each lead investigator in every town where the Alphabet Man had hit, suggesting that they track down Michael Schiftmann’s rental car records and attempt to recover the cars. He had a meeting with Deputy Assistant Director Dunlap and got him up to speed. The fact that the case seemed finally to be breaking seemed to lessen some of the pressure coming from above. Hank had pushed the limit with his bosses. Their patience was wearing thin. He was glad to be able to go to them with something good.

  That Friday morning, the call he’d been waiting for finally came in.

  “Agent Powell?” the gruff voice said.

  “Hello, Max. I’ve been waiting for your call.”

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” Bransford offered.

  “Which do you want first?”

  Hank felt his chest weigh down. Damn, he thought.

  “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Let’s go with the good.”

  “I’ll fax you the whole report, but the bottom line is we got a match. The blood in the trunk positively matches that of Allison May Matthews. It’s going to take a couple of weeks to get a full DNA workup, but right now it looks like the same blood was at the murder scene, on the coveralls we found in the Dumpster, and in the trunk of the rental Schiftmann had when he was in Nashville.”

  “That’s it,” Hank said, the heaviness in his chest lifting.

  Not lifting, but releasing, exploding, like a fireworks display that, for a brief moment, let him drop his professional detachment. “Max, we’ve got him! We’ve got the son of a bitch! He’s toast.”

  “I know, Hank. We did it. All of us. The DA is taking the case to the grand jury after their lunch break. They’ve already heard all of the evidence except the blood match-up.

  After they get that, the DA will get the indictment processed, issue a warrant for Schiftmann’s arrest, and start extradition proceedings.”

  Hank gripped the phone tightly and realized he was smiling so hard his jaw hurt. “Fantastic! This is incredible. But wait? You said there was bad news.”

  “The bad news is somebody leaked the story to the press.

  Andy Parks from the Chattanooga paper-”

  “The same guy who wrote the other story,” Hank interrupted.

  “Yeah, that’s him. He went to the DA with everything that had gone on in the grand jury room.”

  “Jesus, how’d he get that?”

  “I don’t know, but when the DA finds out, I wouldn’t want to be in their moccasins. He’s loaded for bear. But Collier made him a deal, if he’d hold off on printing the story …”

  “He’d give him a heads-up on the indictment.”

  “That’s it,” Bransford said.

  “When’s the story supposed to break?” Hank asked.

  “Sometime this weekend.”

  “That means Schiftmann will have advance warning.”

  “Maybe not,” Bransford said. “It’s just the Chattanooga paper.”

  Hank shook his head. “No, not this story. This one’ll be all over. Probably be the lead story on the networks Sunday night. Schiftmann’s going to find out for sure. No telling what he’ll do.”

  “Think he might rabbit?”

  Hank shrugged. “Who knows? He’s got money, resources.

  He’s smart.”

  “Yeah, and he’s famous. His picture was in Entertainment Weekly and People magazine last week. How’s he going to hide?”

  Hank sat silently for a moment, thinking.

  “You there?” Bransford asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m here. Max, we already know how smart this guy is. He’s killed at least thirteen people we know of.

  He’s bound to know that sooner or later, something like this could happen.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking this guy’s already got an escape route. He’s got a Plan B in place, and if we’ve got a chance of actually seeing him in court, then we better not let the SOB out of our sight between now and the time the New York City police take him into custody.”

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “I’m suggesting,” Hank offered, “that I call the NYC Field Office and have this guy put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. I don’t want him to go into a public bathroom without one of my guys standing outside the stall waiting for him.”

  “All right,” Max Bransford said. “Let’s nail this bastard.”

  Hank smiled. “It’ll be a pleasure.”

  Andy Parks woke up early that Sunday morning, dressed quickly, and left his apartment at the Metro Manor. He drove his rusting Datsun 280Z out of the basement garage and turned left onto the James Robertson Parkway. At seven A.M. on a Sunday morning, there was practically no traffic.

  The day held promise of warm spring sunshine and clear skies. Andy’s stomach churned in anticipation. This was the biggest story he’d ever covered in his life. If this story broke like he hoped, a little resume dusting-off would be in order.

  He had worked like a demon these past four or five days.

  He’d researched Schiftmann’s life and work, read three of his books, checked and cross-checked every element of the story. He had kept his word to the district attorney, and Collier had done right by him.

  Andy sped up to make the light at Broadway, then turned right and headed toward Vanderbilt University. There was a smal
l coffee and bagel place on Twenty-first Avenue across from the law school that got the Chattanooga paper every day. Five minutes later, he pulled the 280Z into a parking space out front and almost jumped out of the car.

  He opened the door, nodded to Gretchen behind the counter, and went straight to the long rack of newspapers against the far wall. The wooden bins held the New York Times, the Washington Post, and papers from Birmingham, Atlanta, Miami, and, at the far end of the bins, Chattanooga.

  “The usual, Andy?” Gretchen called.

  “Yeah,” Andy nodded, preoccupied. He grabbed the top copy of the News-Free Press and smiled. There, in sixty-point bold block type, over the lead story for the Sunday edition, was the headline that Andy had suggested the afternoon before:

  BEST-SELLING AUTHOR TO BE INDICTED IN BRUTAL DOUBLE MURDER

  Andy laughed out loud and flapped the paper open, scanning his lead to see if the editor had changed it.

  NASHVILLE, March 27-The Davidson County Grand Jury will indict New York Times best-selling author Michael Schiftmann on two counts of first-degree murder tomorrow in the brutal February slaying of two MTSU coeds. District Attorney T. Robert Collier will make the announcement at a press conference scheduled for 10 A.M. Monday.

  Andy folded the paper under his arm and stepped between the empty tables over to the counter, where his double latte with an extra shot of espresso was already waiting for him.

  Gretchen, the thin, dark-haired Vanderbilt sophomore with an eyebrow ring, gave him a look as he approached.

  “What’s going on with you?” she asked. “You look like the cat that swallowed the canary. What, did you get lucky last night or what?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s it,” he said. “I got lucky.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “Keep it,”

  he said.

  “Wow, you did get lucky last night,” Gretchen said.

  Andy started to walk away, then turned back to her, grinning again. “Gretchen, you ever hit a home run before? I mean, really hit one out of the park?”

  CHAPTER 26

  Sunday afternoon, Manhattan

  Taylor Robinson’s violent retching echoed down the hallway of her empty office building.