Monday afternoon, Washington, D.C.
Hank Powell stepped out of the director’s office, strode quickly past the receptionist without speaking and through the doors into the outer office, then through that room and out into the hallway. His face was set in stone, which belied the churning in his gut. His temples throbbed. The back of his neck burned as if he’d been too long in the sun. His right hand clenched the black leather portfolio like someone was without warning going to mug him for it. His left fist was a knot of muscle and bone.
Once out in the main hallway, he took a deep breath as he walked to the elevators, trying to center himself, trying not to give anything away to the other starched and suited robots passing him in the opposite direction. All he wanted was out of there, back to the safety and relative quiet of his office at Quantico.
Behind him, a voice called out: “Hank! Wait.”
Damn it, he thought. He recognized the voice, though, and turned.
A flushed and winded Lawrence Dunlap burst past the doors of the director’s office and almost trotted to catch up with him.
“Wait,” he said, puffing as he stopped next to Hank. The air in the Hoover Building, Hank thought, suddenly felt even more stale and suffocating.
“Yes, sir?” Hank asked.
Deputy Assistant Director Dunlap stopped a moment, catching his breath, then reached out and touched Hank gently on his left elbow.
“C’mon,” he said, “let’s step over here, out of the way of all this traffic.”
The wall across from the bank of elevators had an alcove to one side, which led to a door where janitorial supplies and equipment were kept. Dunlap walked over, Hank following, then stopped in the shadows and turned to him.
“Look, for what it’s worth, I think the old man was a little out of line in there,” Dunlap said.
“I don’t appreciate being talked to like that,” Hank said after a moment. “But I’ve been around long enough not to let it get to me.”
“Yeah, well,” Dunlap said, slowly shaking his head as if trying to figure something out, “go ahead and let it get to you. He was wrong. But you know how he hates this kind of publicity.”
“And I don’t?” Hank demanded. “You think this makes my job any easier? I’ve got to worry about not only this son of a bitch going around slicing up girls practically my own daughter’s age, but now I’ve got the director of the FBI crawling up my ass screaming about a press leak.”
“Hank, don’t lose your detachment here. You’ve always been a pro. I need you to hold on to that for me.”
Hank took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I know,” he said after a moment. “He’s under a lot of pressure.”
“We all are on this one,” Dunlap said. “We’ve gotten a lot of bad publicity the last few years. The old man wants it stopped. We find this guy and nail his ass, people might forget some of the other cluster fucks that have gone around here.”
Hank was silent for a few seconds, then looked up directly into his superior’s eyes. “Is he going to pull me off this?”
Hank asked. “If he’s going to yank me, I want to know. I’ve got my twenty. The old man relieves me, I’m putting in for early retirement. I mean it. I won’t fall on my sword for him.
Not when I’ve done my job as well as anyone could.”
Dunlap stared at Hank Powell and realized he meant every word of what he’d just said. “No,” he answered. “There’s no talk of relieving you. You’re still the SAC of this investigation.”
Hank’s jaw relaxed just enough for him to feel it, but not enough for Dunlap to see it. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you, sir. Now if that’s all, I have a lot of work to do.”
Dunlap nodded.
The thirty-five miles that separated the FBI main headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., from the three hundred and eighty-five acres that contained the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, might as well have been the distance between two planets at opposite ends of the solar system.
The back of Hank’s neck still burned on the long ride back. As he left I-395 South and merged onto I-95, he saw that the traffic was even thicker than usual. Normally the drive would take between forty-five minutes and an hour, but it had already taken him nearly that long just to hit the freeway. It didn’t matter; he barely noticed. In his long career at the Bureau, no one had ever talked to him like he’d just been spoken to. It was all he could do to keep himself under control.
Hank kept a stack of books on tape in his car for long drives and had popped in a tape as soon as he pulled out into traffic. He soon realized, though, that there was no way he could focus on the reading and flicked off the tape player.
Hank Powell also felt bad for the way he had talked to Dunlap back at FBI headquarters. Threatening to resign was no way to gain the support of your superiors, he knew, but in this case he had to do and say something strong enough to let Dunlap know they had pushed him about as far as he was willing to be pushed.
So Hank felt bad for being dressed down in the director’s office and for copping an attitude with Dunlap, but what he felt worst of all about was his inability to make any progress on this case at all. The material that had been found in Nashville had yielded a DNA profile, but whose? And nothing else of any use had been gleaned from the Alphabet Man’s garbage.
This guy’s got to screw up somewhere, he thought over and over again. But when? Where?
Hank couldn’t remember the last time he felt so low. Even when Anne got sick, it hadn’t been quite like this. He’d been saddened, grieving, had felt frustrated and helpless as she became sicker and sicker. But he’d never questioned his own actions, his own worth. He knew he’d done his best for her, had done everything possible.
And, he realized, it was different now because he was so alone. If this had happened years earlier, before he lost her, he’d have gone home at the end of the day and talked to her-never in specifics, but enough to let her know how troubled he was. She would have listened, as she always did, and been savvy enough not to tell him what to do or to med-dle in his business. She was his sounding board, and by processing his thoughts with her and through her, he would find something he hadn’t seen before, some insight he’d missed, some element that had bypassed him.
Now there was no one.
Almost an hour later, Hank barely nodded to the Marine guard at the gated entrance to Quantico. He wound his way around until he found his parking space outside an office building behind Hogan’s Alley, the mock small town made up entirely of facades that was used in training. In the distance, he heard rhythmic gunfire snapping from one of the outdoor ranges.
The air was cold and dry, the sun beginning its slide toward the horizon in a cloudless, blue winter sky. Hank pulled his overcoat tightly around him as the cutting wind from the east chilled him.
Sallie Richardson, the division’s longtime administrative assistant, looked up from her desk as Hank entered. She tried to smile, but as soon as she saw the look on his face, her smile disappeared.
“That bad?” she asked.
Hank stopped at her desk and nodded his head. “Hasn’t been my best day.”
“Sorry, Hank,” she offered. “It’ll get better.”
He shrugged. “Sure.” He walked down the hall to his office.
“Oh,” Sallie called to him. “Check your voice mail. Max Bransford in Nashville called.”
“Thanks.”
Hank opened the door to his small office, with the one window that looked out onto the woods that surrounded the academy. He hung up his coat, sat down at his desk, and punched the buttons to retrieve his voice mail. There were four other messages ahead of Bransford’s, but none had the urgency that was in Bransford’s voice.
“Agent Powell,” the recording began. “This is Lieutenant Bransford with the Nashville Murder Squad. I need to talk to you ASAP. Can you give me a call at 615 …”
Hank scribbled down the number, then punched the buttons to leave voice mail and get an outside line. Within ten seconds, the phone in Max Bransford’s office was ringing. A female voice with a deep Southern accent answered.
“Lieutenant Bransford’s office,” she piped. “May I help you?”
“This is Agent Powell at the FBI, returning Lieutenant Bransford’s call.”
“Oh, hi, Agent Powell. This is Bea Shuster. Good to hear from you. The lieutenant’s been waiting for your call. Just hold on a second.”
Hank smiled. How can these people be so damn friendly?
Bransford came on the line before the thought could completely leave his head. “Hank?”
“Yes, Max, how are you?”
“Up to my nether regions in amphibious reptiles. Listen, I won’t take up too much of your time but I had to call. You got a minute?”
“Sure.” Hank opened a notebook and grabbed a pen.
“Talk to me.”
The voice on the other end of the line hesitated. “I’m going to ask you to reserve judgment on this one until I finish, okay? This is going to sound kind of crazy at first.”
Hank felt his brow furrow. Curious …
“I’m listening,” he said.
“You remember Maria Chavez?”
“Yes, of course. The young Hispanic woman. Quite sharp, if I recall.”
“Very,” Bransford said. “Top-notch. Smart as a whip. If this had come from anyone else, I’d have blown ‘em off. But she’s convinced and I thought it was worth a call to you.”
“Okay,” Hank said. “My curiosity’s running wild. Let me have it.”
“About the butt crack of dawn this morning, Maria Chavez comes in to catch up on some paperwork and have a little quiet time. Only she gets a call that there’s this old lady out front who claims to know who the Alphabet Man is. Maria figures she’s a nutcase. We get a few of those from time to time, you know.”
“Like every other day,” Hank interrupted.
“Yeah. So anyway, Maria offers to give her five minutes, and the old lady says she knows who our guy is. He’s this famous writer, right? The old lady reads all his books and claims he bases the plots to his novels on murders he’s committing himself.”
“What?” Hank asked. “That’s crazy.”
“But she’s brought in the New York Times article and a stack of paperbacks by the guy and she starts spouting off details of the books that sound an awful lot like some of the shit our killer’s doing. She convinces Maria to at least take a look at the books. So Maria ushers the old lady out and disappears for a few hours to look over the novels.”
The line went silent for a few moments. “And?” Hank asked.
Hank heard Bransford sigh on the other end of the line, the long, weary sigh of a longtime cop who’s close enough to retirement to taste and smell it.
“And I find Chavez curled up on a couch in the break room practically in a fetal position. She’s read the books and is convinced the old lady’s right.”
Hank leaned back in his chair and stared out the window for a moment. For that moment, his mind seemed more still than it had been all day, as if it had settled into a sweet, sub-lime, and welcome silence.
“You there?” Bransford asked.
“Yeah,” Hank said, forcing himself back to reality. “Max, this is crazy.”
“I know, it’s insane. Completely loony tunes. But what if it’s true?”
“Who’s the writer? I mean, who the hell is this guy?”
Hank felt his own voice rise from the tension.
Hank heard some paper shuffle in the background as Bransford flipped through some notes. “His name’s Michael Schiftmann-”
Hank scribbled down the name as Bransford spelled it for him.
“The guy’s apparently famous. On the New York Times best-seller list, big bucks, movie deals, all that celebrity crap. Personally, I never heard of him, but I get too much of the real thing to go home and read about murder.”
“Me, too,” Hank agreed. “Who’s got time? And what books are these?”
“Chavez made me a list, although it’s pretty easy to remember. The first one’s called The First Letter, the second one’s The Second Letter, then The Third Letter, and so on.”
The mention of letters caused the already tense muscles in Hank’s neck to contract even further. “Letters?” he asked.
“Yeah. Fuckin’ creepy, you ask me. And the hero, protagonist, whatever the hell you call him of the novels is like this crusader, vigilante type who goes around killing bad girls in cold blood, like an executioner or something.”
“Or a serial killer,” Hank offered.
“Yeah, like that.”
“This is crazy,” Hank said again. “What do we do with this?”
“Well, I’ve given Chavez twenty-four hours to write this up as a full report and make her case. Knowing her, I’ll have it tomorrow morning. I’ll fax it to your office.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Beyond that, we’re just going to sit tight. But there is one other thing that’s kind of a raise-the-hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck thing …”
“Yeah?”
“That night those two girls were murdered over on Church Street, that night Howard Hinton from Hamilton County called you?”
“Sure, I remember.”
“This famous author guy was in Nashville,” Bransford said. “He did a book signing at the Davis-Kidd bookstore over in Green Hills. Something like three hundred people showed up.”
“Three hundred? It was snowing like hell that night.
Must’ve been about twenty degrees.”
“Yeah,” Bransford answered. “Like I said, the guy’s real popular.”
Hank finished the call by promising to hook back up with Bransford as soon as he’d had a chance to read Maria Chavez’s report. Then he walked out of his office and back down the hall to Sallie Richardson’s desk.
“You know where I live in Arlington, right?” he asked.
“Well, I know about where,” she answered, looking up from her computer screen.
“Is there a bookstore on the way home? A pretty good one?”
Sallie gazed up at Hank, questioning. “Hmm, let me think. Yeah, you know where Army-Navy Drive is, where it crosses-what is it?-Hayes, I think?”
“Oh yeah, over near that huge, obnoxious mall.”
“The Fashion Center at Pentagon City,” Sallie said. “And it’s no more obnoxious than any other mall. There’s a Borders Books across the street.”
“Great, the traffic should be wonderful right about now,”
Hank muttered.
Sallie crossed her legs and planted her elbows on her desk.
“Okay,” she said, “what’s going on?”
Hank checked his watch. It was nearly four. “I think I’m going to cut out a little early today. I’ll have my cell phone if anything comes up.”
The first fifteen minutes after arriving home from work were always the worst. The house was so quiet, the undis-turbed air within so heavy and still. Hank had considered getting a dog, but he wasn’t home enough to take care of one.
Ordinarily, silence didn’t bother Hank. In fact, when Jackie was a baby, he’d often wished for a little silence.
Now, with Anne gone, it seemed that was all he had.
He set the plastic bag full of books down on the coffee table in the living room, then hung up his overcoat in the hall closet. With Hank getting home early, the computerized thermostat hadn’t had a chance to warm the house up.
He walked over to the keypad and overrode the program-ming, the gas heater in the basement clicking on as he did so. Within seconds, he felt warm air wafting up out of the vents.
He went upstairs to the master bedroom and changed into a pair of jeans and a sweater, then made up the bed and folded some laundry from the night before. There was a time when Hank’s bed was made as soon as he got out of it and the clothes folded and hung up as soon as they came out of the dryer, but that was before the seventy-hour weeks and the sleepless nights the Alphabet Man had brought into his life.
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 kitchen 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?