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 dismal 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?
Then, five years ago, he’d published The First Letter. Six months later, The Second Letter was released. Two months after that, Schiftmann quit his day job, this time for good.
After four years of wandering in the desert, Michael Schiftmann had suddenly become a publishing dynamo.
And, he thought, a cash cow for everyone involved.
Hank looked up from his desk and stared out the window.
Outside, it was dark. He looked at his watch and was surprised to find it was almost seven. He’d been at this twelve hours almost nonstop. Somehow, the time seemed to go by quickly.
To the untrained eye, Hank thought, there was nothing in Michael Schiftmann’s past that would jump out and shout
“murderer.” To the outside onlooker, Schiftmann looked more like a troubled kid from a troubled background who triumphed over every obstacle to succeed beyond his most impossible-to-imagine dreams. He wasn’t an ice-cold sociopath, a stone killer; he was the American dream personified.
He was a literary Horatio Alger.
But, little by little, the circumstantial evidence was piling up. Hank Powell looked at his scribbled notes. In every city where the Alphabet Man took a victim, Michael Schiftmann was close by at the time, usually at book signings on publicity tours, but sometimes at book fairs, writers’ conferences, and the like.
And as Maria Chavez had discovered, the order and basic descriptions of the murders in the first five installments of Schiftmann’s best-selling series were exactly the same as the real murders, even though some of the details and places had changed.
And finally, Hank realized, everything about Michael Schiftmann-the freedom and lack of structure in his life, his living on the edge of society for so many years, his intelligence and his resources, his history in work and school, his egomaniacal drive and lust for fame, recognition, and wealth-fit the psychological profile of a highly intelligent, organized serial killer.
In other words, the Alphabet Man …
But was this enough? The key, of course, was Nashville.
That’s where they had the best forensic evidence. That’s where they had the blood and tissue samples, the samples that could be DNA-typed to Schiftmann’s blood. If there was a match, he’d go down, hard.
Which meant that without a grand jury indictment, the chance of getting a search warrant to collect the samples was thin. It was possible, of course. Hank realized they were lucky in getting the best forensic evidence in a Southern, conservative town, rather than, say, Vancouver or New York City, where people were commonly less sympathetic to police. Schiftmann, though, had the resources to put up a good fight-primarily the money, but also the fame, and as the American public had learned over the past years, fame is a powerful weapon to a good defense attorney.
So many variables, so many things to consider. Powell and Max Bransford had talked several times in the past few days alone, and the one thing they agreed on was that there was no way they were going to the DA and the grand jury until they had a case that was solid enough to withstand the inevitable hurricane that would follow.
Hank walked over to the window and stared out into the darkening woods. To his left, in the distance, the faint sulfurous glow of the lights over the west parking lot intruded on the darkness. He realized that at this moment, he probably knew more about Michael Schiftmann than anyone alive except Schiftmann himself. But that was the problem: He knew more about him rather than really knowing him.
“There’s got to be something else,” he whispered. “There’s got to be more out there.”
He went back to his desk and dug out the background file on Michael Schiftmann. The Manhattan Field Office had done a thorough, professional job of bringing Schiftmann’s current situation up to speed. He’d sold his condo in Cleveland, made almost six figures on it, then moved to Manhattan, where he’d been house hunting. Hank had everything on Schiftmann’s recent moves, up to and including the Northwest flight number he’d taken from Cleveland to LaGuardia.
Then Hank saw a note appended to the report almost as an afterthought, that Schiftmann had been staying with his literary agent, a woman named Taylor Robinson.
Staying with her? Hank suddenly thought. What? This guy can’t afford a hotel?
It was one of two things, he realized. Either Taylor Robinson took really good care of her clients, or these two were an item.
“Wonder what it would take to find out?” he whispered.
Hank turned to his computer and double-clicked the Internet Explorer icon. He went to Google.com and typed in Taylor’s name. In a few hundredths of a second, he found more than forty-seven thousand hits for Taylor Robinson.
The first was her home page at the Delaney amp; Associates Web site. He scanned her biography and noted she was a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College, that she had been an editor for several years before joining the agency, and that in a few short years, she had become one of the most powerful agents in the business.
Hyperbole aside, he thought, this was an impressive woman. He stared at her picture for a few seconds. She was, he realized, quite lovely as well. The picture was black-and-white, so it was hard to tell colors, but she had dark hair swept down onto her shoulders, dark piercing eyes, and high cheekbones.
She looked, he thought, patrician.
He read a few more pages, learned a little more about her, and generated some assumptions that he would later test.
Because Hank Powell had decided to pay a visit to Taylor Robinson.