Thursday morning, Manhattan
Taylor Robinson stood in the silence of her office, staring at the closed door. From the outside, she appeared calm, almost serenely so. But in her chest, she felt a pounding that, for a moment, genuinely frightened her. She fought to control her breathing, to loosen her neck and jaw muscles.
To stay in control.
She turned and walked to the window. Through the film of dust and grime, she watched as, to her right, the FBI agent exited the building and walked down the stoop onto the sidewalk. He paused, standing still, then shook his head and walked off in the direction of Third Avenue.
She stayed like that for what felt like a long time. Her mind went blank, as if the encounter with the FBI agent-
what was his name?-had caused something inside her to empty.
How long had he been here? She had, for the moment, lost perception of time. She gazed out the window to the traffic below on East Fifty-third. Behind her, she heard a door open.
“Taylor?”
Taylor turned. Her assistant, Anne, was in the doorway, a concerned look on her face.
“Yes?” she answered blankly.
“Are you okay?”
Taylor turned and looked back out the window. The sun was breaking through a layer of gray overcast, throwing random beams of bright yellow light on the street below. She turned back and faced the young woman.
“I’m going out for a while,” she said.
She had spent her entire life since that day trying to forget.
It had been her fault, her fault, and she had carried that weight around inside her over half her life.
Over half her life. Twenty years. Twenty years that Jack never got. And many more in front of her that he wouldnever have.
It was supposed to have been the best summer ever.
Her brother, three years her senior, was home from VMI.
John Prentice Robinson was his full name, but no one ever seemed able to call him that with a straight face. He was tooplayful, too spontaneous, too reckless, to be a John PrenticeRobinson. He was the family prankster, the practical jokemaster, the puncturer of pretense, the outrageous smart assthat everyone loved. He would always, in everyone’s perception, be a Jack. And she adored him.
Handsome, rugged, a born athlete … He had captained the soccer team and track team in private school, then goneonto the Virginia Military Institute, where he was soon captain of the varsity shooting team. He came home that summer as a prime candidate for the Olympics.
Her brother, Jack, on the U.S. Olympic Shooting Team.
He was home for just a week, only a week, before heading out to Colorado Springs to spend the rest of the summer training. The days had been buoyant, happy. Her father-
one of Greenwich, Connecticut’s most prominent cardiolo-gists-had even taken time off from his rounds. They played tennis at the country club, hosted a grand summer party,danced and swam and sang and drank.
Taylor felt as if it would go on forever. That they would always be young and energetic and happy, that life wouldalways be a banquet.
That day, that day it all ended, her father woke early, left in his Mercedes to make his hospital rounds. Her motherslept late, as did Taylor and Jack, and then went out for atennis date at the club.
Jack climbed into his Jeep and drove off to meet friends for lunch.
Taylor relaxed, hanging around the house, debating what to do with the rest of the day. She had chores to do, hadpromised her mother to do some laundry and clean up herroom. Her senior year would begin in a few weeks as well.
So maybe it was time she started going through the stack of college catalogs that had been coming in the mail formonths.
Then the phone rang. Her best friend, Dori, invited her over to spend the afternoon swimming, sunbathing, listening to music, talking about boys. The usual …
Just guilty enough at neglecting her chores to feel it, but not guilty enough to say no to Dori, Taylor rushed into herbedroom and changed into her bikini, then threw on a T-shirtand a pair of cutoffs just as Dori pulled up in her convert-ible Mustang. Taylor grabbed her purse and bag, then ranfor the back door. Dori honked the horn and yelled to her.
As Taylor went out the back door, she slapped her hand across the burglar alarm panel.
And hit the wrong button. The burglar alarm system her father had installed a few years earlier had a silent mode.
No one ever used it.
She didn’t mean to do it.
God, she didn’t mean to do it.
They would later stitch together from bits and pieces how it all happened.
At two-twelve that afternoon, an automated call came into the Greenwich Police Department reporting a breakinat the Robinson home. Dispatch sent a prowl car to investigate. Riding alone that shift was a young, rookie patrolmanbarely older than Jack. In fact, he had just a week earlierfinished his probationary period, which required him toride along with an older, more experienced officer.
When the officer arrives, a Jeep is in the driveway behind the house.
The officer exits the squad car carefully. There’s no sign of a breakin. The officer stands there a moment.
Suddenly, the sliding glass door to the patio courtyard opens up and a young blond man in a pair of jeans, a T-shirt,and running shoes steps out.
With his hands in his pockets …
The officer unsnaps his weapon.
Jack, smiling, gregarious as always, never met a fellow he didn’t like, walks toward the officer.
With his hands in his pockets …
“Stop right there,” the officer commands, holding his left palm out, his right hand on the butt of his pistol.
Jack grins, keeps walking: “What’s up, Barney Fife?”
“Stop,” the officer yells.
Jack suddenly pulls his hand out, cocked, his index finger pointing like the barrel of a gun, his thumb like the hammer,like a seven-year-old boy playing cowboys and Indians. Hepoints it at the officer.
Who draws his weapon and fires.
John Prentice Robinson, star athlete, captain of the varsity shooting team, prankster and naively stupid young man, came home that afternoon and didn’t realize he’d setoff the burglar alarm when he came in. And as a result, hedied that afternoon on the warm clay tiles of the courtyardpatio of his parents’ two-million-dollar home, of a singlegunshot wound to the chest.
They buried him three days later next to his grandparents.
Devastation is too tepid a word, too mild a description, for what happened to Taylor, her parents, her family.
The city settles for one-point-five million. Taylor refuses any part of it.
Her father shuts down, buries himself in his work.
Her mother begins drinking heavily, becomes a recluse, goes on about a dozen different medications for anxiety, depression, insomnia.
Her parents begin fighting, worse than ever. Her father spends more and more time at the hospital.
Taylor spends her last year at home in a haze, retreats into her schoolwork, graduates with honors and goes on toSmith College. At the time she chose Smith, she had no ideawhy she chose it, other than it was away from home.
Her parents sell the house, divorce. Her father relocates to Miami and eventually marries a woman Taylor cannotstand. Her mother goes into rehab, comes out clean andsober, but depressed and miserable. The sound of her voicegives Taylor a headache.
The weight never completely goes away. That corner of her heart is locked away, leaden.
And filled with hatred for macho cowboy cops and their guns. Their stupid, goddamn fucking guns.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” the voice said. “Are you okay?”
The voice was young, feminine. A woman’s voice. Taylor looked up. It was a young woman in a dark blue ski parka and jeans.
Taylor looked around. She was sitting on a concrete bench, so cold she couldn’t feel her hips, the backs of her legs. The bench was on a walk overlooking the East River. To her left and above, the Queensboro Bridge towered over it like the drawbridge to a castle.
Sutton Place. She’d walked up to Sutton Place. But when?
How long had she been there?
“Ma’am?” the voice asked again.
“What?” Taylor said, finally.
“You’ve been sitting there staring for a long time. I walked my dog like an hour and a half ago and you were sitting there staring out at the river. I saw you from my apartment.
I thought I’d just make sure you were okay.”
“Thanks,” Taylor said, standing up. Her legs tingled as the circulation was restored. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”
“You don’t have to apologize. It’s a public bench. I just thought I’d make sure you were okay.”
Taylor looked into the young woman’s face. It was round, pale, with an aquiline nose and large blue eyes. It’s a myth, Taylor thought, that New Yorkers are cold and unfriendly.
“I appreciate that,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to work.
I don’t know where my mind was at.”
The young girl smiled. “Okay, have a good day. I’m glad you’re all right.”
“Yes,” Taylor said, lying. “I’m fine.”
Taylor realized she was cold, chilled almost completely through. As she walked the blocks back to her office, the movement began to warm her, and as it did, she started thinking in a more organized, focused fashion.
Powell, that was his name. Special Agent Powell of the FBI. He had come into her office and announced that the man she loved, the man she was going to marry, the man upon whom her fortune and reputation were built, was a psycho, a killer.
She had to think this through. She had to remember as much of the conversation as possible, everything that had happened in the short couple of minutes he was in her office.
What he had said stunned her, caught her off guard. But now she had her footing back, and, as always, she knew it was better to act, to do something, even if it was wrong.
She had looked at his badge, his credentials. They looked real enough, but fake ID cards could be purchased anywhere.
And as far as she knew, that badge could have come from a war surplus store. She wouldn’t know a real FBI badge from a fake if it ran up behind her and bit her on the ankles.
But why would a fake FBI agent concoct such a story?
What good would it do anyone?
Why?
As she walked, one scenario after another played in her head. This was a conspiracy by a rival publishing house.
Maybe Michael had made enemies somewhere in the past who now sought to cause him harm. Maybe she had enemies who wanted to hurt her and were using Michael to do it.
She turned left on Second Avenue and headed south toward East Fifty-third and her office, oblivious to the crowds around her on the sidewalk. There had to be a way to handle this. This had to be taken care of as quickly and as quietly as possible. This would be a public relations disaster if she made a single misstep.
Hank Powell reached over the front seat and handed cash to the painfully skinny, dark-skinned driver and climbed out of the cab at Federal Plaza. Five minutes later, he’d worked his way through the tight security and was on his way to the FBI New York City Field Office.
Once inside, he tracked down SAC Joyce Parelli in her office and threw his overcoat onto the chair across from her desk.
“You’re not going to believe the morning I’ve had,” he said.
Joyce Parelli, a third-generation Italian-three generations in America, three generations in law enforcement-who sounded like she’d rarely set foot out of her native Brooklyn, grinned. She was amused to see Hank Powell, normally so composed one could almost call him smug, exasperated.
“Ah, my poor delicate little rosebud,” she said. “Sit down and tell me all about it.”
Too agitated to sit, Powell paced back and forth, his arms in constant motion. “I just got thrown out of somebody’s office! You believe that? I’m an employee and a representative of the United States government and I got tossed out like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman!”
Parelli laughed out loud this time. “And who threw you out, boobala?”
“Michael Schiftmann’s literary agent, that’s who! And if it won’t be a violation of the sex-discrimination statutes, would it be all right if I described her as a first-class bitch?”
Joyce Parelli sat up. “Wait a minute!”
Hank stopped pacing. “What?”
Parelli leaned down behind her desk and pulled out a standard, government-issue black plastic wastebasket. She shuffled around in the garbage for a moment and extracted a crumpled roll of newspaper.
“What?” Hank repeated.
“Shush, it’s here somewhere.” Parelli spread the paper out on her desk and started thumbing through it. “I know I saw it here.”
Hank stood at her desk, leaning over slightly, as she scanned page after page.
“Damn it,” she muttered. “I know it’s- There! Found it.” She spun the paper around on her desk, facing Hank, and jabbed at an item with the bright red fingernail of her index finger.
Hank looked down. “Liz Smith? Who the hell is-?”
“Gossip column,” Parelli answered. “Read.”
Hank bent down and focused. ” ‘Who’s the hot new power couple in the N.Y. literary scene?’” he read aloud. ” ‘Word around the publishing campfire is that superstar novelist and tall, dark, handsome hunk Michael Schiftmann has popped the question to his glitterati literary agent, Taylor Robinson. When you’re making the kind of moolah these two are bringing in, you may as well keep it in the family.’”
Hank stood up, shocked. “May as well keep it in the family …” he muttered. “Serves me right for not reading the tabloids.”
Parelli nodded. “That would certainly explain why you weren’t a welcome guest in her office this morning.”
Hank nodded, thinking. “Yes, it certainly would, wouldn’t it?”
CHAPTER 23
Friday morning, FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia Hank Powell was at his desk early the next morning, reexamining the stack of files in front of him and trying to figure out what to do next. He couldn’t get his mind off the interview with Taylor Robinson. It festered inside him like a wound gone septic. He was angry, but more than that, he was embarrassed.
He kept trying to figure out what could possibly have triggered her outbursts. There were only two options he could come up with. First, Taylor Robinson was so far in love with this guy that she was simply unable to grasp the concept that he might not be what she thought he was. Either that, or she knew what he was and was part of it.
But could that really be an option? What were the chances that Taylor Robinson was as psycho as her fiance? What were the chances that two such completely evil people could find each other in this world and glom on to each other?
“Probably better than you think,” he whispered to himself.
He reached for his third cup of coffee just as the phone rang. “I’ve got Max Bransford on line one,” Sallie said.
“Thanks,” Hank answered, pressing the blinking button on his desk set.
“Good morning, Max,” Hank said brightly. “How’s tricks?”
“Hank, I gotta talk to you,” Bransford said, his voice serious.
Hank felt his neck stiffen. “What’s up?”
“Yesterday morning, I got called into Major Katz’s office.
He’s my division commander and immediate supervisor. He reports directly to the assistant chief.”
“Okay,” Hank said. “And?”
“It was a come-to-Jesus meeting on the Exotica Tans murders.”
Hank sat there for a moment, holding the phone, waiting for Bransford to continue.
“Anyway, he wanted the case summarized right then and there. Apparently there’s some political pressure on this one.
Either that or somebody leaked to the chief that we had a possible suspect. So I didn’t have any choice. I laid it all out for him.”
Hank had a bad feeling about where this was going. “And?”
“And,” Bransford continued, “he called the DA’s office then and there and arranged a meeting. We were in there for four hours yesterday.”
“So what happened?”
Bransford sighed heavily, almost wearily, into the phone.
“Bottom line, Hank, is the DA’s going to the grand jury. The shit’s gonna hit the fan down here.”
“No!” Hank said. “You can’t do that, Max. It’s too early.
We don’t have enough.”
“The DA is talking about getting one of the judges to sign off on a search warrant. He’s gonna try and get hair and tissue samples from Schiftmann.”
“No judge is going to issue that kind of warrant without an indictment.”
“In the state of Tennessee, if there’s enough there to jus-tify a probable cause search, then a sympathetic judge can do it. And it can be done in secret, as part of the grand jury hearing.”
Hank’s head throbbed. This was a big, major, earth-shaking screwup. “Yeah, and how long will it stay secret, Max?
You know what this is going to do when it hits the media.
We’re going to have a circus on our hands.”
“I know that, Hank,” Bransford said. “That’s what I told the major. This is the kind of cluster fuck that can cause us to lose our amateur standing. You gotta be a pro to fuck up this bad.”
“Can you put this back in the bottle? Get them to hold off maybe even a few days?”
“Too late,” Bransford said. “The DA red-balled this one right into the grand jury. I finished testifying an hour ago.”
Hank Powell moaned. “Okay,” he said. “If they think they’re good to go and ready to launch, who am I to get in the way? I’m going to get on the horn and call my boss and tell him to hunker down.”
“Hang in there, buddy. We’re both gonna have to keep our heads down.”
Hank felt the coffee churning away in his gut. “Mine already is.”
Taylor stood at the kitchen counter, her eyes burning from lack of sleep, her neck stiff. She poured another cup of coffee, took a small sip, and grimaced. The coffee made the already foul taste of bile in her mouth even worse. She poured the coffee into the sink.
She sat down at the counter and stared at the clock for a few moments. It was almost eleven-thirty in the morning and she was still in her bathrobe. Ordinarily, she’d have put in three or four hours in the office by now. But that was after nights when she actually slept.
Not like last night …
Michael was still upstairs asleep. Lately, he’d been staying up even later than usual, watching old movies on television or reading, and usually with a drink in his hand. He’d been at her apartment for almost two and a half weeks continuously now. For the first few days it was like a honeymoon, but lately they’d not even been going to bed at the same time.
Taylor just couldn’t stay up half the night, then get up at seven to be at work by eight. And Michael couldn’t go to bed before about two at the earliest.
Last night, she pretended to be asleep when he finally came to bed at three-thirty. He nuzzled her neck, kissed her shoulders. After a few moments of no response, he’d rolled over and was soon snoring.
And she lay there the rest of the night, staring up into the darkness, unable to turn her brain off, unable to let go.
At five in the morning, shortly before the sun came up, she found herself wondering if it was even possible that the FBI agent could be telling the truth, but she pushed that thought out of her mind as quickly as it came in.
She’d gotten out of bed as quietly as possible, then gone downstairs and sat in an easy chair, her feet up on the coffee table, staring into the darkened spaces of her loft. At some point, she might have dozed off for a short time, but it wasn’t the good, hard sleep she needed. It was like skating over the surface of a pond when what you needed was to dive in.
She heard a shuffling upstairs and water running. She pulled her bathrobe tighter around her as, a few seconds later, Michael came down the stairs in a T-shirt and a pair of running shorts. He walked over to where she was sitting, leaned down, and kissed her on the top of the head.
“Hi, gorgeous,” he said cheerily.
“Morning.”
“You’re not going to work today?” He opened the cabinet door and took out a large coffee mug.
“Later,” she answered. “I wasn’t feeling all that well when I woke up. Didn’t sleep well.”
“You were sleeping pretty good when I came up,” Michael offered, pouring a cup. “I tried to wake you up, see if you wanted something to sweeten your dreams. But, alas.”
“What time was that?” Taylor asked.
“I don’t know. Sometime around three, three-thirty.”
“Kind of late, wasn’t it?”
“Well,” he said, pausing to take a sip of the hot coffee, “I decided to stay up until eight London time so I could call the agent.”
Taylor looked up. “And?”
“Looks like it’s a done deal, my darling. That two-bedroom flat in Earl’s Court is where you and I can stay on our honeymoon if you want. I have to fly over in a couple of weeks for the closing. Maybe you’ll come with me?”
“Michael,” she said cautiously, “are you sure this is such a good idea? You bought the condo in Palm Beach and now a flat in London?”
He sat on a barstool across the counter from her and leaned in toward her, smiling. “Look, until you got me a decent book deal, I’d never even been to London. I fell in love with it! And now we’ve got the money. Let’s enjoy it. I’ve got a lot of time to make up.”
“You have the money,” she said. “Not us.”
He reached over and took her hand in his. “Soon it’ll be us. And we have to decide about the house, too. You haven’t even seen it.”
“I know,” Taylor answered. “I’ve just been too busy. Besides, I’m not sure I’m ready to give this place up. I worked so hard for it, and I’ve made it so much mine.”
“So I’ll let the house go and we’ll live here. Whatever makes you happy.”
Taylor’s face went blank for a moment, as if she’d left the room for now but would be back later to claim her body.
“This is all happening so fast,” she murmured.
Michael’s forehead knitted up into hard wrinkles. “Hey,”
he said softly. “Something the matter?”
Taylor abruptly stood, almost jumped, out of the chair and walked over toward the sofa. She stopped in the middle of the room, turned and faced him, and looked at him hard.
“We have to talk,” she said.
Michael stared back at her for a moment. “Sounds serious.”
She nodded. “Yesterday, in my office, this man came to see me. He was from the FBI.”
Michael’s eyes narrowed. “FBI? You sure?”
Taylor nodded again. “I saw his badge, his credentials.
He’s an FBI agent in charge of an investigation. And he was asking me questions.”
“Questions? What kind of questions?”
“About you, Michael.” Taylor’s voice dropped off, silence hanging uncomfortably between them.
“What about me?” Michael asked, his voice a low monotone.
Taylor’s eyes started burning again, whether from lack of sleep or stress or a combination of both, she couldn’t tell.
But she felt herself tearing up and made herself fight the welling up behind her eyes. She turned away from Michael for a moment.
“I don’t even know how to say it,” she said.
Michael got off the chair and started toward her. She held out a hand, palm toward him. He stopped.
“Just say it,” he said.
She turned back to him, shaking her head. “This is crazy.
I almost want to laugh, but I also want to scream. I just want to scream my goddamn head off. Michael, he says you’re a murderer. He says you’ve been traipsing around the country killing women.”
Michael Schiftmann stood there, stock-still, for what seemed like a long time, his hands at his side, his face expressionless.
“The Alphabet Man,” he whispered.
Taylor sucked in a huge gulp of air and almost started to choke. “You? How did you- How did you know?”
Michael sighed, a long, weary release of air and tension that seemed to fill the room. “Where do you think I get the plots for the Chaney novels?”
Taylor squinted at him, her arms wrapped around herself now, clenching and holding herself tightly. “What? What did you say?”
“I said,” Michael spoke louder, “that the plots to the Chaney novels are based on the Alphabet Man murders. I’ve been following this guy for years. I’m fascinated by him.
Hell, I’m obsessed by him. I have a book carton full of clip-pings and research I’ve done on the guy. This FBI moron has got it exactly one hundred and eighty degrees back-as-swards. I’m not the Alphabet Man. I just rip him off to sell books.”
Taylor’s jaw dropped. “You mean that you-?”
“I’m embarrassed,” Michael said. “I’m not the creative genius, the artist, the guy with the original story. I’m just a hack writer who takes real life, embellishes it, and throws it out there to the public, who gets suckered into buying it.”
Taylor dropped her arms to her side and started laughing.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You’re not a killer.”
“No, I’m just a hack.”
She came to him, arms outstretched. He took her in his arms and held her tight as she laughed almost hysterically.
“I’ve never been happier in my life to be with a hack.”
“Oh, great,” Michael said, laughing now. “Thanks for being so agreeable.”
She put her hands on his chest and pushed herself away.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not a hack and you know it. Every great writer, up to and including Shakespeare, has based fiction on actual events.”
Suddenly Taylor’s face went stern, dark. “But that makes me even crazier, that that stupid bastard from the FBI would come around here slinging that kind of crap around. We ought to sue him! Sue ‘em right now!”
Michael, grinning, shook his head. “No, that’d be the worst thing we could do. Why draw attention to this and give them the satisfaction? They can’t prove a damn thing.
They’re just desperate. Like I said, I’ve been following this case for years, and I’ve managed to dig up some insider stuff through contacts here and there. This is a political hot potato for these guys. It’s making them look real bad.”
“Yeah,” Taylor agreed. “They’re just desperate.”
Relieved, she came to him again and settled into his arms.
He held her tightly, his arms around her, the two of them rocking gently back and forth.
“If we do nothing,” Taylor whispered. “This will just go away.”
Michael Schiftmann pulled her even tighter. As he held her, he stared at the exposed brick wall that made up one whole side of Taylor’s loft.
“Yes,” he whispered back. “This will all go away. Don’t you worry.”