Steven Womack - By Blood Written

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.”