Steven Womack - By Blood Written

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