Steven Womack - By Blood Written

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.