Steven Womack - By Blood Written

“Hello, Hank,” Bransford said, extending a hand as Hank approached him. “It’s good to see you again. Thanks for coming down.”

“Thanks for inviting me,” Hank said.

“Here,” Bransford motioned, “sit next to me.”

Hank took a seat to Bransford’s left, then nodded and leaned across the table to shake hands with Howard Hinton of the Chattanooga Police Department’s Homicide Squad.

The two exchanged comments about the terrible Nashville traffic as the rest of the investigators took seats in an informal, but recognizable, seating by rank. Fred Cowan took a side chair near the end of the table where Gary Gilley, lead investigator on the case, sat anchoring the group.

“Let’s get to work, ladies and gentlemen,” Bransford intoned, as people began shifting in their chairs, shuffling paperwork, and opening notebooks in front of them. “We’ve got a lot to cover today, a lot of thinking to do. Has everyone had a chance to read Maria’s report?”

All heads nodded with the exception of Cowan, who held up an index finger. “I’m sorry. I just got it this morning.

Haven’t had a chance to get to it.”

Hank clenched his jaw. If Cowan had mentioned that to him, he would have brought him up to speed on the long drive down West End Avenue. Instead, the two made tense chitchat as Hank maneuvered his way downtown.

“Don’t worry,” Bransford said. “Just hang with us. You’ll catch up.”

There was a moment’s silence as all the investigators turned to Bransford. “I guess the first thing we should do is have a show of hands. Is there anyone in this room who actually believes this cockamamie theory of Detective Chavez’s that a famous, rich, best-selling writer comes into town for a book signing and, just for shits and grins, decides to butcher two young girls?”

A few hands went up, including Maria Chavez’s and Hank’s, with Gary Gilley at the other end of the table holding his hand out over the table, palm down, wiggling it back and forth.

“Okay, Gary, what’s that mean?”

“It means Maria put together a helluva report that reads like it oughta be on the best-seller list itself-”

A couple of investigators laughed as Gilley paused for effect. “-but the question is can we prove it to anyone’s satisfaction, especially a jury. Personally, I think the DA’s gonna laugh us out of town.”

“What other theories have you got, Detective Gilley?”

Hank asked.

Gilley shook his head. “Not much. We’ve gone all through these two girls’ backgrounds. Deep stuff. There’s nothing there. The closest is that the Burnham girl was dating a soldier out of Fort Campbell, a paratrooper with the 101st Air-borne. These guys are trained in close combat, especially with knives, bayonets, machetes, shit like that. Also, this guy supposedly had a real temper. Maybe he didn’t know his girlfriend was working in a massage parlor and went apeshit when he found out. That was our best bet, but we went up this guy’s ass with a very bright light and we didn’t see anything up there that shouldn’t have been there. He had an alibi for that weekend. And he just got shipped out to downtown Baghdad.”

Hank turned to Max Bransford. “What about the forensic evidence from the Dumpster?”

“Yeah, that,” Gilley answered. “The soldier boyfriend voluntarily gave us a swab and we typed him against the DNA on the overalls and the rags. Nothing.”

“So he’s clear,” Maria said.

“Anything else from the Dumpster?” Hank asked.

“Oh, yeah, we got blood and tissue matches to both girls.

The stuff definitely came from the murder scene. And we got a bunch of stuff we were able to profile, but were unable to match.”

Hank nodded to Gilley. “That means we’ve probably got blood, saliva, scrapings, something from the killer.”

Jack Murray, near the end of the table across from Cowan, raised his hand. “So why can’t we just get this famous guy to give us a DNA sample and type it.”

“Because,” Bransford said, “if this guy’s got a brain in his head, he’ll tell us to go fuck ourselves. And I wouldn’t blame him.”

“That’s putting the cart ahead of the horse,” Hank agreed.

“We’d have to build a case for subpoenaing the sample and we’re not there yet.”

Bransford turned to Howard Hinton, the homicide investigator who had raised his hand. “So you buy into this crazi-ness, Howard? Wanta tell us why?”

Hinton, who had been silent before now, leaned his heavy bulk over the table and planted his elbows on the hard wood.

He rested his chin on his right palm and sat there for a moment.

“At first, I thought it was crazy, too. Then I went back and did a little checking. The night he did the two murders, the L

and the M killings, he was in Nashville at a book signing.”

“Yeah?” Bransford said after a moment.

“Almost two years ago, when Laurie Metzger, the twenty-two-year-old blond who worked out of that strip club, Deja View, became the J murder?”

Hank felt his neck tighten.

“Yes?” Bransford said again, his voice tense.

“Michael Schiftmann was in Chattanooga as the keynote speaker at the Chattanooga Mountain Writers’ Conference.

Schiftmann arrived on a Thursday afternoon. She was murdered Friday night. Schiftmann didn’t leave until Sunday morning.”

Hank wondered how Bransford could deliver a bombshell like this in such an offhanded manner. For a few moments, there was complete silence in the room. Then, from down the table to Hank’s left, a voice muttered: “Holy shit …”

Bransford turned to Hank. “Did you know this?”

“No, but I would have eventually. I’ve e-mailed every field office where the Alphabet Man has hit and asked them to cross-check against Schiftmann’s book signings and travel.”

“This is insane! Do you guys have any idea how crazy this sounds?” Gilley, his voice shrill with tension, shouted.

“Of course it’s insane,” Chavez said loudly. “But it’s insane to butcher two MTSU coeds, too! That’s the whole thing with serial killers, Gary, they’re nuts! Get it? Serial killer-”

Chavez held her hand out and drew an equal sign in the air.

“-nuts! It comes with the territory.”

“But he’s not nuts,” Hank interrupted. “We have to remember that, he’s not crazy. He’s a sociopath, he’s ruthless and relentless, and he’s evil, but he’s not crazy. And so far he’s gotten away with this, so he’s careful and he’s smart.

And we have to be just as careful and just as smart or we blow this.”

Again, there was a tense silence in the room. After a few moments, Max Bransford spoke up. “So, let’s strategize.

How do we reel this guy in and nail him?”

Hank looked around the room, scanning the face of each one of the investigators. “A couple of observations. If we’ve learned anything about high-profile celebrity murder cases in the past dozen years or so, it’s that the police and the prosecutors usually lose by shooting off their mouths. The first thing we have to do is lock this thing down, tight. If that reporter down in Chattanooga-”

Hank looked over at Howard Hinton, questioning.

“Yeah,” Hinton said, “Andy Parks.”

“Andy Parks gets this and then it goes to the New York Times and the Washington Post like that last story did, then we’re in deep trouble.”

“Everybody got that?” Bransford asked. “If this leaks, we know it came from this room.”

“And we don’t have to even begin to discuss the world of shit the leaker will be in when I find out who he or she is,”

Gilley added.

“The second thing is,” Hank added, “we’ve got to coordinate and work together. You guys have to treat this as a local homicide, but I have to deal with it on a much larger scale, even an international scale. Once word gets out that we’ve got a suspect in these killings, I’ve got police departments from Macon, Georgia, to Vancouver, Canada, who are going to want everything we’ve got.”