Steven Womack - By Blood Written

Gary Gilley shook his head wearily. “Jesus, this is going to be one huge cluster fuck if we’re not careful.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Hank answered.

“So where do we start?” Maria Chavez asked.

Max Bransford eased back in his chair and laced his fingers together behind his head. “To a certain extent, we treat it like any other homicide. We have to establish method, put the guy at the scene, look for witnesses …”

“And prove a motive,” Gary Gilley said from the other end of the table. “That’s going to be a tough one. We know why this sicko did what he did, but making it real for a jury might be a bitch.”

“Will be,” Bransford said. “But let’s get started. Gary, you’ll coordinate. Get the search warrants and subpoenas under way. I want this guy’s credit card records, travel records, hotel registrations. I want the bookstore people interviewed, the hotel people. If this guy rented a car, I want to know which car and what he left behind in it.”

“In the meantime,” Hank added, “I’ve got a complete, full-blown background check going on this guy. We’ve already run his name through NCIC and came up with squat.

As far as I can tell, he’s never even spit on the sidewalk before. But we’re still digging. And later on down the road, if we have to, we’ll dive under the Patriot Act umbrella and pull a sneak ‘n peek.”

“Okay,” Gilley said. “Maria and Jack, you’ll work with me on assigning areas. We’ll split everything up and everybody into teams. After this meeting, we’ll huddle in the bullpen and get going right now.”

“You know the weirdest thing about all this?” Maria Chavez asked.

“What?” Bransford answered.

“This whole thing broke because some silly old lady stays up all night reading paperback mysteries.”

“If she were here right now,” Hank offered, “I’d kiss her on the mouth and give her a medal.”

Friday afternoon, Barberton, Ohio

Special Agent David Kelly smiled as he took the exit ramp off I-76 West and turned south toward Barberton, Ohio, one of the dozens of small towns that cluster around the Cleveland/Akron hub. Kelly, at twenty-eight, was the youngest agent in the Cleveland Field Office of the FBI. He’d been with the Bureau less than two years and still approached each assignment with the kind of eagerness and excitement that the older agents seldom exhibited.

Agent Kelly didn’t know why he’d been sent to Barberton, Ohio, in pursuit of a deep background check on Michael Schiftmann. He knew who Schiftmann was, being a regular reader of the Sunday New York Times Book Review .

But he’d never read one of his novels. And when the e-mail came through from Quantico to start digging, he took his orders like the good soldier he was and went out into the field armed with his file folder full of report pages.

He already knew that Michael Schiftmann had been born in Barberton, Ohio, in 1969, during the height of the Vietnam war. Just over a year after Schiftmann’s birth, four students would be shot down by the Ohio National Guard just up the road in Kent. Michael’s father, a burned-out Vietnam combat veteran with an ever-growing and intrusive drug problem, would desert the infant and his mother and never be heard from again.

And, Kelly discovered from a check of the Summit County public assistance database, Michael’s mother, Virginia, still lived in the same two-bedroom project house in South Barberton that she’d raised him in.

Kelly looked down at his notes, then turned left into Fourth Street South, a narrow street clogged with parked cars-mostly run-down-on both sides of the curb. Even though the street was two-way, it would have been tough for two oncoming cars to maneuver around each other. He leaned over the steering wheel, looking out the windshield for house numbers. Most of the houses looked to be from the thirties, he thought, maybe early forties. They were identical shotgun duplexes, two narrow houses jammed together into one, with a narrow driveway between it and the house next door. Most needed a coat of paint. Random shutters hung askew, dotted by the occasional cracked window. There seemed to be no one around, not even kids or stray dogs.

One empty lot was marked by a rusted fifty-five-gallon oil drum set up as a stove and a couple of ratty sofas next to it.

Kind of like his old neighborhood, Kelly thought. Depressing.

He passed the Schiftmann house, but there was nowhere to park. He cruised most of the block before he found an empty slot, then pulled his government-issue Ford Taurus over and cut the engine. He sat there a moment, organizing his thoughts, then opened the car door. The dry, cold Ohio wind hit him hard in the face. He tucked his chin into his neck, slammed the car door behind him, and pulled his overcoat tighter as he walked up the street against the wind.

Virginia Schiftmann lived six houses up on the left, number 232-B. He turned off the cracked sidewalk onto another cracked walk that led up to the house. There was a door-bell button, but when he pushed it, Kelly heard nothing. He tried again, then knocked. From somewhere in the house, he heard the faint sound of a television. He knocked again, louder. His hands were so cold, it hurt to rap them against the wood. He wished he’d brought gloves, but the use of gloves was discouraged because it made the rapid drawing of a weapon difficult.

He raised his hand to knock again when the door opened a crack. An older woman, heavy, with ruddy red cheeks, wearing a gray housecoat, looked suspiciously out the door.

“What?” she said, her voice a monotone.

“Mrs. Schiftmann,” Kelly said, pulling his credentials out of his coat pocket, “I’m Special Agent Kelly of the FBI. I work out of the Cleveland Field Office. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

The old lady peered out through the crack in the door, the light dim behind her, the flickering of an old, seventies-era color television in the background. She examined his ID and his badge, then looked up into his face. Then, slowly, she opened the door wider.

Kelly stepped in, the casual smile on his face designed to be as nonthreatening as possible. He stepped into the small entrance alcove and was hit by a wave of hot, musty air. Michael Schiftmann’s mother kept the furnace going full blast.

“I won’t take up much of your time,” he offered as she closed the door behind him. She motioned toward the living room and he turned to walk.

“I got nothing but time,” she muttered.

As they entered the living room, the light got better and Kelly was able to examine the surroundings. Genteel poverty was a stretch, he realized. The carpet was worn and threadbare, with the faint odor of pet urine wafting up in the heat. The furniture was old, and even when new was pretty basic and bare. A framed photo of the pope hung on one wall over the television, partially hidden by a green vase full of ragged, dusty silk flowers.

“Have a seat,” she said, walking slowly over to the television and turning down the soap opera she’d been watching.

“Thank you,” Kelly said, pulling off his overcoat and draping it over the back of an overstuffed, tired chair. Tufts of white stuffing poked through the material in the corners of the seat pillow.

He pulled out his notebook and a ballpoint pen from his coat pocket. “Mrs. Schiftmann, this is nothing more than a routine background check, and it’s standard procedure to go back to a subject’s home neighborhood and just ask some questions. It’s nothing to be alarmed about.”

Kelly looked at the woman and waited for some kind of response from her. As she eased onto the sofa, he realized that she was even heavier than he first thought. The skin of her face was stretched tight, and as the housecoat draped open from her knees down, he saw that the skin on her lower legs was stretched until shiny and broken in several places by networks of spidery red veins.