Steven Womack - By Blood Written

“Sure, shoot.”

“Okay,” Brett said. “First, Jack Hamlett from ICM called last week trying to find you. They’ve got the option terms worked out. They’re ready to go to contract.”

“I hope that means the higher figure we were talking about. You know my motto: ‘No cheap options.’”

“Got you covered there,” Brett agreed. “We’re not giving these guys shit. They’re paying top dollar. And he’s got a package he wants to present to you and Michael. He didn’t give me all the details, but he’s got George Melford set to produce and Jack Holt to star as Chaney.”

“Jack Holt,” Taylor said, impressed. “Damn, he’s good.

Sexy, too.”

“He’ll draw the chick demographic, that’s for sure.”

“So this is all looking good,” Taylor offered. “I can let Michael know.”

“Tell him to get his signing pen ready.”

“He’ll be locked and loaded, I’m sure.”

“And there’s one other thing, Taylor. This one’s a little weird. But have you heard anything from Carol Gee?”

Taylor frowned, set the coffee mug down on the counter.

“The publicist?”

“Yeah, have you heard anything from her?”

“No, nothing. Why should I?”

“Just wondered,” Brett said, pausing. “She’s sort of disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Taylor asked, surprised.

“Yeah. Out of nowhere. She was set to take some vacation after the last tour ended. She was flying from San Diego to somewhere. Hell, I forget where. But apparently she never showed up. And when her vacation was over, she never came back to work.”

“Well, has anyone gone by her apartment or tried to call?”

“Kim over in publicity tracked down her roommates. She lives with three other girls in a two-bedroom apartment over in Woodside. They haven’t heard from her, either. Big mystery.”

“She got a boyfriend?”

“I don’t know. Nobody exactly knows how to handle this.

Human resources is taking the point on this, but they sent around an e-mail asking all of us who knew her to keep an eye out.”

Taylor shrugged. “I haven’t heard a word. But if I do hear anything, I’ll let you know. When’s the last time anyone saw her?”

“The last person we’ve been able to track down is the bookstore manager at Michael’s San Diego signing. The next morning, she did the automatic checkout from the hotel and no one’s seen her since.”

Taylor glanced upstairs in the direction of her bedroom.

“I’ll ask Michael when he wakes up. Maybe he knows something.”

“Yeah, do that. And are we still on for lunch Tuesday?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Taylor answered. “See you at one.”

The two exchanged good-byes, then hung up. Taylor poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down with the rest of the Sunday Times . She drank the coffee and scanned the front page, but in the back of her mind, she kept wondering what had happened to Carol Gee.

Tuesday morning, two weeks later FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia Hank Powell closed the door to his office, set a fresh cup of coffee on his desk, and opened the window blinds. Outside, the trees that had been so tired and barren all winter were beginning to bud. Another few weeks and the view outside his window would be a palette of bursting greens, whites, and reds as spring broke through and brought everything back to life.

This was one winter Hank Powell was not sorry to see go.

It had been a rough one.

But, he thought, smiling, things were looking up. He turned his back on the window and sat down at his desk.

In front of him was a stack of file folders that had come in from all over the U.S. and Canada. Eleven FBI field offices, twelve police departments, nine sheriff’s departments, and the Forensic Laboratory Services Directorate of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had all contributed to what had evolved into an extraordinary effort to stop the Alphabet Man.

Everything had come together, and now Hank Powell’s job was to sift through several pounds of paper and try to make sense of it all. If he could do that, then the slow, cum-bersome, but unstoppable machinery of justice would go to work. The parents, friends, and families of the thirteen murdered girls they knew about could-if not find peace-at least begin to put this behind them. No one knew how many young women who might have been future victims would now be spared.

And no one knew if there were other victims, other murdered girls who just hadn’t been found, who hadn’t been part of the pattern.

Hank felt weighed down by the responsibility, but somehow elated at the same time. He’d been living with this so long that to finally see an end in sight made the weight somehow more bearable.

He set a legal pad and pen on his desk to the right of the folders, then opened the first one. He had stacked the folders by order of the murders; the A murder had been committed in Cincinnati, so the reports from the Cincinnati Police Department’s Homicide Squad and the Cincinnati FBI Field Office were first in the pile. Hank began reading and making notes.

Then he worked his way, over the next five hours, through the reports from Macon, Georgia, then Scottsdale, Arizona, followed by Seattle, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, New York City, Vancouver, Omaha, Chattanooga, Dallas, and finally, Nashville.

Twelve cities: thirteen brutal, senseless murders.

He took a quick break for a late lunch, then went back to work on the files, this time going over the extensive background material on Michael Schiftmann. The agent out of the Cleveland Field Office, a young guy named Kelly, had done an outstanding job of compiling a biography of Michael Schiftmann. Hank read the interview with Schiftmann’s mother and got about as much out of it as Kelly did, but it was the interview with the neighbor that caught his attention.

Schiftmann’s mother had painted a portrait of a lonely, mistreated kid who was smarter than the other children, worked harder, was fiercely devoted to books and his stud-ies, and was ashamed of his impoverished background.

“Okay,” Hank muttered out loud. “Lots of lonely, weird, nerdy kids don’t grow up to be serial killers, though.”

But the interview with the neighbor, an eighty-one-year-old disabled WWII veteran named Stan Walonsky, painted an entirely different picture. Walonsky had used terms like

“psycho” and “bastard” in describing Schiftmann. This, in and of itself, would have very little credibility. Sometimes people simply dislike each other. But Walonsky had specific examples to back up his claims.

When Michael Schiftmann was eleven, for instance, Walonsky caught him in an outbuilding that he used for a workshop and for storage, masturbating to a pornographic magazine. Walonsky told on the boy, and apparently his mother administered a pretty severe whipping.

“I really didn’t mean for the boy to take a beating like that,” Kelly quoted Walonsky as saying. “I just thought maybe the kid needed some help.”

In any case, Walonsky added, two days later the building burned down in the middle of the night. As the firemen were fighting the fire, trying to keep it from spreading to the nearby houses, Walonsky caught a glimpse of Michael Schiftmann in an upstairs bedroom window, looking down on the scene and smiling.

Walonsky had told the arson investigators about the kid, but his mother had covered for him, insisting he’d never been out of his bedroom that night.

A year later, Walonsky’s wife’s cat was found dead, the body horribly mutilated. Somebody had obviously tortured the cat to death. Hank grimaced as he read the details. But he also knew that in the details lay the truth.

Hank had twenty years in with the FBI, but he’d come to VICAP in the mid-nineties, long after the pioneer FBI profiler Robert Ressler had retired. He’d never met Ressler, but he’d read all his books and studied his work intensely.