Glenn Cooper - Library of the Dead aka Secret of the Seventh Son

From the start she found him nerdy and sweet with no macho pretenses. He was wicked smart too, and his job at Area 51 drove her crazy with curiosity because, when she was ten, she was certain she’d seen a flying saucer one summer night, darting high over the Kanawha River, as bright as a jar of lightning bugs collected on the riverbank.

And in the past few weeks, he had dropped the pseudonym and started buying up all of her time and lavishing presents on her. She was starting to feel more like a girlfriend and less like a call girl. He was getting more self-assured by the day, and while he was never going to be Clark Gable, he was beginning to grow on her.

She was unaware that with $5 million sitting high and dry in an offshore bank account, he was feeling more confident about the accomplishments of Mark Shackleton. Peter Benedict was gone. He wasn’t needed anymore.

Even the bathrooms in the suite had flat-screen TVs. Mark got out of the shower and started toweling himself. There was a cable channel on. He wasn’t paying attention until he heard the word Doomsday and looked up to see Will Piper on a replay of the weekly FBI press conference, standing tall at a podium speaking into a crop of microphones. The sight of Will on TV always made his heart race. He reached for his toothbrush without taking his eyes off the screen and began brushing his teeth.

The last time he’d seen Will at a media briefing, he looked lackluster and dispirited. The postcards and killings had stopped and the wall-to-wall coverage was no longer sustainable. The long unsolved case had drained the public and law enforcement alike. But he seemed more energized today. The old intensity was back. Mark pushed the volume button.

“I can say this,” Will was saying. “We are pursuing some new leads and I remain completely confident we will catch the killer.”

That irritated Mark and he said, “Oh, bullshit! Give it up, man,” before turning off the TV.

Kerry was snoozing on the bed, naked underneath a thin sheet. Mark cinched his bathrobe and retrieved his laptop from his briefcase in the suite’s sunken living room. He went online and saw he had an e-mail from Nelson Elder. Elder’s list was longer than usual-business was good. It took Mark the better part of half an hour to complete the job and reply via his secure portal.

He went back to the bedroom. Kerry was stirring. She waved her adorned wrist in the air and said something about how great it would be to have a matching necklace. She threw off the sheet and sweetly beckoned him with a finger.

At that precise moment, Will and Nancy were having the opposite of sex. They were sitting at Will’s office plowing through a mind-numbing mountain of bad screenplays, completely unsure of the object of their exercise.

“Why were you so confident at the news conference?” she asked him.

“Did I overdo it?” he asked sleepily.

“Oh, yeah. Big-time. I mean, what do we have here?”

Will had to shrug. “A wild-goose chase is better than doing nothing.”

“You should’ve told the press that. What are you going to say next week?”

“Next week’s a week away.”

The wild-goose chase almost didn’t happen. Will’s initial call to the Writers Guild of America was a disaster. They lit into him about the Patriot Act and vowed to fight till Hell froze over to prevent the government from getting its mitts on a single script in its archives. “We’re not looking for terrorists,” he had protested, “just a demented serial killer.” But the WGA was not going to give in without a fight, so he got his superiors to sign off on a subpoena.

Screenwriters, Will learned, were a squirrelly lot, paranoid about producers, studios, and especially other writers ripping them off. The WGA gave them a modicum of comfort and protection by registering their scripts and storing them electronically or in hard copy in case proof of ownership was ever required. You didn’t have to be a guild member-any amateur hack could register his script. All you did was send a fee and a copy of the screenplay and you were done. There were West Coast and East Coast chapters of the WGA. Over fifty thousand scripts a year were registered with WGA West alone, a tidy little business for the guild.

The Department of Justice had a tricky time with the probable cause section of the subpoena. It was “fanciful,” Will was told but they’d give it the old college try. The FBI ultimately succeeded at the Ninth District Court of Appeals because the government agreed to whittle down its request so it was less of a fishing expedition. They’d only get three years’ worth of scripts from Las Vegas and a halo of Nevada zip codes, and the writers’ names and addresses would be suppressed. If any “leads” were developed from this universe of material, the government would have to go back with fresh probable cause to obtain the writer’s identity.

The scripts started pouring in, mostly on data disks but also in boxes of printed material. The FBI clerical staff in New York went into printer overdrive, and eventually Will’s office looked like a caricature of the mail room at a Hollywood talent agency, film scripts everywhere. When the task was done, there were 1,621 Nevada-pedigreed screenplays sitting on the twenty-third floor of the Federal Building.

Without a road map, Will and Nancy couldn’t skim too hastily. Still, they quickly found a rhythm and were able to slog through a script in about fifteen minutes, carefully reading the first few pages to get the gist, then flipping and scanning the rest. They steeled themselves for a slow, laborious process, hoping to wrap up the task within one painful month. Their strategy was to look for the obvious: plots about serial killers, references to postcards, but they had to stay vigilant for the nonobvious-characters or situations that simply struck a responsive chord.

The pace was unsustainable. They got headaches. They got irritable and snapped at each other all day then retreated to Will’s apartment to make cranky love in the evenings. They needed frequent walks to clear their heads. What really made them crazy was that the vast majority of scripts were complete and utter crap, incomprehensible or ridiculous or boring to the extreme. On the third or fourth day of the exercise, Will perked up when he picked up a script called Counters and declared excitedly, “You’re not going to believe this, but I know the guy who wrote this.”

“How?”

“He was my freshman roommate in college.”

“That’s interesting,” she said, uninterested.

He read it much more thoroughly than the others, which set him back an hour, and when he put it down he thought, Don’t give up your day job, buddy.

At three in the afternoon Will made a notation into his database about a piece of dreck concerning a race of aliens who came to Earth to beat the casinos, and grabbed the next one in his pile.

He gently kicked Nancy’s knee with the tip of his loafer.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she replied.

“Suicidal?”

“I’m already dead,” she answered. Her eyes were pink and arid. “What’s your point?”

His next one was titled The 7:44 to Chicago. He read a few pages and groused, “Christ. I think I read this one a few days ago. Terrorists on a train. What the fuck?”

“Check the submission date,” she suggested. “I’ve had a few with multiple submissions. Writer changes it and spends another twenty bucks to register it again.”

He punched the title into his database. “When you’re right, you’re right. This one’s a later draft. I rated it zero out of ten for relevance. I can’t read it again.”

“Suit yourself.”

He started to close the script then stopped himself. Something caught his eye, a character name, and he began frantically paging forward, then sat upright, flipping faster and faster.