By Blood Written

fact, at his office at the FBI Academy in Quantico.

It hadn’t always been like that. When Anne was still alive, he had religiously saved Saturdays for working around the house, in the yard, or for simply spending family time with her and their daughter, Jackie. But that had all ended two years ago, when he lost her.

How had it happened so fast? It seemed in his memory that literally one day Anne was playing tennis at the country club and gardening their modest acre-and-a-half lot and then the very next moment she was withering away, her weight visibly dropping from one day to the next, her hair falling out, her eyes settling deeper and deeper into her head until the light in them faded to nothing. She had been only thirty-eight when the doctors made the diagnosis: ovarian cancer. And from the moment they identified the cancer as a particularly virulent and aggressive form of the disease, everything happened far too quickly. A matter of months, they predicted, was all they had together. From a passionate, intelligent, active woman who loved parties and cook-ing and good wine and everything about life to deathly ill in a matter of weeks …

But the doctors hadn’t counted on Anne’s willingness to fight, her ability to hang on to every second and to live every moment as hard and as fully as she was capable. The doctors had told them it would be a matter of months; Anne had beaten their odds, beaten their gloomy prognosis, beaten everything except death itself. In the end, she took two long, agonizing years to die. Anne had missed her fortieth birth-day by three weeks. By then, Hank-six months older than his wife-had turned forty and felt eighty.

It had been especially hard on Jackie, who had been twelve when her mother became ill and who had turned fourteen two months after she died. It had been Anne’s dream that Jackie attend the same boarding school she had gone to, the Butler School in upstate Vermont, and Jackie had insisted on fulfilling her mother’s dream. That was two years ago, and now Hank and Anne’s daughter was sixteen, a sophomore at Butler. And Hank lived alone in their four-bedroom house, a house he had been intending to sell ever since Anne’s death.

Somehow he’d never gotten around to putting it on the market. Just too busy, he told himself.

He worked. That’s all he did, work. Hank Powell was putting in twelve hours a day, six days a week. In the two years since his wife’s death, he hadn’t dated a single time. Not once. It was as if with Anne’s death, something inside him died as well.

Now he hated Sundays, hated them with a passion. The only saving grace was his weekly phone call from Jackie, which was due in another hour or so. They spoke like clock-work, every Sunday after chapel at the school and just before lunch. Occasionally they would speak during the week, but as Jackie had learned, her father was easier to catch at the office than at home and sometimes you couldn’t catch him there.

Hank had taken to having a couple of drinks at night, just to take an edge off the stress buzz and make it a little easier to sleep. Hank and Anne had never been big drinkers, and he wasn’t one now. But lately he’d needed a single vodka martini upon arriving at home and then a snifter of brandy at bedtime.

It wasn’t just missing Anne that kept him awake at night.

Hank had taken the maximum amount of leave possible during his wife’s illness, and was truly, genuinely grateful to the Bureau for granting him that. After her funeral, Hank Powell did the only thing he knew to do: go back to work.

Ever since, the main focus of his life had been finding the man who had so brutally killed at least thirteen young women. Even in the post-9/11 era, when the politicians were trying to remake the FBI into a counterterrorism agency, he had fought to stay on the Alphabet Man case.

Hank woke up particularly early this Sunday morning, and had come to consciousness with an ever-widening sense of dread. He’d been warned and had seen the article in the Chattanooga paper last Wednesday, had been disheartened to see it picked up by the wire services and then the Friday edition of USA Today. But the real test was this morning.

Whatever rested in the snow on the sidewalk leading out from his front door would determine whether the next few weeks of Hank Powell’s life would be manageable, or chaotic and stressful on a scale he’d never experienced.

He brushed his teeth and combed his hair, threw on a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans, then went downstairs and put on the coffee to brew. He pulled the living-room drapery back and looked outside. Two more inches of snow had fallen on the Virginia countryside overnight, but the two plastic-wrapped bundles were on top of a shallow drift with just a dusting on top.

Hank pulled on his galoshes over his bare feet and pushed the front door open. The sharp, icy dry air stung his face as he stepped out onto the porch. The cold shot through the rubber soles of the boots and immediately began to deaden his feet. He jumped off the porch and trotted down the walk, the boots crunching on the dry snow. He reached over to one side of the walk and picked the Sunday New York Times off the snowdrift, then leaned down on the other side of the walk and plucked the Washington Post off the top of a wind-blown mound of powder.

Seconds later, he was kicking off his boots and wondering whether he should start a fire in the den fireplace. The smell of coffee caught him first, though, and he decided to sit at the kitchen table. He tossed the two papers, which between them weighed several pounds, onto the kitchen table, then poured a large mug of coffee. He pulled the chair away at the head of the table and then sat down in the large kitchen Anne had loved so much.

“Well,” he whispered, “let’s see what you’ve got for me.”

He pulled the plastic cover off the Post first, then removed all the inserts: the slicks and the advertisements, the Sunday magazine and the television guide, then thumbed quickly through the sections, separating the possibles from the not-likelies.

Hank Powell found the article on page six of Section A, above the fold, with about a thirty-point headline that read: FEDS STYMIED IN MULTI-YEAR HUNT FOR “ALPHABET MAN”

Hank’s spirits sunk as he read the article. The reporter had clearly taken the local article from Chattanooga and run with it. The reporter at the Tennessee paper had not done a bad job of writing up what little he had, but the Post reporter had considerably more resources to draw upon. As Hank read the article, which covered at least three-quarters of the page, complete with a clouded, out-of-focus crime-scene picture and another photo of Max Bransford in Nashville, he realized that the Post reporter had to have a source within the Bureau. When he read some of the details of the Milwaukee killing-the one in which the letter E had been left at the crime scene-he knew that somebody with access to the FBI case files had leaked.

Hank felt his face flush. He knew the press had a job to do, but the one thing he hated more than anything was a press leak. If Hank had gone the other way in life, if he’d become a criminal himself rather than an FBI agent, he’d have hated a snitch just as much. That’s what he considered guys who leaked confidential information that threatened the very success of an investigation: snitches who just happened to be on the same side as the good guys.

The Times article, on page two of the first section, was about as bad, only that the reporter had chosen to go after interviews with local cops. He’d focused on establishing a trail and had even discovered something that the Post reporter had slipped up on: The eighth murder-H- had taken place in Vancouver, just across the border in Canada. For the first time, the world would learn that the Alphabet Man was a killer for whom boundaries of every type meant little.

“Damn it,” Hank muttered. He sat back in his chair, his eyes focusing on the wall opposite him and then gradually losing focus as his mind shifted into an analysis of everything he’d read. A minute or so later, the process was finished, and he reached what he felt was a proper evaluation of the situation: It could be worse, but it was hard to imagine how.

Hank was so lost in thought, it took until the third ring for the phone to break his concentration. He looked at the kitchen clock and smiled. Jackie.

He stood up, grabbed the handset off the wall phone next to the kitchen sink.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said pleasantly.

“Good morning, darling.” The voice was heavy-set, masculine, definitely not his daughter’s.

Hank reddened, recognizing the voice of Lawrence Dunlap, an FBI deputy assistant director and his immediate supervisor. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said quickly. “I thought you were my daughter. She calls every Sunday about this time.”

“Then I won’t take long,” Dunlap said. Over the years, Hank and Larry Dunlap had had their differences, but