By Blood Written

he lost her, he’d have gone home at the end of the day and talked to her-never in specifics, but enough to let her know how troubled he was. She would have listened, as she always did, and been savvy enough not to tell him what to do or to med-dle in his business. She was his sounding board, and by processing his thoughts with her and through her, he would find something he hadn’t seen before, some insight he’d missed, some element that had bypassed him.

Now there was no one.

Almost an hour later, Hank barely nodded to the Marine guard at the gated entrance to Quantico. He wound his way around until he found his parking space outside an office building behind Hogan’s Alley, the mock small town made up entirely of facades that was used in training. In the distance, he heard rhythmic gunfire snapping from one of the outdoor ranges.

The air was cold and dry, the sun beginning its slide toward the horizon in a cloudless, blue winter sky. Hank pulled his overcoat tightly around him as the cutting wind from the east chilled him.

Sallie Richardson, the division’s longtime administrative assistant, looked up from her desk as Hank entered. She tried to smile, but as soon as she saw the look on his face, her smile disappeared.

“That bad?” she asked.

Hank stopped at her desk and nodded his head. “Hasn’t been my best day.”

“Sorry, Hank,” she offered. “It’ll get better.”

He shrugged. “Sure.” He walked down the hall to his office.

“Oh,” Sallie called to him. “Check your voice mail. Max Bransford in Nashville called.”

“Thanks.”

Hank opened the door to his small office, with the one window that looked out onto the woods that surrounded the academy. He hung up his coat, sat down at his desk, and punched the buttons to retrieve his voice mail. There were four other messages ahead of Bransford’s, but none had the urgency that was in Bransford’s voice.

“Agent Powell,” the recording began. “This is Lieutenant Bransford with the Nashville Murder Squad. I need to talk to you ASAP. Can you give me a call at 615 …”

Hank scribbled down the number, then punched the buttons to leave voice mail and get an outside line. Within ten seconds, the phone in Max Bransford’s office was ringing. A female voice with a deep Southern accent answered.

“Lieutenant Bransford’s office,” she piped. “May I help you?”

“This is Agent Powell at the FBI, returning Lieutenant Bransford’s call.”

“Oh, hi, Agent Powell. This is Bea Shuster. Good to hear from you. The lieutenant’s been waiting for your call. Just hold on a second.”

Hank smiled. How can these people be so damn friendly?

Bransford came on the line before the thought could completely leave his head. “Hank?”

“Yes, Max, how are you?”

“Up to my nether regions in amphibious reptiles. Listen, I won’t take up too much of your time but I had to call. You got a minute?”

“Sure.” Hank opened a notebook and grabbed a pen.

“Talk to me.”

The voice on the other end of the line hesitated. “I’m going to ask you to reserve judgment on this one until I finish, okay? This is going to sound kind of crazy at first.”

Hank felt his brow furrow. Curious …

“I’m listening,” he said.

“You remember Maria Chavez?”

“Yes, of course. The young Hispanic woman. Quite sharp, if I recall.”

“Very,” Bransford said. “Top-notch. Smart as a whip. If this had come from anyone else, I’d have blown ‘em off. But she’s convinced and I thought it was worth a call to you.”

“Okay,” Hank said. “My curiosity’s running wild. Let me have it.”

“About the butt crack of dawn this morning, Maria Chavez comes in to catch up on some paperwork and have a little quiet time. Only she gets a call that there’s this old lady out front who claims to know who the Alphabet Man is. Maria figures she’s a nutcase. We get a few of those from time to time, you know.”

“Like every other day,” Hank interrupted.

“Yeah. So anyway, Maria offers to give her five minutes, and the old lady says she knows who our guy is. He’s this famous writer, right? The old lady reads all his books and claims he bases the plots to his novels on murders he’s committing himself.”

“What?” Hank asked. “That’s crazy.”

“But she’s brought in the New York Times article and a stack of paperbacks by the guy and she starts spouting off details of the books that sound an awful lot like some of the shit our killer’s doing. She convinces Maria to at least take a look at the books. So Maria ushers the old lady out and disappears for a few hours to look over the novels.”

The line went silent for a few moments. “And?” Hank asked.

Hank heard Bransford sigh on the other end of the line, the long, weary sigh of a longtime cop who’s close enough to retirement to taste and smell it.

“And I find Chavez curled up on a couch in the break room practically in a fetal position. She’s read the books and is convinced the old lady’s right.”

Hank leaned back in his chair and stared out the window for a moment. For that moment, his mind seemed more still than it had been all day, as if it had settled into a sweet, sub-lime, and welcome silence.

“You there?” Bransford asked.

“Yeah,” Hank said, forcing himself back to reality. “Max, this is crazy.”

“I know, it’s insane. Completely loony tunes. But what if it’s true?”

“Who’s the writer? I mean, who the hell is this guy?”

Hank felt his own voice rise from the tension.

Hank heard some paper shuffle in the background as Bransford flipped through some notes. “His name’s Michael Schiftmann-”

Hank scribbled down the name as Bransford spelled it for him.

“The guy’s apparently famous. On the New York Times best-seller list, big bucks, movie deals, all that celebrity crap. Personally, I never heard of him, but I get too much of the real thing to go home and read about murder.”

“Me, too,” Hank agreed. “Who’s got time? And what books are these?”

“Chavez made me a list, although it’s pretty easy to remember. The first one’s called The First Letter, the second one’s The Second Letter, then The Third Letter, and so on.”

The mention of letters caused the already tense muscles in Hank’s neck to contract even further. “Letters?” he asked.

“Yeah. Fuckin’ creepy, you ask me. And the hero, protagonist, whatever the hell you call him of the novels is like this crusader, vigilante type who goes around killing bad girls in cold blood, like an executioner or something.”

“Or a serial killer,” Hank offered.

“Yeah, like that.”

“This is crazy,” Hank said again. “What do we do with this?”

“Well, I’ve given Chavez twenty-four hours to write this up as a full report and make her case. Knowing her, I’ll have it tomorrow morning. I’ll fax it to your office.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Beyond that, we’re just going to sit tight. But there is one other thing that’s kind of a raise-the-hair-on-the- back-of-your-neck thing …”

“Yeah?”

“That night those two girls were murdered over on Church Street, that night Howard Hinton from Hamilton County called you?”