By Blood Written

He popped his frozen Salisbury steak dinner into the microwave and punched some numbers into the keypad. The microwave began humming as Hank walked back into the living room and picked up his drink. The glass had been sitting there so long, the condensation on the side had dried.

Hank took a small sip and winced.

As he took the glass into the kitchen, he realized that something else was bothering him about the book. It was gruesome and graphic, hard to read yet impossible to put down. But there was something else.

Something else …

Something about the description of the murder. Some element of the scene, something that stuck, buried, deep in his mind. But what?

What was it?

Frustrated, Hank picked up the book, opened it to the first page, and began rereading chapter one. The first murder took place in a small town in Ohio, a place called Middletown.

The victim was a young girl, a college student, working at a fast-food place over the summer. She worked the breakfast shift and arrived early one day, before the manager got there to unlock the doors.

Chaney was sitting in the parking lot, waiting for the place to open. As he stared out the windshield, an elderly man with the air of homelessness about him approached the young girl and spare-changed her. Chaney watched as the girl went off on the homeless man, finally swatting at him with her heavy handbag, almost knocking him over.

As the man stumbled away, Chaney got out of his car and walked up to the girl. Sad state of affairs, he said to her, when a young girl working an honest job can’t wait outside her place of employment without being accosted by bums.

The girl smiled, agreed, and the conversation continued.

When the manager arrived twenty minutes later, there was no sign of the girl. A week later, she was found in a rental storage unit-raped, tortured, and set out on display.

On the wall above her body, the block letter “A” had been painted in her own blood.

“Middletown,” he said out loud. “Where the hell is Middletown?”

Hank walked into his study and pulled an atlas off the bookshelf. He turned to Ohio and began scanning. Then, in the southern part of the state, near the Kentucky border, he found Middletown, Ohio, which was close enough to Cincinnati to be a suburb.

Cincinnati.

Hank felt his heart catch in his chest. The Alphabet Man’s first murder had been in Cincinnati, and the victim had worked at a fast-food place.

“No,” he said out loud. “It can’t be. It’s crazy.”

In the background, the microwave timer dinged. Hank walked into the kitchen, grabbing the second installment of the Chaney series off the coffee table and taking it with him. He carefully pulled the lid off his steaming microwaved dinner and sat down at the kitchen table. For the next hour, he halfheartedly picked at his meal as he read The Second Letter.

When he finished that book just after one in the morning, the grease on his uneaten Salisbury steak dinner had congealed into a whitish-gray paste. He threw the box into the garbage, poured himself a snifter of brandy, then turned off all the lights downstairs. He took The Third Letter to bed with him. He shaved and showered, put on a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt and slid into bed, the drink on the nightstand, the book next to him.

The night slipped by effortlessly as Hank, almost beyond exhausted, read on and on. When he closed The Third Letter and dropped it on the floor next to the bed, it was just past three-thirty in the morning.

And like Maria Chavez, Hank Powell now knew who the Alphabet Man was. As crazy as it seemed, as insane a theory as this would appear to most people who heard it, Hank knew. He was as sure as he was that the sun would rise in another two hours. Only one question remained.

How the hell was he going to prove it?

CHAPTER 16

Tuesday afternoon, Manhattan

Taylor Robinson was so engrossed in her reading she almost didn’t hear the phone in her office buzz. On the third ring, she lifted the handset.

“Yes,” she said blankly, still staring at the contract in front of her.

Jennifer, the new receptionist, laughed. “Did I wake you up?”

“No,” Taylor said, smiling. “I was just off in the zone.”

“Well, come back to Earth. I’ve got Mr. Schiftmann holding for you on line three.”

“Oh, great,” Taylor said, punching the blinking button for line three. “Hello,” she continued.

“Hi, you,” Michael answered. “How are you?”

“Fine. I was just going over the last of the foreign contracts. Did you know you’re going to be published in Por-tuguese?”

Michael sounded surprised. “Really? Where?”

“Brazil. It’s not much money, only twenty-five thousand a book, but it’s a lot of money for foreign.”

“I can remember when I’d kill for a twenty-five-grand contract. Now it’s just side money. I think I see a Rio de Janeiro book tour in my future. What do you think?”

“I think that’s quite doable. And I think you’ll need a competent guide.”

“You’ve been to Rio?”

“Couple of times. One of my favorites. So where are you?”

“Cleveland,” Michael answered.

“Ah, Cleveland. Not one of my favorites.”

“Well, I won’t be here much longer. I closed on the condo today. The movers are coming first thing in the morning, and then I’m out of here.”

Taylor frowned, grateful that Michael couldn’t see the look on her face. “Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked. “Moving to Manhattan is a pretty big step.”

“Of course I’m sure,” he said. “Look, it’s a long way from the slums of Barberton to the Cleveland lakefront. And when I bought this place a year ago, I thought I’d use it as a base for the rest of my life. But things change. We’ve changed.

I want to be with you, and I certainly don’t expect you to move to Cleveland.”

There was a moment’s silence as Taylor tried once again to take all this in. “Okay, if you’re sure. I want us to have a chance, too, and I guess we need to at least be in the same zip code if we’re going to give it a go.”

“And that’s what we’re going to give it,” Michael said brightly. “Besides, I sold out just at the right time. I made a tidy little bundle off that condo.”

Taylor laughed. “Does everything you touch turn to money?”

“Everything I touch since I met you turns into money.”

“That’s sweet.”

“No, Taylor, I mean it. When I walked into your office that day, I had enough cash to my name for one more night’s stay in a fleabag hotel and a Greyhound bus ticket back home.

Meeting you turned everything around.”

Taylor smiled now and held the phone tightly to her ear.

“It’s pretty well rocked my world too, buster. So when’re you coming home?”

“I’m flying out tomorrow night after the movers leave. I’ll be at LaGuardia about ten. I’ll just take a cab in, if it’s okay for me to stay with you awhile longer.”

“I’d be heartbroken if you stayed anywhere else,” she teased.

“I’ve got an appointment with a broker Thursday morning. She’s got about six places for me to look at, including a house on Hudson Street.”