phoned upstairs. Less than a minute later, the metal entrance door to the police offices buzzed and Maria Chavez stepped out.
She waved Hank and Cowan past security and held the door for them as they entered the long hallway.
“Sorry we’re late,” Hank said.
“Don’t worry, we haven’t started yet. C’mon, this way.”
Maria Chavez wore jeans and boots, with a long-sleeved white cotton shirt. She looked like a clean, freshly scrubbed farmhand, with the exception of the nine-millimeter Glock Model 19 attached to her belt.
“Maria, I’ve got to tell you,” Hank said as the three walked quickly down the hallway, “that report you did was sensa-tional. I can’t believe you put all this together.”
Maria turned, smiling broadly, her white teeth glistening in the harsh fluorescent light. “Thanks, Agent Powell. I appreciate it. But it was really that daffy old lady who convinced me.”
“Please, Maria, it’s Hank.”
“Thanks, Hank.”
Maria came to a bank of three elevators and pushed the up button. Hank leaned down and glanced at his watch, which read one-twelve. Twelve minutes late …
As if reading his mind, Maria chimed in. “Don’t worry, Howard Hinton just got here, too. There’s road construction all the way down I-24 to Smyrna. Took him an hour and a half to make the last twenty miles.”
Cowan grinned. “I hear the legislature’s thinking about making the orange traffic barrel the state bird.”
Chavez chuckled. “Good one.”
Hank secretly wished Cowan would shut the hell up. He was a bit too relaxed and jovial for the circumstances, or maybe it was just that Hank was unable to be relaxed or jovial about any of this. If this meeting went the way he thought it would, then Maria Chavez’s theory was the break in this case they’d been needing for years.
Hank had spent the entire week reading the rest of Michael Schiftmann’s work and analyzing Maria’s report. He now believed that Maria was right, but he also knew that if she was right, this was going to be the biggest media fire-storm since the O. J. case. Hank wasn’t even ready to begin thinking about the consequences of charging a celebrity like Michael Schiftmann with being a serial murderer, with the corroborating theory being that he was basing the plots of his own best-selling novels on murders he committed himself.
As Maria Chavez led Hank and Cowan into the small conference room that was already crowded with Murder Squad investigators, the voice in his head was still warning that even though he believed it, no one else was going to.
Max Bransford sat at the head of a long table and rose when Hank entered the room. He looked like he’d gained ten pounds and lost a year’s sleep since that cold February night of the Exotica Tans murders. In fact, Hank noticed, looking around the room, they all looked tired.
“Hello, Hank,” Bransford said, extending a hand as Hank approached him. “It’s good to see you again. Thanks for coming down.”
“Thanks for inviting me,” Hank said.
“Here,” Bransford motioned, “sit next to me.”
Hank took a seat to Bransford’s left, then nodded and leaned across the table to shake hands with Howard Hinton of the Chattanooga Police Department’s Homicide Squad.
The two exchanged comments about the terrible Nashville traffic as the rest of the investigators took seats in an informal, but recognizable, seating by rank. Fred Cowan took a side chair near the end of the table where Gary Gilley, lead investigator on the case, sat anchoring the group.
“Let’s get to work, ladies and gentlemen,” Bransford intoned, as people began shifting in their chairs, shuffling paperwork, and opening notebooks in front of them. “We’ve got a lot to cover today, a lot of thinking to do. Has everyone had a chance to read Maria’s report?”
All heads nodded with the exception of Cowan, who held up an index finger. “I’m sorry. I just got it this morning.
Haven’t had a chance to get to it.”
Hank clenched his jaw. If Cowan had mentioned that to him, he would have brought him up to speed on the long drive down West End Avenue. Instead, the two made tense chitchat as Hank maneuvered his way downtown.
“Don’t worry,” Bransford said. “Just hang with us. You’ll catch up.”
There was a moment’s silence as all the investigators turned to Bransford. “I guess the first thing we should do is have a show of hands. Is there anyone in this room who actually believes this cockamamie theory of Detective Chavez’s that a famous, rich, best-selling writer comes into town for a book signing and, just for shits and grins, decides to butcher two young girls?”
A few hands went up, including Maria Chavez’s and Hank’s, with Gary Gilley at the other end of the table holding his hand out over the table, palm down, wiggling it back and forth.
“Okay, Gary, what’s that mean?”
“It means Maria put together a helluva report that reads like it oughta be on the best-seller list itself-”
A couple of investigators laughed as Gilley paused for effect. “-but the question is can we prove it to anyone’s satisfaction, especially a jury. Personally, I think the DA’s gonna laugh us out of town.”
“What other theories have you got, Detective Gilley?”
Hank asked.
Gilley shook his head. “Not much. We’ve gone all through these two girls’ backgrounds. Deep stuff. There’s nothing there. The closest is that the Burnham girl was dating a soldier out of Fort Campbell, a paratrooper with the 101st Air-borne. These guys are trained in close combat, especially with knives, bayonets, machetes, shit like that. Also, this guy supposedly had a real temper. Maybe he didn’t know his girlfriend was working in a massage parlor and went apeshit when he found out. That was our best bet, but we went up this guy’s ass with a very bright light and we didn’t see anything up there that shouldn’t have been there. He had an alibi for that weekend. And he just got shipped out to downtown Baghdad.”
Hank turned to Max Bransford. “What about the forensic evidence from the Dumpster?”
“Yeah, that,” Gilley answered. “The soldier boyfriend voluntarily gave us a swab and we typed him against the DNA on the overalls and the rags. Nothing.”
“So he’s clear,” Maria said.
“Anything else from the Dumpster?” Hank asked.
“Oh, yeah, we got blood and tissue matches to both girls.
The stuff definitely came from the murder scene. And we got a bunch of stuff we were able to profile, but were unable to match.”
Hank nodded to Gilley. “That means we’ve probably got blood, saliva, scrapings, something from the killer.”
Jack Murray, near the end of the table across from Cowan, raised his hand. “So why can’t we just get this famous guy to give us a DNA sample and type it.”
“Because,” Bransford said, “if this guy’s got a brain in his head, he’ll tell us to go fuck ourselves. And I wouldn’t blame him.”
“That’s putting the cart ahead of the horse,” Hank agreed.
“We’d have to build a case for subpoenaing the sample and we’re not there yet.”
Bransford turned to Howard Hinton, the homicide investigator who had raised his hand. “So you buy into this crazi-ness, Howard? Wanta tell us why?”
Hinton, who had been silent before now, leaned his heavy bulk over the table and planted his elbows on the hard wood.
He rested his chin on his right palm and sat there for a moment.
“At first, I thought it was crazy, too. Then I went back and did a little checking. The night he did the two murders, the L
and the M killings, he was in Nashville at a book signing.”
“Yeah?” Bransford said after a moment.
“Almost two years ago, when Laurie Metzger, the twenty-two-year-old blond who worked out of that strip club, Deja View, became the J murder?”
