Hank felt his neck tighten.
“Yes?” Bransford said again, his voice tense.
“Michael Schiftmann was in Chattanooga as the keynote speaker at the Chattanooga Mountain Writers’ Conference.
Schiftmann arrived on a Thursday afternoon. She was murdered Friday night. Schiftmann didn’t leave until Sunday morning.”
Hank wondered how Bransford could deliver a bombshell like this in such an offhanded manner. For a few moments, there was complete silence in the room. Then, from down the table to Hank’s left, a voice muttered: “Holy shit …”
Bransford turned to Hank. “Did you know this?”
“No, but I would have eventually. I’ve e-mailed every field office where the Alphabet Man has hit and asked them to cross-check against Schiftmann’s book signings and travel.”
“This is insane! Do you guys have any idea how crazy this sounds?” Gilley, his voice shrill with tension, shouted.
“Of course it’s insane,” Chavez said loudly. “But it’s insane to butcher two MTSU coeds, too! That’s the whole thing with serial killers, Gary, they’re nuts! Get it? Serial killer-”
Chavez held her hand out and drew an equal sign in the air.
“-nuts! It comes with the territory.”
“But he’s not nuts,” Hank interrupted. “We have to remember that, he’s not crazy. He’s a sociopath, he’s ruthless and relentless, and he’s evil, but he’s not crazy. And so far he’s gotten away with this, so he’s careful and he’s smart.
And we have to be just as careful and just as smart or we blow this.”
Again, there was a tense silence in the room. After a few moments, Max Bransford spoke up. “So, let’s strategize.
How do we reel this guy in and nail him?”
Hank looked around the room, scanning the face of each one of the investigators. “A couple of observations. If we’ve learned anything about high-profile celebrity murder cases in the past dozen years or so, it’s that the police and the prosecutors usually lose by shooting off their mouths. The first thing we have to do is lock this thing down, tight. If that reporter down in Chattanooga-”
Hank looked over at Howard Hinton, questioning.
“Yeah,” Hinton said, “Andy Parks.”
“Andy Parks gets this and then it goes to the
“Everybody got that?” Bransford asked. “If this leaks, we know it came from this room.”
“And we don’t have to even begin to discuss the world of shit the leaker will be in when I find out who he or she is,”
Gilley added.
“The second thing is,” Hank added, “we’ve got to coordinate and work together. You guys have to treat this as a local homicide, but I have to deal with it on a much larger scale, even an international scale. Once word gets out that we’ve got a suspect in these killings, I’ve got police departments from Macon, Georgia, to Vancouver, Canada, who are going to want everything we’ve got.”
Gary Gilley shook his head wearily. “Jesus, this is going to be one huge cluster fuck if we’re not careful.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Hank answered.
“So where do we start?” Maria Chavez asked.
Max Bransford eased back in his chair and laced his fingers together behind his head. “To a certain extent, we treat it like any other homicide. We have to establish method, put the guy at the scene, look for witnesses …”
“And prove a motive,” Gary Gilley said from the other end of the table. “That’s going to be a tough one. We know why this sicko did what he did, but making it real for a jury might be a bitch.”
“Will be,” Bransford said. “But let’s get started. Gary, you’ll coordinate. Get the search warrants and subpoenas under way. I want this guy’s credit card records, travel records, hotel registrations. I want the bookstore people interviewed, the hotel people. If this guy rented a car, I want to know which car and what he left behind in it.”
“In the meantime,” Hank added, “I’ve got a complete, full-blown background check going on this guy. We’ve already run his name through NCIC and came up with squat.
As far as I can tell, he’s never even spit on the sidewalk before. But we’re still digging. And later on down the road, if we have to, we’ll dive under the Patriot Act umbrella and pull a sneak ‘n peek.”
“Okay,” Gilley said. “Maria and Jack, you’ll work with me on assigning areas. We’ll split everything up and everybody into teams. After this meeting, we’ll huddle in the bullpen and get going right now.”
“You know the weirdest thing about all this?” Maria Chavez asked.
“What?” Bransford answered.
“This whole thing broke because some silly old lady stays up all night reading paperback mysteries.”
“If she were here right now,” Hank offered, “I’d kiss her on the mouth and give her a medal.”
CHAPTER 18
Special Agent David Kelly smiled as he took the exit ramp off I-76 West and turned south toward Barberton, Ohio, one of the dozens of small towns that cluster around the Cleveland/Akron hub. Kelly, at twenty-eight, was the youngest agent in the Cleveland Field Office of the FBI. He’d been with the Bureau less than two years and still approached each assignment with the kind of eagerness and excitement that the older agents seldom exhibited.
Agent Kelly didn’t know why he’d been sent to Barberton, Ohio, in pursuit of a deep background check on Michael Schiftmann. He knew who Schiftmann was, being a regular reader of the Sunday
But he’d never read one of his novels. And when the e-mail came through from Quantico to start digging, he took his orders like the good soldier he was and went out into the field armed with his file folder full of report pages.
He already knew that Michael Schiftmann had been born in Barberton, Ohio, in 1969, during the height of the Vietnam war. Just over a year after Schiftmann’s birth, four students would be shot down by the Ohio National Guard just up the road in Kent. Michael’s father, a burned-out Vietnam combat veteran with an ever-growing and intrusive drug problem, would desert the infant and his mother and never be heard from again.
And, Kelly discovered from a check of the Summit County public assistance database, Michael’s mother, Virginia, still lived in the same two-bedroom project house in South Barberton that she’d raised him in.
Kelly looked down at his notes, then turned left into Fourth Street South, a narrow street clogged with parked cars-mostly run-down-on both sides of the curb. Even though the street was two-way, it would have been tough for two oncoming cars to maneuver around each other. He leaned over the steering wheel, looking out the windshield for house numbers. Most of the houses looked to be from the thirties, he thought, maybe early forties. They were identical shotgun duplexes, two narrow houses jammed together into one, with a narrow driveway between it and the house next door. Most needed a coat of paint. Random shutters hung askew, dotted by the occasional cracked window. There seemed to be no one around, not even kids or stray dogs.
One empty lot was marked by a rusted fifty-five-gallon oil drum set up as a stove and a couple of ratty sofas next to it.
Kind of like his old neighborhood, Kelly thought. Depressing.
He passed the Schiftmann house, but there was nowhere to park. He cruised most of the block before he found an empty slot, then pulled his government-issue Ford Taurus over and cut the engine. He sat there a
