a month afterwards, I was so depressed…. I
Altman looked up at Wallace and shook his head.
The reporter gestured for the phone. Altman figured, Why not?
“Mr. Carter, there’s a person here I’m going to put on the line. I’d like him to have a word with you.”
“Who?”
The cop handed the receiver over and sat back, listening to the one-sided conversation.
“Hello, Mr. Carter.” The reporter’s gaunt frame hunched over the phone and he gripped the receiver in astonishingly long, strong fingers. “You don’t know me. My name is Wallace Gordon. I’m a fan of your book — I loved it. I’m a reporter for the
Altman lifted an impressed eyebrow at the reporter’s sales pitch. Wallace held the receiver to his ear for a moment, listening. Finally he nodded and glanced at Altman. “He wants to talk to you.”
Altman took the phone. “Yessir?”
“What exactly would you want me to do?” came the tentative voice through the phone.
“All I need is to go through the fan mail you got about the book.”
A bitter laugh. “Hate mail, you mean. That’s mostly what I got.”
“Whatever you received. We’re mostly interested in handwritten letters, so we can match physical evidence. But any emails you got, we’d like to see too.”
A pause. Was he going to balk? Then the detective heard the man say, “It’ll take me a day or two. I kind of stopped… well, let me just say things haven’t been too organized around my office lately.”
“That’s fine.” Altman gave the author the directions to the police station and told him to wear kitchen gloves and handle the handwritten letters by the edges to make sure he didn’t mess up the fingerprints.
“All right,” Carter said sullenly.
Altman wondered if he’d really come. He started to tell the author how much he appreciated the help but after a moment he realized that the man had hung up and he was listening to dead air.
Andy Clark did indeed make the journey to Greenville.
He turned out not to resemble either a sinister artist or a glitzy celebrity but rather any one of the hundreds of white, middle-aged men who populated this region of the Northeast. Thick, graying hair, neatly trimmed. A slight paunch (much slighter than Altman’s own, thanks to the cop’s fondness for his wife’s casseroles). His outfit wasn’t an arm-patch sports jacket or any other authorial garb, but an L.L. Bean windbreaker, Polo shirt and corduroy slacks.
It had been two days since Altman had spoken to Carter. The man now stood uneasily in the cop’s office, taking the coffee that the young detective Josh Randall offered and nodding greetings to the cops and to Gordon Wallace. Carter slipped off his windbreaker, tossing it on an unoccupied chair. The author’s only moment of ill ease in this meeting was when he glanced on Altman’s desk and blinked as he saw the case file that was headed,
They made small talk for a minute or two and then Altman nodded at a large white envelope in the author’s hand. “You find some letters you think might be helpful?”
“Helpful?” Carter asked, rubbing his red eyes. “I don’t know. You’ll have to decide that.” He handed the envelope to the detective.
Altman opened the envelope and, donning latex gloves, pulled out what must’ve been about two hundred or so sheets.
The detective led the men into the department conference room and spread the letters out on the table. Randall joined them.
Some of them were typed or printed out from a computer — but these were signed, offering a small sample of the correspondent’s handwriting. Some were written in cursive, some in block letters. They were on many different types and sizes of paper and colors of ink or pencil. Crayons too.
For an hour the men, each wearing rubber gloves, pored over the letters. Altman could understand the author’s dismay. Many of them were truly vicious. Finally he divided them into several piles. First, the emails, none of which seemed to have been written by potential killers. Second were the handwritten letters that seemed like the typical innocent opinions of readers. None of these asked for details about how he’d researched the novel or seemed in any way incriminating, though some were angry and some were disturbingly personal (“Come and see us in Sioux City if your in town and the wife and me will treat you to our special full body massege out side on the deck behind our trailer”).
“Ick,” said young officer Randall.
The final pile, Altman explained, “included letters that were reasonable and calm and cautious… Just like the Strangler. See, he’s an organized offender. He’s not going to give anything away by ranting. If he has any questions he’s going to ask them politely and carefully — he’ll want some detail but not too much; that’d arouse suspicion.” Altman gathered up this stack — about ten letters — placed them in an evidence envelope and handed them to the young detective. “Over to the county lab, stat.”
A man stuck his head in the door — Detective Bob Fletcher. The even-keeled sergeant introduced himself to Carter. “We never met but I spoke to you on the phone about the case,” the cop said.
“I remember.” They shook hands.
Fletcher nodded at Altman, smiling ruefully. “He’s a better cop than me. I never thought that the killer might’ve tried to write you.”
The sergeant, it turned out, had contacted Carter not about fan mail but to ask if the author’d based the story on any previous true crimes, thinking there might be a connection between them and the Strangler murders. It had been a good idea but Carter had explained that the plot for
The sergeant’s eyes took in the stacks of letters. “Any luck?” he asked.
“We’ll have to see what the lab finds.” Altman then nodded toward the author. “But I have to say that Mr. Carter here’s been a huge help. We’d be stymied for sure, if it wasn’t for him.”
Appraising Carter carefully, Fletcher said, “I have to admit I never got a chance to read your book but I always wanted to meet you. An honest-to-God famous author. Don’t think I’ve ever shook one’s hand before.”
Carter gave an embarrassed laugh. “Not very famous to look at my sales figures.”
“Well, all I know is my girlfriend read your book and she said it was the best thriller she’d read in years.”
Carter said, “I appreciate that. Is she around town? I could autograph her copy.”
“Oh,” Fletcher said hesitantly, “well, we’re not going out anymore. She left the area. But thanks for the offer.” He headed back to Robbery.
There was now nothing to do but wait for the lab results to come back, so Wallace suggested coffee at Starbucks. The men wandered down the street, ordered and sat sipping the drinks, as Wallace pumped Carter for information about breaking into fiction writing, and Altman simply enjoyed the feel of the hot sun on his face.
The men’s recess ended abruptly, though, fifteen minutes later when Altman’s cell phone rang.
“Detective,” came the enthusiastic voice of his youthful assistant, Josh Randall, “we’ve got a match! The handwriting in one of Mr. Carter’s fan letters matches the notes in the margins of the book. The ink’s the same too.”
The detective said, “Please tell me there’s a name and address on the letter.”
