By Blood Written (28 page)

Taylor felt as if it would go on forever. That they would
always be young and energetic and happy, that life would
always be a banquet.

That day, that day it all ended, her father woke early, left
in his Mercedes to make his hospital rounds. Her mother
slept late, as did Taylor and Jack, and then went out for a
tennis date at the club.

Jack climbed into his Jeep and drove off to meet friends
for lunch.

Taylor relaxed, hanging around the house, debating what
to do with the rest of the day. She had chores to do, had
promised her mother to do some laundry and clean up her
room. Her senior year would begin in a few weeks as well.

So maybe it was time she started going through the stack
of college catalogs that had been coming in the mail for
months.

Then the phone rang. Her best friend, Dori, invited her
over to spend the afternoon swimming, sunbathing, listening to music, talking about boys. The usual …

Just guilty enough at neglecting her chores to feel it, but
not guilty enough to say no to Dori, Taylor rushed into her
bedroom and changed into her bikini, then threw on a T-shirt
and a pair of cutoffs just as Dori pulled up in her convert-ible Mustang. Taylor grabbed her purse and bag, then ran
for the back door. Dori honked the horn and yelled to her.

As Taylor went out the back door, she slapped her hand
across the burglar alarm panel.

And hit the wrong button. The burglar alarm system her
father had installed a few years earlier had a silent mode.

No one ever used it.

She didn’t mean to do it.

God, she didn’t mean to do it.

They would later stitch together from bits and pieces how
it all happened.

At two-twelve that afternoon, an automated call came
into the Greenwich Police Department reporting a breakin
at the Robinson home. Dispatch sent a prowl car to investigate. Riding alone that shift was a young, rookie patrolman
barely older than Jack. In fact, he had just a week earlier
finished his probationary period, which required him to
ride along with an older, more experienced officer.

When the officer arrives, a Jeep is in the driveway behind
the house.

The officer exits the squad car carefully. There’s no sign
of a breakin. The officer stands there a moment.

Suddenly, the sliding glass door to the patio courtyard
opens up and a young blond man in a pair of jeans, a T-shirt,
and running shoes steps out.

With his hands in his pockets …

The officer unsnaps his weapon.

Jack, smiling, gregarious as always, never met a fellow
he didn’t like, walks toward the officer.

With his hands in his pockets …

“Stop right there,” the officer commands, holding his left
palm out, his right hand on the butt of his pistol.

Jack grins, keeps walking: “What’s up, Barney Fife?”

“Stop,” the officer yells.

Jack suddenly pulls his hand out, cocked, his index finger
pointing like the barrel of a gun, his thumb like the hammer,
like a seven-year-old boy playing cowboys and Indians. He
points it at the officer.

Who draws his weapon and fires.

John Prentice Robinson, star athlete, captain of the varsity shooting team, prankster and naively stupid young
man, came home that afternoon and didn’t realize he’d set
off the burglar alarm when he came in. And as a result, he
died that afternoon on the warm clay tiles of the courtyard
patio of his parents’ two-million-dollar home, of a single
gunshot wound to the chest.

They buried him three days later next to his grandparents.

Devastation is too tepid a word, too mild a description,
for what happened to Taylor, her parents, her family.

The city settles for one-point-five million. Taylor refuses
any part of it.

Her father shuts down, buries himself in his work.

Her mother begins drinking heavily, becomes a recluse,
goes on about a dozen different medications for anxiety, depression, insomnia.

Her parents begin fighting, worse than ever. Her father
spends more and more time at the hospital.

Taylor spends her last year at home in a haze, retreats
into her schoolwork, graduates with honors and goes on to
Smith College. At the time she chose Smith, she had no idea
why she chose it, other than it was away from home.

Her parents sell the house, divorce. Her father relocates
to Miami and eventually marries a woman Taylor cannot
stand. Her mother goes into rehab, comes out clean and
sober, but depressed and miserable. The sound of her voice
gives Taylor a headache.

The weight never completely goes away. That corner of
her heart is locked away, leaden.

And filled with hatred for macho cowboy cops and their
guns. Their stupid, goddamn fucking guns.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” the voice said. “Are you okay?”

The voice was young, feminine. A woman’s voice. Taylor looked up. It was a young woman in a dark blue ski parka and jeans.

Taylor looked around. She was sitting on a concrete bench, so cold she couldn’t feel her hips, the backs of her legs. The bench was on a walk overlooking the East River. To her left and above, the Queensboro Bridge towered over it like the drawbridge to a castle.

Sutton Place. She’d walked up to Sutton Place. But when?

How long had she been there?

“Ma’am?” the voice asked again.

“What?” Taylor said, finally.

“You’ve been sitting there staring for a long time. I walked my dog like an hour and a half ago and you were sitting there staring out at the river. I saw you from my apartment.

I thought I’d just make sure you were okay.”

“Thanks,” Taylor said, standing up. Her legs tingled as the circulation was restored. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“You don’t have to apologize. It’s a public bench. I just thought I’d make sure you were okay.”

Taylor looked into the young woman’s face. It was round, pale, with an aquiline nose and large blue eyes.
It’s a myth
, Taylor thought,
that New Yorkers are cold and unfriendly
.

“I appreciate that,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to work.

I don’t know where my mind was at.”

The young girl smiled. “Okay, have a good day. I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Yes,” Taylor said, lying. “I’m fine.”

Taylor realized she was cold, chilled almost completely through. As she walked the blocks back to her office, the movement began to warm her, and as it did, she started thinking in a more organized, focused fashion.

Powell, that was his name. Special Agent Powell of the FBI. He had come into her office and announced that the man she loved, the man she was going to marry, the man upon whom her fortune and reputation were built, was a psycho, a killer.

She had to think this through. She had to remember as much of the conversation as possible, everything that had happened in the short couple of minutes he was in her office.

What he had said stunned her, caught her off guard. But now she had her footing back, and, as always, she knew it was better to act, to do something, even if it was wrong.

She had looked at his badge, his credentials. They looked real enough, but fake ID cards could be purchased anywhere.

And as far as she knew, that badge could have come from a war surplus store. She wouldn’t know a real FBI badge from a fake if it ran up behind her and bit her on the ankles.

But why would a fake FBI agent concoct such a story?

What good would it do anyone?

Why?

As she walked, one scenario after another played in her head. This was a conspiracy by a rival publishing house.

Maybe Michael had made enemies somewhere in the past who now sought to cause him harm. Maybe
she
had enemies who wanted to hurt her and were using Michael to do it.

She turned left on Second Avenue and headed south toward East Fifty-third and her office, oblivious to the crowds around her on the sidewalk. There had to be a way to handle this. This had to be taken care of as quickly and as quietly as possible. This would be a public relations disaster if she made a single misstep.

Hank Powell reached over the front seat and handed cash to the painfully skinny, dark-skinned driver and climbed out of the cab at Federal Plaza. Five minutes later, he’d worked his way through the tight security and was on his way to the FBI New York City Field Office.

Once inside, he tracked down SAC Joyce Parelli in her office and threw his overcoat onto the chair across from her desk.

“You’re not going to believe the morning I’ve had,” he said.

Joyce Parelli, a third-generation Italian—three generations in America, three generations in law enforcement—who sounded like she’d rarely set foot out of her native Brooklyn, grinned. She was amused to see Hank Powell, normally so composed one could almost call him smug, exasperated.

“Ah, my poor delicate little rosebud,” she said. “Sit down and tell me all about it.”

Too agitated to sit, Powell paced back and forth, his arms in constant motion. “I just got thrown out of somebody’s office! You believe that? I’m an employee and a representative of the
United States government
and I got tossed out like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman!”

Parelli laughed out loud this time. “And who threw you out, boobala?”

“Michael Schiftmann’s literary agent, that’s who! And if it won’t be a violation of the sex-discrimination statutes, would it be all right if I described her as a first-class
bitch
?”

Joyce Parelli sat up. “Wait a minute!”

Hank stopped pacing. “What?”

Parelli leaned down behind her desk and pulled out a standard, government-issue black plastic wastebasket. She shuffled around in the garbage for a moment and extracted a crumpled roll of newspaper.

“What?” Hank repeated.

“Shush, it’s here somewhere.” Parelli spread the paper out on her desk and started thumbing through it. “I know I saw it here.”

Hank stood at her desk, leaning over slightly, as she scanned page after page.

“Damn it,” she muttered. “I know it’s— There! Found it.” She spun the paper around on her desk, facing Hank, and jabbed at an item with the bright red fingernail of her index finger.

Hank looked down. “Liz Smith? Who the hell is—?”

“Gossip column,” Parelli answered. “Read.”

Hank bent down and focused. ” ‘Who’s the hot new power couple in the N.Y. literary scene?’” he read aloud. ” ‘Word around the publishing campfire is that superstar novelist and tall, dark, handsome hunk Michael Schiftmann has popped the question to his glitterati literary agent, Taylor Robinson. When you’re making the kind of moolah these two are bringing in, you may as well keep it in the family.’”

Hank stood up, shocked. “May as well keep it in the family …” he muttered. “Serves me right for not reading the tabloids.”

Parelli nodded. “That would certainly explain why you weren’t a welcome guest in her office this morning.”

Hank nodded, thinking. “Yes, it certainly would, wouldn’t it?”

Friday morning, FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia
Hank Powell was at his desk early the next morning, reexamining the stack of files in front of him and trying to figure out what to do next. He couldn’t get his mind off the interview with Taylor Robinson. It festered inside him like a wound gone septic. He was angry, but more than that, he was embarrassed.

He kept trying to figure out what could possibly have triggered her outbursts. There were only two options he could come up with. First, Taylor Robinson was so far in love with this guy that she was simply unable to grasp the concept that he might not be what she thought he was. Either that, or she knew what he was and was part of it.

But could that really be an option? What were the chances that Taylor Robinson was as psycho as her fiance? What were the chances that two such completely evil people could find each other in this world and glom on to each other?

“Probably better than you think,” he whispered to himself.

He reached for his third cup of coffee just as the phone rang. “I’ve got Max Bransford on line one,” Sallie said.

“Thanks,” Hank answered, pressing the blinking button on his desk set.

“Good morning, Max,” Hank said brightly. “How’s tricks?”

“Hank, I gotta talk to you,” Bransford said, his voice serious.

Hank felt his neck stiffen. “What’s up?”

“Yesterday morning, I got called into Major Katz’s office.

He’s my division commander and immediate supervisor. He reports directly to the assistant chief.”

“Okay,” Hank said. “And?”

“It was a come-to-Jesus meeting on the Exotica Tans murders.”

Hank sat there for a moment, holding the phone, waiting for Bransford to continue.

“Anyway, he wanted the case summarized right then and there. Apparently there’s some political pressure on this one.

Either that or somebody leaked to the chief that we had a possible suspect. So I didn’t have any choice. I laid it all out for him.”

Hank had a bad feeling about where this was going. “And?”

“And,” Bransford continued, “he called the DA’s office then and there and arranged a meeting. We were in there for four hours yesterday.”

“So what happened?”

Bransford sighed heavily, almost wearily, into the phone.

“Bottom line, Hank, is the DA’s going to the grand jury. The shit’s gonna hit the fan down here.”

“No!” Hank said. “You can’t do that, Max. It’s too early.