By Blood Written (45 page)

The vodka felt delicious burning down her throat.

“So what’s next for you?” Hank asked, fingering his martini glass in an almost contemplative way. “Where do you go from here?”

Taylor took another sip of the drink before answering. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I guess I’ll go home, go back to work. Try to figure out some way to live with myself.”

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t punish yourself for this.

You were a victim.”

“I could write a book,” she said brightly. “
My Fiance Was
a Serial Killer!
“

“Oh, please,” he said, grinning. “Please don’t.”

“You know, I always thought it would be fun to be a celebrity. Now I’ve found out in the worst way possible. I don’t know how I can ever hold my head up again. My career is probably over. I can’t stand the thought of people I meet whispering behind my back. Imagine the kinds of clients I’ll get; every wacko with five hundred pages’ worth of sadistic, violent, misogynist crap will want me to get him a million-dollar book deal.”

She stared across the table at him, wondering why in hell she was willing to talk to him this way.

“And then,” she said sadly, “I’ll probably need to undergo every medical test for every disease ever discovered. There’s no telling what I’ve picked up—”

Her voice broke. “—sleeping with him.”

“Hey,” Hank said, reaching across the table, taking her hand. “Stop it. C’mon.”

He held her hand for a second, then pulled back. “Listen,”

he said, hesitating. “I don’t know how much detail you want to know about all this. But I can tell you that if it will ease your mind, go ahead and see your doctor, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“What?” Taylor asked, studying him. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like this. He’s a smart guy. He’s completely up-to-date on modern homicide techniques, DNA and forensic testing, the whole schmear. He knew the only way he could get away with this was to leave absolutely nothing behind.”

Taylor held her hands out, questioning. “And that’s supposed to mean what?”

“What that means,” Hank said, “is that when he had …

sex, with his victims—”

“You mean
raped
his victims,” Taylor interrupted.

“Okay, raped his victims, that he used, well, protection.”

“You mean he wore a condom not to protect them, but to keep from getting caught?”

Hank nodded. “Yeah.”

Taylor picked up her drink and slammed the rest of it down in one gulp. “My God,” she muttered, “just when I thought nothing else could surprise me. That son of a bitch!”

She looked up at Hank. “How many were there? How many total?”

“Thirteen we know of,” Hank answered. “There may be more. We’ll never know unless he decides to tell us someday.”

Taylor’s eyes went dark and she felt a murderous fury of her own welling up inside her.

“Catch the bastard,” she said. “Catch the bastard and send him to hell.”

Tuesday evening, Manhattan

God, it felt good to be home.

At first, Taylor was nervous, anxious. She’d been gone for over a month. The housekeeper had been in once a week to water the plants and check on things, but the place still felt stale, musty, in need of a good airing out.

It was cold as well, the heat turned down to sixty-five degrees so long that the apartment was frigid to its bones. She got the maintenance man to come up with her, to go into her apartment alongside her just in case. But no one was there; the place was deserted. The maintenance man set her bags down in the living room, walked through once with her, turning on every light in the house, then left. The moment he closed the door behind him, Taylor felt a chill.

And then, without warning, it went away. She was home, finally, and she was blissfully, sweetly alone behind locked doors. Suddenly the stress of the past month or so melted away and she wanted nothing more than a hot bath and a glass of wine. She turned up the thermostat to seventy-five, then walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

There were two unopened bottles of Chardonnay on the top shelf.

As she was twisting the corkscrew into the top of the bottle, she glanced over at the answering machine and was surprised the message light wasn’t blinking. Then she remembered: She’d turned the machine off and muted the ringer on the phone. Anyone she wanted to talk to knew to call her cell phone; to hell with the rest.

As she was pouring a glass of wine, she heard the faint chirping of her cell phone buried deep inside her purse. She walked quickly back into the living room and dug through her bag. She flipped the phone open, didn’t recognize the number, but decided to answer anyway.

“Yes?” she said.

“Taylor?”

Taylor smiled. “Oh, hi. How are you?”

“I’m fine. The question is, how are you?”

“I made it in just fine, Hank. No problems. The place was well-tended, although a bit stuffy and cold. There was no sign of anyone having been here but the cleaning lady.”

“Good. I meant to ask you last night, what are you going to do with all his things?”

“God,” she said, sighing. “I haven’t gotten that far. What should I do?”

“I’d like to have one of my guys from the New York Field Office go through them. NYPD Homicide might want a shot as well. After that, it really doesn’t matter. You can trash it all, give it to the Salvation Army.”

Taylor walked back into the kitchen and picked up the wineglass. She held it up, staring through the buttery, almost golden liquid into the kitchen. The kitchen light diffused into a series of brilliant yellow circular halos.

“I guess he won’t have any need for it, will he?” Taylor asked.

“Was he working out of your apartment?” Powell asked.

“Yes, he was working on another book,” Taylor said offhandedly. Then her voice caught in her throat. “I guess that means he was reliving another—”

There was a long moment of silence broken only by the static on the cell phone. “Yeah,” Hank said, breaking the quiet. “I guess he was.”

“You know, I can’t think about that right now,” Taylor said brightly. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t. I’ve got too much else on my mind.”

“I understand,” Hank answered. “But I want you to do something for me. Seal off the room he worked in and hold it for my guys. I want to go through his computer hard drive, any archived material, all his papers and correspondence, bills and bank statements. Anything that might give us a clue as to what he’s up to.”

Taylor nodded. “Sure, I can do that. I don’t want to touch any of it, anyway.”

“Great, thanks. I can have my team at your place tomorrow morning.”

“Not too early. If I can sleep, I’m going to as long as I can.”

“You need it. So how was the flight?”

Taylor took a sip of the wine. It tasted like heaven in her mouth. “Good,” she said after a second or two. “Any flight that got me out of there would be good. How was yours?”

“We were an hour and a half late into Reagan, but all that meant was that I missed rush hour.”

“So,” Taylor said cheerily, “you got home in time to have a late dinner with Mrs. Powell.”

Hank cleared his throat. “There, uh, there isn’t a Mrs.

Powell,” he said.

“Oh, divorced or never married?”

“I’m a widower.”

Taylor felt like an idiot. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“How could you? Besides, it was a while ago. Life goes on.”

“Kids?”

“Yeah,” Hank said. She could feel his voice brighten over the phone. “Daughter. She’s seventeen, goes to the same boarding school her mother went to.”

“I’ll bet she’s beautiful,” Taylor offered.

“Gorgeous. Looks just like her mother.”

“Wow,” Taylor said softly.

“Look, Taylor, there’s something else. I debated whether or not to tell you, but for all I know it’s already on the evening news.”

Taylor felt her throat tighten. “What? What now?”

“We know he’s got a car,” Hank said.

She could tell he was choosing his words carefully. “How?

How do you know that?”

“There was a homicide in Nashville last night,” Hank said. When the words came across the phone, Taylor felt her head swim. “This time it was a guy, mid-thirties, dark hair.

Height and weight about the same as Michael’s. Dressed in a nice suit. They found him stuffed in a dark corner of the top floor of a multistory parking lot. When they found him, he had Michael’s driver’s license on him and no other ID.”

Taylor leaned against the counter, trying to keep her balance. “Which means Michael’s got his driver’s license and his ID,” she said.

“And his registration and his car.”

“So go after the guy’s car,” Taylor said.

“We will,” Hank said. “Just as soon as we get a positive ID

on the victim. Right now, we still don’t know who he is.”

“God,” Taylor said, her voice breaking. “That means some poor woman is sitting home with her kids wondering why her husband hasn’t come home from work yet. Is he out messing around? Has he disappeared? Has he—”

“Taylor, stop,” Hank interrupted. “Don’t. It won’t help anything.”

She slammed the wineglass down on the counter. The stem snapped in two; the glass fell and shattered, splattering wine everywhere.

“I can’t stand this, Hank! Damn it, I can’t take any more!”

“We’ll stop him,” Hank insisted. “I promise you. We’ll get him.”

“Please,” she said. “Before he does any more.”

“You’ve got my number?” Hank said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you’ll hear from him, but if you do, let me know. And don’t get into it with him. Play along, then let me handle it from then on. Okay?”

“Yes,” Taylor said, looking down at the mess she’d just made. “I will.”

“And call me if you need anything else, or if you just need to talk. And in the meantime, get some sleep,” Hank said.

“You need it. It’ll be the best thing for you.”

“All right,” she said. “I will. And Hank?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you. Thank you for calling. Thank you for the dinner and drinks last night. Thank you for giving a damn.”

“No problem, lady,” he said. “S’why I get the big bucks.”

Taylor Robinson went back to work the next day. She was in her office by nine, after a fitful night’s sleep, determined to get her life back. She waded into the mountain of e-mail, contracts, phone messages, manuscripts, and paper that was piled neck-high on her desk. She met with Joan Delaney for an hour and a half, trying to figure out how to handle the detritus of Michael Schiftmann’s career. Taylor was surprised—and then realized that she shouldn’t be—that Michael Schiftmann’s murder trial had sent his sales into the stratosphere. The publisher had never seen anything like it.

They couldn’t go back to press fast enough.

Web sites sprang up all over the world commenting on Michael’s murder case, his books, the details of the Alphabet Man’s crimes. One Web site was running a contest: Match the novel with the murder. Society’s sick fascination with violence, cruelty, evil had never been more exploited.

But in her quiet moments, alone in her office, facing the stacks of work, Taylor wondered if she wasn’t part of the process as well. When she was honest with herself, even she admitted that she couldn’t read Michael’s books; they were too cruel, too twisted. Early in their association, she had even let herself wonder what kind of man could write such things. Like everyone else, though, she was charmed with his looks, his manner, and his style.

Then the money started rolling in.
God, the money
, she thought. There had never been so much of it. Her family was well-off, she’d grown up well taken care of, even entitled. But she had never seen anything like it. She had to admit that she was as seduced by the money and the fame and the attention as she was by Michael himself; maybe even more so.

She wondered if she would have allowed herself to become so enamored of him if his books had flopped.

No, she decided. No way. But money and fame are seduc-tive and arousing and thrilling, like a drug, like a blinding orgasm.

Blinding orgasms.
She blushed. It embarrassed her to go there even in the solitude of her tiny office, but she had never in her life had sex like that. With Michael, her orgasms were not only literally blinding, but blinding as well to a great many other things.

Thank God, she thought, the blindness was temporary.

She forced her mind to go elsewhere. There was work to do. It would be a long, long time before she felt like getting involved with anyone again, if ever. And she never expected—wasn’t even sure if she wanted—sex to be like that again. Sex that good makes you stupid.

She buried herself in her work, opened up the piles of paper and dived in headfirst. At eight that first night, her assistant, Anne, stuck her head into Taylor’s office and asked if she was ever going home. Taylor looked up, distracted.

She hadn’t realized it was so late and apologized to Anne for keeping her.

Days went by like that. After a week, the NYPD stakeout of her building went down to one uniformed officer. After the third day, she began to relax and return to her old routines. She bought food and cooked for herself again. She ignored the news, stopped following anything about Michael’s case. After a while, she could even find herself going a few minutes at a time without thinking of him.

She still refused all calls from the news media, and after about three days, word got around and the calls slowed to one or two a day. There was a famous writer doing a long piece on Michael for
Vanity Fair
, and another equally famous one for the
New Yorker
.

“They’ll just have to get along without me,” Taylor told Joan over lunch one day. “I’ve got nothing to say to anyone about anything.”

“Good,” Joan agreed. “Let’s just get back to selling books.”

One big concern was what to do with Michael’s next book.

The Friday afternoon after returning to Manhattan, Taylor cleared enough of the pile away to meet Brett Silverman for lunch. She caught a cab over to Central Park, where Brett was holding a corner table at Tavern on the Green for them.