By Blood Written (8 page)

“Early Saturday morning,” Chavez said. “What’ve you got? “

“I’m down at the Mapco Express on Charlotte Avenue just off the I-40 interchange. Got a local Dumpster diver down here who came across a pile of bloody rags and clothes. I just happened to be stopping by for coffee and he led me here. I don’t know if it’s anything or not, but thought I’d better call.”

The voice on the other end was suddenly tense. “Officer—

what did you say your name was?”

“Greenwood, Deborah Greenwood.”

“Officer Greenwood, I want you to secure the scene, keep the guy who found this nearby, and sit tight till we get there.

And nothing goes out over the radio, got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good,” Chavez said. “Now give me your cell phone number in case I need to get to you before we arrive.”

Greenwood gave her the number, then grabbed her pad and scribbled down Chavez’s cell phone number.

“And Greenwood,” the voice said.

“Yes?”

“You done good.”

Greenwood smiled. “Thanks, Detective Chavez.”

Special Agent Hank Powell got the call on his cell phone just as he was pulling into the parking lot of Nashville International Airport to catch his flight back to D.C. He had spent the last two days working with the Nashville police reviewing the case history of the Alphabet Man, detailing the other eleven crime scenes, and working to establish the kinds of linkages and clues the homicide detectives should be searching for.

Powell clicked off his cell phone and drove past the entrance to the rental return parking lot, all the way around the outskirts of the massive facility, and back onto the freeway headed downtown. By the time he got to the Mapco Express, the homicide detectives had the entire parking lot cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape and were holding off a phalanx of media vehicles interspersed with curious onlookers, most of them young and black.

Powell flipped his badge wallet open at the uniformed officer controlling access to the parking lot, signed the crime-scene log-in sheet, and parked his rental next to an unmarked white Crown Victoria. On the other side of the lot, near the corner of the building, he saw Lieutenant Max Bransford and Detective Gilley huddled together, vainly trying to keep the wind off them.

“What’ve we got?” he asked, approaching the two men and pulling his overcoat tightly around him.

“I think we got lucky,” Bransford said. “That uniformed officer over there—” Bransford pointed toward Officer Greenwood, who was leaning against the hood of her Ford Taurus as Maria Chavez stood next to her scribbling in a notepad.

“—just happened to be doing a drive-by of this place when some wacky old guy who makes his living in the en-trepreneurial recycling industry came across a pile of bloody clothes inside that thing.”

Bransford pointed behind him. Powell took two steps to his left and spied the Dumpster over Gilley’s shoulder.

“What’ve you found?” Powell asked.

Gilley flipped open his notebook and looked down at his notes. “The lab techs are still in there scouring the place out.

But so far we’ve got a bloody, torn jumpsuit, a pair of white socks with bloodstains, a couple of bloody white towels that are consistent with the type of towels we found at the tanning parlor …”

Powell felt his heart begin to race. Of the thirteen murders committed by the Alphabet Man, this was the first instance of any of his effects being found. For the first time, the police had found his dump site.

“And, best of all,” Gilley said, “two pairs of latex gloves covered in what appears to be blood. One of the four gloves is torn.”

“Jesus,” Powell said. “That means maybe one of the girls managed to scratch him, tear a piece off one of the gloves, and he had to change.”

“Meaning,” Bransford said, finishing Powell’s thought,

“that maybe we’ve got some of the killer’s blood on that glove as well.”

Powell looked around, scanning the scene. “It’s getting dark out here,” Powell said. “Can the lab get some lights up?”

“Already in progress,” Gilley said.

Powell turned to Bransford, knowing that he was the ranking officer at the crime scene and not wanting to step on anyone’s toes, but also not wanting to mince a single word as to the importance of this discovery.

“Max, we need that Dumpster scraped and swabbed all the way down to the paint. I know it’s miserably cold out here and this is rough duty, but this is our first chance to really nail this bastard on some forensic evidence. There may be hair, saliva, fingerprints. Hell, we don’t know.”

“We’re going to get it all, Hank,” Bransford said, reassuring him. “But it’s going to take time. I think our best bet is to have the Dumpster hauled downtown and have the techs go through it in the garage.”

“Works for me,” Powell said. “But let’s get a thorough search of the area around it before we move it. There might be footprints, tire tracks.”

“That’ll be a tough one, Agent Powell,” Gilley said.

“There’s a lot of foot traffic here, this being the closest convenience market to a housing project. Some of this ice has melted, which is going to distort any tire tracks. Plus lots of discarded bottles, cigarette butts. Hell, people are just trashy, you know.”

“Get what we can, as much as we can, now, before it’s too late,” Powell said, urgency in his voice. “We can sort it all out later.”

“Okay,” Gilley said, nodding. “We’re also canvassing the neighborhood, and we’ve got the manager inside going through his time cards to see who was working the cash register late Friday night, early Saturday morning. Maybe this guy dumped his clothes, then came in for a six-pack and a loaf of bread afterward.”

“What about surveillance cameras?” Powell asked.

“None on the exterior,” Gilley said, waving his hand around the parking lot. “The manager’s pulling the tape out of the interior camera.”

“Is it a looping tape?” Powell asked, knowing that if it was, the traffic from the night of the homicide would be long erased.

“The manager doesn’t know,” Gilley said, grinning. “He’s new, never had to do this before.”

“Great,” Powell said. “We’ll just have to check the time and date stamps. And, look, I just thought of something.

Who touches a Dumpster? I mean, you’re gonna throw stuff in there, you try
not
to touch anything. So dust the area around the metal door for prints, then fume it with iodine, ninhydrin, silver nitrate, whatever. You guys got a laser in the lab?”

Bransford nodded. “Yeah.”

“Shoot it with that, then. Maybe there won’t be as many prints on there as we think. At least we’ll have them in the file. This is our chance to nail the bastard. Let’s not blow it.”

“I called the TBI lab,” Bransford said, “I’ve told them to bump the specimens to the head of the lab. I want a DNA profile ASAP.”

“Great,” Powell said, “and if they get jammed up, I’ll get Washington in on it.”

“Super,” Bransford said.

Powell looked at Gilley and Bransford, and a smile slowly came to his face.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” he asked.

Gilley shook his head. “What?”

“The guy’s fucked up,” Powell answered. “For the first time, he got sloppy. No matter what happens from now on out, this is the beginning of the end. He’s ours now. He’s history. I can taste it.”

Monday evening, Manhattan

A light dusting of snow had covered the sidewalks as Taylor Robinson pushed open the heavy wooden front door of Joan Delaney’s brownstone. Moments earlier, she’d glanced up from the manuscript she was reading and saw the time: six-fifteen. She yelped, bolted out of her chair, threw on her overcoat and wool hat and grabbed her briefcase, then raced down the stairs. She had fifteen minutes to make it all the way across town and up the West Side, a task that on a snowy February evening in Manhattan was a practical impossibility.

She glanced to her left, then right, desperately hoping to spot an available cab. The street was lined with cars moving along at walking speed, but the only cabs she saw had darkened roof-mounted medallion lights. She began walking west the two long blocks to Third Avenue, hoping that by getting to a cross street, she’d have twice the chance of catching a taxi.

The winter gusts seemed to rip through the Manhattan canyons faster and more powerfully than ever as they gathered strength on their way to the East River and Queens.

Taylor pulled her coat tightly around her and bent into the wind, forcing herself to move as quickly as she could while still maintaining her balance on the slick streets.

New York was gray in the seemingly endless wintertime.

Even then Taylor loved the city, its gloomy days melting into early darkness and frigid evenings. She found the cold invigorating, the nights romantic, even though it had been months since she’d had the chance to share a romantic evening with anyone.

Taylor loved the city; what she hated was being late. She’d been reading a manuscript from the slush pile that actually might have some promise. Maybe, she thought, Michael will understand.

About fifty feet from the intersection and just ahead of her, a yellow Checker Cab pulled off to the right in front of the Hawthorne Building, its door opening and discharging an older woman in an ancient fur coat carrying two large Bloomingdale’s bags. Taylor put her fingers to her mouth and whistled, hard, just the way her brother had taught her when they were kids. The shrill, piercing noise easily caught the driver’s attention. Seconds later, Taylor slid into the rear seat, pulled her briefcase in behind her, and slammed the door. The driver turned, scowling at her through the dingy bulletproof Plexiglas panel.

“Sorry,” she said, “didn’t mean to slam it.”

The driver’s wrinkled face softened a bit. “Where to?”

“Broadway and Seventy-eighth,” Taylor answered.

The driver shifted, turning to face the front of the car and grabbing the wheel. “Care which way we go?” he asked.

“Whatever’s fastest. Your call.”

“Gotcha,” the driver said, slapping the handle on the meter and jerking the car forward as the light at Second changed.

Twenty-five minutes later, the driver turned onto Broadway a half block from the restaurant. “There,” Taylor instructed, pointing out the right front corner of the cab. She checked the meter and quickly figured a generous tip that could be left without having to wait for change, and pulled two bills out of her wallet.

The driver pushed the slide tray into the passenger com-partment. “Thanks,” Taylor announced loudly as she stuffed the bills into the plastic bin and reached for the door handle.

“Pleasure was all mine,” the cabbie said, his voice a mixture of stress and sarcasm.

Taylor stepped gingerly out onto the slick street and was careful not to slam the door again. She made her way between two parked cars over to the sidewalk and up the front steps of La Caridad, the neighborhood restaurant Michael had requested for dinner. The front of the restaurant was, as usual, packed with locals waiting for a table. She scanned the crowd, looked past it, and spotted Michael at a window table near the middle of the restaurant. She slid past a group of chattering college-age kids and wove her way through the crowd. He glanced up from the menu just as she approached the table.

“Sorry to be late,” she huffed, realizing that the dash up the sidewalk had left her short of breath.

“No problem,” he said, rising halfway up out of his chair as she pulled her coat off, folded it onto the chair next to her, then sat down. She pushed her briefcase under the seat with her right foot.

“Been here long?”

He shook his head. “About fifteen minutes is all,” he answered. “But I just now got a table. I was late, too. This being rush hour, I took the subway. Even it was moving slow today.”

“Believe it or not,” Taylor said, unfolding a menu, “I got here in about twenty-five minutes.”

“From your office?” Michael asked, surprised, as he held up his hand and motioned for the waitress.

The cuisine at La Caridad was Cuban-Chinese-Hispanic, a curious combination of flavors that Taylor could not recall having seen anywhere outside Manhattan. She had eaten here a couple of times before and found it to be cheap and scrumptious, a combination that was getting harder and harder to find in the city.

The waitress approached. “Maybe we’d better go ahead and order,” Taylor suggested. “We’ve only got about an hour.”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“No, you,” Taylor said, reading the menu as the waitress fidgeted.

“Okay, I’ll have the lemon pork chops,” Michael said, closing the menu. “Skip the salad. Oh, and a glass of Chardonnay.”

“I’ve had a hard day,” Taylor said. “I want the shrimp pa-ella and a Cuervo Gold margarita.”

Michael smiled as the waitress scribbled their orders and turned to walk away. Then his smile faded as he turned back to her.

“Taylor …” he said. He looked down at the table, his eyes flicking back and forth nervously.

“Yes.” Taylor felt a knot beginning to form in her stomach.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Taylor studied his face for a moment. “Okay.”

Michael crossed his arms and leaned forward, his elbows on the table, then looked up at her. “About the other night,”

he said. “I feel really bad about that.”

Taylor stared at him a moment, confused. “What?”

“The girl,” he said. “The blond.”

Taylor sighed. It was her turn to look away. “Yes, the blond,” she said.

“I don’t usually behave like that,” Michael said, his voice low. “It’s not something I make a habit of.”

“Michael, you don’t have to explain—”

“This isn’t an explanation,” he said. “It’s an apology. I’m not making any excuses. I behaved badly, and in the home of someone I happen to respect very much. Someone I owe a lot to.”

“Look, we’re both adults,” Taylor said, looking up at him.

“And our relationship is a professional one.”

“It’s more than that,” he snapped. “It’s more than that to me. You saved my life, Taylor. I was sinking fast and you rescued me.”

Taylor felt her skin flush. “C’mon, Michael. You’re a talented guy. You were going to make it no matter what.”