By Blood Written (2 page)

“That damn thing’s giving me a headache, Gary,” Bransford said, turning away from the vibrant hot-pink, blue, and red neon. “Reach in there and turn it off, will you?”

Just then, a white and blue squad car with the markings of the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department pulled into the parking lot. It came to a stop, and a large man in a gray suit, with a blue ski parka as an overcoat, exited the car.

“Hey, Hint,” Bransford called.

“Hey, Max,” the man called back. “Sorry we’re late.

There’s a helluva wreck on I-24 down around Manchester.”

“Howard,” Bransford said, motioning, “this is Detective Gary Gilley, Metro Murder Squad. Gary, meet Sergeant Howard Hinton, Chattanooga Homicide.”

The two homicide investigators shook hands as Hinton gazed at the crime-scene tape flapping slowly in the icy wind.

“So where’s the party?” he asked.

Bransford motioned with his head toward the crime-scene tape.

Hinton sighed. “Let’s get it over with.”

Irv Stover reached into the large side pocket of his ski parka and extracted a plastic bag. “Here,” he said. “You’ll need these.”

The Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department detective opened the small bag and pulled out a pair of slip-on disposable booties and latex gloves. Stover turned, walked back toward the white ME’s van as Bransford, Gilley, and Hinton stepped wearily over the crime-scene tape and into the building where the two slaughtered girls lay. They walked through the tiny reception area with the cheap, office furniture warehouse desk and tacky green vinyl sofa, then down a narrow hallway lined with cheap paneling, their gloved hands clasped behind them to avoid inadvertently touching anything. A pasty-faced investigator carrying a large strobe-equipped Nikon and a heavy camera bag backed out of a door to their right. There wasn’t enough room in the dimly lit hallway for the men to pass each other. The crime-scene tech took three steps backward to make room for the three detectives.

“You guys about finished?” Bransford asked.

“Yeah,” the tech answered. “Just wrapping up here.”

Bransford turned to Hinton. “This’s the first one you come to. Be careful,” he warned. “The floor’s still kinda sticky.”

“I’ll watch it.”

The three men stepped single-file into the room, Bransford leading, with Hinton in the middle, and Gilley a couple of steps behind. The room was perhaps twelve by fifteen feet in size, dimly lit and musty. A table with various lotions, oils, and sex toys nestled in one corner. Against the opposite wall, a massage table was covered in a blood-soaked sheet. Sprawled across the sheet was the mangled body of a barely recognizable young woman, her legs spread-eagled over the sides of the table, her ankles bound to the table legs with thick cord. Her arms were splayed out to the sides, her wrists tied to the front two table legs with the same type of cord. Her lips were pulled back over her teeth, frozen in an encrusted, horrific rictus.

Gilley averted his eyes; he’d seen as much of the victim as he needed. Bransford stepped aside, stopping just short of the thickened pool of nearly black blood. Hinton stepped around him and stared.

“She mutilated sexually?” he asked.

“Irv said severe vaginal and anal tearing.”

Hinton turned. “Irv?”

Bransford, fatigued, shook his head and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Sorry. Irv Stover, the fat guy outside. Forensic investigator from the ME’s office.”

“He got a probable TOD?”

Bransford nodded. “Eighteen hours at least. Maybe longer.”

Hinton turned, squinted. “That means late last night, early this morning. When were the bodies discovered?”

“About five-thirty this afternoon. One of the girls got suspicious when she reported for work and couldn’t get in.

The lights and the heat had been turned off. She called the manager, who drove over, opened the place up, and found the two girls.”

“Hmm, strange,” Hinton offered.

“This part of town is pretty deserted late at night. Any potential customers would see the lights off and just keep on going.”

“You get a statement from the girl and the manager?”

“Yeah,” Gilley answered. “They’re clean. We took their statements, sent ‘em home.”

Hinton turned, gazing at the carnage before them. His thoughts turned briefly to how young the girl was, and how beautiful she must have been. He forced himself back to cop mode, to clear his mind, to observe clinically and record every image.

“Got an ID?”

“One Allison May Matthews, twenty-two years old, student at Middle Tennessee State University. No sheet on her.

Her clothes and purse were in a room down the hall, in a changing room, along with the other girl’s stuff. Money still in her purse. Money still in the strongbox up front as well, so it wasn’t robbery.”

“I could have told you that over the phone,” Hinton said.

He stared a moment longer at the scene in front of him, remembering the first time he’d ever seen a dead body. There was something about a corpse that just wasn’t real, he’d always thought. Maybe it was the strange, skewed angles that lifeless limbs often took; perhaps it was the pallor. Nothing alive ever got that shade of gray. Hinton had depended on that thought to keep him together through some gruesome nights, to disassociate from the horror he’d seen in his life.

“She wasn’t a pro,” he speculated. “Just picking up a few bucks spending money. Paying her way through school, maybe.” Hinton turned and faced Gilley. “Call her family yet?”

“Chaplain’s on his way,” Gilley answered.

Hinton stared at the wall above the girl. A single block letter—M—was inscribed neatly over the table in a crimson so deep it was nearly black.

Hinton turned. “Let’s check out the other one.”

Gilley stepped out of the room and down the hall to make room for the other two. “You guys don’t mind, I’ll take a pass. I’ve seen enough.”

“That bad?” Hinton asked.

“Worse’n the other one,” Bransford said, his voice low.

Hinton padded down the hall, the plastic booties sliding on the scuffed linoleum. Bransford followed a few steps behind, then paused as the Chattanooga man stopped at the doorway to the room.

“Jesus,” Hinton muttered.

“Yeah,” Bransford said. “Looks like the ME’s got a head start on the autopsy.”

The girl had been gutted like a field-dressed deer, a deep Y-incision down the front of her torso to her navel. The skin was peeled back, her internal organs obviously removed, scrambled, then shoved back in the cavity.

“Guy took souvenirs off this one,” Bransford said, staring over Hinton’s shoulder into the killing room. “We’ve searched the whole area, can’t find her nipples anywhere.”

Hinton gritted his teeth and exhaled sharply through his nostrils to control the waves that he felt rising within him.

He forced his eyes to travel up the walls, to where a foot-high letter L had been painted neatly on the wall in blood.

He winced slightly, turned to the heavy man blocking his way down the hall, away from the hellish scene.

“The ME’ll find ‘em,” he whispered.

Bransford looked down at the man, confused.

Hinton raised his upper lip in disgust. “They’re in her stomach.”

The blood seemed to drain from Bransford’s face. “You mean—? I mean, how do you know?”

Hinton ignored the question. “You’re going to have to leave the two of ‘em here,” he said, reaching into the pocket of his down ski jacket and pulling out a cell phone.

“For how long?” Bransford demanded.

Hinton extended the short antenna and punched a speed dial code into the phone, which began a series of high-pitched beeps. He turned back to Bransford with the phone to his ear.

“As long as it takes,” he said.

“As long as
what
takes?” Bransford asked irritably. “The families are going to want the bodies as soon as the ME

finishes with—”

Hinton made a shushing sound and held the cell phone to his ear. “Hank?” he said as a voice on the other end crackled with static.

“Hank, this is Howard Hinton, Hamilton County, Tennessee, Sheriff’s Department, Homicide Squad. You need to book a flight to Nashville ASAP. We got two more for you.”

Late Saturday night, Manhattan
Taylor Robinson stepped out of the tiny kitchen just off the main room of her renovated SoHo loft and surveyed her guests. Against the exposed brick wall across from Taylor, her boss, Joan Delaney, leaned forward in rapt conversation with Michael Schiftmann’s editor, Brett Silverman. Taylor frowned, hoping that Joan wasn’t off on another of her dia-tribes about the sad state of the publishing industry.

Taylor decided a rescue was in order, so began weaving her way through the crowded room. Eighties dance music played at a volume just below the level that would make conversation difficult, but loud enough to keep the party’s energy level up. In one corner, a small group of editorial assistant types—the ink on their honors degrees in English and com-parative lit still wet—danced away on that thin line between professionally cool and unprofessionally out-of-control.

Taylor slid gracefully around two men engaged in a heated discussion over the upcoming New York senatorial race, smiling and nodding amiably at them but never losing her momentum so as not to get trapped, and made her way over to the wall.

“Frankly, I don’t care what happens to the independent booksellers anymore,” Joan spouted, her mass of tangled, dyed black hair vibrating in time to her words. She’d propped her glasses up on her head, a move that Taylor knew meant Joan Delaney was itching to get in a good fight with someone, anyone. It was important to stop her before she started talking with her hands. That, Taylor knew, meant the plug had been pulled.

“The world’s changing,” Joan shouted over the music,

“and the independents are dinosaurs who’ve refused to adapt to an evolving marketplace. If Amazon.com sells more of my clients’ books, then they deserve to beat out the mom-and-pop bookstores.”

Good God!
Taylor thought.
Brett Silverman’s father owns
a bookstore in Hartford!

Taylor sidled up to the two women just as the color was rising in Brett Silverman’s pale, drawn face. Brett was in her late thirties, a couple of years older than Taylor, and had been around long enough to gain the kind of confidence necessary to deal with the likes of Joan Delaney, but not long enough to let Joan’s over-the-top opinions slide off her without leaving skid marks.

“Hello, ladies,” Taylor interjected. “Has anyone seen the star of the evening?”

“Yeah, where is he anyway?” Joan demanded, her already shrill voice rising a notch.

“No,” Brett said quietly. “He disappeared a while ago.”

“Well, he was upstairs powdering his nose earlier,” Taylor said, “and said he’d be down in just a few. I wondered if you’d had a chance to ask him how this latest leg of the tour was going.”

Brett turned, plainly relieved to steer the conversation in another direction. “I talked to Carol Gee yesterday afternoon. He drew a good crowd at Davis-Kidd. People lined up for hours.”

“How about Birmingham and Atlanta?” Taylor asked.

“We were speculating on whether the deep South was ready for Michael Schiftmann.”

Brett shrugged her shoulders, her sheer silk blouse sliding loosely across her freckled skin. “Not so good. Atlanta, maybe twenty. The Little Professor in Birmingham was a bust, though. Less than ten …”

Taylor grimaced. “Jeez, and the
Times
list was already out.”

Brett smiled. “Maybe once you get west of the Hudson, the
New York Times
best-seller list doesn’t carry as much weight.”

“Bite your tongue, girl!” Joan snapped. “We live and die by The List.”

Taylor took Brett’s left elbow softly in her right hand.

“Maybe we need to make some adjustments before the last leg of the tour kicks off. Why don’t you and I step into the kitchen for a moment and make some notes.”

“Yes,” Brett said, her eyes thanking Taylor in advance.

“Good idea.”

“Would you excuse us, boss?”

“Sure,” Joan said, holding up her empty glass. “If you need anything, just call me. I’ll be at the bar.”

Taylor leaned in close to Brett as the two strode arm-in-arm across the room toward the kitchen.

“You’ll have to excuse her,” Taylor said soothingly. “You don’t get to be head of one of the top half-dozen literary agencies in the city by being a shrinking violet.”

“Shrinking violet’s one thing,” Brett said as they stepped through the swinging door into the kitchen. “Dragon lady’s quite another …”

“Yes, she’s abrasive and in-your-face and loud and vul-gar,” Taylor said. “And she also fights like a pit bull for her clients and everyone who works for her.”

Brett held up a hand, palm-out, toward Taylor. “Hold on, girlfriend. You’re preaching to the choir. Remember? I’ve been up against her.”

“Then you understand why her clients are desperately loyal to her, and so are her employees.”

“Yourself included, I guess,” Brett commented.

Taylor smiled. “Yes. And now that we’re away from the crowds and the music, why don’t you tell me what’s really going on with Michael’s tour.”

Brett sighed and leaned against the refrigerator. There was barely room for both women in the cramped kitchen at the same time.

“Well, it’s kind of weird, really,” Brett said slowly. “I can’t quite figure it out, and I’m not sure it’s anything serious.”

Brett paused, crossed her arms, and lifted an eyebrow.

“You’ve seen how women react to him?”

Taylor pursed her lips, thinking of the situation she’d just encountered upstairs. “Yes,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to miss.”

“I mean, the guy’s really good-looking!” Brett said. “Am I right or am I right?”

Taylor nodded. “You’re right, Brett. When you’re right, you’re right.”

“And he’s funny and he’s warm and he’s sexy and he’s personable and he’s smart and—” Brett hesitated for a moment.

“
God!
Why can’t I find a man like that!”

Taylor laughed softly. “Don’t forget, he’s very close to rich and famous as well.”