The car went past a sign so fast it was just a blur. “Welcome to the Cabrillo National Forest,” Michael said. “Isn’t it pretty?”
She looked outside, through the glass clouded with reflected light from the instrument panel. All she saw was black.
Fatigue and hunger settled in on her like weight, a weight that forced her outside herself, and she saw herself sitting frozen on the seat next to him, her eyes large and blank.
Carol Gee had minored in psychology at Yale; she knew the phenomenon of disassociation, had studied it in a class called Abnormal Criminal Psychology. As if there was such a thing as normal …
Fight this! a voice inside her head screamed.
Damn it! Fight!
The car slowed as it made a long, lazy turn to the right.
Carol looked up through the windshield and saw that they were at an intersection. Michael turned the car left, to the south, toward the ocean.
Carol reached down and pressed the unlock button on the armrest, while with her left hand she pressed the release button on her seat belt. At the instant the door-lock stem shot up from the door, she grabbed the handle and yanked as hard as she could.
“Bitch!” Michael yelled, grabbing her by the hair as the door flew open. Carol screamed, grabbed at his hands behind her, flailing helplessly, her legs partway out the door.
Michael slammed on the brake, and the car slid to a stop.
Carol slammed into the dashboard, her knees exploding in bursts of sharp, focused pain. He yanked her hair again, hard, hard enough to get another yelp out of her.
“No, please!” Carol yelled as she felt herself being pulled back into the car. She fought, scraped, jumped, flailed as she felt him pulling her closer. Then he had her with both hands, cradling her head, pulling her face down onto his lap. She tried to think, but panic swept over her. Her arms fluttered like the wings of a bird caught in a trap, with about as much effect.
She thought of the tiny canister of pepper spray she carried hooked to her key chain, the one she’d left at home because they were going through so many airport security checkpoints.
Then she felt his right arm around her neck, the crook of his elbow right at the hollow of her throat. And pressure.
Tightening pressure …
Her eyes bulged as she realized for the first time what was happening. She tried to kick, but in the tight confines of the front seat of the Buick, there was nothing to kick, nothing that would help her. She opened her mouth to scream; nothing came out. She felt his forearm against her throat, his right hand locked in the crook of his left arm, his left arm bent around the back of her head. She felt his palm on the top of her head, pushing down into his curled right arm. She opened her mouth, tried to push her face into his crotch where she could bite him, but he held her too tightly to move.
Her eyes watered, the pressure behind them causing them to bulge.
And then …
From the corners of her field of vision, tiny sparkles. Red ones and gold ones and blue ones, like glitter. Sparkling and dancing.
Her chest was about to explode.
Please …
Her grandmother. She saw her grandmother’s face in front of her.
Please …
She felt her legs kicking, her arms shaking, as if they were no longer part of her, as if they had minds and wills of their own.
She heard a voice, a soft voice, a low, masculine voice above her, behind her head: “Let go, Carol. Let go. It’s easier this way.”
Where had she heard it before?
The sparkles were larger now, like a cascade of colored gemstones spilling in on both sides of her, filling her vision.
And as the dark shapes in front of her became more and more dim, the twinkling colored lights got larger and more vibrant.
“That’s it, baby,” the voice said again, soothing, almost sweet. Michael’s voice. “Let it go. Go to sleep, my sweet baby. It’s time for you to go to sleep.”
Like a vet putting a dog to sleep …
So tired, she thought. So tired.
Her cheeks tingled red, felt full, the skin stretched almost to breaking. Carol Gee felt an overwhelming sadness that welled up inside her, and as the dancing brilliant blues and reds and greens and purples and yellows ran together and through each other and into each other until they became one pulsating, blood-red globe surrounding her, she felt the sadness drift away and the lights shift from painfully bright to soft white, and there was a humming in her head, like the bowing of a violin string, and then she let go. Carol Gee let go of everything.
And found her peace.
Michael stared down at her as she went limp. He let go slowly, ready to clamp on again if she had somehow managed to fake it better than anybody had ever faked death in the history of the species. He patted her back, felt the bra strap beneath the fabric of her blouse.
No, he thought. Not now. This is business.
He shifted her over on the seat, off his lap, then reached down and pulled her legs inside the car. He snatched the door to, killing the dome light inside the car. He listened carefully and looked all around. There was no one. No traffic, no nearby homes, no intruders. He shifted the car back into gear and eased forward down the narrow road.
He drove slowly this time. No need to hurry. Still, it took only a minute or so to get to the end of the road. He parked the car, got out, listened carefully for any unexpected noises.
All was silent, except for the wind and the crashing of the waves at the base of the cliff that was the blunt end of Point Loma.
He opened the passenger door and lifted her out. She couldn’t weigh more than one-ten, he thought. During a break in the signing, after the last idiotic inscription had been written and the last sycophant rushed through and out, he had wandered over and picked up a local paper. The tide had crested at nine forty-five, not quite an hour ago. He lifted her up and threw her over his shoulder, grateful that neither her bladder nor her bowels had let go. He’d done his research and verified it in practice: It was a myth that the body always emptied itself at the moment of death.
He walked the fifty yards or so from the end of the road to the edge of the cliff and set Carol down in the grass. He removed her ring and necklace and checked the pockets on her slacks. They were empty; there was nothing on Carol Gee to identify her.
He looked over the edge of the cliff. There was only a thin sliver of moon to illuminate the ocean floor below, but it was enough to see that the waves were still lapping at the base of the cliff.
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nostrils, savoring the fresh, salty air. The hairs on his arm stood up, tingling and dancing on his skin. The sound of the waves below intensified, grew louder and sharper, more focused.
Like a needle being dragged across a record …
Every nerve in his body alive to every sense, Michael Schiftmann grinned broadly and lifted the lifeless body of Carol Gee over his shoulder, holding her by the collar of her blouse and the belt buckle of her slacks. Already she was beginning to stiffen. He backed up a few steps, held her high in the military press position, then ran forward and flung her out as far as he could over the edge of the cliff, barely missing going over with her.
He froze, a clump of dirt under his foot breaking loose and falling, and listened. Perhaps two seconds later, he heard a crystalline, full splash, clear and sharp like the breaking of glass.
The tide would carry her out, out into the vast, endless Pacific. If she was ever found, there most likely wouldn’t be enough left to autopsy. And there were a thousand Dumpsters between here and downtown San Diego. Carol Gee’s purse and the contents inside, along with her jewelry, would be spread out through a dozen of them.
Michael Schiftmann had never felt more alive than at this moment. It was a sensation beyond sexual, beyond any physical thrill he’d ever felt or experienced.
Michael Schiftmann felt …
Liberated.
He sauntered back to the car, relis
hing the feel of the soft earth beneath his feet, the smell of living grass, breathing plants and trees. He felt the clean air fill his lungs.
Despite the chill, he was warm all over, and in very good appetite.
CHAPTER 12
Sunday morning, Arlington, Virginia Sundays were always the toughest to get through. The other days of the week he could work, even Saturday. Hank Powell had become a Saturday fixture, in fact, at his office at the FBI Academy in Quantico.
It hadn’t always been like that. When Anne was still alive, he had religiously saved Saturdays for working around the house, in the yard, or for simply spending family time with her and their daughter, Jackie. But that had all ended two years ago, when he lost her.
How had it happened so fast? It seemed in his memory that literally one day Anne was playing tennis at the country club and gardening their modest acre-and-a-half lot and then the very next moment she was withering away, her weight visibly dropping from one day to the next, her hair falling out, her eyes settling deeper and deeper into her head until the light in them faded to nothing. She had been only thirty-eight when the doctors made the diagnosis: ovarian cancer. And from the moment they identified the cancer as a particularly virulent and aggressive form of the disease, everything happened far too quickly. A matter of months, they predicted, was all they had together. From a passionate, intelligent, active woman who loved parties and cook-ing and good wine and everything about life to deathly ill in a matter of weeks …
But the doctors hadn’t counted on Anne’s willingness to fight, her ability to hang on to every second and to live every moment as hard and as fully as she was capable. The doctors had told them it would be a matter of months; Anne had beaten their odds, beaten their gloomy prognosis, beaten everything except death itself. In the end, she took two long, agonizing years to die. Anne had missed her fortieth birth-day by three weeks. By then, Hank-six months older than his wife-had turned forty and felt eighty.
It had been especially hard on Jackie, who had been twelve when her mother became ill and who had turned fourteen two months after she died. It had been Anne’s dream that Jackie attend the same boarding school she had gone to, the Butler School in upstate Vermont, and Jackie had insisted on fulfilling her mother’s dream. That was two years ago, and now Hank and Anne’s daughter was sixteen, a sophomore at Butler. And Hank lived alone in their four-bedroom house, a house he had been intending to sell ever since Anne’s death.
Somehow he’d never gotten around to putting it on the market. Just too busy, he told himself.
He worked. That’s all he did, work. Hank Powell was putting in twelve hours a day, six days a week. In the two years since his wife’s death, he hadn’t dated a single time. Not once. It was as if with Anne’s death, something inside him died as well.
Now he hated Sundays, hated them with a passion. The only saving grace was his weekly phone call from Jackie, which was due in another hour or so. They spoke like clock-work, every Sunday after chapel at the school and just before lunch. Occasionally they would speak during the week, but as Jackie had learned, her father was easier to catch at the office than at home and sometimes you couldn’t catch him there.
Hank had taken to having a couple of drinks at night, just to take an edge off the stress buzz and make it a little easier to sleep. Hank and Anne had never been big drinkers, and he wasn’t one now. But lately he’d needed a single vodka martini upon arriving at home and then a snifter of brandy at bedtime.
It wasn’t just missing Anne that kept him awake at night.
Hank had taken the maximum amount of leave possible during his wife’s illness, and was truly, genuinely grateful to the Bureau for granting him that. After her funeral, Hank Powell did the only thing he knew to do: go back to work.
Ever since, the main focus of his life had been finding the man who had so brutally killed at least thirteen young women. Even in the post-9/11 era, when the politicians were trying to remake the FBI into a counterterrorism agency, he had fought to stay on the Alphabet Man case.
Hank woke up particularly early this Sunday morning, and had come to consciousness with an ever-widening sense of dread. He’d been warned and had seen the article in the Chattanooga paper last Wednesday, had been disheartened to see it picked up by the wire services and then the Friday edition of USA Today. But the real test was this morning.
Whatever rested in the snow on the sidewalk leading out from his front door would determine whether the next few weeks of Hank Powell’s life would be manageable, or chaotic and stressful on a scale he’d never experienced.
He brushed his teeth and combed his hair, threw on a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans, then went downstairs and put on the coffee to brew. He pulled the living-room drapery back and looked outside. Two more inches of snow had fallen on the Virginia countryside overnight, but the two plastic-wrapped bundles were on top of a shallow drift with just a dusting on top.
Hank pulled on his galoshes over his bare feet and pushed the front door open. The sharp, icy dry air stung his face as he stepped out onto the porch. The cold shot through the rubber soles of the boots and immediately began to deaden his feet. He jumped off the porch and trotted down the walk, the boots crunching on the dry snow. He reached over to one side of the walk and picked the Sunday New York Times off the snowdrift, then leaned down on the other side of the walk and plucked the Washington Post off the top of a wind-blown mound of powder.
Seconds later, he was kicking off his boots and wondering whether he should start a fire in the den fireplace. The smell of coffee caught him first, though, and he decided to sit at the kitchen table. He tossed the two papers, which between them weighed several pounds, onto the kitchen table, then poured a large mug of coffee. He pulled the chair away at the head of the table and then sat down in the large kitchen Anne had loved so much.
“Well,” he whispered, “let’s see what you’ve got for me.”
He pulled the plastic cover off the Post first, then removed all the inserts: the slicks and the advertisements, the Sunday magazine and the television guide, then thumbed quickly through the sections, separating the possibles from the not-likelies.
Hank Powell found the article on page six of Section A, above the fold, with about a thirty-point headline that read: FEDS STYMIED IN MULTI-YEAR HUNT FOR “ALPHABET MAN”
Hank’s spirits sunk as he read the article. The reporter had clearly taken the local article from Chattanooga and run with it. The reporter at the Tennessee paper had not done a bad job of writing up what little he had, but the Post reporter had considerably more resources to draw upon. As Hank read the article, which covered at least three-quarters of the page, complete with a clouded, out-of-focus crime-scene picture and another photo of Max Bransford in Nashville, he realized that the Post reporter had to have a source within the Bureau. When he read some of the details of the Milwaukee killing-the one in which the letter E had been left at the crime scene-he knew that somebody with access to the FBI case files had leaked.
Hank felt his face flush. He knew the press had a job to do, but the one thing he hated more than anything was a press leak. If Hank had gone the other way in life, if he’d become a criminal himself rather than an FBI agent, he’d have hated a snitch just as much. That’s what he considered guys who leaked confidential information that threatened the very success of an investigation: snitches who just happened to be on the same side as the good guys.
The Times article, on page two of the first section, was about as bad, only that the reporter had chosen to go after interviews with local cops. He’d focused on establishing a trail and had even discovered something that the Post reporter had slipped up on: The eighth murder-H-had taken place in Vancouver, just across the border in Canada. For the first time, the world would learn that the Alphabet Man was a killer for whom boundaries of every type meant little.
“Damn it,” Hank muttered. He sat back in his chair, his eyes focusing on the wall opposite him and then gradually losing focus as
his mind shifted into an analysis of everything he’d read. A minute or so later, the process was finished, and he reached what he felt was a proper evaluation of the situation: It could be worse, but it was hard to imagine how.
Hank was so lost in thought, it took until the third ring for the phone to break his concentration. He looked at the kitchen clock and smiled. Jackie.
He stood up, grabbed the handset off the wall phone next to the kitchen sink.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said pleasantly.
“Good morning, darling.” The voice was heavy-set, masculine, definitely not his daughter’s.
Hank reddened, recognizing the voice of Lawrence Dunlap, an FBI deputy assistant director and his immediate supervisor. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said quickly. “I thought you were my daughter. She calls every Sunday about this time.”
“Then I won’t take long,” Dunlap said. Over the years, Hank and Larry Dunlap had had their differences, but Hank respected him for being an all-business, by-the-book career agent who had learned to play the game over the years without losing quite all of his integrity.
“Have you seen the papers?” Dunlap asked.
“I just finished them,” Hank admitted.
“Pretty bad,” Dunlap said. “Any idea who the leak is?”
“No, but when I find out I’m going to ruin his day.”
“I’ve scheduled a meeting for nine A.M. tomorrow,” Dunlap said, “in my office at the Hoover Building. The director himself will be there. I went out on a limb to keep you on this case, Hank, and now the pressure’s on. He’ll want a complete update on the progress of the investigation and how we plan to deal with the media on this one. It’s a whole new ball game now and we’ve got to get our ducks in a row.”
Hank ignored both the cliched mixed metaphor and the burning sensation in the middle of his stomach. “I understand, sir. I’ll be ready for any questions.”
“Is there anything you need to update me on since we last talked?”
“I’m sorry to say, sir, there isn’t. I wish I had better news.”
By Blood Written Page 12
