By Blood Written (17 page)

“Bless you, my dear,” Priscilla said. “And did you save me a copy of the Sunday
Times
?”

“Didn’t have to.” The girl walked around from behind the checkout counter and stepped over to the pile of newspapers in a rack by the wall. “With the weather like this, we haven’t had much of a run this morning.”

“You know, I have to have my Sunday
Times
,” Priscilla warned. “If that stack ever gets low, you pull one out for me.”

“I will,” the clerk said, picking up a copy of the newspaper with both hands so as not to spill any of the inside sections.

As she handed the newspaper to Priscilla, she suppressed a giggle. Her boss had told her how Priscilla Janovich had made a single three-day trip to New York City once in her entire life, back in 1965, and ever since had considered herself both an authority on and a native of the city.

“Thank you, dear,” Priscilla said, handing the exact change for the newspaper across the counter.

“See you Wednesday, Miss Janovich,” the girl said.

“You be careful in this weather, dear,” Priscilla warned as she walked away.

Twenty minutes later, Priscilla Janovich carefully measured a pony of vodka into her steaming cup of chamomile tea. The vodka cooled it off just enough to swallow and en-hanced the already relaxing effect of the herb.

The fat yellow longhair padded into the living room just as Priscilla sat down on the couch and put her cup on the end table to her right.

“Hello, Prissy,” she said. “Where’s Doodles? Where’s Doodles, baby? We’re all going to sit together and read now.”

In a gesture of Pavlovian feline behavior, the obese cat managed to hop up onto the couch with only a minimum of panting. Priscilla leaned over and rubbed her hand across the top of the cat’s head. The cat purred like a tiny motor-boat.

Priscilla unfolded the first section of the
Times
and settled in for a long afternoon. She sipped the tea, the first wash of vodka over her tongue burning ever so slightly, and began reading. She read the lead story—an article on the upcoming New York City senatorial campaign—carefully, along with two sidebars that interviewed the opposing candidates.

She read thoroughly, thinking over each issue, each statement, and painstakingly formed an opinion in an election in which she would never be allowed to vote.

She finished the jumps to that article, then turned back to the front page. There was an in-depth story on the latest unfolding Israeli peace initiative, followed by an interview with a senator who had unleashed yet another scathing attack on the president.

“Don’t they ever get tired of it?” Priscilla asked Prissy out loud. “You’d think they’d leave the poor man alone.”

Prissy raised her head and purred loudly.

“Yes, Prissums, that’s right,” Priscilla agreed. She finished the front-page lead story, then turned to page two of the first section. Most of that page was covered with a long feature story headlined:

SERIAL KILLER, DUBBED “ALPHABET MAN” BY

FEDS, ELUDES CAPTURE FOR SEVEN YEARS

Priscilla smiled. She was particularly fond of serial killer stories. Was it Mary Higgins Clark who’d written that wonderful novel about the serial killer, or was it that Patricia Cornwell?

“No matter,” she whispered. After a while, they all began to run together.

Priscilla read on:

CINCINNATI, OHIO: On a blustery June Monday in 1995, nineteen-year-old Susan McCrory left her home in a suburban Cincinnati neighborhood and climbed into her Ford Escort station wagon en route to her summer job at a nearby McDonald’s. She never made it.

Priscilla Janovich read the news account as if it were a novel, creating visual images in her mind as the story unfolded of a young woman home from college on summer vacation who worked the morning shift at a local fast-food restaurant. The young woman disappeared, and for several days there was no trace of her. Then two teenage boys who’d rented a storage unit to store their fledgling garage band’s instruments opened the door and found the young woman’s body on the cold concrete floor. She’d been horribly murdered, tortured slowly and for a long time before death mercifully released her. On the cinder-block wall behind the drum set, a letter had been painted on the wall in blood: the letter A.

Priscilla shuddered. What a horrible story, she thought, and continued reading. Nine months later, the
Times
reporter wrote, a second body was found in Macon, Georgia, in a rest stop just off the junction of I-75 and I-17. The twenty-year-old blond was a clerk at the rest stop’s welcome desk, a job she’d taken to make extra money to help pay for her own wedding. The only clue in that murder: the letter B painted in blood on the back wall of the men’s room stall where the poor girl had been found.

The next murder took place out West, this time in Scottsdale, Arizona. A young girl who worked as a gas station attendant had been strangled, raped, tortured just like the first two, and stuffed into a metal locker used for storing tools. On the inside lid of the locker, again neatly painted in blood, was the letter C.

Priscilla read on, as the reporter described several more of the murders in great detail, others in less. When she got to the part about the two girls at Exotica Tans in Nashville, she let out a sharp gasp that was loud enough to startle Prissy, who leaped off the couch and disappeared into the kitchen.

Horrified, Priscilla read the end of the story, which summarized how little the police had on this killer, and how the FBI had proven itself especially inept at moving the investigation forward. The
Times
reporter noted that considerable pressure was on at the J. Edgar Hoover Building and that heads were expected to roll if something didn’t break soon.

“My, my,” Priscilla muttered, polishing off the last of her vodka-laced tea. “What a world.”

She turned the page and went on with the newspaper, her senses lulled by the drink and the quiet of the day. She hadn’t slept well last night; hadn’t slept well in years, to be truth-ful, and she was finding that the older she got, the more she needed the occasional cat nap. She smiled at the thought,
cat
nap
, and wondered where Doodles had gone.

She drifted off after a few more minutes, dozing in a sitting position on the old sofa she’d inherited from her mother. She was almost completely asleep when her meandering, lazy thoughts returned to the
Times
article she’d just read. This serial killer thing, she mused, was becoming so common they were beginning to imitate each other. Yes, she remembered, she’d heard that story before, the story of a wandering serial killer who tortured his victims and left only one clue: a letter painted in blood. In fact, there was—

Priscilla Janovich’s eyes snapped open and she was suddenly wide awake.

A letter … In blood …

“No,” she mumbled. “You’re going crazy in your old age.”

She looked around the room. Where was that damn Doodles?

Priscilla stretched and rubbed the back of her neck to loosen it up. She pulled herself up off the couch and carried her cup into the kitchen to boil more water. She turned on the tap, didn’t like the sound of water coming out of the pipe, so decided to skip the tea and just have the two fingers of vodka. She poured the clear liquid into the cup and stood staring out the window at the wintry landscape outside.

“No,” she muttered. “It can’t be.”

Still, she thought, it was an intriguing notion. She carried her cup back into the living room and reread the article a second time, then a third. Always the methodical teacher, she fished a yellow highlighter out of the kitchen drawer and highlighted the key points of each murder. Then she sat at the kitchen table, poured another two fingers of vodka just to ward off the cold, and began thinking.

I’m sure I’ve heard it before. But where?

She sipped the vodka.

Where?

She went back into the living room. Priscilla Janovich couldn’t bear to throw away books, even the tattered old paperbacks her mother had given her before she died. The walls of both her living room and bedroom were lined with cheap lumber and cinder-block bookshelves she’d made to accommodate them. Most of the shelves were layered two deep with books, and still there were stacks of books gathering dust in the corners of each room. Priscilla knew the place was a fire hazard, but figured without her books, she wouldn’t want to live anyway.

“Where was it?” she said. Doodles, hearing her speak in the next room, aroused himself from a snooze on the bed and padded softly into the living room. Priscilla was down on her knees, her skirt pulled up to her thighs and her wool socks tracing paths through the dust, leaning over and scanning the spines of row after row of books. The cat watched as Priscilla slid slowly across the floor, moving from one set of shelves to another.

Then Priscilla Janovich came to a row of worn paperbacks and stopped. She squinted to focus on the titles and the author’s name and then sat back on her haunches. She pulled one of the paperbacks out of its slot on the shelf and thumbed it open, straining to read it in the low light. She read the first few paragraphs of the first page, then looked over at Doodles.

“Yes,” she said blankly. “Yes, I believe this is it.”

CHAPTER 14
?

5:30 A.M. Monday, Nashville

Maria Chavez shivered as she walked into the Murder Squad break room and wrinkled her nose. An acrid, burnt smell hung in the air. She crossed the room to a counter next to a dingy refrigerator covered in bumper stickers and pulled the brown glass pot off the coffeemaker. The carafe had once been clear and new, but that was before endless pots of coffee with no one ever bothering to wash it out. Lately, someone had developed the habit of not turning it off at the end of the night shift. Maria only wished she knew who it was. She flicked the switch on the coffeemaker and turned the burner off.

“It’s too early for this,” she whispered. She rummaged through a cabinet and found a mug that could almost pass for clean, then rinsed it out in hot water. She refilled it with cold and popped it in the microwave, then turned the plastic dial to set the timer for four minutes. The break-room microwave was so old you could almost boil water faster on the stove, only they didn’t have one.

Still shivering and crossing her arms back and forth, Maria Chavez stopped at the thermostat by the doorway and fiddled with it until she was convinced she’d have no effect on anything, then crossed the hall and into a long, narrow room jammed with gray metal government surplus-type desks. The entire squad shared this one room, with several filing cabinets jammed in at the end partially blocking the only window. The room was cramped, dusty, and claustro-phobic when in full use, which was why Maria often came in early, so that she would at least have a little quiet time to go through her files.

Things had been quiet in the last twenty-four hours or so. Metro Nashville was approaching its third day in a row without a homicide. Maria attributed it to the cold weather and, despite the shivering, welcomed the quiet time. Yet even though it was momentarily peaceful, she still had at last count six unsolved homicides on her plate since January 1.

Maria opened the top drawer of one of the filing cabinets and extracted a three-ring notebook containing the file for complaint number 99-87432, which was the case of Althea Grant, a twenty-four-year-old African-American woman who had been found raped and strangled a week ago in her apartment out near the airport, just off Murfreesboro Road.

The young woman had completed two years of college, was studying to be a paralegal, and by all accounts didn’t hang out in bars, do drugs, run around with the wrong crowd, or any other of the number of things a human being could do to increase his or her chances of being murdered. It didn’t take assignment to the Murder Squad for Maria Chavez to figure out that the vast majority of murder victims were doing something they shouldn’t be doing at a place they shouldn’t be with people they shouldn’t be with. She learned that early growing up in the slums of Laredo, Texas.

That was why this case had kept her up most of the night.

She’d studied the crime-scene photos, read the reports, most of which as the primary investigator she had filed herself.

She’d gone back over her own notes, reexamined the crime-scene photos, rerun the interviews in her head, and still nothing. The only thing she could do was start over.

Maria turned to the first page of the binder, a Form 104

“Supplement Report” filed by the first officer on the scene.

The officer had arrived even before Med Com personnel, and had handled the crime scene like a capable, experienced street cop. He’d done everything right and recorded it in that curiously detached manner taught to all recruits in their intensive report-writing classes at the academy. Maria picked up his narrative in the middle of the second page: Also revealed was the victim’s head and upper torso. The victim was laying on her back with her face toward her right shoulder. Her eyes were open and her mouth appared unusually agap, very wide. Between the victim’s chin and her left arm that was drawn across her body tied to the bedpost …

Maria smiled at the misspellings.
Okay,
she thought,
so
they’re not English teachers.

From behind her, the microwave chimed and Maria crossed the hall to make her tea. As she entered the break room, the telephone on one of the other desks began ringing.

Maria looked up at the wall clock: five-fifty. This early in the morning in the dead of winter, she figured it was probably a wrong number.

But the phone kept ringing, even as Maria opened a tea bag and plopped it into the not-quite-boiling water. She dipped it a couple of times and then with mounting irritation crossed back into the squad room and picked up the phone.

“Homicide, Chavez,” she snapped.

“Detective Chavez, this is Corporal Rogers in the lobby.”

“Yeah, Rogers, whatcha got?”

“Well, Detective, I know it’s kind of early,” Rogers said.