A Dish Served Cold

by Jeffery Deaver

  Finally the onlookers grew bored, or repulsed by the bitter smell of the burnt rubber and plastic, and they returned to their beds or their late-night snacks or their mind-numbing TV. But their vigilance didn't flag; the moment they stepped inside, every one of them locked their doors and windows carefully – to make certain that the strangler would not wreak his carnage in their homes.

  Though in Clara Steading's case, her diligence in securing the deadbolt and chains had a somewhat different effect: locking the hunter inside with her.

  "Jesus," Altman muttered. "That's just what happened in the Banning case, how the perp got inside. He set fire to a car."

  "A convertible," Wallace added. "And then I went back and found another passage that'd been circled. When I'd read it at first I didn't pay any attention. But you know what it said? It was how the killer had stalked the first victim by pretending to work for the city and trimming the plants in a park across from her apartment."

  This was just how the first victim of the Greenville Strangler, the pretty grad student, had been stalked. "So the killer's a copycat," Altman murmured. "He used the novel for research."

  Which meant that there could be evidence in the book that might lead to the perp: fingerprints, ink, handwriting.

  Altman stared at the brooding cover – a drawing of a man's silhouette peering into the window of a house. The detective pulled on his own pair of latex gloves and slipped the book into an evidence envelope. He nodded at the reporter and said a heartfelt, "Thanks. We haven't had a lead on this one in over eight months."

  Walking into the office next to his – that of his assistant, a young crew-cut detective named Josh Randall – he instructed the man to take the book to the county lab for analysis. When he returned, Wallace was still sitting expectantly in the hard chair across from Altman's desk.

  Altman wasn't surprised he hadn't left. "And the quid pro quo?" the detective asked. "For your good deed?"

  "I want an exclusive. What else?"

  "I figured."

  Altman didn't mind this in theory; cold cases were bad for the department's image and solving cold cases was good for a cop's career. Not to mention that there was still a killer out there. He'd never liked Wallace, though, who always seemed a little out of control in a spooky way and was as irritating as most crusaders usually are.

  "Okay, you've got an exclusive," Altman said. "I'll keep you posted." He rose and shook the reporter's hand. Waited for him to leave.

  "Oh, I'm not going anywhere, my friend."

  "This's an official investigation -"

  "And it wouldn't've been one without me. I want to write this one from the inside out. Tell my readers how a homicide investigation works from your point of view."

  Altman argued some more, but in the end he gave in; he felt he had no choice. He said, "Just don't get in my way. If you get in the way, you're out of here."

  "Wouldn't think of it." He frowned an eerie look into his long, toothy face. "I might even be helpful." Maybe it was a joke, but there was nothing humorous about the delivery. He then looked up expectantly at the detective. "So, whadda we do next?"

  "Well, you're going to cool your heels. I'm going to review the case file."

  "But -"

  "Relax, Wallace. Investigations take time. Sit back, take your jacket off. Enjoy our wonderful coffee."

  Wallace glanced at the closet that served as the police station's canteen. He rolled his eyes and the ominous tone of earlier was replaced with a laugh. "Funny. I didn't know they still made instant."

  The detective winked and ambled down the hall on his aching bones.

  Quentin Altman hadn't run the Greenville Strangler case himself. He'd worked on it some – the whole department had had a piece of the case – but the officer in charge had been Bob Fletcher, a sergeant who'd been on the force for years. Fletcher, who'd never remarried after his wife left him some years before and was childless, had devoted his life to his job after the divorce and seemed to take his inability to solve the strangler case hard; the soft-spoken man had actually given up a senior spot in Homicide and transferred to Robbery. Altman was now glad, for the sergeant's sake, that there was a chance to nail the killer who'd eluded him.

  Altman wandered down to Robbery with the news about the book and to see if Fletcher knew anything about it. The sergeant, though, was out in the field at the moment and so Altman left him a message and then dove into the cluttered and oppressively hot records room. He found the strangler files easily; the folders sported red stripes on the side, a harsh reminder that, while this might've been a cold case, it was still very much open.

  Returning to his office, he sat back, sipping the, yes, disgusting instant coffee, and read the file, trying to ignore Wallace's incessant scribbling on his steno pad, the scratchy noise irritatingly audible across the office. The events of the murders were well documented. The perp had broken into two women's apartments and strangled them. There'd been no rape, sexual molestation, or postmortem mutilation. Neither woman had ever been stalked or threatened by former boyfriends, and though Kimberly had recently purchased some condoms, none of her friends knew that she'd been dating. The other victim, Becky Winthrop, her family said, hadn't dated for over a year.

  Sergeant Fletcher had carried out a by-the-book investigation, but most killings of this sort, without witnesses, motive, or significant trace found at the scene, are not solved without the help of an informant – often a friend or acquaintance of the perp. But, despite extensive press coverage of the investigation and pleas on TV by the mayor and Fletcher, no one had come forward with any information about possible suspects.

  An hour later, just as he closed the useless file, Altman's phone rang. A forensic lab tech at the county police told him that they had been through the book page by page and found three passages underlined and starred with large asterisks. In addition to the two that Wallace had found, there was a passage about how the killer had put plastic bags around his shoes to prevent leaving footprints and to keep trace evidence from sloughing off at the crime scene.

  Altman gave a short laugh. The report that he'd just read contained a note that the crime-scene searchers hadn't been able to figure out why the perp had left no footprints.

  Because the goddamn killer had used a goddamn how-to book, the detective thought bitterly.

  The tech continued: Next to two of the underscored passages were several handwritten notations. One said, "Check this one out. Important." And the other: "Used distraction – brilliant."

  The documents department had blown up images of the handwriting and was prepared to compare these to any samples found elsewhere, though until such samples were found they could do nothing more.

  The techs had also checked for any impression evidence – to see if the killer had written something on, say, a Post-It note on top of one of the pages – but found nothing.

  A ninhydrin analysis revealed a total of nearly two hundred latent fingerprints on the three pages on which the paragraphs had been underlined. Unfortunately, many of them were old and were only fragments. Technicians had located a few that were clear enough to be identified and had run them through the FBI's automatic fingerprint identification system in West Virginia. But all the results had come back negative.

  The cover of the book, wrapped in print-friendly cellophane, yielded close to four hundred prints, but they, too, were mostly smudges and fragments. AFIS had provided no positive IDs for these, either.

  Frustrated, Altman thanked the technician as cordially as he could and hung up.

  "So what was that about?" Wallace asked, looking eagerly at the sheet of paper in front of Altman, which contained both notes on the conversation he'd just had and a series of compulsive doodles.

  He explained to the reporter about the forensic results.

  "So, no leads," Wallace summarized dramatically and jotted a note, the irritated detective wondering why the reporter had actually found it necessary to write this observation down.

&
nbsp; As he gazed at the reporter an idea occurred to Altman and he stood up abruptly. "Let's go."

  "Where?"

  "Your crime scene."

  "Mine?" Wallace asked, scrambling to follow the detective as he strode out the door.

  The library near Gordon Wallace's apartment, where he'd checked out the novel, was a small branch in the Three Pines neighborhood of Greenville, so named because legend had it that three trees in a park here had miraculously survived the fire of 1829, which had destroyed the rest of the town. It was a nice place, populated mostly by businessmen, professionals, and educators; the college was nearby (the same school where the first strangler victim had been a student).

  Altman followed Wallace inside and the reporter found the head of the branch and introduced her to the detective. Mrs. McGiver was a trim woman dressed in stylish gray; she looked more like a senior executive with a high-tech company than a librarian.

  The detective explained the connection between the person who'd checked out the book and the murders, shock registering on the woman's face as she realized that the killer was somebody who'd been to her library. Perhaps even someone she knew.

  "I'd like a list of everybody who checked out that book." Altman had considered the possibility that the killer might not have checked it out but had looked through it here, in the library itself. But that meant he'd have to underline the passages in public and risk drawing the attention of librarians or patrons. He concluded that the only safe way for the strangler to do his homework was at home.

  "I'll see what I can find," she said.

  Altman had thought that it might take days to pull together this information, but Mrs. McGiver was back in minutes. Altman felt his gut churning with excitement as he gazed at the sheets of paper in her hand, relishing the sensations of the thrill of the hunt and pleasure at finding a fruitful lead.

  But as he flipped through the sheets, he frowned. Every one of the thirty or so people checking out Two Deaths had done so recently – within the last six months. They needed the names of those who'd checked it out before the killings a year ago.

  "Actually, I need to see the list before July tenth of last year," he explained.

  "Oh, but we don't have records that far back. Normally we would, but about six months ago our computer was vandalized."

  "Vandalized?"

  She nodded, frowning. "Somebody poured battery acid or something into the hard drive. Ruined it and destroyed all our records. Backup, too. Somebody from your department handled the case. I don't remember who."

  Wallace said, "I didn't hear about it."

  "They never found who did it. It was very troubling, but more of an inconvenience than anything. Imagine if he'd decided to destroy the books themselves."

  Altman caught Wallace's eye. "Dead end," he muttered angrily. Then he asked the librarian, "How 'bout the names of everybody who had a library card then? Were their names in the computer, too?"

  "Prior to six months ago, they're gone, too. I'm sorry."

  Forcing a smile onto his face, he thanked the librarian and walked to the doorway. But he stopped so suddenly that Wallace nearly slammed into his back.

  "What?" the reporter asked.

  Altman ignored him and returned to the desk, calling as he did, "Mrs. McGiver! Hold up there!" Drawing stares and a couple of harsh shhhh's from readers.

  "I need to find out where somebody lives."

  "I'll try, but you're the policeman – don't you have ways of doing that?"

  "In this case, I have a feeling you'd be a better cop than me."

  The author of Two Deaths in a Small Town, Andrew M. Carter, lived in Hampton Station, near Albany, about two hours away from Greenville.

  Mrs. McGiver's copy of Who's Who in Contemporary Mystery Writing didn't include addresses or phone numbers, but Altman called the felonies division of the Albany police department and they tracked down Carter's address and number.

  Altman's theory was that Carter might've gotten a fan letter from the killer. Since one notation called a passage "brilliant" and the other appeared to be a reminder to do more research on the topic, it was possible that the killer had written to Carter to praise him or to ask for more information. If there was such a letter, the county forensic handwriting expert could easily link the notation with the fan, who – if they were lucky – might have signed his real name and included his address.

  Mentally crossing his fingers, he placed a call to the author. A woman answered. "Hello?"

  "I'm Detective Altman with the Greenville police department," he said. "I'd like to speak to Andrew Carter."

  "I'm his wife," she said. "He's not available." The matter-of-fact tone in her voice suggested that this was her knee-jerk response to all such calls.

  "When will he be available?"

  "This is about the murders, isn't it?"

  "That's right, ma'am."

  "Do you have a suspect?"

  "I can't really go into that. But I would like to talk to your husband."

  A hesitation. "The thing is…" Her voice lowered and Altman suspected that her "unavailable" husband was in a nearby room. "He hasn't been well."

  "I'm sorry," Altman said. "Is it serious?"

  "You bet it's serious," she said angrily. "When Andy heard that the killer might've used his book as a model for the crimes, he got very depressed. He cut himself off from everybody. He stopped writing." She hesitated. "He stopped everything. He just gave up."

  "Must've been real difficult, Mrs. Carter," Altman said sympathetically.

  "I told him it was just a coincidence – those women getting killed like he wrote in the book. Just a weird coincidence. But the reporters and, well, everybody, friends, neighbors… they kept yammering on and on about how Andy was to blame."

  Altman supposed she wasn't going to like the fact that he'd found proof that her husband's book had indeed been the model for the killings.

  She continued, "He's been getting better lately. Anything about the case could set him back."

  "I do understand that, ma'am, but you have to see my situation. We've got a possibility of catching the killer and your husband could be real helpful…"

  The sound on the other end of the line grew muffled and Altman could hear her talking to someone else.

  Altman wasn't surprised when she said, "My husband just got back. I'll put him on."

  "Hello?" came a soft, uneasy voice. "This's Andy Carter."

  Altman identified himself.

  "Are you the policeman I talked to last year?"

  "Me? No. That might've been the case detective. Sergeant Bob Fletcher."

  "Right. That was the name."

  So Fletcher had talked to the author last year. There was no reference in the case file to it and he supposed that Carter hadn't provided any helpful information. Maybe now, after this much time had passed, he'd be more cooperative. Though Altman soon found that wasn't the case. He reiterated to Carter what he'd told his wife and the man said immediately, "I can't help you. And frankly, I don't want to… This's been the worst year of my life."

  "I appreciate that, sir. But that killer's still free. And -"

  "But I don't know anything. I mean, what could I possibly tell you that -"

  "We have a sample of the killer's handwriting – we found some of his notes in a copy of your book. And we'd like to compare it to any letters from fans you might've received."

  There was a long pause. Finally the author whispered, "So he did use my book as a model."

  "I'm afraid he did, Mr. Carter."

  Altman heard nothing for a moment, then a cryptic noise – maybe a sigh. Or maybe the man was crying softly.

  "Sir, are you all right?"

  The author cleared his throat. "I'm sorry. I can't help you. I just… it'd be too much for me."

  Altman often told young officers under him that a detective's most important trait is persistence. He said in an even voice, "You're the only one who can help us trace the book back to him. He destro
yed the library computer so we don't have the names of who checked your book out. There's no match on the fingerprints, either… I want to catch this man real bad. And I suspect you do, too, Mr. Carter. Don't you, now?"

  There was no response. Finally the faint voice continued, "Do you know that strangers sent me clippings about the killings? Perfect strangers. Hundreds of them. They blamed me. They called my book a 'blueprint for murder.' I had to go into the hospital for a month afterwards, I was so depressed… I caused those murders! Don't you understand that?"

  Altman looked up at Wallace and shook his head.

  The reporter gestured for the phone. Altman figured, why not?

  "Mr. Carter, there's a person here I'm going to put on the line. I'd like him to have a word with you."

  "Who?"

  He handed the receiver over and sat back, listening to the onesided conversation.

  "Hello, Mr. Carter." The reporter's gaunt frame hunched over the phone and he gripped the receiver in astonishingly long, strong fingers. "You don't know me. My name is Gordon Wallace. I'm a fan of your book – I loved it. I'm the one who found the circled passages… No, I'm not with them; I'm a reporter for the Tribune here in Greenville… I got that. I understand that. My colleagues step over a lot of lines. But I don't operate that way. And I know you're reluctant to get involved here. I'm sure you've been through a tough time.

  "But I just want to say one thing: I'm no great novelist like you – I'm just a hack journalist – but I am a writer and if I have any important belief in my life it's in the freedom to write whatever moves us. Now… No, please, Mr. Carter, let me finish. I heard that you basically stopped writing after the murders… Well, you and your talent were as much a victim of those crimes as those women were. You exercised your God-given right to express yourself and a terrible accident happened. That's how I'd look at this madman: an act of God. A couple of people got killed and you were injured because of that. You can't do anything about those women. But you can help yourself and your family to move on. And there's something else to consider: You're in a position to make sure nobody else ever gets hurt by this guy again."