There were two unopened bottles of Chardonnay on the top shelf.
As she was twisting the corkscrew into the top of the bottle, she glanced over at the answering machine and was surprised the message light wasn’t blinking. Then she remembered: She’d turned the machine off and muted the ringer on the phone. Anyone she wanted to talk to knew to call her cell phone; to hell with the rest.
As she was pouring a glass of wine, she heard the faint chirping of her cell phone buried deep inside her purse. She walked quickly back into the living room and dug through her bag. She flipped the phone open, didn’t recognize the number, but decided to answer anyway.
“Yes?” she said.
“Taylor?”
Taylor smiled. “Oh, hi. How are you?”
“I’m fine. The question is, how are you?”
“I made it in just fine, Hank. No problems. The place was well-tended, although a bit stuffy and cold. There was no sign of anyone having been here but the cleaning lady.”
“Good. I meant to ask you last night, what are you going to do with all his things?”
“God,” she said, sighing. “I haven’t gotten that far. What should I do?”
“I’d like to have one of my guys from the New York Field Office go through them. NYPD Homicide might want a shot as well. After that, it really doesn’t matter. You can trash it all, give it to the Salvation Army.”
Taylor walked back into the kitchen and picked up the wineglass. She held it up, staring through the buttery, almost golden liquid into the kitchen. The kitchen light diffused into a series of brilliant yellow circular halos.
“I guess he won’t have any need for it, will he?” Taylor asked.
“Was he working out of your apartment?” Powell asked.
“Yes, he was working on another book,” Taylor said offhandedly. Then her voice caught in her throat. “I guess that means he was reliving another-”
There was a long moment of silence broken only by the static on the cell phone. “Yeah,” Hank said, breaking the quiet. “I guess he was.”
“You know, I can’t think about that right now,” Taylor said brightly. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t. I’ve got too much else on my mind.”
“I understand,” Hank answered. “But I want you to do something for me. Seal off the room he worked in and hold it for my guys. I want to go through his computer hard drive, any archived material, all his papers and correspondence, bills and bank statements. Anything that might give us a clue as to what he’s up to.”
Taylor nodded. “Sure, I can do that. I don’t want to touch any of it, anyway.”
“Great, thanks. I can have my team at your place tomorrow morning.”
“Not too early. If I can sleep, I’m going to as long as I can.”
“You need it. So how was the flight?”
Taylor took a sip of the wine. It tasted like heaven in her mouth. “Good,” she said after a second or two. “Any flight that got me out of there would be good. How was yours?”
“We were an hour and a half late into Reagan, but all that meant was that I missed rush hour.”
“So,” Taylor said cheerily, “you got home in time to have a late dinner with Mrs. Powell.”
Hank cleared his throat. “There, uh, there isn’t a Mrs.
Powell,” he said.
“Oh, divorced or never married?”
“I’m a widower.”
Taylor felt like an idiot. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
“How could you? Besides, it was a while ago. Life goes on.”
“Kids?”
“Yeah,” Hank said. She could feel his voice brighten over the phone. “Daughter. She’s seventeen, goes to the same boarding school her mother went to.”
“I’ll bet she’s beautiful,” Taylor offered.
“Gorgeous. Looks just like her mother.”
“Wow,” Taylor said softly.
“Look, Taylor, there’s something else. I debated whether or not to tell you, but for all I know it’s already on the evening news.”
Taylor felt her throat tighten. “What? What now?”
“We know he’s got a car,” Hank said.
She could tell he was choosing his words carefully. “How?
How do you know that?”
“There was a homicide in Nashville last night,” Hank said. When the words came across the phone, Taylor felt her head swim. “This time it was a guy, mid-thirties, dark hair.
Height and weight about the same as Michael’s. Dressed in a nice suit. They found him stuffed in a dark corner of the top floor of a multistory parking lot. When they found him, he had Michael’s driver’s license on him and no other ID.”
Taylor leaned against the counter, trying to keep her balance. “Which means Michael’s got his driver’s license and his ID,” she said.
“And his registration and his car.”
“So go after the guy’s car,” Taylor said.
“We will,” Hank said. “Just as soon as we get a positive ID
on the victim. Right now, we still don’t know who he is.”
“God,” Taylor said, her voice breaking. “That means some poor woman is sitting home with her kids wondering why her husband hasn’t come home from work yet. Is he out messing around? Has he disappeared? Has he-”
“Taylor, stop,” Hank interrupted. “Don’t. It won’t help anything.”
She slammed the wineglass down on the counter. The stem snapped in two; the glass fell and shattered, splattering wine everywhere.
“I can’t stand this, Hank! Damn it, I can’t take any more!”
“We’ll stop him,” Hank insisted. “I promise you. We’ll get him.”
“Please,” she said. “Before he does any more.”
“You’ve got my number?” Hank said.
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you’ll hear from him, but if you do, let me know. And don’t get into it with him. Play along, then let me handle it from then on. Okay?”
“Yes,” Taylor said, looking down at the mess she’d just made. “I will.”
“And call me if you need anything else, or if you just need to talk. And in the meantime, get some sleep,” Hank said.
“You need it. It’ll be the best thing for you.”
“All right,” she said. “I will. And Hank?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. Thank you for calling. Thank you for the dinner and drinks last night. Thank you for giving a damn.”
“No problem, lady,” he said. “S’why I get the big bucks.”
Taylor Robinson went back to work the next day. She was in her office by nine, after a fitful night’s sleep, determined to get her life back. She waded into the mountain of e-mail, contracts, phone messages, manuscripts, and paper that was piled neck-high on her desk. She met with Joan Delaney for an hour and a half, trying to figure out how to handle the detritus of Michael Schiftmann’s career. Taylor was surprised-and then realized that she shouldn’t be-that Michael Schiftmann’s murder trial had sent his sales into the stratosphere. The publisher had never seen anything like it.
They couldn’t go back to press fast enough.
Web sites sprang up all over the world commenting on Michael’s murder case, his books, the details of the Alphabet Man’s crimes. One Web site was running a contest: Match the novel with the murder. Society’s sick fascination with violence, cruelty, evil had never been more exploited.
But in her quiet moments, alone in her office, facing the stacks of work, Taylor wondered if she wasn’t part of the process as well. When she was honest with herself, even she admitted that she couldn’t read Michael’s books; they were too cruel, too twisted. Early in their association, she had even let herself wonder what kind of man could write such things. Like everyone else, though, she was charmed with his looks, his manner, and his style.
Then the money started rolling in. God, the money, she thought. There had never been so much of it. Her family was well-off
, she’d grown up well taken care of, even entitled. But she had never seen anything like it. She had to admit that she was as seduced by the money and the fame and the attention as she was by Michael himself; maybe even more so.
She wondered if she would have allowed herself to become so enamored of him if his books had flopped.
No, she decided. No way. But money and fame are seduc-tive and arousing and thrilling, like a drug, like a blinding orgasm.
Blinding orgasms. She blushed. It embarrassed her to go there even in the solitude of her tiny office, but she had never in her life had sex like that. With Michael, her orgasms were not only literally blinding, but blinding as well to a great many other things.
Thank God, she thought, the blindness was temporary.
She forced her mind to go elsewhere. There was work to do. It would be a long, long time before she felt like getting involved with anyone again, if ever. And she never expected-wasn’t even sure if she wanted-sex to be like that again. Sex that good makes you stupid.
She buried herself in her work, opened up the piles of paper and dived in headfirst. At eight that first night, her assistant, Anne, stuck her head into Taylor’s office and asked if she was ever going home. Taylor looked up, distracted.
She hadn’t realized it was so late and apologized to Anne for keeping her.
Days went by like that. After a week, the NYPD stakeout of her building went down to one uniformed officer. After the third day, she began to relax and return to her old routines. She bought food and cooked for herself again. She ignored the news, stopped following anything about Michael’s case. After a while, she could even find herself going a few minutes at a time without thinking of him.
She still refused all calls from the news media, and after about three days, word got around and the calls slowed to one or two a day. There was a famous writer doing a long piece on Michael for Vanity Fair, and another equally famous one for the New Yorker.
“They’ll just have to get along without me,” Taylor told Joan over lunch one day. “I’ve got nothing to say to anyone about anything.”
“Good,” Joan agreed. “Let’s just get back to selling books.”
One big concern was what to do with Michael’s next book.
The Friday afternoon after returning to Manhattan, Taylor cleared enough of the pile away to meet Brett Silverman for lunch. She caught a cab over to Central Park, where Brett was holding a corner table at Tavern on the Green for them.
Brett was already nursing a glass of wine when the maitre d’ led her over to the table. Brett stood quickly and opened her arms, then wrapped them around Taylor hard enough to draw stares from the surrounding tables.
“I have missed you so much,” she whispered.
“Me, too,” Taylor said.
The two sat down as the waiter came over. “May I bring you something to drink?” he asked. Brett pointed at her glass of wine.
“I don’t usually drink during the day,” Taylor said, then added, smiling: “Oh, what the hell.”
“That a girl,” Brett said. The waiter disappeared as Brett leaned in. “Okay, look, let’s get right to it. I have no idea how much you want to talk about this, but I have to ask. How are you? Really?”
Taylor shrugged. “I’ve had some bad nights,” she admitted. “A couple of times when I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it. But you know the old saw, that which doesn’t kill you-”
“Beats the crap out of you and nearly kills you,” Brett interrupted.
Taylor found herself laughing in a way she hadn’t in a long time. It felt good, as if a weight had been lifted from her.
“You know,” she said. “You’re right. It feels like this nearly killed me. But it didn’t. I survived. And it feels great to be back at work and back here, and it’s wonderful to see you again.”
Brett smiled back at her, then turned serious. “Have they made any progress toward finding him?”
“You get the same news channels I do, honey. I haven’t heard a word. There’s an FBI agent that’s been really nice to me. We’ve talked a couple of times since I got back. Last I heard, they had nothing.”
“Amazing,” Brett said, then she lowered her voice. “Where the hell do you think he is?”
Taylor shrugged again. “Who knows? He could be anywhere.”
“What was it like when he disappeared? Did they just go nuts down there?”
Taylor nodded. “It was pandemonium. The first thing the judge did was throw Michael’s attorney in the slammer for contempt, then they hauled me in for questioning.”
“You? What the hell did they think, that you helped him?”
“I think they were just more embarrassed than anything else. They should have been watching him a little better.”
“God, I feel like for the rest of our lives, he’s going to be the eight-hundred-pound white elephant sitting in the middle of the living room that no one wants to talk about.”
“I’m okay with it,” Taylor said as the waiter brought her wine. “Really. This is all going to work out. It’s going to be okay.”
The two ordered lunch and made small talk for a while.
Then the conversation turned to business.
“Jack decided to move up the pub date,” Brett said.
“That’s interesting. How come, as if I didn’t know?”
“He’d be crazy not to,” Brett answered. “Look, darling, advance orders for The Sixth Letter have broken all company records. We’ve never had a book come out of the blocks like this one.”
“You know,” Taylor said, a sadness settling over her face,
“when I really think about it, I hate that so much money is being made off human suffering. It’s evil what he did. We ought to give the money to the families.”
“Let ‘em sue him if they want to,” Brett said. “But this is the publishing business, and it’s a business fueled by this kind of media attention. We’d be crazy not to take advantage of it. You gotta make hay while the sun shines.”
“I know,” Taylor admitted. “Doesn’t mean we have to like it.” “So that brings up another subject,” Brett said. “All this money, the royalties, the sub rights income. Where’s it going to go? If the author is an escaped fugitive on the run, where do we send the checks?”
“Joan and I met with the lawyers on Wednesday,” Taylor said. “We’ve set up an escrow account to hold the money until he’s caught-or whatever. At some point, I would assume the courts will have some input into where the money goes.
I know they’ve frozen all his bank accounts. He couldn’t get to the money even if we did write him a check. He’s already had his passport confiscated. His options are really limited.”
“Then what’s he using for money?” Brett asked.
“Who knows? My guess is he had some stashed away somewhere.”
Brett and Taylor lingered over lunch for two hours, with two more glasses of wine each, then coffee afterward. Taylor enjoyed the company, the chance to get away from the office and to simply get lost in a crowd of people where if anyone recognized her, they had the good manners to not acknowledge it.
Just after two-thirty, the two left and hailed separate cabs.
They made plans for dinner the following Friday night and agreed to talk before then. Taylor was relaxed and drowsy as she settled into the back of the cab. The driver headed across town back to the office on East Fifty-third.
As he pulled to a stop in front of Joan Delaney’s brownstone, Taylor’s cell phone went off. She stuffed a ten-dollar bill through the tray in the clear plastic shield between the front and back seats, then scrambled out onto the sidewalk.
She fumbled in her purse for the cell phone, then pulled it out and flipped the cover open.
“Hello,” she said.
“Taylor,” a voice said.
Taylor froze. Everything around her seemed to go quiet and still, the people around her shifting into slow motion, the traffic noise hushed.
“Michael?” she gas
ped.
CHAPTER 37
Thursday afternoon, Manhattan
“What’re you- My God, where are-?” Taylor stammered.
She felt like she’d been body slammed. It was all she could do to remain upright.
“It’s good to hear your voice,” he said, as if he’d been away on holiday.
“Michael, where are you?” she asked.
“I’m in the city. You’ll pardon me if I can’t be more specific.”
Taylor’s mind raced. How to handle this? What to say?
What had Hank told her?
Don’t get into it with him, he’d said. But what did that mean?
“How did you get here?”
“It’s a long story, but let’s just say I had to take a very circuitous route.”
Yes, Taylor thought, and how many dead bodies did you leave behind on the way?
“Look, Michael,” she said, trying to keep herself and her words calm, “why are you calling me?”
“Because I missed you,” the disembodied voice said with a thin layer of cell-phone static over it. “And because I hoped you’d be glad to hear from me.”
Taylor stood there. The wind picked up off the East River, funneled down through the city streets by the rows of buildings. She shivered, wondered if she should just walk on to the office, but she knew from experience that her cell phone wouldn’t work inside the building.
The silence was broken by a low hiss and crackle. She wondered if she’d lost the signal.
“And because I need your help,” he said.
“My help? Are you crazy? I can’t help you, Michael. You need to turn yourself in. Get this over with. They’re coming after you and they’ll eventually get you.”
“Turn myself in so they can kill me? Is that what you want?”
“They haven’t passed sentence yet, Michael. You don’t know that that’s what’s going to happen.”
“C’mon, Taylor. You and I both know that if the state of Tennessee doesn’t do it, somebody else will. They’ve got it in for me.”
By Blood Written Page 36