More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II

COPYCAT

Detective Quentin Altman rocked back, his chair squealing with the telltale caw of aging government furniture, and eyed the narrow, jittery man sitting across from him. “Go on,” the cop said.

“So I check out this book from the library. Just for the fun of it. I never do that, just read a book for the fun of it. I mean, never. I don’t get much time off, you know.”

Altman hadn’t known this but he could certainly have deduced it. Wallace Gordon was the Greenville Tribune’s sole crime reporter and must’ve spent sixty, seventy hours a week banging out copy, to judge by the number of stories appearing under his byline every day.

“And I’m reading along and—”

“What is it you’re reading?”

“A novel — a murder mystery. I’ll get to that…. I’m reading along and I’m irritated,” the reporter continued, “because somebody’d circled some passages. In a library book.”

Altman grunted distractedly. He was head of Homicide in a burgh with a small-town name but big-city crime statistics. The fifty-something detective was busy and he didn’t have much time for reporters with crackpot theories. There were twenty-two folders of current cases on his desk and here Wallace was delivering some elliptical message about defaced books.

“I don’t pay much attention at first but I go back and reread one of the circled paragraphs. It jogs my memory. Anyway, I checked the morgue—”

“Morgue?” Altman frowned, rubbing his wiry red hair, which showed not a strand of gray.

“Our morgue, not yours. In the newspaper office. All the old stories.”

“Got it. How ’bout getting to the point?”

“I found the articles about the Kimberly Banning murder.”

Quentin Altman grew more attentive. Twenty-eight-year-old Kimberly had been strangled to death eight months ago. The murder occurred two weeks after a similar killing — of a young female grad student. The two deaths appeared to be the work of the same person but there were few forensic leads and no motive that anyone could determine. The cases prompted a task force investigation but eventually the suspects were cleared and the case grew cold.

Tall and gaunt, with tendons and veins rising from his pale skin, reporter Wallace tried — usually unsuccessfully — to tone down his intimidating physique and face with brown tweed jackets, corduroy slacks and pastel shirts. He asked the cop, “You remember how the whole town was paranoid after the first girl was killed? And how everybody was double locking their doors and never letting strangers into their houses?”

Altman nodded.

“Well, look at this.” The reporter pulled latex gloves out of his pocket and put them on.

“Why the gloves, Wallace?”

The man ignored the question and dug a book out of his battered briefcase. Altman got a look at the title. Two Deaths in a Small Town. He’d never heard of it.

“This was published six months before the first killing.” He opened the book to a yellow Post-it tab and pushed it forward. “Read those paragraphs.” The detective pulled on his CVS drugstore glasses and leaned forward.

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

“A convertible,” Wallace added. “And then I went back and found some passages that’d been marked. One of them was about how the killer had stalked his 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.

Wallace pointed out several other passages, marked with asterisks. There were margin notes too. One said, “Check this one out. Important.” Another jotting was “Used distraction.” And: “Disposing of body. Note this.”

“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. Hence, the reporter’s CSI gloves.

Altman stared at the melodramatic dust jacket on the novel — a drawing of a man’s silhouette peering into the window of a house. The detective pulled on his own 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 then paused. Waited for Wallace 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.”

Quentin Altman argued some more but in the end he gave in, feeling he had no choice. “All right. But just don’t get in my way. You do that, you’re out of here.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.” Wallace 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 at the detective. “So whatta 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.

He’d worked on it some — the whole department’d had a piece of the case — but the officer in charge had been Bob Fletcher, a sergeant who’d been on the force forever. 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 novel and to see if Fletcher knew anything about it. The sergeant, though, was out in the field at the moment and so Altman left 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, yeah, disgusting instant coffee, and read the file, trying to ignore Wallace’s incessant scribbling on his steno pad, the scratchy noise irritatingly audible throughout 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 generally 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. The documents department had blown up images of the handwriting and was prepared to compare these to any samples found elsewhere, though until such specimens were found the officers could do nothing.

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 marked paragraphs appeared and another eighty on the jacket. Unfortunately many of them were old and only fragments. Technicians had located a few that were clear enough to be identified and had run them through the FBI’s integrated automated 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. IAFIS had provided no positive IDs for these either.

Frustrated, he thanked the technician 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 and jotted a note, leaving the irritated detective to wonder why the reporter’d actually found it necessary to write this observation down.

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 Two Deaths in a Small Town, was a 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 otherwise destroyed the rest of the town. It was a nice area, 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, 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 how they suspected the book had been used by a copycat as a model for the killings. Shock registered on the woman’s face as she realized that the Strangler was somebody who’d been to her library. Perhaps he was 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 merely 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 eight months ago. He explained this to her.

“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 drives. Ruined them and destroyed all our records. The 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,” the cop said 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?”

She nodded. “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 hurried back to the main desk, calling out, “Mrs. McGiver! Hold up there! I need you to find out something for me.”

Drawing glares and a couple of harsh shhhh’s from readers.

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 street addresses or phone numbers but Altman called the DMV and they tracked down the specifics.

The idea that occurred to Altman as he was leaving the library was that Carter might’ve gotten a fan letter from the Strangler. Maybe he’d written to express some admiration, maybe he’d asked for more information or how the author had done his research. 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 to the letter 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.”

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 the news got out that Andy’s book, you know, inspired somebody to kill those girls he got real depressed. He cut himself off from everybody. He stopped writing.” She hesitated. “He stopped everything. He just gave up.”

“Must’ve been difficult, Mrs. Carter,” Altman said sympathetically, reflecting that reporter Wallace wasn’t the first person to wonder if the novel had inspired a copycat.

“You have no idea. I told him it was just a coincidence — those women getting killed like he wrote in the book. Just a weird coincidence. But these 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 he’d found proof that her husband’s book had probably 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.

Quentin 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.

“Were you the policeman I talked to a while back?”

“Me? No. That might’ve been the case detective. Sergeant Bob Fletcher.”

“Right. That was the name.”

So Fletcher had talked to the author. There was no reference in the case file that he recalled. He must’ve missed it. He reiterated to Carter what he’d told the author’s wife and the man said immediately, “I can’t help you. And frankly, I don’t want to…. This’s been the worst time 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 may have a sample of the killer’s handwriting — we found some notes in a copy of your book that make us think he might’ve written them. 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.”

In a kind voice Altman said, “It’s looking that way, Mr. Carter. The underlined passages are the ones that fit the M.O. of the two murders. I’m afraid they’re identical.”

Altman heard nothing for a moment then he asked, “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.”

Quentin Altman often told young officers who worked for 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 the killer. He destroyed the library computer so we don’t have the names of who checked out your book. 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?”

The cop handed the receiver over and sat back, listening to the one-sided 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 Wallace Gordon. I’m a fan of your book — I loved it. I’m a reporter for the Tribune here in Greenville…. I got that. I understand how you feel — 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 let me just say one thing: I’m no talented 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 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. 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.”

Altman lifted an impressed eyebrow at the reporter’s sales pitch. Wallace held the receiver to his ear for a moment, listening. Finally he nodded and glanced at Altman. “He wants to talk to you.”

Altman took the phone. “Yessir?”

“What exactly would you want me to do?” came the tentative voice through the phone.

“All I need is to go through the fan mail you got about the book.”

A bitter laugh. “Hate mail, you mean. That’s mostly what I got.”

“Whatever you received. We’re mostly interested in handwritten letters, so we can match physical evidence. But any emails you got, we’d like to see too.”

A pause. Was he going to balk? Then the detective heard the man say, “It’ll take me a day or two. I kind of stopped… well, let me just say things haven’t been too organized around my office lately.”

“That’s fine.” Altman gave the author the directions to the police station and told him to wear kitchen gloves and handle the handwritten letters by the edges to make sure he didn’t mess up the fingerprints.

“All right,” Carter said sullenly.

Altman wondered if he’d really come. He started to tell the author how much he appreciated the help but after a moment he realized that the man had hung up and he was listening to dead air.

Andy Clark did indeed make the journey to Greenville.

He turned out not to resemble either a sinister artist or a glitzy celebrity but rather any one of the hundreds of white, middle-aged men who populated this region of the Northeast. Thick, graying hair, neatly trimmed. A slight paunch (much slighter than Altman’s own, thanks to the cop’s fondness for his wife’s casseroles). His outfit wasn’t an arm-patch sports jacket or any other authorial garb, but an L.L. Bean windbreaker, Polo shirt and corduroy slacks.

It had been two days since Altman had spoken to Carter. The man now stood uneasily in the cop’s office, taking the coffee that the young detective Josh Randall offered and nodding greetings to the cops and to Gordon Wallace. Carter slipped off his windbreaker, tossing it on an unoccupied chair. The author’s only moment of ill ease in this meeting was when he glanced on Altman’s desk and blinked as he saw the case file that was headed, Banning, Kimberly — Homicide #13–04. A brief look of dismay filled his face. Quentin Altman was grateful that he’d had the foresight to slip the crime scene photos of the victim’s body to the bottom of the folder.

They made small talk for a minute or two and then Altman nodded at a large white envelope in the author’s hand. “You find some letters you think might be helpful?”

“Helpful?” Carter asked, rubbing his red eyes. “I don’t know. You’ll have to decide that.” He handed the envelope to the detective.

Altman opened the envelope and, donning latex gloves, pulled out what must’ve been about two hundred or so sheets.

The detective led the men into the department conference room and spread the letters out on the table. Randall joined them.

Some of them were typed or printed out from a computer — but these were signed, offering a small sample of the correspondent’s handwriting. Some were written in cursive, some in block letters. They were on many different types and sizes of paper and colors of ink or pencil. Crayons too.

For an hour the men, each wearing rubber gloves, pored over the letters. Altman could understand the author’s dismay. Many of them were truly vicious. Finally he divided them into several piles. First, the emails, none of which seemed to have been written by potential killers. Second were the handwritten letters that seemed like the typical innocent opinions of readers. None of these asked for details about how he’d researched the novel or seemed in any way incriminating, though some were angry and some were disturbingly personal (“Come and see us in Sioux City if your in town and the wife and me will treat you to our special full body massege out side on the deck behind our trailer”).

“Ick,” said young officer Randall.

The final pile, Altman explained, “included letters that were reasonable and calm and cautious… Just like the Strangler. See, he’s an organized offender. He’s not going to give anything away by ranting. If he has any questions he’s going to ask them politely and carefully — he’ll want some detail but not too much; that’d arouse suspicion.” Altman gathered up this stack — about ten letters — placed them in an evidence envelope and handed them to the young detective. “Over to the county lab, stat.”

A man stuck his head in the door — Detective Bob Fletcher. The even-keeled sergeant introduced himself to Carter. “We never met but I spoke to you on the phone about the case,” the cop said.

“I remember.” They shook hands.

Fletcher nodded at Altman, smiling ruefully. “He’s a better cop than me. I never thought that the killer might’ve tried to write you.”

The sergeant, it turned out, had contacted Carter not about fan mail but to ask if the author’d based the story on any previous true crimes, thinking there might be a connection between them and the Strangler murders. It had been a good idea but Carter had explained that the plot for Two Deaths was a product of his imagination.

The sergeant’s eyes took in the stacks of letters. “Any luck?” he asked.

“We’ll have to see what the lab finds.” Altman then nodded toward the author. “But I have to say that Mr. Carter here’s been a huge help. We’d be stymied for sure, if it wasn’t for him.”

Appraising Carter carefully, Fletcher said, “I have to admit I never got a chance to read your book but I always wanted to meet you. An honest-to-God famous author. Don’t think I’ve ever shook one’s hand before.”

Carter gave an embarrassed laugh. “Not very famous to look at my sales figures.”

“Well, all I know is my girlfriend read your book and she said it was the best thriller she’d read in years.”

Carter said, “I appreciate that. Is she around town? I could autograph her copy.”

“Oh,” Fletcher said hesitantly, “well, we’re not going out anymore. She left the area. But thanks for the offer.” He headed back to Robbery.

There was now nothing to do but wait for the lab results to come back, so Wallace suggested coffee at Starbucks. The men wandered down the street, ordered and sat sipping the drinks, as Wallace pumped Carter for information about breaking into fiction writing, and Altman simply enjoyed the feel of the hot sun on his face.

The men’s recess ended abruptly, though, fifteen minutes later when Altman’s cell phone rang.

“Detective,” came the enthusiastic voice of his youthful assistant, Josh Randall, “we’ve got a match! The handwriting in one of Mr. Carter’s fan letters matches the notes in the margins of the book. The ink’s the same too.”

The detective said, “Please tell me there’s a name and address on the letter.”

“You bet there is. Howard Desmond’s his name. And his place is over in Warwick.” A small town twenty minutes from the sites of both of the Greenville Strangler’s attacks.

The detective told his assistant to pull together as much information on Desmond as he could. He snapped the phone shut and, grinning, announced, “We’ve found him. We’ve got our copycat.”

But, as it turned out, they didn’t have him at all.

At least not the flesh-and-blood suspect.

Single, forty-two-year-old Howard Desmond, a veterinary technician, had skipped town six months before, leaving in a huge hurry. One day he’d called his landlord and announced that he was moving. He’d left virtually overnight, abandoning everything in the apartment but his valuables. There was no forwarding address. Altman had hoped to go through whatever he’d left behind but the landlord explained that he’d sold everything to make up for the lost rent. What didn’t sell he’d thrown out. The detective called the state public records departments to see if they had any information about him.

Altman spoke to the vet in whose clinic Desmond had worked and the doctor’s report was similar to the landlord’s. In April Desmond had called and quit his job, effective immediately, saying only that he was moving to Oregon to take care of his elderly grandmother. He’d never called back with a forwarding address for his last check, as he said he would.

The vet described Desmond as quiet and affectionate to the animals in his care but with little patience for people.

Altman contacted the authorities in Oregon and found no record of any Howard Desmonds in the DMV files or on the property or income tax rolls. A bit more digging revealed that all of Desmond’s grandparents — his parents too — had died years before; the story about the move to Oregon was apparently a complete lie.

The few relatives the detective could track down confirmed that he’d just disappeared and they didn’t know where he might be. They echoed his boss’s assessment, describing the man as intelligent but a recluse, one who — significantly — loved to read and often lost himself in novels, appropriate for a killer who took his homicidal inspiration from a book.

“What’d his letter to Andy say?” Wallace asked.

With an okaying nod from Altman, Randall handed it to the reporter, who then summarized out loud. “He asks how Mr. Carter did the research for his book. What were the sources he used? How did he learn about the most efficient way a murderer would kill someone? And he’s curious about the mental makeup of a killer. Why did some people find it easy to kill while others couldn’t possibly hurt anyone?”

Altman shook his head. “No clue as to where he might’ve gone. We’ll get his name into NCIC and VICAP but, hell, he could be anywhere. South America, Europe, Singapore…”

Since Bob Fletcher’s Robbery Division would’ve handled the vandalism at the Greenville Library’s Three Pines branch, which they now knew Desmond was responsible for, Altman sent Randall to ask the sergeant if he’d found any leads as part of the investigation that would be helpful.

The other men found themselves staring at Desmond’s fan letter as if it were a corpse at a wake, silence surrounding them.

Altman’s phone rang and he took the call. It was the county clerk, who explained that Desmond owned a small vacation home about sixty miles from Greenville, on the shores of Lake Muskegon, tucked into the backwater, piney wilderness.

“You think he’s hiding out there?” Wallace asked.

“I say we go find out. Even if he’s hightailed it out of the state, though, there could be some leads there as to where he did go. Maybe airline receipts or something, notes, phone message on an answering machine.”

Wallace grabbed his jacket and his reporter’s notebook. “Let’s go.”

“No, no, no,” Quentin Altman said firmly. “You get an exclusive. You don’t get to go into the line of fire.”

“Nice of you to think of me,” Wallace said sourly.

“Basically I just don’t want to get sued by your newspaper if Desmond decides to use you for target practice.”

The reporter gave a scowl and dropped down into an officer chair.

Josh Randall returned to report that Sergeant Bob Fletcher had no helpful information in the library vandalism case.

But Altman said, “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got a better lead. Suit up, Josh.”

“Where’re we going?”

“For a ride in the country. What else on a nice fall day like this?”

Lake Muskegon is a large but shallow body of water bordered by willow, tall grass and ugly pine. Altman didn’t know the place well. He’d brought his family here for a couple of picnics over the years and he and Bob Fletcher had come to the lake once on a halfhearted fishing expedition, of which Altman had only vague memories: gray, drizzly weather and a nearly empty creel at the end of the day.

As he and Randall drove north through the increasingly deserted landscape he briefed the young man. “Now, I’m ninety-nine percent sure Desmond’s not here. But what we’re going to do first is clear the house — I mean closet by closet — and then I want you stationed in the front to keep an eye out while I look for evidence. Okay?”

“Sure, boss.”

They passed Desmond’s overgrown driveway and pulled off the road then eased into a stand of thick forsythia.

Together, the men cautiously made their way down the weedy drive toward the “vacation house,” a dignified term for the tiny, shabby cottage sitting in a three-foot-high sea of grass and brush. A path had been beaten through the foliage — somebody had been here recently — but it might not have been Desmond; Altman had been a teenager once himself and knew that nothing attracts adolescent attention like a deserted house.

They drew their weapons and Altman pounded on the door, calling, “Police. Open up.”

Silence.

He hesitated a moment, adjusted the grip on his gun and kicked the door in.

Filled with cheap, dust-covered furniture, buzzing with stuporous fall flies, the place appeared deserted. They checked the four small rooms carefully and found no sign of Desmond. Outside, they glanced in the window of the garage and saw that it was empty. Then Altman sent Randall to the front of the driveway to hide in the bushes and report anybody’s approach.

He then returned to the house and began to search, wondering just how hot the cold case was about to become.

Two hundred yards from the driveway that led to Howard Desmond’s cottage a battered, ten-year-old Toyota pulled onto the shoulder of Route 207 and then eased into the woods, out of sight of any drivers along the road.

A man got out and, satisfied that his car was well hidden, squinted into the forest, getting his bearings. He noticed the line of the brown lake to his left and figured the vacation house was in the ten-o’clock position ahead of him. Through dense underbrush like this it would take him about fifteen minutes to get to the place, he estimated.

That’d make the time pretty tight. He’d have to move as quickly as he could and still keep the noise to a minimum.

The man started forward but then stopped suddenly and patted his pocket. He’d been in such a hurry to get to the house he couldn’t remember if he’d taken what he wanted from the glove compartment. But, yes, he had it with him.

Hunched over and picking his way carefully to avoid stepping on noisy branches, Gordon Wallace continued on toward the cabin where, he hoped, Detective Altman was lost in police work and would be utterly oblivious to his furtive approach.

The search of the house revealed virtually nothing that would indicate that Desmond had been here recently — or where the man might now be. Quentin Altman found some bills and cancelled checks. But the address on them was Desmond’s apartment in Warwick.

He decided to check the garage, thinking he might come across something helpful the killer had tossed out of the car and forgotten about — maybe a sheet containing directions or a map or receipt.

Altman discovered something far more interesting than evidence, though; he found Howard Desmond himself.

That is to say, his corpse.

The moment Altman opened the old-fashioned double doors of the garage he detected the smell of decaying flesh. He knew where it had to be coming from: a large coal bin in the back. Steeling himself, he flipped up the lid.

The mostly skeletal remains of a man about six feet tall were inside, lying on his back, fully clothed. He’d been dead about six months — just around the time Desmond disappeared, Altman recalled.

DNA would tell for certain if this was the vet tech but Altman discovered the man’s wallet in his hip pocket and, sure enough, the driver’s license inside was Desmond’s. DNA or dental records would tell for certain.

The man’s skull was shattered; the cause of death was probably trauma to the head by a blunt object. There was no weapon in the bin itself but after a careful examination of the garage he found a heavy mallet wrapped in a rag and hidden in the bottom of a trash-filled oil drum. There were some hairs adhering to the mallet that resembled Desmond’s. Altman set the tool on a workbench, wondering what the hell was going on.

Somebody had murdered the Strangler. Who? And why? Revenge?

But then Altman did one of the things he did best — let his mind run free. Too many detectives get an idea into their heads and can’t see past their initial conclusions. Altman, though, always fought against this tendency and he now asked himself: But what if Desmond wasn’t the Strangler?

They knew for certain that he was the one who’d underlined the passages in the library’s copy of Two Deaths in a Small Town. But what if he’d done so after the killings? The letter Desmond had written to Carter was undated. Maybe — just like the reporter Gordon Wallace himself had done — he’d read the book after the murders and been struck by the similarity. He’d started to investigate the crime himself and the Strangler had found out and murdered him.

But then who was the killer?

Just like Gordon Wallace had done…

Altman felt another little tap in his far-ranging mind, as fragments of facts lined up for him to consider — facts that all had to do with the reporter. For instance, Wallace was physically imposing, abrasive, temperamental. At times he could be threatening, scary. He was obsessed with crime and he knew police and forensic procedures better than most cops, which also meant that he knew how to anticipate investigators’ moves. (He’d sure blustered his way right into the middle of the reopened case just the other day, Altman reflected.) Wallace owned a Motorola police scanner and would’ve been able to listen in on calls about the victims. His apartment was a few blocks from the college where the first victim was killed.

The detective considered: Let’s say that Desmond had read the passages, become suspicious and circled them, then made a few phone calls to find out more about the case. He might’ve called Wallace, who, as the Tribune’s crime reporter, would be a logical source for more information.

Desmond had met with the reporter, who’d then killed him and hid the body here.

Impossible… Why, for instance, would Gordon have brought the book to the police’s attention?

Maybe to preempt suspicion?

Altman returned to the disgusting, impromptu crypt once again to search it more carefully, trying to unearth some answers.

Gordon Wallace caught a glimpse of Altman in the garage.

The reporter had crept up to a spot only thirty feet away and was hiding behind a bush. The detective wasn’t paying any attention to who might be outside, apparently relying on Josh Randall to alert him to intruders. The young detective was at the head of the driveway, a good two hundred feet away, his back to the garage.

Breathing heavily in the autumn heat, the reporter started through the grass in a crouch. He stopped beside the building and glanced into the side window fast, noting that Altman was standing over a coal bin in the rear of the garage, squinting at something in his hand.

Perfect, Wallace thought and, reaching into his pocket, eased to the open doorway, where his aim would be completely unobstructed.

The detective had found something in Desmond’s wallet and was staring at it — a business card — when he heard the snap of a twig behind him and, alarmed, turned.

A silhouette of a figure was standing in the doorway. He seemed to be holding his hands at chest level.

Blinded by the glare, Altman gasped, “Who’re—?”

A huge flash filled the room.

The detective stumbled backward, groping for his pistol.

“Damn,” came a voice he recognized.

Altman squinted against the back lighting. “Wallace! You goddamn son of a bitch! What the hell’re you doing here?”

The reporter scowled and held up the camera in his hand, looking just as unhappy as Altman. “I was trying to get a candid of you on the job. But you turned around. You ruined it.”

“I ruined it? I told you not to come. You can’t—”

“I’ve got a First Amendment right to be here,” the man snapped. “Freedom of the press.”

“And I’ve got a right to throw your ass in jail. This’s a crime scene.”

“Well, that’s why I want the pictures,” he said petulantly. Then he frowned. “What’s that smell?” The camera sagged and the reporter started to breathe in shallow gasps. He looked queasy.

“It’s Desmond. Somebody murdered him. He’s in the coal bin.”

“Murdered him? So he’s not the killer?”

Altman lifted his radio and barked to Randall, “We’ve got visitors back here.”

“What?”

“We’re in the garage.”

The young officer showed up a moment later, trotting fast. A disdainful look at Wallace. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“How’d you let him get past?” Altman snapped.

“Not his fault,” the reporter said, shivering at the smell. “I parked up the road. How ’bout we get some fresh air?”

Angry, Altman took perverse pleasure in the reporter’s discomfort. “I oughta throw you in jail.”

Wallace held his breath and started for the coal bin, raising the camera.

“Don’t even think about it,” Altman growled and pulled the reporter away.

“Who did it?” Randall asked, nodding at the body.

Altman didn’t share that for a moment he’d actually suspected Wallace Gordon himself. Just before the photo op incident he’d found a stunning clue as to who Desmond’s — and the two women’s — killer probably was. He held up a business card. “I found this on the body.”

On the card was written, “Detective Sergeant Robert Fletcher, Greenville Police Department.”

“Bob?” Randall whispered in shock.

“I don’t want to believe it,” Altman muttered slowly, “but back at the office he didn’t let on he even knew about Desmond, let alone that they’d met at some point.”

“True.”

“And,” he continued, nodding at the mallet, “Bob does all that metalwork — his hobby, remember? That could be one of his.”

Randall looked uneasily at the murder weapon.

Altman’s heart pounded furiously at the betrayal. He now speculated about what had happened. Fletcher bobbled the case intentionally — because he was the killer, probably destroying any evidence that led to him. A loner, a history of short, difficult relationships, obsessed with violence and military history and artifacts and hunting…. He’d lied to them about not reading Two Deaths and had used it as a model to kill those women. Then — after the killings — Desmond happened to read the book too, underlined the passages and, being a good citizen, contacted case officer Fletcher, who was none other than the killer himself. The sergeant murdered him, dumped the body here and then destroyed the library’s computer. Of course, he never made any effort to pursue the vandalism investigation.

Alarmed, Quentin Altman had another thought. He turned to the reporter. “Where was Fletcher when you left the office? Did you see him at the station?” The detective’s hand strayed to his pistol as he looked around the tall grass, wondering if the sergeant had followed him here and intended to kill them as well. Fletcher was a crack rifle shot.

But Randall replied, “He was in the conference room with Andy Carter.”

No! Altman realized that they weren’t the only ones at risk; the author was a witness too — and therefore a potential victim of Fletcher’s. Altman grabbed his cell phone and called the central dispatcher. He asked for Carter.

“He’s not here, sir,” the woman said.

“What?”

“It was getting late so he decided to get a hotel room for the night.”

“Which one’s he staying at?”

“I think it’s the Sutton Inn.”

“You have the number?”

“I do, sure. But he’s not there right now.”

“Where is he?”

“He went out to dinner. I don’t know where but if you need to get in touch with him you can call Bob Fletcher’s phone. They were going together.”

Twenty minutes from town, driving at twice the posted limit.

Altman tried again to call Fletcher but the sergeant wasn’t answering. There wasn’t much Altman could do except try to reason with the sergeant, have him give himself up, plead with him not to kill Carter too. He prayed that the cop hadn’t already done so.

Another try. Still no answer.

He skidded the squad car through the intersection at Route 202, nearly sideswiping one of the ubiquitous dairy tankers in these parts.

“Okay, that was exciting,” Randall whispered, removing his sweaty palm from the dashboard as the truck’s horn brayed in angry protest behind them.

Altman was about to call Fletcher’s phone again when a voice clattered over the car’s radio, “All units. Reports of shots fired on Route One-twenty-eight just west of Ralphs grocery. Repeat, shots fired. All units respond.”

“You think that’s them?”

“We’re three minutes away. We’re about to find out.” Altman called in their position and then pushed the accelerator to the floor; they broke into three-digit speed.

After a brief, harrowing ride, the squad car crested a hill. Randall called breathlessly, “Look!”

Altman could see Bob Fletcher’s Police Interceptor half on, half off the road. He skidded to a stop nearby and the two officers jumped out. Wallace’s car — which’d been hitching an illegal ride on their light bar and siren — braked to a stop fifty feet behind them. The reporter too jumped out, ignoring the detective’s shout to stay back.

Altman felt Randall grip his arm. The young officer was pointing at the shoulder about fifty feet away. In the dim light they could just make out the form of Andrew Carter lying face down in a patch of bloody dirt.

Oh, goddamn it! They weren’t in time; the sergeant had added the author to the list of his victims.

Crouching beside the car, Altman whispered to Randall, “Head up the road that way. Look out for Fletcher. He’s someplace close.”

Scanning the bushes, in a crouch, Altman ran toward the author’s body. As he did he happened to glance to his left and gasped. There was Bob Fletcher on the ground, holding a sheriff’s department shotgun.

He shouted to Randall, “Look out!” And dropped flat. But as he swung the gun toward Fletcher he noted that the sergeant wasn’t moving. The detective hit the man with his flashlight beam. Fletcher’s eyes were glazed over and there was blood on his chest.

Wallace was crouching over Carter. The reporter called, “He’s alive!”

The detective rose, pulled the scattergun out of Fletcher’s lifeless hands and trotted over to the author. Fletcher had shot him and he was unconscious.

“Andy, stay with us!” Altman called, pressing his hand onto the bloody wound in the author’s belly. Over the crest of the road the detective could see the flashing lights and hear the sirens, growing steadily louder. He leaned down and whispered into the man’s ear, “Hang in there! You’ll be all right, you’ll be all right, you’ll be all right…”

His book had saved his life, the author was explaining with a laugh that turned into a wince.

It was the next morning, and Quentin Altman and Carter’s wife — a handsome, middle-aged blonde — were standing at his bedside in Greenville Hospital. Fletcher’s bullet had missed vital organs but had snapped a rib and the author was in major pain despite the happy pills he’d been given.

Carter told them what had happened last evening: “Fletcher says let’s go to dinner — he knew some good barbecue place in the country. We were driving along this deserted road and I was talking about Two Deaths and said that this was just the sort of road I had in mind when I wrote that scene where the Hunter was stalking the first victim after he sees her at McDonald’s. Then, Fletcher said that he pictured that road being in cornfields, not forests.”

“But he said he hadn’t read the book,” Altman said.

“Exactly…. He realized he’d screwed up. He got real quiet for a minute, and I was thinking something’s wrong. I was even going to jump out of the car. But then he pulls his gun out and I grab it but he still shoots me. I reach over with my foot and slam on the brake. We go off the road and he slams his head into the window or something. I grab the gun and roll out of the car. I’m heading for the bushes to hide in but I see him getting the shotgun from the trunk. He starts toward me and I shoot him.” He shook his head. “Man, if it hadn’t been for the book, what he said about it, I never would’ve known what he was going to do.”

Since Altman was involved in the incident, the investigation of the shooting went to another detective, who reported that the forensics bore out Carter’s story. There was GSR — gunshot residue — on Fletcher’s hand, which meant he’d fired the pistol, and a bullet with Carter’s blood on it embedded in the cruiser passenger door. Evidence also proved that Fletcher was indeed the Greenville Strangler. The sergeant’s fingerprints were all over the mallet and a search of the sergeant’s house revealed several items — stockings and lingerie — that had been taken from the homes of the victims. Murdering Howard Desmond and trying to murder Andy Carter — well, those had been to cover up his original crimes. But what had been the sergeant’s motive for killing the two women in Greenville? Maybe the anger at being left by his wife had boiled over. Maybe he’d had a secret affair with one of the victims, which had turned sour, and he’d decided to stage her death as a random act of violence. Maybe someday an answer would come to light.

Or maybe, Altman reflected, unlike in a mystery novel, they’d never know what had driven the man to step over the edge into the dark world of the killers he’d once hunted.

It was then that Wallace Gordon loped into the hospital room, saying, “Hot off the presses.” He handed a copy of the Tribune to Carter. On the front page was Wallace’s story about the solving of the Greenville Strangler case.

“Keep that,” Wallace said. “A souvenir.”

Thanking him, Carter’s wife folded the paper up and set it aside with the stiff gesture of someone who has no interest in memorabilia about a difficult episode in one’s life.

Quentin Altman walked to the door and, just as he was about to leave, paused. He turned back. “Oh, one thing, Andy — how’s that book of yours end? Do the police ever find the Hunter?”

Carter caught himself as he was about to answer. The author gave a grin. “You know, Detective — you want to find that out, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to buy yourself a copy.”

Several days later Andrew Carter slipped out of his bed, where he’d lain, wide-awake, for the past three hours. It was two a.m.

He glanced at the quiescent form of his sleeping wife and — with the help of his cane — limped to his closet, where he found and pulled on an old pair of faded jeans, sneakers and a Boston University sweatshirt — his good-luck writing clothes, which he hadn’t donned in well over a year.

Still in pain from the gunshot, he walked slowly down the hall to his office and went inside, turning on the light. Sitting at his desk, he clicked on his computer and stared at the screen for a long moment.

Then suddenly he began to write. His keyboarding was clumsy at first, his fingers jabbing two keys at once or missing the intended one altogether. Still, as the hours passed, his skill as a typist returned and soon the words were pouring from his mind onto the screen flawlessly and fast.

By the time the sky began to glow with pink-gray light and a morning bird’s cell-phone trill sounded from the crisp holly bush outside his window, he’d finished the story completely — thirty-nine double-spaced pages.

He moved the cursor to the top of the document, thought about an appropriate title and typed: Copycat.

Then Andy Carter sat back in his comfortable chair and carefully read his work from start to finish.

The story opened with a reporter finding a suspense novel that contained several circled passages, which were strikingly similar to two real-life murders that had occurred earlier. The reporter takes the book to a detective, who concludes that the man who circled the paragraphs is the perpetrator, a copycat inspired by the novel to kill.

Reviving the case, the detective enlists the aid of the novel’s author, who reluctantly agrees to help and brings the police some fan letters, one of which leads to the suspected killer.

But when the police track the suspect to his summer home they find that he’s been murdered too. He wasn’t the killer at all but had presumably circled the passages only because he, like the reporter, was struck by the similarity between the novel and the real-life crimes.

Then the detective gets a big shock: On the fan’s body he finds clues that prove that a local police sergeant is the real killer. The author, who happens to be with this very officer at that moment, is nearly killed but manages to wrestle the gun away and shoot the cop in self-defense.

Case closed.

Or so it seems…

But Andy Carter hadn’t ended the story there. He added yet another twist. Readers learn at the very end that the sergeant was innocent. He’d been set up as a fall guy by the real Strangler.

Who happened to be the author himself.

Racked by writer’s block after his first novel was published, unable to follow it up with another, the author had descended into madness. Desperate and demented, he came to believe that he might jump-start his writing by actually reenacting scenes from his novel so he stalked and strangled two women, exactly as his fictional villain had done.

The murders hadn’t revived his ability to write, however, and he slumped further into depression. And then, even more troubling, he heard from the fan who’d grown suspicious about the similarities between certain passages in the novel and the real crimes. The author had no choice: He met with the fan at his lakeside cottage and beat him to death, hiding the body in the garage and covering up the disappearance by pretending to be the fan and telling his boss and landlord that he was leaving town unexpectedly.

The author believed he was safe. But his contentment didn’t last. Enter the reporter who’d found the underlined passages, and the investigation started anew; the police called, asking him for fan letters. The author knew the only way to be safe was to give the police a scapegoat. So he agreed to meet with the police — but in fact he’d arrived in town a day before his planned meeting with the detective. He broke into the police sergeant’s house, planted some incriminating clothing he’d taken from the dead women’s houses and stole one of the cop’s mallets and a business card. He then went out to the dead fan’s lake house, where he’d hidden the body, and used the tool to crush the skull of the decomposed body and hid the mallet, along with some of the dead man’s hairs, in an oil drum. The card he slipped into the wallet. The next day he showed up at the police station with the fan letter that led to the cottage — and ultimately to the sergeant.

The author, who’d asked the unsuspecting sergeant to drive to dinner, grabbed his gun, made him stop the car and get out. Then he shot him, rested the pistol near the dead cop’s hands and fired it into the woods to get gunshot residue on the man’s finger (writers know as much about forensics as most cops). The author had gotten the shotgun from the trunk, left it with the sergeant and then climbed back into the squad car, where he’d taken a deep breath and shot himself in the belly — as superficially as he could.

He’d then crawled onto the road to wait for a passing car to come to their aid.

The police bought the entire story.

In the final scene the author returned home to try to resume his writing, having literally gotten away with murder.

Carter now finished rereading the story, his heart thumping hard with pride and excitement. True, it needed polishing but, considering that he hadn’t written a word for more than a year, it was a glorious accomplishment.

He was a writer once again.

The only problem was that he couldn’t publish the story. He couldn’t even show it to a soul.

For the simple reason, of course, that it wasn’t fiction; every word was true. Andy Carter himself was the homicidal author.

Still, he thought, as he erased the entire story from his computer, publishing it didn’t matter one bit. The important thing was that by writing it he’d managed to kill his writer’s block as ruthlessly and efficiently as he’d murdered Bob Fletcher and Howard Desmond and the two women in Greenville. And, even better, he knew too how to make sure that he’d never be blocked again: From now on he’d give up fiction and pursue what he’d realized he was destined to write: true crime.

What a perfect solution this was! He’d never want for ideas again; TV news, magazines and the papers would provide dozens of story leads he could choose from.

And, he reflected, limping downstairs to make a pot of coffee, if it turned out that there were no crimes that particularly interested him… well, Andy Carter knew that he was fully capable of taking matters into his own hands and whipping up a bit of inspiration all by himself.