“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.