More Twisted

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