More Twisted

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’ssales 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 theNortheast. 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