Black Lightning

by John Saul

  “Has something happened, Anne?” the detective asked.

  “It’s my husband,” she replied. “He’s had a heart attack. I have to get home right away. My flight’s not till tomorrow.” She felt panic rise. “I have to get home!”

  Mark Blakemoor reached into the inside pocket of his rumpled gabardine jacket and handed her an envelope. “My flight leaves in a couple of hours,” he told her. “If there isn’t room for both of us, you fly, and I’ll go home on your ticket tomorrow.”

  Anne’s brows rose a fraction of an inch. “And in return?” she asked. There had to be a catch: in all her years of dealing with cops, Mark Blakemoor had been the single individual who refused to divulge anything unless he was promised a future favor as the price. Now, to her surprise, he shook his head.

  “This isn’t work,” he said. “This is personal. With personal, everything’s a freebie. Okay?”

  “Let’s go,” Anne replied, instinctively knowing that he didn’t want to be thanked for the offer.

  Five minutes later they were out of the prison, being driven through the crowd of demonstrators and reporters in a car the warden had supplied.

  At least, Anne reflected as she heard the muffled questions the press was shouting after the closed vehicle, I don’t have to keep talking about the execution. One more article for the Herald and then, perhaps, she would take a leave of absence, and concentrate on Glen’s recovery.

  As the car sped away from the prison, the thought lingered in her mind, and the more she thought about it, the more it appealed to her.

  After all, soon it would be summer, and school would be out, and the whole family would be together. Then her mood darkened: how much of the family would there still be?

  What if Glen didn’t make it? What would she do? How would she cope? How could she live without Glen?

  CHAPTER 7

  Total silence hung over the tenth grade journalism class at Maples School, named for the grove of trees within which it had been constructed back in 1923. Heather Jeffers and her classmates gazed fixedly at the television set that had been brought into the room so they could watch and discuss the coverage of Richard Kraven’s execution; the set had been on since eight-thirty, and until the stroke of nine—noon in Connecticut, where the execution was taking place—several of the students had been speculating on how close to the deadline it would get before the execution was stayed. Maude Brink, who had been leading the discussion of both the media coverage of the execution and capital punishment itself for the last week, had warned them that this time a stay was unlikely, but some of the kids clung to their hopes right up until the end. What struck Mrs. Brink as most interesting was that those students most strongly opposed to capital punishment were the most certain that the execution would inevitably be delayed, while those who were the execution’s strongest supporters were convinced it would take place as scheduled.

  Obviously, each faction believed that in the end the system would validate his or her own view.

  Yet when the execution had taken place and the first word had come out of the prison that Richard Kraven was dead, the entire class had finally experienced the reality of it. This was not a television show, or a movie, or a book, in which the execution affected only a man who was the invention of a writer’s mind. This time it was real, and a man who had only a few seconds ago been as much alive as each of them was now dead. As they all watched numbly, the news anchor on the screen began cutting to correspondents around the country, each of them interviewing someone whose life would be directly affected by the execution.

  First there was Edna Kraven, being interviewed in her small home in the south end of Seattle, not far from Boeing Field.

  As the camera’s relentless eye zoomed in on the tear-stained face of Richard Kraven’s mother, Heather and her friends squirmed uncomfortably, watching the woman’s most private emotions exposed for all the world to watch.

  “He was always a good boy,” Edna whispered, her fingers twisting a crumpled handkerchief with which she blotted at red-rimmed eyes every few seconds. “Smarter than all the other kids, always interested in everything, and always helping everyone. Everybody liked my Richard. How could they do this to him? Why did they want to? He never hurt anyone—never! It isn’t right! It just isn’t!” The camera held steady on the distraught woman as a fit of sobbing overcame her; then, in what seemed an almost reluctant retreat from her, so she could grieve in private, it cut away to Richard’s brother Rory, who sat across a worn coffee table from his mother.

  “It must be almost as hard for you as for your mother,” the pretty blond correspondent said, her face carefully composed into an expression designed to tell the viewers that this job was not easy for her. “Tell us, what went through your mind as the clock at the prison struck noon?”

  Rory Kraven, visibly nervous in front of the camera, glanced at his mother, then shrugged. “I—I guess I didn’t really think anything,” he stammered. “I mean, I know what my brother did, and—” But before he could continue, his mother cut him off.

  “Nothing!” she flared. “My Richard did nothing, and you know it! How dare you speak ill of your brother? If you were half the man he was—”

  As some invisible director at the network decided that Edna Kraven’s furious outburst was less compelling than her grief, the image on the screen abruptly switched to an elegantly dressed and perfectly coiffed woman of perhaps sixty, who was being interviewed by another attractive young network correspondent.

  “I’m with Arla Talmadge in Atlanta. Mrs. Talmadge, how do you feel today?”

  Arla Talmadge touched the corner of one eye with a perfectly pressed handkerchief, then sighed and shook her head. “I’m not sure what I feel anymore. Ever since Richard Kraven killed my son, I—well, there’s just an emptiness inside me. Did he say anything before they—well, before they did what they did?”

  “Early indications are that he didn’t,” the reporter replied.

  “Then we’ll never know why he did it, will we?” Mrs. Talmadge asked. “And I can’t help wondering, what was really accomplished today? After all, killing that man won’t bring my son or any of the others back, will it? I keep wondering if maybe he wouldn’t have—I don’t know—explained it all someday, I suppose. But now …” She drew in a shaky breath, let it out, then shook her head again. “I just don’t know,” she went on. “I suppose there’s nothing to do now except try to go on living.”

  For almost fifteen minutes it went on, the images on the screen shifting as the families and friends of the victims were interviewed, some of them expressing relief that at last this grim chapter in their lives was over; others barely able to contain their rage that Richard Kraven hadn’t been tortured before he died; still others echoing Arla Talmadge’s sad sense of resignation in the face of the inevitable.

  It was in the midst of one of those interviews that the network anchor cut in to announce that the warden was ready to speak to the press, and the scene dissolved to a room painted in a sickly green in which lights had been set up and several microphones placed on the shiny surface of a gray metal table.

  The classroom buzzed with anticipation, and then the students began nudging each other as they recognized Heather Jeffers’s mother in the group of witnesses who followed Warden Wendell Rustin into the room. Her face pale, her expression strained, she hovered near the wall just inside the door.

  “It’s really her, Heather,” someone said from the back of the room. “It’s your mom! Cool!”

  As the warden started to speak, Heather ignored her classmate’s comment, her eyes fixing on the screen.

  “At noon today, Richard Kraven was executed,” Wendell Rustin began. “He entered the chamber at 11:55, and was strapped into the chair. The electrodes were applied, and at exactly noon he was exposed to a charge of two thousand volts. At two minutes past noon he was pronounced dead.” The warden fell silent for a moment, then appeared to look directly into the camera. “Are there any questions?”r />
  Instantly, a babble of voices emerged from the television speakers, but then Rustin pointed to someone, and the rest of the crowd subsided into a restless silence. “Did he say anything? Did he confess?”

  The warden glanced toward Anne Jeffers, who shook her head and seemed about to speak when suddenly a door opened and a uniformed guard stepped inside and whispered into Anne’s ear. A look of surprise crossed her face and she rushed from the room.

  In the classroom, Heather Jeffers’s schoolmates all turned to gaze curiously at her, as if by dint of being Anne Jeffers’s daughter, she should be able to explain her mother’s sudden departure. Maude Brink, seeing the look of worry that had now come over Heather’s face, switched off the television. “All right,” she began as she moved briskly to the front of the room and faced the class. “What do we think? Was the coverage fair? Was it justified? Was it responsible reporting of news, or was it sensationalism? Who wants to start?”

  Three hands instantly went up, and Mrs. Brink nodded to Adam Steiner, who sat in the back row and rarely spoke in class.

  “How come they always have to talk to the families?” he asked. “I mean, Mrs. Kraven didn’t do anything—why couldn’t they just leave her alone?”

  “How do you know she didn’t do anything?” someone else asked. “She must have done something to have raised a nut-case like Richard Kraven!”

  “Maybe he had something wrong with his genes,” a third voice suggested. “Nobody knows what causes people to do things like that.”

  “I heard he was a Satanist,” someone else called out, and Mrs. Brink finally raised her hand to bring some order back into the discussion.

  “For now, let’s stick to the coverage, and not speculate on Richard Kraven’s motives, all right? This is a class in current events and journalism, not criminology—” The teacher fell silent as the door to her classroom opened. One of the principal’s secretaries came in, nodded curtly to her, and without any apology for disrupting the class, spoke directly to one of the students.

  “Heather? Could you come with me, please? Mrs. Garrett would like to speak with you for a moment.”

  Maude Brink was about to object that whatever it might be could surely wait until her class was over, but then she remembered Heather’s mother’s mysterious disappearance from the press conference, and gave the teenager an encouraging smile as she left the classroom. Something, obviously, had gone very wrong.

  As Heather entered Olivia Garrett’s office, the principal gestured her onto the sofa, then sat in the wing-backed chair instead of returning to her desk.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,” she said, approaching the subject with the directness for which she was famous throughout the school. “Your father’s secretary just called.”

  “Rita?” Heather breathed. “Rita Alvarez?”

  Mrs. Garrett nodded. “Your father has apparently had a heart attack. He’s been taken to the hospital, and your mother wants you to go there right away. Mrs. Alvarez is picking your brother up at his school, then she’ll come—”

  But Heather Jeffers was no longer listening to Olivia Garrett. Instead she was trying to absorb what she had just been told. Her father? In the hospital?

  A heart attack?

  If her mother wanted her to go to the hospital—and Kevin, too—it must be serious! But just this morning he’d been fine! He’d gone out jogging, and when he’d come back, he hadn’t even been out of breath. So how could he have a heart attack?

  Suddenly fifteen-year-old Heather felt far younger than she was, and far more vulnerable.

  Was her father going to die?

  CHAPTER 8

  They’d been in the air almost two hours, and if the uncomfortable silence between Anne Jeffers and him was going to go on for another three, Mark Blakemoor decided, he’d have a couple of drinks and then try to get some sleep.

  He’d done far too much drinking lately, though, especially in the ten months since Patsy had left. Eighteen years and then the marriage had simply been over. All she’d said was that she couldn’t take it anymore, that she couldn’t deal with being a cop’s wife any longer. But what else could he do? He couldn’t change careers—didn’t even want to. On the other hand, Patsy had complained about his drinking, too, and if he wanted to be really honest about it, she was right—he had been drinking too much. Besides, even one drink on an airplane always left him with a hangover. Better to spend the time finding out what, if anything, Richard Kraven had told Anne Jeffers before he’d died.

  “Anything you want to talk about?” he asked, shifting his muscular six-foot-two, 210-pound frame a fraction of an inch in a futile effort to make himself more comfortable in the cramped seat.

  Anne had been staring out the window at the endless expanse of clouds that lay in an unbroken blanket a few thousand feet below the plane, and at first the detective’s words didn’t register. Then she sighed, rubbed at her stiffening neck and glanced over at him. “About Glen?” she asked, deliberately pretending she couldn’t read Blakemoor like a book. From what she’d gathered about his recent divorce, the man had barely paid any attention to his own wife when he’d been married to her; so why on earth would he now be interested in her husband, whom he didn’t even know? Then she relented: after all, Blakemoor had been willing to give up his seat on this flight, even though it hadn’t come to that. “Or is it Richard Kraven you want to talk about?”

  “Either way,” Blakemoor replied. “But I guess I’m not real good with the sympathy thing. Patsy always used to say—” He cut his own words short, reddening slightly. “Oh, the hell with what Patsy used to say, right? So come on, give. What did Kraven say? I’ve got a lot of open cases back home. If you can close even one of them for me, it’d sure help.”

  Anne shook her head. “Believe me, Mark, if he’d said anything relevant, I’d tell you. Even if I didn’t use it in a story, I’d still tell you. You’ve put too much effort into this for too many years. But it was the same old thing: he didn’t have anything to do with anything, he was framed, there’s a conspiracy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

  The detective’s eyes narrowed darkly. “You’d think a man’d want to go to his grave with a clean conscience, wouldn’t you? But not Kraven. Coldest son of a bitch I ever saw.” Silence fell between them again as each retreated to his own thoughts. With Blakemoor’s next question, though, Anne knew at once that his mullings hadn’t been terribly different from her own. “What do you think? Any chance at all that we were wrong?”

  “Who are you asking?” Anne countered, a thin smile curling the corners of her mouth. “Anne Jeffers, ace journalist, or Anne Jeffers, private citizen?”

  “How about we start with the private citizen?”

  “He’s guilty,” Anne stated with no hesitation at all. “Guilty, guilty, guilty, as charged. And guilty of all the others he was never charged with, too.”

  “Okay,” Blakemoor said. “Now, what about Anne Jeffers, ace reporter? What does she think?”

  Anne spread her fingers wide and wiggled them as if she were typing at an invisible keyboard. “Show me a reporter who wouldn’t like to rip the cover off a conspiracy that sent an innocent man to the electric chair. I mean, we’re talking Pulitzer Prize here, Mark.”

  The detective eyed her speculatively, trying to gauge how much of what she’d just said was meant seriously and how much was merely intended to rile him. “Does that mean you’re planning to keep chasing this one?” he asked.

  Anne opened her mouth to answer, then realized she didn’t know what she was going to do. Three hours earlier, before she’d heard from Rita Alvarez, it would have been an easy call: given what Kraven had said in their last conversation, she’d at least have to give it one more shot. Because if Kraven hadn’t been lying, and she could prove it, there undoubtedly would be a Pulitzer in it for her. Not to mention a huge book contract, probably a movie, and a new job with a salary that would make her current paycheck look like a kid’s allowance. No
w, though, everything was different. In just those few minutes she’d talked to Rita, all her priorities had changed. “I don’t know if I’ll chase the story or not,” she finally replied to the detective’s question. “It’s all going to depend on Glen’s situation. It may be that I’ll take a leave of absence.”

  An incredulous grin spread over the detective’s face. “You? Give me a break, Anne—when it comes to working a story, you’re no different from me when I have a tough case. The hell with hours, the hell with food, the hell with sleep, and the hell with the family, too.”

  Anne’s first reaction to Blakemoor’s words was to mount an immediate and aggressive counterattack: “Maybe that’s why Patsy left you. At least my marriage is still very much intact, thank you.” Blakemoor winced, and Anne immediately regretted her words. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That really wasn’t fair.” As she thought about it, she realized just how unfair it truly was. After all, it wasn’t she who had to hold dinner for Glen every night. Often it was exactly the opposite, or even worse—sometimes during the last few months it was Heather and Kevin waiting for both their parents, or eating alone while both adult Jefferses grabbed a bite in their offices. If she wanted to be completely honest about it, Blakemoor hadn’t been far off the mark at all—she did tend to shut everything else out when she was working on a story. The one that had ended today had occupied nearly all her attention for most of the last five years.

  Suddenly she had a chilling thought: If she hadn’t been so consumed with the Kraven case, would she have seen Glen’s heart attack coming? But how could she have? It had simply come out of the blue!

  Or had it?

  She cast her mind back over the last few days, then the last few weeks and months. How long had it been since she and Glen had simply taken an evening off together, let alone a whole weekend? Usually one or the other—if not both of them—were working. His birthday had gone uncelebrated, as had their anniversary three months ago. If she’d become too engrossed in her work even to celebrate some of the most important landmarks in her life, how could she expect to be aware of her husband’s health?