Black Lightning

by John Saul

  Now he would pursue Anne Jeffers. He would toy with her for a while, let her think perhaps she’d been right all along.

  Then he would plant the seeds of doubt in her mind, and in the end, after she knew the precise truth of what had happened, he would add her to his list, making her his final subject.

  His fingers caressed the satiny texture of the remote control, and there was a soft click as the television screen went blank, the picture contracting into a tiny white dot in the center of the black screen, only to die away completely a moment later.

  Die away as his subjects had died away.

  But their deaths had not been in vain, for out of those deaths—no, not deaths, but merely failed experiments—had come knowledge. The Experimenter had long ago decided that knowledge was far more important even than life itself. Where Socrates had once observed that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, the man in the darkened room knew better: for him, it was the examination of the very phenomenon of life that made his existence possible. Indeed, as he’d thought about it during the long hiatus during which the authorities—those pitiably small minds who were far too simple to understand his work—built their case against Richard Kraven, the Experimenter had come to understand that even the subjects who’d died during his investigations could not truly be considered failures. After all, even in their deaths they’d contributed to the body of knowledge he had been building as painstakingly as the authorities had been building their case against Richard Kraven.

  Now—now that Richard Kraven had been executed—the time had come for him to begin again. The body of his knowledge would expand, and at the same time he would prove once and for all just how much smarter he was than those who sought to judge him.

  Outside the window, a movement caught his eye. He glanced down at the street below.

  A woman was walking along the sidewalk.

  Going to work?

  Returning home from a completed shift?

  Did it matter? Not really. All that mattered was that the woman had caught his eye. Perhaps, now that the time was right and he could soon begin again, he would begin with her.

  Or perhaps not.

  Perhaps he would begin again with someone else entirely.

  The Experimenter smiled to himself as he remembered how it had been the last time, when all the investigators—and the teams they’d put together to examine the scattered bodies—had carried out their fruitless searches of his subjects’ backgrounds, looking for a common denominator that would tie them all together, tie the victims to the single person who had caused their deaths. Of course they had never found that common denominator, so now when it all began again, they would go running back to their records, searching yet again.

  Searching for something they would never find.

  The thought of the havoc his new experiments would cause brought a smile to his lips, and he finally turned away from the window. The day had been long, and filled with excitement, and now it was time for him to sleep.

  Tomorrow he would begin designing the next series of experiments.

  Unconsciously, the Experimenter flexed his fingers once more, this time in anticipation.…

  CHAPTER 11

  A gray sky hovered low over Seattle the next morning, and as people all over the city huddled over their first cups of coffee, newspapers were opened to the editorial page. In kitchens, coffee shops, snack rooms, and offices, nearly everyone in the city began the day by reading the column that had been dictated from the Group Health Critical Care Unit on Capitol Hill the day before:

  Anne Jeffers …

  A Few Last Thoughts

  About Richard Kraven

  At noon yesterday, a reign of terror that spanned five years, as many states, and a dozen cities and towns came to an end when Richard Kraven was electrocuted. Though convicted of three slayings, Kraven was the prime suspect in many others, including at least seven still unsolved cases in his native city of Seattle. At the request of the condemned man, this reporter was among the last people to speak to him before his execution. During the course of that conversation …

  “What the hell does this broad think she’s doing?”

  The booming voice that filled his office in the Public Safety Building was familiar enough that Mark Blakemoor didn’t even have to look up from the report he was studying. From the moment he’d scanned Anne Jeffers’s column in this morning’s Herald, the detective had been expecting Jack McCarty to come barging into the office Blakemoor shared with Lois Ackerly. McCarty’s own copy of the paper would be crushed in his huge fist, his normally ruddy face flushed to the point where anyone who didn’t know him might suspect that the white-haired chief of detectives was about to suffer a terminal stroke. Sure enough, here he was. Mark smoothly moved his coffee cup aside just as the chief slammed the offending newspaper onto the desk.

  “ ‘At least seven unsolved cases’?” McCarty demanded. “What is this crap? And when did she write it? I thought you said her husband was in the fuckin’ hospital!”

  “He is,” Blakemoor replied mildly, leaning back in his chair to savor his boss’s rage. “I sent her some flowers this morning. Thought it might cheer her up.” McCarty’s face turned even redder, causing Mark to wonder if it could actually be possible for a human head to explode. Then, as a vein began to throb in McCarty’s neck, he decided a little extra agitation might just be in order. “You know, if Ackerly heard you call Anne Jeffers a ‘broad,’ she’d have a sexism citation in your jacket before lunchtime.”

  The jab had the intended effect. Jack McCarty spun around, his eyes searching the area outside Blakemoor’s office for any sign of Blakemoor’s partner. But if Lois Ackerly had arrived at the unit yet, she was nowhere to be seen. “Jeez, Blakemoor, don’t say things like that. I only got three more years to retirement, and the last thing I need is another chauvinist-pig chit.” He dropped heavily into the battered wooden chair that sat in the corner of the detective’s cubicle, his eyes fixing malevolently on the small picture of Anne Jeffers that accompanied the column. “You know she was going to do that?”

  Blakemoor shrugged. “She had to write something, didn’t she? She’s a reporter, remember? Why else would she have gone to the execution?”

  “The way she writes it, you’d think she got an engraved invite from that creep Kraven.” His blue eyes took on a look of eagerness. “Did he suffer, Mark?” he asked. “Tell me he did, goddammit. Tell me the son of a bitch shit his pants before they whacked him.” McCarty’s right fist slammed into his left palm. “Christ, I wish I coulda done it to him myself!”

  Mark Blakemoor shifted uneasily in his seat, wishing now he hadn’t goaded his boss into an even more vindictive mood than the one Anne Jeffers had induced. On the other hand, there wasn’t a man or woman in the department who hadn’t wanted Richard Kraven to suffer after they’d seen the pictures of his victims. Even Mark, who after fifteen years on the homicide unit had thought he was inured to anything, had found his stomach heaving the first time he attended an autopsy of one of Kraven’s victims. Actually, he’d been okay until the medical examiner had told him that it appeared the victim had still been alive when Kraven cut open his chest and began tearing him to pieces. At that point Mark had excused himself, hurried to the men’s room, and deposited his lunch into one of the toilets. Still, Kraven had been executed, and Mark Blakemoor found himself strangely discomfited by McCarty’s words. Then, as more members of the unit drifted into his office to complain about Anne’s column, he remembered their conversation on the plane the day before. Was that what was worrying him? Some slight nagging doubt that everyone might have been wrong?

  “Why’s she want to kick a dead horse?” Frank Lovejoy asked, dolefully shaking his bald head. “She’s been living off Kraven for five years now—can’t she let it go?”

  “Let her write whatever the hell she wants,” McCarty groused. “Time for us to get on to other things. What about the DOA they took into Harborview last night, Fran
k? Anything I need to know about? The mayor gonna be calling me?”

  Lovejoy shook his head. “Just another drive-by. Sometimes I think we ought to just let ’em all go at each other till they wipe themselves out. Fuckin’ scumbags.”

  McCarty grunted his agreement, then turned his attention back to Mark Blakemoor. “So what are you on to now that Kraven’s been burnt?”

  Although it wasn’t yet eight A.M., Blakemoor sighed tiredly as he gestured to the stack of open cases on his desk. In the corner, occupying half a dozen brown corrugated boxes, were his copies of every scrap of information pertaining to every single case in which Richard Kraven had been a suspect, not just in Seattle, but everywhere else as well. It had been more than two years since he and Lois Ackerly had spent all their time investigating the kind of killings that had stopped with Kraven’s arrest, but he still found himself going back to the boxes over and over again, searching one folder after another for something—anything—he might have missed that would tie at least one of the local cases indisputably to Richard Kraven. The evidence was there; he was certain of it. Buried somewhere in the depths of one of those boxes there was something he hadn’t yet spotted; some insignificant fact that would let him at last put to rest the nagging feeling he had that something was wrong, that there was something about this case nobody yet understood. In the two-plus years that Kraven had waited to die, Blakemoor hadn’t found it. And maybe, he had to admit on the days when the frustration of the case threatened to overwhelm him, he hadn’t found that little fact because it simply wasn’t there. Still, why did his gut consistently tell him that Richard Kraven was as guilty as the courts had found him? Mark Blakemoor had been operating on his guts every day for the last twenty years, and they had never failed him yet. He sighed again. Maybe it was finally time to let it all go, move the files down to the storeroom in the bowels of the building, get them out of his sight, remove them from the corner of his office, where they taunted him every day. He looked up at McCarty, nodding toward the stack of boxes. “First, I guess I’ll get all that crap out of here.”

  Jack McCarty’s head bobbed in gruff agreement. He started out of Blakemoor’s office, then wheeled around to glare once more at the open newspaper that had started his day so badly. “You think that Jeffers broad is going to keep harping on this?” he asked.

  Mark Blakemoor, still remembering his conversation with Anne, shrugged in a carefully calculated display of ignorance. No point putting the homicide chief in an even fouler mood. “How would I know?” he asked. “I can’t read her mind.”

  Grunting, McCarty turned and shambled out of Blakemoor’s office, already feeling his ulcer start to act up. Another day of milk for lunch, another day in which he would not dare eat one of the pastrami sandwiches he loved so much. Well, what the hell. Nobody ever said life was going to be a pastrami sandwich anyway.

  As the chief made his exit, Lois Ackerly arrived, precariously balancing two Starbucks cups on top of what looked very much like a box of doughnuts. “What’s wrong with McCarty?” she asked, putting the box down on Mark’s desk. “The look he gave me would have killed a lesser woman.” Then her eyes fell on the ruined newspaper protruding from beneath the doughnut box, and she understood. “Oh. Anne Jeffers.” Her gaze shifted inquiringly to her partner. “Did you know this was coming?”

  “Sort of,” Mark replied. He pulled the top off one of the coffee cups and helped himself to a particularly sticky-looking, chocolate-covered pastry.

  “And?” Lois Ackerly pressed when it became obvious that Mark wasn’t going to tell her anything else.

  “And what?”

  Ackerly flopped into the chair behind the desk her partner always described as “compulsively neat” and fixed him with the look that meant he might as well tell her everything he knew or be prepared to subject himself to a day of nagging far worse than anything his ex-wife had ever dished out. Reading her expression perfectly, Mark closed the door to their office and recounted the events of the previous day.

  “So what do you think?” Ackerly asked when he was through. “Is it over, or isn’t it?”

  Blakemoor hesitated, then decided to go with his gut feeling. He picked up the newspaper, tore it into shreds, and dropped the whole mess into the wastebasket. “It’s over,” he told her. “As far as I’m concerned, the case is closed.” But as he reached for his cup of coffee, he found himself glancing down into the wastebasket, where Anne Jeffers’s picture seemed to be staring back at him.

  CHAPTER 12

  … Richard Kraven still insisted that he was innocent of all charges that have ever been brought against him. Even on his last morning, he still protested his innocence, and as I listened to him, I had to wonder what motive he could possibly have for lying, knowing that in only a few more hours he would surely be dead.

  Did he expect a last-minute reprieve?

  Surely not, for despite the hopes of the anti-capital-punishment forces gathered in front of the prison, both the courts and the governor of Connecticut had made it clear there would be no further intervention in the case.

  What, then, would Richard Kraven have to gain by lying to me?

  Perhaps it was simply his way of attempting to make me his last victim, by leaving me with questions in my mind, questions that remain unanswered …

  “How dare she write such filth?” Edna Kraven’s voice quavered with anger and the newspaper rattled in her shaking hand. Finally, she had to set it down on the kitchen table. Really, it was simply too much to be borne! Richard—her wonderful, perfect Richard—dead not even twenty-four hours, and that awful Jeffers woman was already writing about him again, repeating yet again all the terrible things she’d written for the last five years.

  It was bitterness, of course. Edna had long ago come to understand that Anne Jeffers had fallen in love with Richard, and that when Richard had spurned her, her love had turned to hatred. Why else would she have pursued Richard the way she had, making up all those terrible lies about him? For years Edna had written letter after angry letter to the editor and the publisher of the Seattle Herald, protesting that Anne Jeffers was slandering her son, but they had never even responded to her. Once, though, they’d printed one of her letters, but then they’d let Anne Jeffers write an article with the disgusting insinuation that somehow the relationship between Edna and her son might have led to the awful things she’d claimed Richard had done. When Edna read that particular article, she’d actually felt faint—the very idea of what Anne Jeffers had implied fairly set her skin to crawling. To sully the perfect love between a mother and son that way …

  Even now, just remembering that article made Edna Kraven’s blood boil, and she glared across the table at her other son, Rory.

  Rory!

  She’d named him after Rory Calhoun, who had been one of her favorite movie stars. So handsome, so strong.

  And so different from her own Rory.

  Her Rory had taken after his father, that shiftless no-good with his beady eyes and that weak chin, who had walked out on her right after Rory had been born, leaving her with no one to care for her except Richard. And Richard had cared for her, too. He’d helped her with the baby, and done all the housework, and still managed to have time to get perfect grades in school.

  A genius, that’s what Richard had been.

  But Rory …

  Her lips tightened with annoyance as she watched him eat the cereal—her cereal, to which he’d simply helped himself—just as if nothing had happened, just as if his brother hadn’t been murdered yesterday. Yes, murdered, she repeated to herself. That’s what they did to Richard, no matter what they called it in the newspapers or in those terrible Star Chamber affairs they’d claimed were legal hearings. They’d lynched Richard, and deep in her heart of hearts Edna Kraven had a terrible feeling that Rory—his own brother—didn’t care.

  Why else would he have brought the paper with that disgusting article into the house this morning? “Well?” she demanded, her lips pursing, he
r eyes glittering with fury.

  Rory Kraven looked up from the sports pages he’d been perusing as he ate his cereal. Goddamn bitch was gonna start carping at him yet again. Nothing ever satisfied the bitch. Even after thirty goddamn years, nothing he ever did pleased her. Yesterday afternoon and last night had been the worst. He’d arranged to take the day off work to be with her, certain she would want his support when the time finally came for Richard to die, but by the time he’d gone to sleep on the Hide-A-Bed in the guest room that had once been his, he wondered why he’d come at all. All day long he’d had to listen to his mother rant on about Richard—how smart he was, how perfect he was, what a good son he’d always been. Rory had listened to it all, just the way he always listened to it, and he’d known what it really meant, because half the time she said it right out loud. Even now her words echoed in his ears:

  Richard was smart—not like you!

  Richard was perfect—not like you!

  Richard was a good son—not like you!

  All his life he’d known who she really loved. Even when he was a little boy, she’d always held Richard up to him as the ideal of perfection. Why can’t you get as good grades as Richard gets? Why can’t you behave yourself, the way Richard always does?

  Richard could talk before he was eight months old!

  Richard could walk when he was less than a year!

  Richard is a genius!

  Richard, Richard, Richard!

  He’d heard it every day as he was growing up, even after Richard went to college, then moved into a house of his own. Rory himself moved out of the house as soon as he could, renting the little apartment on Capitol Hill where he still lived today, twelve years later. But moving out of his mother’s house hadn’t changed a thing. Edna had been glad to be rid of him, and she’d proved it by showing him his old room the first time he came back to visit her.