Black Lightning

by John Saul

  As he switched the generator on, its droning hum finally drowned out the beating of his heart, and the Experimenter relaxed a little. Filling a teakettle with water, he put it onto one of the three burners in the motor home’s small galley.

  Twenty minutes later, as the fog finally began to burn off and the morning sun cast its golden light through the towering treetops, the boy’s head dropped to his chest and his breathing took on the steady rhythm of a deeply narcotized sleep.

  The Experimenter lowered the blinds over the windows of the motor home and switched on its interior lights. Opening one of the cupboards below the galley counter, he took out a roll of transparent plastic sheeting. Working slowly and methodically—so practiced now that he barely had to think about what he was doing at all—the Experimenter began lining the interior of the motor home with plastic.

  First the floor, running the edges of the plastic a few inches up the walls.

  Then the walls themselves, letting the plastic hang down so it overlapped the coverings on the floor.

  Finally the bed. Two sheets here, folded together twice where they joined, and carefully taped so they couldn’t come apart.

  The Experimenter began to disrobe, removing one garment at a time, carefully folding each item and storing it in one of the drawers beneath the bed.

  When he was finally naked, he at last turned his attention to the boy who was slumped in the passenger seat at the front of the vehicle.

  He undressed the unconscious boy almost as easily as he had peeled the clothing from his own body.

  This time, though, each garment was methodically put into a plastic bag before he removed the next.

  When the boy was as nude as he was himself, the Experimenter lifted him in his arms and carried him to the plastic-shrouded bed.

  Working with all the skill he had developed over the years, he made the initial incisions, using a new scalpel that he would dispose of as soon as this morning’s research was concluded. The razor-sharp blade sliced through the skin of the boy’s chest, and as blood began to ooze from the open wound, the Experimenter stanched it with beeswax.

  A moment later the thrumming of the generator was drowned out by the high-pitched keening of the electric saw. As his practiced hand held the saw steady above the boy’s incised and naked chest, the Experimenter felt the same thrill of anticipation he always experienced before making the first deep cut into the interior of a new subject.

  His heartbeat increased, as did the rate of his respiration.

  He could feel a sheen of sweat covering his skin, oozing down between his shoulder blades just as a thin trickle of blood was making its way down the boy’s belly.

  Gently—reverently—he lowered the whirling blade, reveling in the change of its pitch as it bit into the gristle and bone of the boy’s sternum.

  Soon … soon …

  Soon he would be deep inside the boy, discovering the secret of his existence.

  Soon he would feel the energy of the boy’s body with his fingertips, feel the heat of it enveloping his hands.

  Feel the tingling energy of the youth’s life force—

  Soon … soon …

  But then it was over, and he was standing naked in the morning sun, the boy’s lifeless body clutched in his arms, his own body trembling with the frustration of his failure.

  Angrily, he dropped the corpse to the ground and began covering it with rocks, working steadily until the body had entirely disappeared beneath the rough construction of a rocky cairn that could as easily have been built by the river in flood as by the hands of the Experimenter in his fury.

  Then he was in the forest, dousing the clothes with gasoline and setting fire to them, prodding and stirring them with a stick until they were consumed by the flames.

  Finally he returned to the river, plunging naked into the icy water to wash himself clean of all traces of the latest of his experiments. And as the icy water sluiced over his skin, he screamed out loud, partly from shock, but even more from the frustration of having failed yet again.

  CHAPTER 26

  Anne Jeffers ducked through the front door of the Red Robin on Fourth Avenue just before the rain that had been threatening all morning finally began to fall in earnest. If it didn’t let up within the hour—and she was pretty sure it wouldn’t—she’d have the devil of a time getting a cab back to the paper. Well, maybe she could beg a ride with Mark Blakemoor, unless he’d gotten chewed out over letting himself be quoted in this morning’s paper. But when Mark himself hurried through the door a second later, peeled off his raincoat, and proceeded to shake water not only all over her, but onto a couple of complete strangers as well, she knew his mood wouldn’t matter.

  “Did you drive?” he asked, confirming her certainty that he’d left his car in the garage. “ ’Cause if you didn’t, I’m going to get completely soaked going back to the office.”

  “We’ll split a cab if we can find one,” Anne told him, relieved that he hadn’t mentioned the story in the Herald. Moving deeper into the restaurant, she asked the hostess for a table for two. As she threaded her way through the restaurant behind the waitress, she decided that maybe Mark wasn’t going to chew her out over this morning’s story after all. Surely he couldn’t think she’d happily give him a ride back to his office if he spent an hour ragging on her for suggesting that the department might not be doing its job quite perfectly. On the other hand, there was another possibility, which might be even worse than getting chewed out.

  Mark Blakemoor, she’d noticed, had been giving her a little more help with her search of the Kraven files than she would have expected. In fact, he’d been giving her a lot more help, especially given that anything she found that might be worth a story would almost by definition be critical of the department. After all, if she unearthed something that was news, it would have to be something the department had overlooked.

  So why was Mark Blakemoor helping her, and why had he asked her to have lunch with him?

  Obviously, he’d developed some kind of crush on her. She already knew what the proof of it would be—if he didn’t give her a hard time over the story, he was definitely getting the hots for her.

  As she seated herself at the table, she realized that the idea of his infatuation with her didn’t offend her at all. Indeed, it was flattering, especially since she knew she would never admit to him that she was aware of his feelings, let alone doing anything to encourage them. What’s more, the detective wasn’t bad-looking, and it was nice to know that Glen wasn’t the only man in the world who found her attractive. As Mark Blakemoor dropped into the seat opposite her, Anne had to check a sudden urge to flirt with him, and felt herself starting to blush.

  “Don’t worry,” Blakemoor assured her, misreading her blush. “I’m not going to ride you about the story. I’m not saying Ackerly and some of the others aren’t pissed—not to mention McCarty—but what the hell. You’re only doing your job, right?”

  Suspicions confirmed, Anne thought. So now what do I do? “Well, if you’re not going to chew me out, to what do I owe this lunch? What was it you couldn’t just tell me over the phone?”

  Blakemoor didn’t answer until they’d both given their orders. Then: “Sheila Harrar.”

  Anne pursed her lips. The name was familiar, but she couldn’t quite … Then it came to her. “The woman who called me, whose number was all garbled.”

  Blakemoor nodded. “It took a while, but I finally found it in my case notes. Except there wasn’t much to find. She’s an Indian—pardon me, a Native American—and she made a lot of calls to the task force a few years ago. Claimed Kraven killed her son, and wanted us to go right out and arrest him.”

  “Which you obviously didn’t do,” Anne observed dryly, though her words apparently had no effect on Blakemoor.

  “No reason to,” the detective replied. “No body, no signs of foul play, not much of anything.”

  “But her son is really gone?”

  “Depends on what you mean
by gone,” Blakemoor countered. “If you mean is he still around Seattle, the answer is no. Or if he is, there doesn’t seem to be any record of him being here. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean much. The boy was eighteen when he disappeared, which means he could have simply taken off, and it really isn’t a police matter. Despite what you hear to the contrary, adults in this country still have the right to go where they please, and tell or not tell whoever they want, even including their mothers.”

  “Whomever,” Anne said.

  Mark gazed at her sourly and shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “So the police did nothing?” Anne asked in the journalist’s tone she’d carefully honed over the years until she could make even the simplest question sound like an accusation.

  Blakemoor’s big hands spread in a dismissive gesture. “What was there to do? The kid went to school at the university—Kraven taught there. Big deal. He was never a specialist in students—in fact, it seems to me he generally steered pretty clear of them. And it turned out Danny Harrar was one of Kraven’s very own students, and as far as I’m concerned, that almost eliminates him. His pattern was strangers.”

  “His pattern was to have no pattern,” Anne observed, her brows arching with skepticism. “Which means he could have done one of his students, and it would have fit in just fine. What’s the deal on the mother?”

  “A drunk,” Blakemoor sighed. “For all I know, she could have been one all along. Who knows? Maybe that’s why the kid split.” Quickly, he sketched out Sheila Harrar’s recent history, which hadn’t taken him more than a few minutes of asking questions, first in the Yesler Terrace projects up at the foot of Broadway, then down in the bars around Pioneer Square. Pulling his notebook out of his jacket pocket, he copied an address onto a clean page, tore it out and handed it to Anne. As she took the page, their fingers touched, and Mark’s face instantly flushed a bright red. “Sorry it took so long,” he mumbled, obviously flustered by his reaction to their contact.

  “I’d almost forgotten it,” Anne admitted, tucking the sheet of notepaper into her gritchel and deliberately taking enough time to let Mark recompose himself. For the rest of the lunch, both of them were careful to see that their hands stayed well away from each other, and that the conversation never veered toward a personal level. And although it was still raining when they left the restaurant an hour later, neither of them suggested sharing a cab. Mark turned and hurried off in one direction, while Anne hurried just as quickly in the other. A brief flirtation was one thing, she told herself as she searched the street for an empty taxi, but from now on she would keep that particular relationship on a strictly professional level. The next time she needed help with the Kraven files, she would ask Lois Ackerly.

  Who, Anne was fairly certain, would turn her down flat.

  Well, what the hell—she’d just do it all herself. The last thing she needed in her life right now was a Seattle detective mooning over her.

  Still, it was flattering.…

  CHAPTER 27

  The first thing Glen felt as he began to wake up was the cold. Not the bone-chilling cold the Arctic Express brings when it occasionally comes barreling down from the north in the middle of winter and freezes Seattle solid for a week or so, but the nightmare-bearing cold that comes from kicking the blankets off too long before morning. Except that Glen wasn’t in bed, and it wasn’t nighttime.

  As his mind slowly cleared, he realized he was lying naked on the bathroom floor. He felt disoriented, but then began to remember what had happened. And with memory came fear.

  He lay still, trying to assess how he felt, trying to decide whether it was safe even to move. Had he had another heart attack? He struggled to remember how he’d felt when he woke up in the hospital two weeks earlier. Had his chest hurt? He couldn’t remember.

  Not that it mattered, because his chest didn’t hurt now. He focused his mind on his breathing, and pressed the fingers of his right hand against his left wrist. Both the rhythm of his breath and the beating of his heart seemed normal, at least to himself.

  Then he remembered the feeling he’d had of not being alone in the house. The feeling that had grown when he’d gotten out of the shower. He’d been about to shave, and sensed something—someone?—in the bathroom with him. He’d been about to turn around when …

  Had he been hit? Knocked out?

  Sitting up, he rubbed his head and neck. His neck felt a little stiff, but that could be from lying on the floor.

  Lying on the floor for how long?

  He got to his feet, bracing himself against the sink, half expecting to feel dizzy. In the basin was his shaver, lying where it must have fallen.

  Leaving his face still unshaven, Glen left the bathroom, starting across the bedroom toward his closet. He was halfway across the room when his gaze fell on the clock radio that sat by his side of the bed.

  Two P.M.? Could he have been unconscious for five hours? He glanced across the bed at Anne’s alarm clock, which confirmed the time: two o’clock.

  The fear that had begun to abate when he’d decided that he hadn’t had a heart attack suddenly came flooding back. Going to the dresser, he found his wallet where he’d left it last night, and pulled out the card with Gordon Farber’s phone number on it. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he punched the number into the phone, his fingers now trembling so badly he didn’t get the number right until the third try. “This is Glen Jeffers,” he said when someone finally answered in the heart specialist’s office. “I know I’m not due until tomorrow, but I need to come in today. In fact, I need to come in right now.”

  “Well, whatever happened, you’re all right now.”

  It was almost an hour later, and Glen wasn’t certain whether or not the words Gordy Farber had just uttered were good news or bad. His pulse had been taken, his blood pressure measured, and an electrocardiogram had been administered. And as each test showed normal results, his fear had eased a little more. Except that he still didn’t know what had caused him to wind up unconscious on the bathroom floor. “Then what happened?” he asked. “Did I faint, or did someone knock me out?”

  “Were there any signs of someone being in the house?” Farber countered.

  Glen felt himself flush. “I didn’t really look. It seemed more important to get down here.”

  “Well, you didn’t get hit over the head,” the doctor assured him. “If you had, there’d be swelling, contusions, probably even concussion.”

  “So I just passed out?”

  “I didn’t say that. Someone who knows what he’s doing can knock you out in a matter of a second or two, just by pressing the right nerves. But you said you didn’t see anyone.”

  “Everything was so steamed over, I could barely see myself.”

  “Did you hear the door open?”

  Glen shook his head. “But it wasn’t even all the way closed.”

  Farber shrugged. “Well, if you want my opinion, I’d say you just passed out. Which, frankly, doesn’t really surprise me all that much. You’ve been in bed for two weeks, you’re still recovering from a major heart incident, and you were in a very hot shower. Add it all together, and what happened isn’t all that surprising.”

  “But five hours?” Glen pressed.

  Farber cocked his head. “You want me to readmit you to the hospital?” he asked. “If you’re really that worried, I can order up some more tests.”

  “But you just said I was okay, didn’t you?”

  “An opinion you seem disinclined to accept,” Farber observed. “I think you just fainted from overheating yourself in the shower, had a good nap, and woke up on the floor. You were right to call, and right to come in, and I’m now satisfied that whatever happened, it wasn’t serious. All I’m saying now is that if you’re really worried, I can put you back in the hospital for a few more days.”

  Glen remembered the room filled with equipment, the tasteless food, and the nurses who had come and gone at all hours, taking his temperature and giving him pills.
Suddenly, sleeping on the bathroom floor for a few hours didn’t seem all that bad. “Forget it,” he said. “If you say I’m okay, that’s good enough for me.” A few minutes later though, as he was leaving the doctor’s office, he had another thought. “Do me a favor, Gordy,” he said. “Let’s just keep this between us, okay? I mean, this is just the kind of thing that would scare the hell out of Anne, and if nothing’s wrong, what’s the sense, right?”

  “No problem,” Gordy Farber replied. “Now get out of here and stop worrying. Go do something totally useless.”

  “Like what?” Glen asked, wondering just what a heart specialist’s idea of “something useless” might be.

  Farber thought a second, then: “Go over to Broadway Market, get a magazine at the kiosk and a decaf latte at one of the stands. Then sit, read, and watch the passing parade. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

  Dismissed from the doctor’s office, Glen left the Group Health complex, got into his car, and was about to start back up Sixteenth toward home when he changed his mind.

  Why not just follow his doctor’s orders? Abandoning the idea of going right home, he turned left on Thomas and headed toward Broadway and the big brick building that housed the market.

  For years the structure had contained only an enormous Fred Meyer’s store, with food at one end and a cavernous variety and pharmacy section at the other. It had squatted quietly on its block of Broadway for decades, serving the equally quiet middle-class citizens who had lived on Capitol Hill in the middle of the century. But through the second half of the century, a change came over Capitol Hill. Its middle-class neighborhoods slid into a downward spiral, and as families moved across the lake to Bellevue, the big old houses began to get chopped up into smaller and smaller apartments. And as the neighborhood slid downhill, so also did the shopping district along Broadway, until, by the early seventies, most of it was fairly well decimated. But then, inevitably, change came. First the gay population discovered the cheap rents and bargain houses to be found on Capitol Hill, and the process of gentrification began. Then, as the suburbs east of Lake Washington became more crowded and less appealing, the children of the families who had fled eastward twenty years earlier began migrating back toward the city. As the neighborhood came back to life, so did Broadway, evolving from a strip of dying shops whose customers consisted primarily of elderly women pulling shopping carts, into an eclectic collection of small restaurants and boutiques, each of them catering to one or another of the new groups who now strolled the street. And Fred Meyer, seeing the graffiti on the wall, changed, too. Moving the pharmacy into a trailer in the parking lot, they gutted their building, kept the old facade, and rebuilt the interior into a vaguely European-feeling shopping structure, complete with a multiplex theater upstairs, a huge subterranean garage, and a few apartments for those who could never live quite close enough to the action. Resigning the food business, Fred Meyer concentrated on the variety store and drug operations, and the rest of the space was rented out to all the entrepreneurial types who had a business dream and enough cash to rent one of the carts with which the main floor of the new building was lined.