Black Lightning

by John Saul

  “Heel, Boots,” Anne commanded.

  For just a second the little dog glanced back at her, but then he resumed his struggle against the leash. The two of them stayed in place for nearly a minute, Anne commanding the dog to heel, Boots refusing to budge. In the end, knowing she was ruining whatever minimal training Kevin and Glen might have succeeded in inculcating into the little animal’s head, Anne gave in. “Oh, all right. If it’s that important to you, pick whatever spot you want.”

  Letting the dog have his head, she followed, already reaching into her pocket for one of the blue plastic bags she used to clean up after her son’s pet. But instead of sniffing madly around until he’d found the perfect place to squat, Boots pulled harder and harder, his body low to the ground as he scrambled toward the brow of the hill. Then he was over the edge of the steep embankment, disappearing from Anne’s view for a moment, but at last falling silent, his mad barking dying away as he apparently reached whatever goal he’d set for himself.

  When she came to the edge of the lawn where the level area around the reservoir gave way to the slope and a tangle of brush, the dog was nowhere to be seen. Then she spotted him. He’d pushed into the mass of vegetation and was sniffing eagerly at something she couldn’t quite see.

  Reaching out and pushing a branch aside, Anne looked down.

  The dead, empty eyes of Joyce Cottrell gazed back up at her.

  Anne’s first instinct was to be sick, but she refused to give in to the wave of nausea.

  Her next instinct was to try to help the woman whom she’d instantly recognized as her next-door neighbor, but even as the urge rose in her she knew Joyce was far beyond any aid she could give her.

  Her third instinct was to scream for help, and that was the instinct she finally acted upon.

  CHAPTER 34

  “Where’s Mom?” The question was issued with a darkly accusatory tone, as if Kevin suspected his mother had been abducted, if not out and out murdered.

  “She’s just jogging in the park,” Glen told him as he poured his son a glass of orange juice, then moved the Grape-Nuts from the cupboard to the kitchen table.

  “She’s supposed to be back by now,” Kevin informed him.

  Glen glanced at the blue-green digits on the oven clock. Though he wasn’t about to admit it to his son, he realized that Kevin was right. Before his heart attack, their jog had usually lasted no more than half an hour—forty-five minutes at the most. Unless the digital display was wrong, Anne had been gone more than an hour. He was pretty sure he knew why, but he wasn’t about to get into that with Kevin. Both he and Anne subscribed to the idea that even if their marriage wasn’t perfect—not that it was far short—they had no need to air their dirty laundry in front of the kids. Besides, even if he’d been willing to explain to Kevin what had happened between himself and Anne that morning, he wasn’t quite sure he could. The truth was, he wasn’t certain himself. When he woke up and found her looking at him, he thought she was still angry at him from the night before. But then they’d made love, and for a few minutes it seemed as though everything was back to normal. Then, when she suggested that he’d been acting “off the wall,” he’d flown off the handle. He shook his head. It wasn’t as if she was wrong—he knew perfectly well that he hadn’t been behaving very much like the man she’d married. Yet instead of confessing to the unaccountable blackouts—and that they were frightening him—he’d barked that he was just obeying his doctor’s orders and that there was nothing wrong at all. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to tell her. Indeed, in those few quiet minutes after they made love, he’d been rehearsing the words he would say.

  Only when it came time to speak, something inside had stopped him, some voice inside his head had whispered to him: Do you want to go back to the hospital? Do you want her to think you’re crazy? The warning stopped him cold, even knowing he was shutting Anne out, lying to her, refusing to trust her.

  Of course she hadn’t wanted him to go jogging with her, and of course she had decided to take an extra turn around the reservoir. He could almost hear her telling herself to run her anger out in the park instead of taking it home and dumping it on her family. If she could leave the bad moment in the park, the least he could do was be dressed and have breakfast ready for her by the time she got back, so she’d at least know she wasn’t married to an invalid who was planning to lie around in a bathrobe for the rest of his life.

  “She’ll probably be back by the time you finish your cereal,” Glen told Kevin as Heather came into the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee and started working on the crossword puzzle Glen himself had begun only a few minutes earlier. “Do you mind?” he asked his daughter. “I was planning to do that crossword this morning.”

  Heather shrugged. “So far, you only put in two words, and one of them was wrong. Besides, if you don’t do it in ink, it doesn’t count.”

  “Something’s happened to Mom,” Kevin announced.

  Heather looked up, glancing at her brother then turning to her father. “Is she sick?”

  Glen sighed exaggeratedly and retrieved the crossword from his daughter. “Nothing’s happened to her. She’s fine. She just decided to jog a little longer than usual this morning, that’s all.”

  “They had a fight,” Heather instantly translated for Kevin.

  “We didn’t have a fight,” Glen told her. “How come nobody around here ever believes anything?”

  “Because grown-ups always lie to kids,” Kevin informed him. “Justin Reynolds told me so. And how come Mom’s allowed to go to the park by herself, when I’m not?”

  “Because she’s a grown-up,” Glen replied, leaning toward Kevin and giving him a mock-fierce glare. “You can tell Justin Reynolds that that’s another thing grown-ups do.”

  Kevin began to giggle, but then Heather spoke again.

  “Maybe we better go look for her,” she said. “She’s never gone this long. What if something has happened to her?”

  Glen felt the balance of power in the room tilt. In about five more seconds, unless Anne came walking in the door, Kevin would team up with Heather and he might as well give up. Better to offer an instant compromise rather than wind up having them late for school. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll go take a look, while you two finish your breakfast. But I suspect that your mom will come breezing in ten seconds after I’m gone, and I’ll just be on a wild goose chase.”

  Before Kevin could plead with him to come along, Glen was out the back door and behind the wheel of the ten-year-old Saab he refused to part with despite Kevin’s insistence that it was a “dweebmobile.”

  Minutes later he entered Volunteer Park from the Fifteenth Avenue side, just as Anne had a little more than an hour earlier. Until he reached the greenhouse, everything looked normal, but as he started down the gentle grade past the tennis courts, he saw the first of what turned out to be five police cars. A little farther down he spotted the familiar yellow plastic tape marking a police barricade. The tape ran along the left side of the road, blocking entrance to the shrubbery that covered this flank of the reservoir. Glen slowed to a stop as he came abreast of a cop who was impatiently trying to wave him through.

  “Keep it moving, Mac,” the cop said as Glen rolled his window down. “Nothing to see here.”

  “I’m looking for my wife,” Glen said, ignoring the policeman’s words. “She came out jogging a little over an hour ago, and she hasn’t come back yet.”

  The patrolman’s expression changed from impatience to uncertainty, and he unclipped a radio from his belt, speaking into it too quietly for Glen to hear what he was saying. When he’d gotten a reply, he turned his attention back to Glen. “What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Anne Jeffers. She’s a report—”

  The patrolman’s expression shifted again. “She’s up there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the crest of the hill. “I can’t let you go up this way, but if you want to walk around from the other side, I don’t suppose anyone’s goin
g to stop you.”

  “What happened?” Glen asked.

  The cop shook his head. “Body. Fact is, I heard your wife found it.”

  “Gay bashing?” Glen asked, aware that more than one man had been beaten in this part of the park over the last few years.

  The cop shook his head. “A woman.”

  For some reason, an image of Joyce Cottrell flashed into Glen’s mind, then was gone almost as quickly as it had come. As another police car pulled up behind, briefly flashing its lights, Glen moved on, completing the circuit around the reservoir and the water tower, then pulling the Saab into an empty space near the huge black granite doughnut that stood across the street from the Art Museum.

  Locking the car despite the fact that there were half a dozen more police cruisers within the surrounding fifty yards of roadway, Glen crossed the sidewalk and loped down the short slope. A well-worn path followed the chain-link fence that kept swimmers out of the reservoir. Halfway around, another police tape blocked his way, but before he could decide what to do next, he spotted Anne. Boots was sitting at her feet. As he approached, the little dog caught his scent, barked happily and dashed toward him, only to do a complete back flip as he came to the end of the leash. Unfazed by the mishap, the terrier scrambled back to its feet, straining at the leash, his tail wagging furiously. Anne turned to quiet the dog, caught sight of Glen, and waved him over. Scooping Boots up and cradling him in the crook of one arm, Glen slipped the other protectively around his wife. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  For a moment Anne said nothing at all. Suddenly Glen realized how pale she was—every drop of blood seemed to have drained from her face. But Anne had seen corpses before—accident victims, even the butchered remains of the brutal Kraven killings; she’d even wondered out loud from time to time if she wasn’t becoming insensitive to the violence of the city. Then she spoke, and with a rush of horror, he understood. “It’s Joyce, Glen,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. Glen felt a cold knot form in his stomach as he remembered the image that had inexplicably come to him the moment the patrolman at the foot of the hill had told him the body of a woman had been found. But it was crazy—what would Joyce Cottrell have been doing in the park? She rarely even left her house except to go to work!

  “Oh, God, Glen, it’s horrible. She was naked, and her chest was all torn open, just like Shawnelle Davis’s. But they say it didn’t happen here. It looks like whoever killed her dumped her here after she was already dead. So it must have happened in her house, Glen.” Anne’s voice was shaking now, her body shivering. “Right next door to us, while we were sleeping. Oh, God …”

  Glen’s arm tightened around his wife, partly to offer her support, but as much to support himself. For now another image had flashed into his mind.

  He saw a figure carrying a body through the dark.

  Light was spilling onto the face of the figure so it was clear in his mind, as vivid as if he were staring at a clearly focused black-and-white photograph. But he didn’t recognize the face.

  It was the face of a stranger, and the stranger was carrying Joyce Cottrell’s body.

  Though the image was nearly perfect, there was no familiarity to go with it, no sense of recollection. Was it possible he had witnessed a murder but had no memory of it?

  Now he remembered the blackouts he’d had, the time that seemed forever lost from his consciousness.

  Glen stood mutely listening to Anne as she brokenly described how Boots had led her to their next-door neighbor’s corpse, how she hadn’t been certain what the object in the bushes was at first, how she’d finally seen the face and recognized it.

  Joyce Cottrell.

  Someone who had no friends. No enemies.

  Someone no one even knew.

  Why had Joyce been killed?

  Neither of them could answer that question. Still, though neither of them spoke the thought aloud, Anne and Glen each had a terrible feeling: somehow, in a way neither of them had yet begun to understand, this murder had something to do with them.

  CHAPTER 35

  The man called in sick for the second day in a row. He’d intended to go to work this morning, for even though they didn’t appreciate him at Boeing, he still took his job seriously.

  Just as he took everything seriously.

  But when he got home last night, he’d been far too excited to go to sleep right away. Instead of going to bed, he’d stayed up, reliving the event in his memory over and over again.

  Relishing the memory of being in Joyce Cottrell’s house.

  Of waiting for her.

  Of watching her undress.

  Of killing her, and possessing her.

  And finally, he’d relished the memory of the feeling he’d had as he carried her through the night. Bearing her out of her house and up to the park, the man had felt a freedom and exhilaration he’d never experienced before. He’d known no one was going to see him as he carried her body through the darkness to the park, known it as surely as he knew he was going to kill Joyce Cottrell from the first moment he saw her. It was in those last moments when he’d held her in his arms in the darkness that the man finally felt complete. For the first time—much more than with Shawnelle Davis—he’d experienced the sheer sense of power and ecstasy that came with extinguishing another life. Joyce Cottrell had truly belonged to him, taken like a trophy, dying at his hands like the prey of a hunter.

  He hadn’t even tried to hide her body.

  Indeed, that was why he’d taken it to the park, to make certain it was discovered early in the morning, when the joggers came out to run the path around the reservoir.

  He’d left the park from the south side, walking down Twelfth Avenue to Aloha, then cutting over to Fourteenth. He’d stayed away from the bright lights of Fifteenth Avenue. After he’d deposited the body in the shrubs, he lost the feeling of power, of invincibility, and from then on ducked from one deeply shadowed area to another, feeling as if the light of the streetlamps were trying to expose him. The thick red stains on his clothes had gleamed brightly, and when it started to rain while he was still two blocks from home, he slowed his pace, letting the water wash the blood from his face and hands. Coming at last to the corner of Sixteenth and Thomas, he had to resist the temptation to step into the emergency room and see who had replaced Joyce Cottrell at the reception desk. But resist it he had, knowing that if the person even looked up, the sight of his soaked hair and bloodstained clothing would not be forgotten within a minute or two. In the morning, when the body was discovered, the first place the police would come would be here, to question whoever had relieved Joyce Cottrell, and the person would remember him.

  So he passed the emergency room by, slipping instead into the musty, deserted lobby of the building in which he lived, making his way silently to his studio on the second floor.

  In the morning, someone would find the body, and Anne Jeffers would report it in the Herald. This time it was her next-door neighbor he’d killed. This time, the bitch would put it on the front page.

  The front page, where he belonged.

  He’d stayed up all night, reveling in the remembered ecstasy of the killing. By dawn he knew he would be too tired to go to work. Too tired, and too excited. He waited until precisely six, the time he normally got up, and then called the plant, telling them he was feeling better than yesterday but that he wasn’t well enough yet to come to work. They told him to take as much time as he needed. And why wouldn’t they? After all, he wasn’t like some of the others at work who called in sick every time they wanted to take an extra day off. This was only the second time he’d ever called in sick at all.

  The call finished, he left his apartment and went over to the 7-Eleven on Fifteenth to get a cup of coffee and the first edition of the Herald. After all, it was possible that someone—perhaps one of the perverts who hung out in certain parts of the park at night—had found the body even before the joggers were out. He scanned the front page, assuaging his disappointment
by telling himself that even if the body had been found right away, they might not have had time to get a story in the earliest edition. Still, he paged quickly through the whole paper, scanning each page.

  Nothing.

  But by the time he got back to his apartment, he wondered if he might have missed something, so he went through the paper again, this time studying each page carefully. When he turned to the last page, he felt a kind of relief. If he wasn’t going to be on the front page, it was better not to be in the paper at all.

  He turned on the television, thinking there might be a story on the morning news, then shut it off, afraid one of his neighbors might hear it and wonder why he was watching the news so early.

  He began pacing nervously around the apartment. How soon would the next edition of the paper be out?

  What if no one had found the body? If someone had found it and called the police, wouldn’t there have been sirens when the cops went up to the park?

  He hadn’t heard any sirens.

  When his cheap digital watch—his mother’s lousy Christmas present last year—finally told him it was eight, he turned on the radio, tuning it to KIRO.

  Endless talk about a press conference the President was going to be holding later that day.

  The man went back to pacing the stained avocado carpeting that covered his floor, and wondered if anybody had found the body yet.

  Maybe he should call the police himself.

  He reached for the phone, then changed his mind. If he was going to do that, he’d better use a pay phone.

  And not one near his house.

  Maybe one over on Broadway. Or maybe he should even go downtown.

  That was it. A phone down on First Avenue, where no one ever looked at anyone else. He was just about to leave, was just reaching out to switch off the radio, when he finally heard it: