Black Lightning

by John Saul

  Anne repeated most of what Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly had told her, holding back only the few words that had been spoken—and not spoken—about Glen. “And as for your changing my story to say that the police aren’t connecting the Davis and Cottrell killings, that simply isn’t true,” she finished. “They told me off the record that they’re definitely treating them as related, and that they’re going to have the same medical examiner who autopsied Davis and Cottrell look at our cat, too.”

  Vivian Andrews sourly eyed the array of papers that Anne had dropped onto her desk. “May I assume you’ve decided to take yourself off this particular mess?” she asked, tilting her head toward the transit plan notes.

  “It seems to me that there are a lot of people around here who could do that story perfectly well.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the point,” Vivian replied. “I can also think of half a dozen people who could deal with these new killings in a more objective fashion than you.”

  “Maybe. But there’s something else—something I haven’t told anyone else yet.” Struggling not to let her voice betray the extent of the fear she’d felt last night—still felt, she realized as she repeated the story—she told Vivian about the note that had appeared on her computer, then disappeared almost as quickly as it had come. “Look,” she finished. “Put someone else on the story with me, if you want to. But you have to let me stay with it.” When she saw the editor wavering, she pushed harder. “Vivian, something’s going on here. This isn’t just a copycat. Whoever’s doing this has something going against me personally. Maybe he’s trying to scare me off, or maybe he’s seen a picture of me and just likes the way I look. For some reason, he’s fixated on me, and even if you don’t think it’s a good idea for me to stay on the story, you know damned well that we can slant it to sell more papers than the P.I. and the Times combined. Picture the headline, Viv: ‘Killer Stalks Herald Reporter.’ I can write it without getting Blakemoor and Ackerly into trouble—I was there, Viv! It was my next-door neighbor. My cat. And my computer he left his damned note on!”

  She fell momentarily silent, then spoke again, no longer making any attempt to keep her voice steady. “My God, Viv—he’s been watching me! He as much as said so!” Her voice rose. “ ‘See you soon!’ That’s what he said, Viv: ‘See you soon.’ He might even have taken Joyce Cottrell up to the park and dumped her there because he knew I jog there.” She shuddered. “Oh, God, I wonder how long it’s been going on—how long he’s been out there.” Again she fell silent, for now a memory was stirring. A faint memory, of having felt as though she were being watched. But where …?

  Misreading Anne’s silence as a demand for a decision, Vivian Andrews made up her mind. Even as she committed herself, she knew she was doing it for the wrong reasons. Every instinct within her told her to assign someone else to this story. But she also knew that she was no more immune to the lure that Anne had held out than anyone else would be. How often did any reporter anywhere get a chance to go after a murder story where she herself might be one of the intended victims? They would, indeed, sell a lot of papers. “All right,” she said. “Keep on it. But be very careful, and keep in mind that I’m going to be going over every word you write with a fine-tooth comb. Keep it fair, keep it objective, and you can keep the story. Agreed?”

  Anne stood up. “Agreed.” She started out of the editor’s office, already composing a mental list of the phone calls she needed to make. But then she turned back, and her eyes met her boss’s. “Thanks,” she said quietly.

  Vivian Andrews gazed steadily at her. “Anne, I hope you’re smart enough to realize that all this should be scaring you to death.”

  “I am,” Anne replied. “Right now, I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. And I don’t even know why this guy’s mad at me. What could I ever have done to him?”

  “What makes you think you did anything to him at all?” Vivian Andrews asked. “It’s probably not even about you, Anne. It could still all be just a coincidence. But even if it isn’t, don’t start thinking it has anything to do with something you did, or even didn’t do. It’s just him, Anne. It’s just some nut.”

  Anne left the editor’s office and returned to her desk, where she riffled through the short stack of messages that had come in overnight, then checked her E-mail, half expecting to find a duplicate of the note that had been left on her computer at home. She wasn’t sure whether she felt relief or disappointment when she found nothing.

  Nothing in the way of a note, and nothing pertaining to the murders of either Shawnelle Davis or Joyce Cottrell.

  Lots pertaining to the rapid transit mess, which she rerouted to Vivian Andrews for reassignment.

  She was about to reach for the phone to call Mark Blakemoor when she changed her mind: it had long been her experience that people found it far easier to lie over the phone than in person, a phenomenon she attributed more to her own ability to read people’s facial expressions and body language than to any peculiar compunctions on the part of those she was interviewing.

  Face-to-face, she could reel in practically any fish. On the phone, they could wriggle off the hook.

  Retrieving her coat from the rack that served her own and half a dozen other desks, she scooped up her gritchel, slung the strap over her shoulder, left the office, and headed downtown.

  Twenty minutes later—her car maybe-not-quite-completely-illegally parked in a passenger zone whose white paint was sufficiently worn away for her to think she might be able to argue the case—she entered the Public Safety Building and strode directly to the cramped office Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly shared.

  “They’re not here,” a detective whose name Anne couldn’t remember said as she was about to knock on the closed door. He grinned at her, his eyes glinting with malicious humor. “Would you believe they’re down at the M.E.’s office, checking out a dead cat?” Not bothering to reply, Anne turned on her heel and walked out of the Homicide Division. She did, however, make a mental note to find out the detective’s name, just in case she ever got the opportunity to make fun of him in the paper.

  She arrived at the medical examiner’s office, only to be told there was no more chance of her attending the autopsy of her cat than there would be of her attending that of a human being.

  “But it’s a cat!” Anne protested. “And it’s my cat! Doesn’t that make any difference at all?”

  The young man behind the desk, whose name was David Smith according to a chipped plastic plaque propped up against a pen holder, shook his head. “Not around here. The rules are the rules. Only our staff and other authorized personnel can attend an autopsy.”

  “Come on,” Anne began, using her best wheedling and subservient tones. “Surely just this once you could let me—”

  “No exceptions,” David Smith told her in a voice filled with the kind of smug self-satisfaction that only career bureaucrats seem capable of producing.

  Frustrated, but certain that there would be no changing David Smith’s mind, Anne dropped onto a hard bench, prepared to wait for the rest of the morning if that’s what it took. It turned out to be only forty-five minutes before Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly emerged from the double doors that led to the labs from which Anne had been denied admittance.

  There was an uncomfortable moment as the reporter and the two detectives regarded each other uncertainly, their long-standing professional relationship having suddenly taken on a new aspect.

  “Why don’t I meet you back at the shop,” Mark Blakemoor told his partner, breaking the silence. “I’ll have a cup of coffee with Anne and fill her in.” Lois Ackerly gave him a strange look, started to say something, then seemed to change her mind.

  “See you when you get there,” she said. Nodding a greeting to Anne, she disappeared out the main door.

  Mark led Anne to a small room equipped with two Formica-topped tables, a half-dozen chairs, and a counter on which sat a grease-splattered microwave oven and a crusted coffeepot. Fishin
g two mugs out of a badly stained sink, the detective rinsed them out, filled them with coffee, and handed one to Anne. “Not exactly a latte, but so far no one’s been able to convince Starbucks to take over this space. Sit?”

  Anne settled onto a flimsy vinyl chair; Blakemoor leaned against the counter.

  “So what’s the deal?” Anne asked. “What did you find out?”

  “Nothing conclusive,” the detective replied. “In fact, no one’s even willing to say the same person who did the women did the cat, too.”

  Anne’s brows arched as she recognized what she suspected was only the first of a series of noncommittal statements. Before she could begin questioning him, Mark Blakemoor went on.

  “Here’s how it lays out,” he told her. “We’re pretty sure the same guy did both women. We’re pretty sure Shawnelle Davis let him into her apartment voluntarily—probably she picked him up thinking he was going to be a score. As for Cottrell, we found a key with a thumbprint on it, and the print isn’t Cottrell’s. So either she gave him the key or, more likely, he found it hidden in one of the usual places—the doormat, a planter. Everyone knows where to look, right?” Without waiting for Anne to reply, he went on. “Anyway, the only thing we really have to go on are the cuts, and they’re pretty much alike on both women. He used knives he found in their own kitchens, so the wounds aren’t exactly alike. But they’re close enough that Cosmo—that’s the M.E. who’s working this for us—is willing to say it’s the same perp in both homicides.”

  “And my cat?” Anne asked as Blakemoor finished.

  “That’s another story.” The detective’s expression tightened. “There are similarities to both the women. But the cut is—” He hesitated, then used the same word that had come into his mind the previous day, when he’d first examined the cat. “It’s a neater cut. Cosmo says it was done with a sharper instrument—a razor blade, possibly a scalpel. And he says the incision is straighter.” He paused again, his eyes avoiding Anne’s when he finally went on. “He says it could be the same guy, and that by the time he got to the cat he’d had more practice.”

  “I see.” Anne felt numb.

  “Or someone else could have done the cat,” Blakemoor finished. There was something in his voice that made Anne look up.

  “Someone else, like my husband?” she asked, still remembering the silence that had fallen over Blakemoor and Ackerly as Glen had returned from the house with the plastic bag. When Blakemoor made no reply, Anne decided it was time to tell him about the note on her computer. “Whoever killed poor Kumquat put the note there,” she finished. “And whoever put the note on my computer knew a lot more about programming than Glen does. He can operate a couple of programs, but he doesn’t know the difference between an autoexec.bat and a config sys. At our house, I even install the programs.”

  “But you thought of him,” Blakemoor pointed out.

  Anne almost wished she hadn’t told the detective about the note at all. But it was too important to keep from him. “How could I not have?” she countered. “He was there by himself all day.” A dark and hollow sound that wasn’t quite a chuckle emerged from her throat. “I even searched the house, looking for signs that someone else had been there.”

  “And you didn’t find anything,” Blakemoor surmised.

  Anne shook her head. “So what’s next?” she asked.

  “The same thing that’s always next in a case like this,” Blakemoor told her. Though she’d heard the words before—practically knew them by heart—this time they made Anne’s blood run cold. “We keep looking, even though we don’t have much of anything to go on.” He stopped speaking, and it was Anne herself who finished the recitation.

  “And we wait for him to kill someone else, and hope that next time he makes a mistake.”

  Blakemoor nodded, but said nothing. The silence between them stretched on until finally Anne could take it no longer.

  “What if it’s me?” she asked, rising to her feet. “What if it’s me he kills, or one of my family?”

  Without even thinking about what he was doing, Mark Blakemoor put his arms around Anne. “It won’t be you,” he said. “I won’t let it be.”

  Struggling against an almost overpowering urge to cling to the big detective—even if just for a moment—Anne pulled away from him and picked up her coat and her large leather satchel. They left the medical examiner’s office in silence.

  Neither of them could think of anything else to say.

  CHAPTER 43

  Glen Jeffers knew something was wrong the moment he woke up that morning. It was a feeling that flooded not only his brain, but his body as well—a feeling that although he was wide-awake, his mind was only half conscious; that although he’d slept through the night, his body was still exhausted. How could he possibly be so tired when he hadn’t done much of anything except rest since coming home from the hospital?

  The reality was that he was just plain bored. He’d spent his life being active, rising early for his morning jogs with Anne, putting in long days at the office—days that were often broken only by a fierce lunchtime game of racquetball with Alan Cline—then coming home to work in the evening at the drafting table in the den, or, if it was summer and the evenings long, going up to the park to throw a ball around with Kevin.

  What he wasn’t used to was inactivity, and this morning, after Anne and the kids had finally left, the house had begun to close in around him. Part of it, he reflected as he set about cleaning up the kitchen, was simply cabin fever. But there was more to it than that. It seemed to him that everything was getting tangled up in his mind. Just before he’d come fully awake this morning, he’d had a dream—one of those half-waking dreams in which you are unpleasantly aware that you’re dreaming, but are powerless to stop the unwelcome images parading before you.

  This one had been a jumble of scenes: Joyce Cottrell, and Kumquat, and Mark Blakemoor staring at him as though the detective thought he’d killed not only his daughter’s cat, but his next door neighbor as well. By the time Glen came fully awake, he felt as surrounded by death and violence as he had when Anne was spending so much of her time on the Richard Kraven story.

  That was another thing that was starting to get to him. The whole Kraven thing should have ended when the killer was executed, but it seemed to be rising up all over again. Anne was already looking for a connection between Kraven and the two new killings, and if he knew Anne, she’d find one, no matter how implausible it might seem.

  Finished in the kitchen, Glen wandered into the den: maybe he’d just spend a few minutes at the drawing board, not working, really, but just sketching and thinking, seeing if any new ideas came to him. Before he even reached his drafting table, however, his eye was caught by the thick file on Anne’s desk.

  The Richard Kraven file—the one he’d made Kevin bring to him when he was still in the hospital.

  Why had he done that? Now, he couldn’t even remember having read the stuff. He leafed through a few pages of the file, but none of the articles struck him as something he’d read recently. And he certainly wasn’t interested in reading the pieces this morning.

  The mood of restless boredom that had been gathering around him since the moment he’d awakened coalesced into an oppressive claustrophobia. Suddenly he had to get out of the house, had to escape the confines of walls that suddenly seemed to be closing in on him. But where should he go?

  A walk?

  Forget it. Despite his promise to Gordy Farber, he’d always hated walking just for the sake of walking. What he needed was a destination to give the exercise purpose.

  The office?

  Forget that, too. If he so much as showed up there, Rita Alvarez would not only send him home, but call Anne, too.

  But what about the Jeffers Building? He hadn’t been to the construction site since his heart attack. A quick look at its progress, he thought now, would be the perfect antidote for his mood, and unless Alan happened to be there, no one on the job would even know about Farb
er’s orders that he stay away from work. His mind made up, Glen pulled on a jacket against the chill of the overcast morning, locked the house, and set out.

  A little less than an hour later he was standing on the sidewalk across the street from the soaring skeleton of the Jeffers Building. Even the quickest glance told him that the work was on schedule despite his not being there to supervise it. He felt a twinge of insecurity that they seemed not to need him at all, but then decided the signs of progress were actually something of a tribute—obviously, he and the huge design team working under him had done a good enough job that Jim Dover hadn’t needed to call him.

  The building—his building—drew him like a magnet. Crossing the street, he let himself through the door in the fence around the site, and headed for the office, a large trailer that would become unnecessary as soon as the ground floor had been enclosed and could be properly lit and heated. The young woman behind the desk, whose name was Janie Berkey, glanced up from the purchase orders she was working on, looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled.

  “Mr. Jeffers!”

  “Back among the land of the living,” Glen said. “Thought I’d have a look around. Jim here?”

  “Mr. Dover won’t be on site until after lunch today,” Janie told him. “If you want to wait for him—”

  “Actually, I’d just as soon poke around on my own a little.” Glen gave her a conspiratorial wink. “How can I find out what he’s doing wrong if I only see what he wants to show me?”

  Janie’s eyes darkened. “Mr. Dover doesn’t have anything to hide,” she began, in a voice that made Glen wonder exactly how close a relationship the receptionist had with her boss. “He’s the most—”

  “Joke!” Glen interrupted. “It was just a joke.”

  Janie looked uncertain, then uttered a small laugh. Glen seized the opportunity to pick up a hard hat, put it on, and slip out of the office before she could insist on calling someone to escort him.