Black Lightning

by John Saul

  “He was watching me one night,” she said, her voice so low that neither detective was certain whether she was talking to them or to herself. “I’d been visiting Glen in the hospital, and I was on my way home. I felt someone watching me. It must have been him.” She fell silent for a moment, then turned back to the two detectives. “What happened?” she asked.

  Wordlessly, Blakemoor handed Anne the note.

  She read it through, then looked up at Blakemoor. “He’s dead? Rory Kraven’s dead?”

  The detective nodded. “He’s in the bathtub. Naked, just like Cottrell.”

  Anne suddenly felt numb. Rory Kraven had killed her next door neighbor? But Rory had been nothing—the kind of man who plodded through life, using all his resources just to get by. She could still remember interviewing him years ago, when suspicion had first begun focusing on his brother. Rory hadn’t wanted to talk about Richard—all he’d said was that they didn’t get along very well, they weren’t close, they weren’t very much alike.

  Which had certainly been the truth.

  Where Richard’s features had been strong, even handsome, Rory’s face had been a study in weakness and ineffectuality. He’d had a low-level job at Boeing, if she remembered correctly, and he seemed to her the kind who never missed a day, never created a problem for anyone, could always be counted on to do his work steadily, if never brilliantly. But dull, uninspired Rory had also been the little brother of Richard Kraven. Richard, who was brilliant. Richard, who was everything Rory wasn’t.

  Richard, who was the apple of his mother’s eye.

  And that, she well knew, hadn’t stopped even after Richard had been executed. Even after her son’s trial, failed appeals, and execution, Edna Kraven still insisted that Richard had been innocent. Innocent, and perfect.

  Richard must have been eating at Rory all his life, even if he’d never shown it. Richard, who had remained newsworthy even after he’d been executed. She herself—

  And suddenly it made sense.

  “He wanted the attention,” she whispered, barely even aware that she was speaking out loud. “All his life, everything was focused on Richard. And even after Richard was dead, it didn’t stop.”

  Her eyes went back to the note she still held in her hand.

  I hate a copycat … an inept copycat … I doubt anyone will be too upset that Rory is gone. After all, he could never be me …

  She read the words again and again—read them so many times she was sure she could recite them in her sleep—staring all the while at the note.

  It was the handwriting.

  She kept staring at it, knowing she recognized it, but not wanting to admit it. Not without an explanation.

  And there could be no explanation for this.

  She had seen Richard Kraven die in the electric chair. She had watched as his body stiffened, his face contorted, and his eyes rolled back into his head.

  It was impossible that Richard Kraven could have written the note that was now in her hand.

  And yet there was no question.

  The handwriting was his.

  CHAPTER 48

  Blood.

  There was blood everywhere, but this time it wasn’t the blood of a cat.

  This time it was human blood.

  Glen Jeffers knew it was human blood, although he had no idea where it had come from. The blood was all over him—on his hands, on his face, smeared down the whole length of his naked body.

  Naked?

  Why was he naked?

  Tearing his eyes away from the stains on his hands and torso, Glen scanned the walls that surrounded him. He was in a room he didn’t recognize—a shabby room, the kind he’d lived in years ago when he was a student in the architecture school at the university. But even that apartment, up in the University District just off Roosevelt, had been nicer than this one. Its walls had been cracked, and there’d been a hole in one of them where the previous tenant had let the closet door slam against the plaster every time he opened it. But at least the walls of that apartment had been white—a good, clean white that Glen had put on himself.

  The walls surrounding him now were beige—the kind of drab, dirty beige that covers the walls of most cheap apartments. He could see a Murphy bed in one wall, and a sagging recliner, its upholstery so stained it was hard even to tell what color it might once have been.

  A rickety-looking table with a couple of badly nicked painted metal chairs.

  And more blood.

  The walls were covered with it, and so was the furniture.

  Blood everywhere.

  He wanted to run from the room, but as he turned from one wall to another—and now they seemed to loom over him, imprisoning him—he couldn’t find a door.

  Only more blood, dripping down the grimy walls, puddling on the floor.

  Glen could feel it under his bare feet now, warm and sticky, and he tried to move away from it but his feet felt heavy, immobile, almost as if they were encased in concrete.

  The walls seemed to be closing around him, and he reached out to push them away, but succeeded only in smearing their bloody surface. Blood, glistening scarlet, covered his fingertips, and he opened his mouth to vent his terror in a scream.

  Nothing came out.

  His throat constricted, and now he could barely even breathe, let alone howl out in terror.

  He turned again, and finally there was a door.

  An open door, leading into another room.

  He worked his way toward it, his feet dragging, resisting him every step of the way. There was light flooding through the doorway, and inside he could see the shiny surface of white enamel on the other room’s ceiling, and a darkly mildewed grid of uncleaned grout surrounding the tile on the walls.

  A bathroom.

  There would be a shower there, and at least he could wash the blood from his body, get it off his face, out of his hair. A whimper bubbled out of his throat as he reached the door, but even that whimper died away as he gazed at the carnage in the bathtub.

  It was a body—a man’s body, stripped as naked as Glen himself—its eyes gazing sightlessly up at the ceiling. The man’s throat had been slashed and his chest laid open to expose the heart and lungs.

  And although Glen was certain the man was dead, he watched, transfixed with unbelieving horror, as the heart beat steadily and the lungs rose and fell with the slow, deep, even rhythm of sleep.

  As another scream was born in Glen’s throat, he lurched forward, tripped, and found himself plunging headlong toward the body. Instinctively, he threw his hands out to break the fall, only to watch in helpless disgust as first his fingers, then his entire hands, disappeared deep into the corpse’s vital organs. Glen gagged, felt his stomach constrict, and knew he was going to throw up. He collapsed into the tub, sprawling on top of the body, the cold clamminess of its skin sending an icy chill through him. Now the corpse seemed to come fully alive, its arms wrapping around him, pulling him closer.

  The head moved then, and the eyes blinked.

  The mouth began to work, and Glen felt lips against his neck.

  Lips, then teeth.

  As terror and revulsion built inside him, Glen gathered his strength to jerk himself loose from the macabre embrace.

  “No!” he screamed, finally finding his voice. “No!”

  “No!” Glen bellowed once more, and this time he sat bolt upright. The nightmare fled as Glen came awake, but the dark image of the corpse in the bathtub was already burned indelibly into his memory.

  For a few seconds he wasn’t sure where he was. He sat still, gasping to catch his breath, shaking, waiting for the horror of the blood-soaked dream to release him from its grip. He felt his heart pound, and terror seized him. Another heart attack! But then, as he came fully awake, his pounding heart slowly settled back into its normal rhythm.

  As his panting, too, began to ease, he gazed around. The blood-smeared beige walls of the room in which he’d been trapped were gone. He was on the temporary platfo
rm fronting the construction elevator at the Jeffers Building. Slowly, it began to come back to him. He’d come downtown to take a look at the building, and come up here to the top.

  He’d made himself go out to the edge, forced himself to look down.

  He’d panicked! A wave of dizziness had come over him, and he’d felt that awful sensation of the abyss enticing him, drawing him in, almost sucking him over the edge. He’d felt himself leaning outward, ready to fall, when …

  Something—someone—had stopped him.

  After that, nothing.

  Nothing except the nightmare.

  Glen glanced at his watch. Almost four. But it had only been ten-thirty when he’d come up here! How could he have lain on the platform most of the day with nobody noticing him? Wouldn’t the construction worker who’d ridden partway up with him have wondered why he’d never come back down? Or the girl in the office? Wouldn’t she have wondered what had happened when he didn’t show up to return the hard hat? Getting to his feet, Glen pulled open the door of the elevator and hit the button to take him back to the bottom of the long shaft.

  On the way down he was careful to keep his eyes focused on the door of the cage, never looking down, unwilling to risk another attack of the terrible acrophobia that had almost killed him earlier in the day. The elevator clanged to a stop and Glen sighed in relief. But in the site office, his worry came flooding back: Janie Berkey smiled at him brightly, then said, “That didn’t take long! You must have found your pen as soon as you got off the elevator!”

  Unable to do more than offer her a quick nod, Glen put the hard hat on the shelf with the others and made his escape from the office.

  Once again he’d blacked out.

  Once again he’d lost hours out of the day.

  Obviously, he’d gone somewhere.

  But where?

  And what had he done?

  The blood-soaked nightmare rose out of his memory.…

  CHAPTER 49

  The story would run on the front page. Anne knew that, even knew she should have been pleased. Instead she was terrified.

  It was four-thirty, and she’d finished her account of Rory Kraven’s death. She’d talked to Mark Blakemoor one last time, half hoping he’d be able to tell her there had been a mistake, that Rory Kraven’s fingerprints hadn’t matched the ones lifted from the knife with which Joyce Cottrell had been killed.

  He not only confirmed Rory Kraven as Joyce Cottrell’s killer, he told her that the lab had now matched parts of Rory’s right palm print to one of the smeared prints found in Shawnelle Davis’s kitchen.

  Finally, Anne had dropped a note in Vivian Andrews’s E-mail suggesting they run only the bare bones of the story until they could penetrate at least part of the thick fog of questions that still cloaked the morning’s events in the drab apartment on Sixteenth Avenue.

  Who?

  And why?

  Who could have known that Richard Kraven’s brother had killed Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell when the police hadn’t yet been willing to state unequivocally even that the same person had committed both those murders?

  The questions were still tumbling through her mind as Anne walked out of the Herald Building into the gray afternoon and headed up Denny toward Capitol Hill and home. The worst of it—the part that threatened to drive her crazy—was the appearance of the notes. She’d finally told Mark Blakemoor about the message that had appeared when she’d booted her computer up the previous afternoon. Though he’d listened intently as she described every detail, in the end he’d had some questions she wasn’t prepared to answer:

  He’d still been in her backyard when it had occurred yesterday afternoon. Why hadn’t she told him about it then?

  She hadn’t mentioned the fishing fly to Blakemoor, either.

  Why not?

  Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. Because it didn’t mean anything, that’s why. And it didn’t have anything to do with the note on her computer screen, or Kumquat being killed, or anything else! Glen had explained to her where it had come from, hadn’t he? He’d bought it! It was nothing but a coincidence that it happened to be made out of feathers and fur that could have come from her children’s pets. For God’s sake, what was she thinking? That someone—some stranger who was pretending to be Richard Kraven—had come sneaking into her house, made a fishing fly, killed her cat, and then left a note on her computer?

  Anne decided the whole idea was insane; she was starting to sound paranoid even to herself. Two blocks from home she cut over to Sixteenth and cursed out loud as she crept past the big motor home somebody had parked on her block, taking up the parking spot she normally used, and another one as well. Finally finding an empty spot in the next block, she walked back to the house, glaring at the motor home one more time before going inside.

  “Hello?” she called out. “Anybody home?”

  “Back here,” Glen called from the den.

  Anne dropped her gritchel under the table by the stairs and went into the den. Glen was sitting at the drafting table, and he looked up almost guiltily as she came in. “I’m not working,” he assured her. “I’m just doodling.”

  Moving around the table, she kissed him. “Is that what you’ve been doing all day? Doodling?”

  She felt him stiffen, but then he nodded.

  “Pretty much,” he said. “What about you?”

  Dropping into her desk chair, Anne told Glen about Rory Kraven’s murder.

  And as he listened to his wife, an image came into Glen’s mind.

  An image from the dream he’d had this afternoon.

  An image that was, in every detail, a perfect portrayal of Anne’s description of Rory Kraven’s body when it had been found in his bathtub that afternoon.

  But he had only dreamed it, Glen thought. Surely, he had only dreamed it.

  CHAPTER 50

  Serial Killer’s Younger

  Brother Found Dead

  Rory Kraven Linked to New Series of Capitol Hill Deaths

  The body of Rory Kraven, 41, brother of recently executed serial killer, Richard Kraven, was found in his Capitol Hill apartment yesterday afternoon. The victim of a thus-far-unknown assailant, the younger Kraven suffered multiple stab wounds. His unclothed body, mutilated in a manner that police sources concede was similar to the mutilations inflicted on victims of Richard Kraven, was found in the bathtub of the apartment by his mother, Edna Kraven, 66.

  As part of their investigation into this most recent Capitol Hill slaying, police have found evidence conclusively linking Rory Kraven to the killings of both Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell. Detective Mark Blakemoor confirms that Rory Kraven’s fingerprints match those found …

  Edna Kraven glared at the article on the front page of the morning Herald. She had sat up all night long, afraid even to go to bed, so certain was she that she would be robbed of her sleep by the image of poor Rory. It was a vision she knew would stay with her for the rest of her life. Even now it was almost more than she could bear just to think about it—the way his eyes had stared at her, and the terrible slashes in his throat and chest! If only she hadn’t pushed the door to his apartment open! She’d known something was wrong, had felt it from the moment she came up those stairs. And she’d told Anne Jeffers about it, too.

  Not that the woman had printed anything she’d said! Edna thought angrily. She’d only written more lies. And as though it wasn’t enough to hash over the falsehoods about Richard again—now the bitch was making up things about poor Rory, too!

  The very idea of Rory killing those two women!

  It was ridiculous—Rory could barely even bring himself to speak to women.

  Edna had seen the photographs of those women on television. Cheap, both of them.

  One of them had been a whore, and the other some kind of recluse. What would Rory have had to do with women like them?

  Wasn’t it obvious that whoever had killed them had killed Rory, too?

  Incompetence, that’s
what it was, Edna told herself. The police couldn’t find the killer, so they’d blamed poor, stupid Rory. And then that reporter, who had always been out to get her darling Richard, had gone and printed it! Edna shuddered as she thought of her neighbors reading the slander smeared all over the front page of this morning’s paper.

  Well, there might not be anything she could do about the police, she decided, but she could certainly give that Jeffers woman a piece of her mind!

  Though it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, Edna scrabbled through the yellow pages until she found the number for the Seattle Herald. She dialed it and demanded to speak to Anne Jeffers. Her lips tightened as she listened to the operator tell her the reporter hadn’t come in yet that morning. “No, I certainly do not want to leave a message,” Edna said when the girl offered to connect her to the reporter’s voice mail. “I want to talk to her!”

  Her anger growing steadily, Edna reached for the white pages and began searching through the J’s.

  … on the knife that killed Joyce Cottrell, while a partial palm print taken from the apartment of Shawnelle Davis matches a portion of Kraven’s right hand.

  An unsigned note was found at the scene of this latest death, but police have so far refused to make its contents public, except to say that neither the note nor the wounds inflicted on the dead man are consistent with a suicide. At the same time, police department sources confirmed that they have no suspects in this killing.

  It is, however, believed that his assailant was familiar to Rory Kraven, as no signs of a struggle or of forcible entry were found at the murder scene. Three neighbors, whose names are being withheld at their own request, denied hearing anything unusual yesterday morning. Police are requesting that anyone having any information regarding this murder contact the Homicide Division at…

  As the phone rang, Glen Jeffers looked up from the copy of the Herald that lay unfolded on the kitchen table. He waited to see if either Heather or Kevin would answer on the extension in the upstairs hall, then finally reached for the wall phone mounted over the end of the counter.