Black Lightning

by John Saul

  “We all did,” Blakemoor replied. He moved closer to the body, squatting down to get a clear look at it. “Anyone have any idea how long it’s been here?” he asked of no one in particular.

  “Offhand, it looks like a day or two. Maybe since yesterday morning, or the day before. It’s not too badly decomposed yet, but it’s been getting chewed on. Fulla bugs, too.”

  Mark Blakemoor’s gaze was instantly drawn to the mutilation done to the corpse’s chest. There were the familiar cuts, the skin having been laid neatly back after being incised by a scalpel or something equally as sharp.

  The sternum cut with a saw.

  The rib cage spread wide to expose the lungs and heart.

  The heart torn away, as always, and, in this case, missing entirely. Kept by the killer as a souvenir? Or taken by some foraging animal? More likely the latter—if this fit what had been called the Kraven pattern up until now, the killer wasn’t interested in souvenirs.

  He was, however, interested in leaving signatures.

  “Photo guys through?” he asked.

  “They burned enough film to make a movie,” someone said.

  Carefully, Blakemoor moved one of the lungs enough to get a look at the interior of the dorsal surface of the thoracic cavity.

  The moment he saw the familiar form of the lightning bolts that had been etched into the pleura, he glanced up at Lois Ackerly and nodded almost imperceptibly. Easing the lung back into the position in which he’d found it, he forced himself to look at the victim’s face.

  A woman; at least in her sixties, maybe older. In death her skin, already sagging, had gone slack, and the thick layer of makeup she’d worn when she died had been reduced by the elements to dark streaks of mascara under her empty eye sockets; a stain of rouge still clung to one of her cheeks.

  Her hair, the too-dark black of someone desperately pretending that the date on her birth certificate was a grotesque error, had broken out of its prison of hairpins and holding spray and was spread around her face in a mud-and-blood-spattered halo. But despite the depredations of the elements, the animals, and time, Mark Blakemoor recognized her almost immediately.

  Getting to his feet, he turned to Lois Ackerly. “This is getting weirder and weirder. First he kills Richard Kraven’s brother, now he kills his mother. What the hell is going on?”

  Lois Ackerly gazed expressionlessly at the body. “I don’t get it—first he sets up Richard Kraven, then waits until he’s executed, and goes after the brother and the mother. How come?”

  Mark Blakemoor’s lips curved into a dark smile. “I don’t know, either, but at least he’s giving us a pattern this time,” he said. “And with a pattern, we can find him. Let’s get to work.” He began issuing orders, organizing a systematic search of the entire area, although he was pretty sure that, as ever, the killer had cleaned up after himself, leaving nothing in the area that would lead anyone back to him. Still, the search had to be made. Sooner or later even this killer would make a mistake.

  And when he did, Mark Blakemoor intended to be the one to find it.

  CHAPTER 58

  “Dad? Hey, Dad, is something wrong?”

  The words hovered on the fringes of Glen Jeffers’s mind, not quite penetrating. From his place in the Saab’s passenger seat, Kevin looked worriedly at his father. Then, just as Kevin was about to speak again, the words sank in, and Glen glanced over at his son.

  “No, everything’s fine. We’re almost there.” He sounded confident enough, he knew, but Glen wondered how much truth there was to what he’d said. The fact was, he wasn’t really fine; hadn’t been since he’d gotten up this morning. Almost as soon as he awakened he had a feeling that something was wrong, that maybe he shouldn’t take Kevin fishing after all. But when he’d suggested postponing the trip until the following weekend, the look of devastation on his son’s face had quickly changed his mind. Besides, when Anne had asked him what was bothering him, he hadn’t been able to tell her—indeed, he hadn’t even been quite able to figure it out himself. All day yesterday he’d been feeling fine. There were no repeats of the blackout he’d experienced on Thursday, and finally he’d decided the vague sense of unease he was feeling wasn’t worth disappointing Kevin over. By the time the two of them had actually gotten into the car and headed east across the Evergreen Point bridge, he’d felt much better. But as they’d moved farther east, passing through Redmond, then continuing on out toward Carnation and Fall City, he’d started to experience a strange sense of déjà vu—strange because it wasn’t exactly that eerie feeling that what was happening right at the moment was a perfect repeat of something that had occurred before. Rather, the experience Glen was having this morning was something else, not a flash of familiarity, as though something was being repeated, but a stroke of anticipation, a feeling that he was about to repeat something.

  Something that had given him great pleasure, and that even now, even when he couldn’t quite grasp what it was, still sent a shiver of excitement through him.

  He glanced over at Kevin, and an image flashed through his mind, disappearing so quickly he was almost unaware that it had happened at all.

  Yet the memory of it held.

  A heart.

  A human heart, which he was holding in his hand. Where had it come from?

  Then he remembered the experience he’d had two days before, when he imagined himself staring down at the naked torso of a woman, then watching helplessly as he cut her chest open.

  Her heart? Had he taken her heart out? His stomach twisted with revulsion merely at the thought, and he felt a burning sensation as bile rose in his throat.

  But it hadn’t happened! None of it had happened! It had only been a horrible nightmare, or a trick of his imagination. Hadn’t the psychiatrist told him it couldn’t possibly have been real?

  He shut his mind to the terrible image, and when his eyes threatened to turn toward Kevin once more, he forced them to stay on the road ahead. Now they were starting up into the mountains. To their right the river cascaded down its rocky channel, frothing white as it roared over broad rapids.

  “Where are we going, Dad?” Kevin asked, gazing anxiously at the tumbling waters. What would happen if he slipped while they were fishing? He could swim, but not really very well. “We’re not going down there, are we?”

  “Another couple of miles,” Glen said. “There’s a campground. We can park there.” A campground? he thought. What campground? He didn’t know of any campground. But a few minutes later, as he came around a bend in the road, he saw a sign with the familiar graphics of a tent, a picnic table, and a hiker, with the phrase 1 MILE emblazoned below them. Glen felt his hands turn clammy. How had he known it was there? Was it possible that somehow, in some way he couldn’t fathom, the dream had been real? No! It had to be some old memory from one of the drives he, Anne, and the kids had taken over the years. That must be it—although he had no conscious memory of it, the campground must have registered on his mind long ago. He slowed the car, ready to turn in when the side road became visible, but as he rounded the next turn in the road, he saw a police car blocking the entrance, and a State Patrolman waving him on by. As they passed, he was barely able to catch a glimpse of several other police cars parked in the lot at the end of the narrow lane.

  “What’s happening, Dad?” Kevin asked, twisting around to stare out of the back window. “Can we stop and find out? Maybe a bear got someone!”

  “We’re not stopping,” Glen told Kevin as the boy faced forward again in his seat. “And fasten your seat belt, okay?” He glanced over at Kevin, and as his eyes fixed on his son, he heard a voice in his head:

  Remember the cat?

  Glen tensed, his fingers tightening on the wheel.

  We could do it, the voice whispered. We could do it, and no one would ever know.

  Suddenly Glen’s eyelids felt heavy and the road ahead blurred. A fogginess began to settle over his mind, and he felt sleepy. If he could just close his eyes for a—
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br />   No!

  He jerked his eyes open, sitting straight up in the seat. No blackouts! Not today! Not with Kevin here with him. He pictured the car careening off the road, hurtling through the guardrail to plunge into the river a hundred feet below, and just the image was enough to send a shot of adrenaline into his bloodstream. As the heat of the hormone spread through his system, his heart began to pound and the strange lassitude that had settled over him while the voice whispered inside his head evaporated.

  A new sign appeared ahead. Even before Glen saw it clearly, he knew what it was—a sign indicating a side road a quarter mile farther up.

  He would turn there.

  A few moments later, as he came closer to the narrow track leading off to the right, he once again experienced a strong sense of déjà vu; this looked exactly like the place where he’d dreamed he was fishing.

  Fishing nude, with a vague memory of having killed a woman, of having opened her chest, of having—

  No! It had only been a dream, and Dr. Jacobson had found rational sources for every image in it! It wasn’t real—none of it! Braking harder than he’d intended, Glen turned the car onto a steep road that wound so closely through the trees that branches scraped against both its sides.

  “What if we can’t turn around?” Kevin asked, instinctively ducking as a branch slapped against the windshield in front of his face.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he heard his father reply. “I’ve been here before. Lots of times.”

  Something in his father’s voice caught the boy’s attention. Kevin’s gaze shifted away from the trees.

  The eyes of the man and the boy locked for a moment, and then Kevin looked away.

  There was something in his father’s eyes he’d never seen before.

  Something that scared him.

  CHAPTER 59

  Anne heard the sound of the mail dropping through the slot in the front door and seized the opportunity to shift her eyes away from the monitor, relax the muscles of her neck, then stand up to stretch her whole body. Could it really be almost three hours since she’d sat down at the computer in the den to review a few of the interview files? Now that her concentration had finally been broken, she realized that it felt like even longer—her legs were stiff, and her right shoulder was sore from manipulating the mouse she’d been using to navigate through the files. So far she’d gotten nothing for her very literal pains. Only a long and tedious review of information that was already so familiar to her that she felt she could have repeated it in her sleep.

  Richard Kraven, whether or not he was the serial killer she’d made him out to be, had been a man of many parts. He’d mastered both biology and electrical engineering, and had studied religion and metaphysics as well. He’d loved the arts, especially dance, contributing at least a thousand dollars each year to the ballet.

  Dozens—hundreds—of people had known him.

  And no one had thought of him as a friend.

  Over and over the people she’d interviewed had used the same words. A lot of them had been complimentary: “Charming … Fascinating … Well-read … Genius …”

  But other words kept recurring as well: “Cold … Distant … Detached … Remote …”

  Sighing, her certainty fading that she would find something in the files she’d overlooked before, Anne moved through the living room into the foyer.

  She saw it even before she bent over to pick up the mail strewn across the floor. A plain white envelope—the kind you could buy anywhere—with her name and address written across it in the same spiky script she’d seen only a few days ago when she followed up the police call to Rory Kraven’s apartment. Leaving the rest of the mail where it lay, Anne snatched up the envelope and tore it open. She was about to pull the single sheet of paper out when she stopped herself.

  Fingerprints! Maybe, just maybe, whoever had written the note had gotten careless. Her hands trembling, she brought the letter to the kitchen, found a pair of tongs, and carefully pulled the neatly folded sheet out of the envelope. Her heart pounding, she spread it open so she could read it.

  Dearest Anne,

  An explanation: As I’m sure you’re aware, I had no opportunity to hone my surgical skills during my recent incarceration. Hence, the incident with your daughter’s cat; I simply needed something to practice on. Perhaps I should have left my signature on it, but it was only a cat, and not truly representative of my best endeavors. By the way, no one let the cat out. I came in and got it, just as I came in and left the note on your computer. I can come into your house any time, you know. Any time at all.

  An icy numbness spreading through her, she read the note a second time, then a third. She felt panic rising in her, felt an insane urge to run through the house locking the doors and windows and pulling the curtains. But it was broad daylight outside—eleven o’clock on Saturday morning. What could happen to her? Besides, if Richard Kraven—

  No! Not Richard Kraven! Richard Kraven was dead!

  She took a deep breath. If whoever had written the note really intended to come into her house, why would he warn her?

  He was only trying to scare her.

  Her panic of a moment before now yielding to anger, Anne carefully reinserted the note into the envelope, then picked up the telephone and dialed the number Mark Blakemoor had given her after their last meeting. “Call me any time,” he’d told her. “If anything happens, or you find something, or you even think of something, call me.”

  She let the phone ring a dozen times—didn’t he even have a machine? What kind of cop was he? Finally, she hung up, and dialed his office number from memory. On the fourth ring someone picked it up.

  “Homicide. McCarty.”

  Jack McCarty? What would the chief of Homicide be doing in the office on a Saturday? “I’m looking for Mark Blakemoor,” Anne said. “This is Anne Jeffers.” When there was no immediate reply, she added, “It’s important. It’s about the Richard Kraven killings.” She hesitated, then took a gamble: “The new ones.”

  “What did Mark tell you about them?” McCarty growled suspiciously.

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Anne said quickly, remembering Mark’s warning not to repeat anything he’d told her. “But I have something to tell him. He gave me his home number, but he’s not there.”

  “He damn well better not be,” McCarty replied. “He’d better be up on the Snoqualmie, doing his job.”

  “The Snoqualmie?” Anne echoed, feeling a chill of apprehension creep over her skin. “What’s going on up there?”

  There was another silence, then McCarty spoke again, his voice dripping with the contempt he held for every member of the press. “You’re a reporter, Jeffers. Why don’t you go find out?”

  The phone went dead in her hand. “I’ll do that, Jack,” she said out loud. “I’ll just do that.” Leaving a message for Heather, although her daughter had said she’d be gone until five, Anne shut off the computer, locked the house, and went out to get into her car. But, stepping onto the front porch, she found herself remembering the note she’d stuffed into the depths of her gritchel.

  I can come into your house any time, you know. Any time at all.

  Though she fought against the impulse, furious that anyone who might actually be watching her would know how well he’d succeeded in terrifying her, she couldn’t resist scanning the street.

  Empty, except for a few kids playing on the sidewalk a couple of houses down.

  And the motor home.

  Its massive form squatted near the end of the block, the sight of it sending a chill through her.

  Who owned it? Where had it come from?

  Why was it here?

  Could someone be inside it even now, watching her? Instead of going directly to her car, parked in front of the house, Anne walked down the sidewalk toward the suddenly ominous vehicle. She circled it slowly, finally venturing close enough to peer into its windows.

  Empty.

  But for how long?

&nbs
p; As her memory of Richard Kraven’s love for his motor home rose in her mind, she dug into her gritchel for her dog-eared notebook and a pen. Jotting down the li-should go back into the house right now, and start the mechanics of putting a trace on it.

  Later, she told herself. Plenty of time for that later. Right now she had to find out what sent Mark Blakemoor up to the Snoqualmie River. She slid behind the wheel of the Volvo and twisted the key in the ignition, already knowing the reason. Only one thing would have sent Mark up there this morning.

  A body.

  They had to have found another body.

  CHAPTER 60

  The river was fairly shallow as it made its way around the wide bend, deepening only on the far side, where the force of the current had cut the bottom deep into the granite bed. The fly rod, just as it had in his dream the day before yesterday, felt familiar in Glen’s hand. On his very first cast, he flicked the fly nearly halfway across the river, then whipped it back and forth a couple of times before letting it settle onto the surface of the water while he reeled the line back in.

  “Wow,” Kevin breathed. “How’d you do that?”

  “It’s simple,” Glen explained, covering his own amazement at the skill with which he’d cast the fly. “It’s all in the wrist.”

  Laying his own rod on the rocky beach, he went over to Kevin and stood behind him, guiding his son’s hands with his own. As soon as he touched Kevin, something happened.

  He felt a rush of energy stream into him, as if some kind of electricity were pouring out of his son’s body and into his. And something happened inside him, too: The voice began whispering to him again. You feel it, don’t you, Glen? You feel the life inside him. And you want to know where it comes from, don’t you? He jerked his hands away from Kevin as if he’d touched a hot iron, and his son looked up at him, frowning.

  “You okay, Dad? You look kinda funny.”