Black Lightning

by John Saul

  Had she figured out how close to the truth Maybelle Swinney had come when she’d tried to make a joke?

  Probably: unlike Maybelle Swinney, Anne was smart.

  But where had she gone?

  To Mark Blakemoor, probably. Even if she wasn’t with him right now, she soon would be.

  But neither of them could yet suspect the truth, and in the end, when finally he lost this body as surely as he’d lost his own, at least his reputation would be restored.

  Glen Jeffers would be convicted of all of it.

  For Glen Jeffers, Richard Kraven had decided, would be caught in the act. Indeed, the only thing he’d changed his mind about was whom he would choose to be the subject of his final experiment.

  Anne had been his first choice, of course. But now he’d come to a new decision.

  An elegant decision.

  The kind of decision that was worthy of a man of his intellect.

  Anne would stay alive.

  And in his own final moment—or at least in the moment before he left this body to find a new one—he would see the expression on her face as she watched her husband clutch her daughter’s heart in his hand and tear it from her breast.

  For the rest of her life Anne would live with that memory.

  Richard Kraven’s reputation would be totally restored.

  And Anne Jeffers’s entire life would be utterly destroyed. Justice would be served.

  Sitting down at Anne’s desk, Richard Kraven began writing one last note. And this time he made no effort to keep from leaving Glen Jeffers’s fingerprints all over it. Then, leaving the note where Anne would be sure to find it, he left the house. There were preparations to make for his final experiment.

  The one he would perform on Heather Jeffers.

  CHAPTER 64

  The worst of the thunderstorm had moved eastward, and the dismal gray of the rainy afternoon had given way to a glittering darkness. The wet pavement shimmered brightly beneath the streetlights. As Anne turned left from Highland onto Sixteenth, she braked a little too sharply and felt the rear end of the car drift slightly to the right. It wasn’t until she’d recovered from the brief skid that Anne noticed the empty spot on the right that had still been occupied by the motor home when she and Kevin had left the house nearly two hours before. At least they wouldn’t have to walk too far in the downpour. Locking the car, she followed Kevin up the sidewalk, then climbed the flight of steps to the house, arriving on the porch just as Kevin was opening the door. “Glen?” she called. “Heather? Anybody …” Her call died on her lips as she felt the emptiness within the house, the same kind of emptiness she’d experienced while Glen had been in the hospital.

  Today, though, something had changed. Always before when she’d been alone in the house, the place was still filled with the vibrancy of her family. This evening that vibrancy was gone; the house had taken on the dead feeling that had pervaded it the first day they had walked in.

  Trying to banish her rapidly growing uneasiness, Anne strode quickly through the dining room to the kitchen. No note posted on the refrigerator door; the message light on the answering machine was not flashing. But the door to the basement stairs stood open. Not quite certain why the open door struck her as foreboding, Anne went to the top of the stairs and peered down into the work area below. The white glare of the fluorescent light shone down on the cleared surface of the workbench. Frowning, Anne started slowly down the stairs, her gaze fixed on the workbench. Only when she’d come to the bottom of the stairs did she notice the other things that had been done.

  The meticulously sorted containers of hardware.

  The perfectly vacuumed floor.

  For nearly two decades neither she nor Glen had even bothered to complain about the mess on the workbench, let alone clean it up.

  Now it looked as pristine as an operating room.

  Turning away from the workbench, Anne remounted the steps, searched the refrigerator door once more for a message from Glen, then went to the den. Maybe he’d left a Post-it on her monitor. But it wasn’t a yellow square that she found. It was an envelope with her name written on the outside.

  Written in a familiar spiky script.

  Recoiling from the envelope as if it were a coiled viper preparing to strike, Anne snatched up the telephone, her fingers punching at the buttons even as her mind tried not to imagine what the message inside the envelope might be, much less the terrifying significance of its presence on her desk. “Can you come over here?” Anne asked, the instant the phone was picked up at the other end. “Something’s happened—”

  “Five minutes,” Mark Blakemoor replied. “Is that soon enough? Do you need me to call 911 for you?”

  Anne gazed mutely at the envelope. “No,” she breathed. “I—We’ll be all right.” She laid the phone back on the hook, realizing only then that Kevin was standing in the doorway, his brow creased with worry as he watched her.

  “Is something wrong, Mom?” the boy asked, sounding far younger than his ten years. Moving closer to his mother, he put his arms around her, and she, still staring at the envelope on her desk, held him close.

  When the doorbell rang five minutes later, Anne had moved to the sofa in the living room, but her arms were still around her son. As the chimes sounded a second time, Anne gently disengaged herself from Kevin and approached the front door. Before she was halfway there, Kevin had scooted around her and pulled the door wide. Looking up, he gazed quizzically into Mark Blakemoor’s face. “I know you,” he said. “You came over when I found Kumquat in the alley.”

  “Pretty good memory,” Mark Blakemoor said. He squatted down so his eyes were level with Kevin’s. “And now, since I’m a cop, I’m going to ask you a question. How did you know it was me before you opened the door?”

  Kevin looked puzzled. “Wh-what do you mean?” he stammered.

  “Well, you must have known who it was, or you wouldn’t have just opened the door like that, would you? So what was it? Did your mom tell you?” As Kevin glanced nervously at his mother, Blakemoor jerked his head toward one of the curtained windows that flanked the door. “Or did you peek, like I would have done?”

  “I peeked,” Kevin cried, seizing the opportunity Blakemoor had offered him.

  “Good for you,” Mark said, tousling Kevin’s hair as he rose to his feet. “Always best to know who’s outside before you open the door, right?” Finally he turned his attention to Anne. “What happened?” he asked. “On the phone you sounded—” Then, realizing that Kevin was listening to every word he uttered, he made a quick adjustment. “—worried,” he finished, feeling inordinately pleased at the glint of appreciation that came into Anne’s eyes as she realized that he’d avoided referring to her obvious terror in front of her son. Also, she’d obviously decided to forgive him for the theory he’d expounded at lunch, and the realization had the effect of lifting the depression that had fallen over him as he’d watched her speed out of the parking lot of the Salish Lodge.

  “A lot has happened,” Anne said. As she led the detective through the living room to the den, she quickly told him about the knife Glen had found, and Sheila Harrar’s identification of it as having belonged to her son. “When Kevin and I got home, the motor home was gone, but that was on my desk.” She nodded toward the envelope, which Mark Blakemoor gingerly picked up, carefully holding it by its edges.

  “You haven’t read it?” he asked, his voice betraying nothing of what he might be thinking. When Anne shook her head, he opened the unsealed flap of the envelope and carefully slid the single sheet of paper onto the desk’s surface. It was the same kind of paper, he noted, that had been used for the message that had been mailed to Anne. “Got a Baggie?” he asked. “Anything like that?”

  “I’ll get one,” Kevin instantly volunteered. As he darted out of the room, Anne took the opportunity to speak quickly to Blakemoor.

  “Everything’s crazy,” she told him, her voice shaking now. “The basement’s cleaned up to the point that i
t looks like some kind of laboratory, and Kevin said Glen was acting funny up in the mountains today.”

  “Funny, how?” Mark asked.

  Anne shrugged. “All he would say was that Glen kept looking at him in a way that made him nervous, then sent him off to fish all by himself. But he says he can tell us where they were, and he thinks he knows where Glen found the knife. And when I got home from lunch—” She fell silent as Kevin reappeared clutching a box of Baggies in his hand.

  The boy watched in fascination as Mark Blakemoor carefully opened the folded note and sealed it inside one of the plastic bags even before reading it. Then, after scanning it himself, he handed it to Anne. Her hand trembling, she focused on the words:

  Dearest Anne,

  Are you ready to face the truth yet? (Only part of it is in the computer, Anne. The rest is in your mind.) You’ve known it since my release from the hospital. Remember that afternoon, Anne? There was an excitement you’d never felt before, wasn’t there? It was electricity, Anne, the kind that filled the theater when Nijinsky leaped. That’s the single great sorrow of my life, you know. I never sat in an audience when Nijinsky danced. But at least I know he wasn’t mad.

  Anyway, it’s been fun, but now it’s time for the final dance. And I’ve already chosen my partner.

  She read the note and reread it, her mind struggling to comprehend the words her eyes were seeing.

  What did it mean?

  Nijinsky? What did a dancer who’d been dead for nearly fifty years have to do with anything?

  “Do you have any idea where Glen might have gone?” she heard Mark Blakemoor saying. His voice was gentle, and when she managed to tear her eyes away from the note to look up at him, she saw no trace of the satisfaction of vindication in his expression.

  All she saw was sympathy.

  “No,” she breathed. “His car’s out in front, so …” Her words died on her lips. She’d been about to say he must have gone for a walk, but it was pouring outside. Even if he’d gone out before the rain started, wouldn’t he be back by now?

  Suddenly a line from the note popped up in her mind:

  It’s time for the final dance. And I’ve already chosen my partner.

  Then she remembered a line from the previous note:

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

  Images tumbled through her mind: the basement, cleaned up for the first time in years.

  The motor home that had mysteriously appeared on the street, and remained there, just a couple of houses away.

  The motor home that was now gone!

  Now the pieces started falling together. Whoever had written the notes had been out there for days, watching them, watching her! “I know where he’s been,” she whispered, turning away from the window, her face drained of color. “Oh, God, Mark, he’s been right outside for days. There was a motor home—” Still talking, telling Blakemoor how annoyed she’d been when the big van had appeared down the block, she found her leather carryall and began rummaging through it, searching for her notebook.

  Her fingers finally closing on it, she pulled it out, ripped out the page on which she’d scrawled the R.V.’s license number, and handed it to Mark. “He was here, Mark!” she said. “My God, he’s taken Glen!” She picked up the note again. “This is wrong. Mark, I know how it looks, and I know what you think, but it’s wrong. Glen didn’t write this note! Someone else did, and now he’s got Glen!” But Mark Blakemoor wasn’t listening; he was already on his cellular phone, putting a trace on the motor home’s license plate. While he talked, Anne read the note one more time, and slowly her numbed mind began to work again.

  The more she studied the note, the more her certainty grew that Glen hadn’t written it. One word kept leaping out at her, taunting her. Finally she went to her computer, called up her file manager, and typed the single word into the search utility.

  NUJINSKY.

  She pressed the return button and waited. A few seconds later a short list of files appeared, all of them transcriptions of interviews she’d had over the years with one man.

  Richard Kraven.

  She double-clicked on the first file on the list and a second later the transcript appeared on the monitor, the word “Nijinsky” brightly highlighted.

  She skipped to the next one, and the next one, her fascination, and her terror, growing as she read.

  The truth of Richard Kraven began to emerge.

  It was a truth he’d hinted at from the very beginning, offering her a single piece of the puzzle here, another one there. But the pieces had been so small, the hints so oblique, that she’d never recognized them for what they were.

  The dance.

  Metaphysics.

  Electricity.

  Life, death, insanity.

  And Nijinsky.

  Richard Kraven had told her about Vaslav Nijinsky himself. It was right there in one of the earliest interviews:

  A.J.: Why the ballet, Mr. Kraven?

  R.K.: My interest in ballet doesn’t have to do with the dance, per se, Ms. Jeffers. It’s the dancers that fascinate me.

  A.J.: The dancers?

  R.K.: Do you know what it takes to be a ballet dancer? Perfection. Perfection in physical discipline, and perfection in mental discipline. That is what’s fascinating. The drive toward perfection.

  A.J.: But is it really possible to achieve perfection?

  R.K.: There was one. Vaslav Nijinsky. Are you familiar with the name?

  A.J.: He died insane, didn’t he?

  R.K.: So they say, but I’m not at all sure I agree. What he did do was leap higher than anyone else, before or since. But he didn’t just leap, Ms. Jeffers. At the zenith of his leaps, he hovered above the stage.

  A.J.: I’m not sure I’m following you.

  R.K.: Oh, at the time they said he only appeared to hover, but according to Nijinsky himself, he truly did suspend himself above the stage. He said he learned to separate himself from his body, and when he danced, he felt as if he were in the flies above the stage, manipulating his own body as if it were a marionette on strings.

  A.J.: And you believe such a thing is possible?

  R.K.: Not just possible, Ms. Jeffers. I believe he did it. You see, the reason he stopped dancing was that he began to feel that he might find himself stranded outside of his own body. He said that toward the end of his career he would find the spirit of a stranger inhabiting his body when he came back, and he began to feel the time would come when the invading spirit was stronger than his own and he would not be able to repossess his own body. It is why he stopped dancing, and why he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. But what if he wasn’t schizophrenic, Ms. Jeffers? What if he wasn’t schizophrenic at all? What would it mean?

  The interview had ended there. Anne had made a note to check out the story of Vaslav Nijinsky. At the time, though, it had seemed irrelevant, and she had focused on what she’d then considered more important things.

  Now, she realized, there were no more important things. Not if Vaslav Nijinsky—and Richard Kraven—were right.

  Her eyes went back to the note one more time, fixing on the last line:

  … I’ve already chosen my partner.

  If Kraven had been right, it wasn’t Glen he’d chosen today, couldn’t possibly be Glen, because he already had Glen.

  Who, then?

  Who might he have chosen? A terrible thought came to her, and she snatched up the phone, dialing Rayette Hoover’s number. On the fourth ring, Rayette herself picked up the phone, and Anne, her voice catching in her throat, asked to speak to her daughter. When she hung up the phone a moment later, her face was ashen, her hands trembling. But before she could say anything, Mark Blakemoor spoke as he slid his phone into the pocket of his jacket. “The R.V.’s a rental, Anne,” he said quietly. “And Glen rented it a few days ago.”

  Anne nodded mutely. “But it’s not Glen,” she said, her voice choked with a sob. “It’s really him, Mark. He’s taken Heather! Oh, God
, he’s taken Heather, and he’s going to kill her.”

  CHAPTER 65

  Heather Jeffers glanced surreptitiously at her father, doing her best to appear to be staring through the windshield at the storm raging outside. When he’d picked her up at Rayette’s, she’d been surprised—usually if either she or Kevin wanted to go somewhere, they walked, took the bus, or rode with friends. She’d been even more surprised when she saw what he was driving.

  “Did you and Mom buy it?” she’d asked as she gazed at the enormous vehicle.

  “I leased it,” her father told her. “Your mom doesn’t even know about it yet.” When he’d told her they were going to meet her mother and brother at the Thai restaurant on Mercer Island, she hadn’t questioned it, just as she hadn’t questioned him when she asked where the rest of the family was and he’d told her, “They went over to Bellevue Square.” He’d grinned at her. “So what do you think of the R.V.?”

  As he’d driven down Denny toward the entrance to I-5, she’d explored the big motor home, then returned to the passenger seat. “How can you even drive it?” she asked. “It’s so big.”

  He’d looked at her, and she’d seen something funny in his eyes—they didn’t look quite right. “I can do lots of things you don’t know about,” he said, and his voice, like his eyes, seemed strange. It left her feeling weird—not exactly scared, but a bit worried—and she asked him if he was okay. When he told her—in the kind of voice he’d never let her use on Kevin—that there wasn’t anything wrong at all, she’d turned to stare out the window, and hadn’t said anything else until they were crossing Mercer Island on I-90 five minutes later.

  “You want to get off at Island Crest, don’t you?” she finally asked, breaking her silence only because he didn’t seem to notice how close to the exit they were.

  He hadn’t answered her. And he hadn’t gotten off at Island Crest, either. Instead he stayed on the freeway, and a minute later they left Mercer Island and were headed across the bridge to Bellevue.