Black Lightning (15 page)

CHAPTER 21

G
len’s whole body jerked spasmodically and his eyes snapped open.

A heart attack—he was having another heart attack! He reached out, groping for the buzzer that would summon the nurse, but even as his thumb was pressing it down, his mind cleared and he realized his mistake. It wasn’t a heart attack at all—it was simply a bad dream.

But a dream of what?

A second ago it had been so vivid.

A cat.

Something to do with a cat. Kumquat?

He tried to remember what the cat had looked like, but the details of the dream vanished like ephemera, fading from his mind even as he tried to retrieve them. A second later the door to his room opened and one of the nurses stepped in. It was Annette Brady, whom Glen had liked from the minute he was conscious enough to know who she was, but this morning her normally cheerful smile was nowhere to be seen.

“Yes?” she asked with a curtness that was as unusual as her scowl.

Suddenly Glen understood—Annette worked the swing shift, so she must have been called in early today. “Sorry about the ring,” he said. “I just had a nightmare, and when I woke up I thought I was having a heart attack.”

The nurse scanned the monitors above the bed. “Well, it all looks normal now.” She started out of the room.

“Gonna be a long one, huh?” Glen asked.

Annette Brady turned back. “No longer than usual.”

Frowning, Glen shifted his gaze to the clock. Seven-thirty?

How could it be seven-thirty? He hadn’t even awakened until—

No longer than usual?

His gaze shifted to the window. The streetlights were already on outside, and the last evening light was rapidly fading away. Had he been sleeping all day?

Why hadn’t they awakened him for dinner? This was a hospital—a couple of times they’d even awakened him to give him a sleeping pill! He was about to ask about it when he realized he wasn’t hungry. Now he began to feel totally disoriented. Had he forgotten the whole day? But maybe he was wrong—maybe they really had let him sleep. “I was just thinking, maybe if I could get something to eat—”

Annette Brady’s eyes widened. “After what you had for dinner, you’re hungry again?” She shook her head in resignation. “Okay, let me see what I can do. But if I can find something this late, I expect you to be polite about it, at least. Okay?”

As the nurse left the room, Glen tried to make sense of it. Obviously he’d eaten, and equally obviously he’d complained about the food. But he had no memory of the meal, any more than he could remember the rest of the day.

He glanced around the room as if hoping to find some clue, and the first thing his eyes fell on was a thick file folder lying on the table next to the bed. Picking it up, he opened it, and frowned. Anne’s file on Richard Kraven? What was it doing here?

She must have been here while he was asleep, and left it. Picking up the phone, he dialed the number, but even as Anne answered, he suddenly had a thought.

He was supposed to go home in a few days—if he’d had a memory loss, would they still discharge him?

Not a chance. They’d keep him here until they were certain they knew exactly what had caused it. So when Anne answered the phone, he hesitated. And while he hesitated, she spoke.

“So you decided to call and apologize, huh?” she asked, her voice only half bantering. “Where would you like to start? With me, or Kevin?”

Glen searched his mind. He couldn’t remember having talked to Anne at all that day, but he did recall talking to Kevin on the phone that morning, and asking him to bring some magazines to the hospital. His eyes flicked back to the bed table; the magazines lay under the file.

So at least Kevin had been there, and probably Anne, too.

“I guess it was just a bad day for me,” he said, uttering the total truth, but still not admitting his memory loss. “I’m really sorry, okay?” A minute later, after he’d repeated the apology to Kevin, Anne came back on the line.

“How long do you want my file?” she asked, her voice sounding almost amused now.

His eyes went back to the thick file. So he’d asked for it. Why?

“I don’t know,” he replied, still not lying, but still not admitting that he seemed to have lost most of the day. But why had he even wanted it? He’d always thought Anne’s fascination with the Kraven case bordered on the morbid, which she well knew. “I guess I just thought as long as I was lying here, I might as well try to figure out what you found so interesting about him,” he improvised. “Maybe I’ll stay up all night reading it.”

A few minutes later, after he’d said good night to Anne, he picked up the file, not really intending to read it but half thinking that the motion would jar his memory. He paused, the thick folder in his lap, then, instead of putting the file aside, opened it.

He began paging through it, and as he scanned the articles, he experienced an odd sense of déjà vu.

All the material seemed very familiar, though he had no memory of having read it before. Then, as he turned one of the pages, he froze. He was staring at a photocopy of an article that he knew Anne must have written, though it had no byline:

Richard Kraven: Animal Abuser?

Former neighbors of Richard Kraven report that the suspected serial killer was a habitual torturer of small animals, even when he was as young as twelve years old.

Martha Demming, 76, who lived for nearly two decades in the house next door to the South Seattle residence still occupied by Edna Kraven, reports that on at least two occasions she witnessed Richard Kraven—then in his very early adolescence—stalking his mother’s pet cat.

“I don’t want to say he was torturing it,” Miss Demming stated in a telephone interview, “but [the cat] always seemed to be afraid of him.”

Later in the same interview, Miss Demming reported that there were rumors the body of the cat had been found by another neighbor who “thought it had been electrocuted, or something.” The neighbor who reputedly found the cat, Wilbur Fankenburg, died three years ago at the age of 56, and could not confirm Miss Demming’s report.

Glen Jeffers read the article through twice, small bits and pieces of the nightmare that had awakened him at last coming back. Closing the file and setting it on the bed table, he leaned back into the pillows.

The origin of the nightmare, at least, was now apparent. Obviously he’d read at least part of Anne’s file during the day.

Why, then, didn’t he remember it?

He was still pondering that question as he sank into a deep sleep a few minutes later.

CHAPTER 22

W
hile the night brought a deep and peaceful sleep to Glen Jeffers, to Anne it brought only tortured wakefulness. Glen’s call had come just as she’d finally convinced herself that his peculiar behavior when she’d visited him at the hospital that afternoon hadn’t meant anything at all.

After all, Dr. Farber had warned her the day after Glen’s heart attack that nothing would be the same. For some people, he’d said, a heart attack such as Glen’s brought on a complete personality change. One of his patients who had been a Type-A personality his entire life suddenly became a Type-B practically overnight. Impatient people often found themselves no longer bothered by things that had driven them crazy before the attack, and easygoing people could just as easily turn cranky. It was the latter that Anne discovered late that afternoon when she’d gone to visit Glen before coming home to fix the kids’ dinner. Her normally sunny husband had been propped up in bed, a file—one of
her
files, it turned out—spread out around him, and when she leaned over to kiss him, he barely responded at all. When she asked him why he had suddenly become interested in Richard Kraven, he replied that he’d just become curious about her own fascination with the case. “And you know what?” he asked, finally looking up from the file. “He was an interesting guy. You always made him out to be some kind of monster, but—”

Anne had stared at Glen in shock, barely able to believe her ears. Only last week he’d said the only legitimate reason for her to go to the execution was to “make sure the bastard’s really dead.” Now he was an “interesting guy”?

“He was a monster,” she’d interjected. “God only knows how many people he killed. And he didn’t just kill them, Glen. He dissected them!” When Glen had glanced up from the story he was reading—one she herself had written, though the way he was talking it was as if she knew nothing about Richard Kraven!—he almost looked angry. She’d dropped the subject right then and there, knowing the last thing Glen needed was to get upset. But for the rest of the visit, she’d felt as though he was barely putting up with her. Finally, she cut the visit short, since Glen hadn’t even acknowledged her presence for almost ten minutes.

On the way out she’d stopped and spoken to the nurse, who assured her that patients often preferred not to have visitors at all, that so much of their energy was taken up with getting better that they simply had none left to entertain anyone. Anne had tried to let it go at that, but still found herself worrying all evening, especially after hearing what had happened when Kevin visited his father that morning. And when Glen finally called, though he’d sounded more like himself, she’d been able to tell that something was wrong. Despite his apology for the way he’d treated both her and Kevin, she had the strange sense that he hadn’t really known why she was upset with him. And ever since the call, the sense of nervousness she’d only just managed to assuage had come flooding back.

Now, setting aside the stack of notes she’d been working on—notes gleaned from hours of work in the storerooms of the Public Safety Building—she abandoned her desk, knowing there was no chance of getting any more work done that evening. Leaving the small study that Glen had carved out of one end of the cavernous living room, she glanced at Kevin, who was sprawled out on the sofa, reading a book while the TV droned unheeded in the background. “If you’re not watching the TV, you might turn it off,” she commented.

“I
am
watching it,” Kevin replied, not even looking up from his book.

Anne decided not to bother arguing with Kevin. If pressed, he would be perfectly capable of telling her all the details of a plot he had seemed to be ignoring. It was a talent he’d inherited from her own father, whom she knew for a fact had been able to read a book, follow a conversation going on in the same room, and still catch any errors she made while practicing the piano in another room. It was a trait that had both impressed and annoyed her in her father. In Kevin she often found it totally confounding, since she knew the ability undermined all her reasons for him not to watch TV while he did his homework. “I’m going over to the hospital to see your father.”

Kevin finally glanced up from his book, and Anne knew her voice had betrayed her worry.

“Is something wrong?”

Anne shook her head. “I just feel like taking a walk, so I thought I’d look in on him.”

“Okay.”

“Tell Heather not to go out.”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “Jeez, Mom, I’m not a baby. I’m here by myself all the time.”

But not at night, Anne thought silently. Rather than voice the thought and expose herself to another of her son’s scornful looks, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “Be back in an hour. Stay out of trouble, okay?”

The night air had grown chilly, and as she headed down Sixteenth East, Anne shoved her hands deep in her pockets. When she came to Mercer Street, where the neighborhood started to deteriorate, she turned right, cut over to Fifteenth, then went south again to Thomas Street, entering the Group Health complex through the emergency entrance, then threading her way through the corridors until she finally came to the elevators that would take her up to the Critical Care Unit on the third floor. Using the red phone in the family room, she identified herself, and a moment later Annette Brady appeared.

“Your husband’s asleep, but I don’t see how it could be a problem if you want to look in on him for a minute.”

“How’s he doing?” Anne asked as the nurse escorted her into the CCU.

“Actually, a lot better tonight. I think he fell asleep after dinner, and when he woke up, he was a human being again. But frankly, if I were you, I don’t think I’d wake him up right now. The best thing for him is just to let him sleep.”

The nurse quietly pulled Glen’s door open, and Anne peered inside. A soft glow of light from the street beyond the window bathed his face. Though he was still attached to the heart monitors, he was starting to look once more like the man she’d married. The last vestiges of the anger she’d felt toward him that afternoon and evening evaporated, as did the worry his uncharacteristic behavior had caused. Feeling much better, she stepped back from the door and let Annette Brady close it again. “Suddenly I feel kind of silly,” Anne confessed as the two of them walked back toward the unit’s main doors. “I suppose I should have just called, but suddenly I feel about Glen the way I used to feel about my kids when they were babies. Being told they’re okay is one thing, but you don’t really believe it until you see it for yourself.”

“Not a problem,” the nurse assured her. “Believe me, we have wives coming in here every night, at all hours. On the other hand, husbands,” she continued, “hardly ever show up at odd hours. Amazing how weak the maternal instinct is in the American heterosexual male.” Anne started toward the elevators, waving a final good-bye as the nurse warned her to be careful if she was going to walk home. “That woman who got killed the other night was only a few blocks from here, you know.”

And she was a hooker who picked up the wrong john, Anne thought as she rode the elevator back to the ground floor, instantly reminding herself that all Shawnelle Davis had been trying to do was earn a living, something for which she certainly hadn’t deserved to die. In almost conscious defiance of Annette Brady’s warning, Anne left the hospital through the main doors and started up Sixteenth East. As she strode up the sidewalk, moving from pools of light into dark shadows, then emerging into the light again a few seconds later as she neared the next streetlamp, she suddenly had a feeling that she was being watched. Pausing, she scanned the street ahead of her, then turned around.

She was alone.

Gazing up and down the street once more, finally satisfied there was no one lurking in the shadows ahead, Anne walked on until, reaching the corner of Thomas Street, her nerve deserted her and she turned left, quickening her step as the brighter lights and heavy traffic of Fifteenth beckoned. By the time she reached the corner, the prickly sensation on the back of her neck had eased, and as she started northward, she began to feel as if she’d just played the fool.

The Experimenter stepped back from the window as Anne Jeffers turned the corner and disappeared from his view. She’d felt him watching her, of that he was absolutely certain. She’d sensed a presence, though she had no idea it was his presence. He’d seen her scan the streets, hesitate, then scan them again, the way he himself always did, watching warily to be certain no one was paying too much attention when he began focusing on a new subject for his experiments
.

Soon it would be time to begin again, time to take up the work once more. His fingers twitched with eagerness in the dimness of the room as he anticipated the feel of plunging his hands once more into the very center of life, experiencing again the thrill of holding a living, throbbing organ in his palms, exhilarating once more to the towering sensation of holding the power of life and death within his very grasp
.

He’d already decided that Anne Jeffers would be the subject of one of his experiments this time. He would toy with her first, of course, just as he’d been toying with her for years. But when her time finally came, and it was finally her body he opened up, her life force he experienced, he might even keep her awake, so that she could share the exhilaration with him
.

There were ways to do that, ways he’d learned about in the years during which he suspended his work. He would have to experiment with the needles, but he was looking forward to that, as he looked forward to all his experiments
.

Not so long now. Soon it would all happen. Soon he would hold Anne Jeffers in the palms of his hands. Soon … soon …