Black Lightning (27 page)

“Smooth move, Ex-Lax,” he told her. “Why don’t you just tell the whole city where we keep the key?”

Heather instantly came to Rayette’s defense. “The whole city probably already knows. And we’re not going to leave it out here anymore, anyway. Not after what happened to Mrs. Cottrell.”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “If that guy saw you, he’s gonna get you anyway,” he declared, seizing on the opportunity to terrify his sister. “I bet he’s been watching you all day.”

“Shut up, Kevin,” Heather said as she took the key from Rayette and stuck it into the lock. “Just shut up, okay?”

“Don’t tell me to shut up,” Kevin shot back as they entered the foyer. Heather closed the door behind them and threw the dead bolt. “Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat,” he chanted, dropping down to rub the belly of Boots, who had thrown himself on his master the instant the door had opened and was now lying on his back, his whole body trembling with joy. “Heather is a scaredy-cat!”

“Why don’t you just stuff it, Kevin,” Heather told her brother, then turned to Rayette as she started toward the kitchen. “Come on. You can open a couple of Cokes while I give Kumquat her food.”

Kevin glared at his sister. “I’m gonna tell Dad you told me to stuff it,” he threatened. “Dad?” he yelled up the stairs. “Hey, Dad!”

Their father’s voice called back from the den behind the living room. “In here!” As the two girls headed through the dining room, Kevin took the opposite direction, Boots scampering after him.

“So what are you gonna do?” Rayette asked as she opened the refrigerator door and pulled two cans of Coke off the bottom shelf.

“About what?” Heather asked, taking a tin of cat food out of the cupboard next to the refrigerator.

“About the man you saw.” Rayette popped the tabs on both cans and poured their contents into two large glasses, then dropped into one of the chairs at the big table in the corner of the kitchen. “I mean, what if Kevin’s right?”

Heather scooped a lump of Friskies into Kumquat’s dish. “He didn’t even see me,” she said, giving her voice a lot more conviction than she felt.

“But what if he did?” Rayette pressed. “I mean what if—”

“I don’t want to talk about it!” Heather set the dish on the floor. Then she frowned as she realized that Kumquat hadn’t been rubbing up against her legs the way she always did while her dish was being filled.

“Come
on
, girl,” Rayette protested. “If he
did
see you—” But her friend was no longer paying any attention to her.

“Kumquat?” Heather was calling. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

When the cat didn’t appear immediately, Heather went back to the foyer. “Dad? Is Kumquat back there?”

“I haven’t seen her since this morning,” her father called from the den.

Frowning, Heather went upstairs and checked her room. When she didn’t find the cat there, she searched the rest of the house, then came back to the kitchen. “She’s gone,” she reported to Rayette.

“Maybe she got a look at some big tomcat and went out to get her some,” Rayette suggested, leering lasciviously.

“She’s spayed,” Heather replied.

“So’s my aunt Tanya, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still like it,” Rayette retorted.

“Rayette!” Heather groaned. She opened the back door and once more called out for the missing cat. “Kumquat! Come on, kitty. Supper’s ready.”

Kevin and Boots came into the kitchen, the dog instantly spotting the open door and seizing an opportunity to make a break for freedom. Heather moved to slam it closed before the dog could dart through, but Kevin stopped her.

“It’s okay. Dad told me to take him outside.”

“Look around for Kumquat, okay?” Heather asked.

“He’s your cat—you look for her,” Kevin argued, but quickly changed his mind when he saw the glint in his sister’s eye. “Okay, okay.”

“Maybe we all ought to go hunt for her,” Heather said.

“Let’s just finish our Cokes, and if she still hasn’t shown up,
then
we can go look for her,” Rayette countered.

Deciding it would be easier to go along with Rayette than try to argue with her, Heather sank onto the chair opposite her friend. Where could the cat have gone? True, she let Kumquat out every morning and every night, but the cat never stayed outside very long, and always spent most of the day sleeping on her bed. Then she noticed the door to the basement wasn’t shut quite tight. Abandoning her Coke, she went to the door, pulled it open and looked down the stairs.

The usual darkness of the cellar was broken by a glow of white light. Her father must have gone down there sometime during the day, and if Kumquat found the door open, her curiosity alone would have made her go through it. “Kumquat?” Heather called again, starting down the stairs. “Here, kitty, kitty. Come on, Kumquat!” Coming to the bottom of the stairs, Heather scanned the room for the cat. Neither seeing nor hearing anything, she crossed to the workbench, reaching for the string that would shut off the glaring fluorescent light. Just as her fingers closed on the string, her eyes fell on something sitting on top of the workbench.

A large, furry bug with bright green wings.

Startled, Heather jumped back, then realized it wasn’t a bug after all. But what was it? Reaching out, she gingerly picked the object up. Turning it over, she saw the needle-sharp point of the fishhook protruding from the mass of fur, and immediately felt like an idiot for being frightened by a fishing fly. On the other hand, if it had made her jump, what would happen if she tossed it at Rayette, who was terrified of bugs? Taking the fly with her, she turned the light off and went back up the stairs, closing the door behind her. Approaching the table with an exaggerated nonchalance, she grinned at Rayette. “Want to see what I found?” Without waiting for a reply, she tossed the fly onto the table, eliciting a gratifyingly loud shriek from her friend. Catching on to the joke even as her screech died away, Rayette was about to vent her outrage on Heather when Kevin called from behind the garage.

“Heather? Hey, Heather! Com’ere, quick!”

Responding to the urgency in his voice, both girls ran down the back steps and out into the yard. As they rounded the corner of the garage, they stopped short. Kevin was squatting on the ground, holding a growling Boots in his arms. Hearing them behind him, Kevin turned and looked up at his sister, his face ashen.

“Bootsie found her.” He was breathing hard, fighting tears. “Just like he found Mrs. Cottrell this morning.”

Her heart pounding, Heather moved closer to her brother, praying she wasn’t going to see what she already knew must be there.

Lying half hidden under the wooden decking that supported the trash barrels was Kumquat.

Her fur was matted with blood and her chest was torn open.

Instinctively, Heather started toward her pet, but Rayette stopped her. “Don’t, Heather,” she whispered. “Don’t even touch her. Just leave her where she is, and let’s call the police.”

Sobbing, unable even to speak, Heather let Rayette lead her back to the house. They came through the back door just as Heather’s mother came in the front. While the two girls were still blurting out what they’d found behind the garage, Anne was dialing the police.

CHAPTER 40

M
ark Blakemoor was considering whether to knock off at five like a normal human being, or go on working until he’d caught up with the stack of files that seemed to grow on his desk at an inexorable rate. Glancing up at the clock on the wall of the tiny cubicle he and Lois Ackerly shared, he saw that he still had ten minutes before he’d actually have to make a decision. He returned his attention to the open folder in front of him. It was nothing more interesting than a copy of Joyce Cottrell’s Group Health personnel record, in which he’d been hunting for something—any little scrap of information that might indicate she’d had an enemy. The problem with Cottrell, though, was that she not only didn’t appear to have any enemies, but hadn’t appeared to have any friends, either. Even her employment jacket didn’t have much to say about her. She’d been working at Group Health for better than twenty years, and in all that time, had accumulated neither praise nor criticism. Apparently she did her job well enough to keep it, but never showed enough initiative to be promoted, either.

Tossing the file aside, he turned his attention to Lois Ackerly, who was already clearing her desk in preparation for an on-time departure, instantly annoying him, though he couldn’t have said whether it was the fact that she was leaving on time that irritated him or that she had someone to go home to.

Reflexively, he glanced at the spot where a picture of his ex-wife had once sat. Except, instead of seeing a picture of Patsy Blakemoor in his mind, it was Anne Jeffers’s image that popped out of his subconscious. Got to stop that, he told himself. More to get Anne’s image out of his mind than because he really wanted to talk about it, he asked Lois Ackerly if she’d had any more luck with her investigation into Joyce Cottrell’s background than he’d had with his.

Lois shook her head in a combination of sympathy and disbelief. “That woman lent new meaning to the phrase ‘Get a life,’ ” she said. “Not only can’t I find anyone who will admit to being her friend, I can hardly find anyone who even knew her. All I’ve found out is that she went to work and she went home. At work, she did her job and kept to herself. She didn’t have any friends—even took her breaks by herself. It’s like she was a complete cipher.”

“Same with her personnel jacket,” Blakemoor agreed. “Ever seen a record with no pluses and no minuses?” He tossed it across, and Lois Ackerly flipped it open, scanning through the evaluation forms that Blakemoor had already found abnormally dull.

“No friends and no enemies.” Ackerly sighed, dropping the file back onto her partner’s desk. “No gossip, either. It’s like she existed in a void.”

“So who killed her?” Blakemoor asked. As he asked the question, another image came into his mind. Glen Jeffers. He had been thinking about Jeffers all afternoon. Though he was sure there was something Anne’s husband hadn’t told him, he’d finally come to the conclusion that even if he wanted Glen out of the way—and he kept insisting to himself that he didn’t, not really—it still didn’t add up. Whoever did the Cottrell woman would have been drenched with blood, and if she’d screamed even once, she damned near would have
had
to awaken someone in the house next door. If your whole family was asleep in that house, would you risk that? Mark Blakemoor didn’t think so. In fact, he was damned well sure of it. Still, he might just ask Glen Jeffers for a set of prints, if for no other reason than to eliminate him as the person who’d left a few smudged but matchable traces in Cottrell’s bathroom, where he’d apparently washed his hands. “Who killed her?” he repeated, sighing in frustration.

“Same creep who did Shawnelle Davis?” Lois Ackerly suggested. “You know Anne Jeffers is going to tie them together, and you know we’re going to have to deal with it.”

Blakemoor leaned back in his chair, propped his feet up on the desk and clasped his hands behind his head. “So what are you suggesting?” he asked, and it was clear to Ackerly that he was settling in for a long discussion of the case. “Is Anne right? Are you starting to buy her nutty idea that maybe Richard Kraven really didn’t do all the others by himself, and that all that shit’s starting up again? Or is it just a copycat? Except if it’s a copycat, how come he dipped his wick in Cottrell but not in Davis?”

Before Lois Ackerly could answer, the phone on her partner’s desk rang. Grateful for the opportunity to stall on Blakemoor’s questions, she snatched up the receiver before Mark’s feet had dropped back to the floor. As she listened, a frown creased her forehead, and for a moment Blakemoor had a sinking feeling that another corpse had turned up. But then the frown cleared, replaced by a broad smile.

“A cat?” the detective asked. “Come on, Phil—what are you calling us for? We don’t do cats. We’re homicide, remember? Not—what would it be?
Felicide?”
Clamping her hand over the mouthpiece, she spoke to Blakemoor. “Would you believe they’re calling us about a dead—” But even before she finished the sentence her smile faded and she swore softly. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Okay, we’ll catch it. We’re on our way.”

Mark Blakemoor stared at her in disbelief as she dropped the receiver back onto the cradle. “A
cat?”
he demanded. “Did I just hear you tell them we’d go out on a dead cat?”

Lois Ackerly nodded unhappily. “It’s not just any dead cat,” she replied. “It’s Anne Jeffers’s cat.”

“Anne’s?” Blakemoor echoed. “And she asked for us?”

Lois Ackerly nodded. “From what Phil said, it sounds like it’s cut up the same way Cottrell and Davis were.”

Mark Blakemoor swore silently. If it were true—and he hoped it wasn’t—he was pretty sure he knew exactly what it meant: they didn’t simply have a serial killer loose; they had a serial killer who was going to start playing grisly games.

But playing with whom?

The police, or his next victim?

There was another possibility, of course: it could be someone’s idea of a sick joke. After all, Anne’s name had been on the radio all day long, with every newscaster in town talking about the oddity of a reporter discovering a body. If someone didn’t like Anne, what better way to throw a scare into her than to kill her cat the same way her neighbor had been killed? What else could she think but that she was being warned that she might be the next victim? Christ, she must be falling apart! A wave of fury at whoever had done this to Anne rose within him, and for the briefest of moments Mark wondered if he should take himself off this whole case. But he knew he wouldn’t—if anything, he would work even harder to find this particular creep.

It wasn’t until they were in the car, headed for Capitol Hill, that Ackerly glanced over at him, her lips curving in an ironic smile. “Well, at least you don’t have to go home.”

Blakemoor felt himself reddening. “I don’t mind going home,” he muttered gruffly.

“Which is why you always manage to start a conversation at just a minute or two before five, right?” Lois Ackerly observed, then relented. “Hey, it’s okay. Loneliness is a bummer. If I didn’t have Jake—”

“Look, can we talk about something else?” Blakemoor broke in.

But they finished the drive in silence. They had pulled up in front of the Jefferses’ house when Lois spoke again. “If you want, I can take this one alone,” she offered.

Shit! Blakemoor thought. Is it that obvious? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said out loud, getting out of the car and slamming the door harder than necessary. Taking the steep flight of steps up to the porch two at a time, he was about to ring the bell when the door opened and Anne Jeffers let him in, her ashen face making clear just how frightened she was.

“I suppose you think I’ve really gone around the bend this time,” she said with a not very successful attempt to make the words sound bantering.

“I don’t even know what happened yet,” Mark replied, hoping nothing in his own voice betrayed his urge to put his arms around her. “What happened?” he asked as Lois Ackerly stepped into the foyer. In the living room he could see a teenage girl who he assumed was Anne’s daughter huddled on the sofa, crying, while a black girl of about the same age tried to comfort her.

“In back,” Anne said quietly, leading the two detectives through the dining room and kitchen, then outside into the backyard. As they crossed the lawn, Mark Blakemoor caught himself glancing over at the house next door and wondering if it were really possible that there was a connection between the brutal murder that had occurred there the previous night and the cat that now lay dead behind Anne Jeffers’s house.

Both Glen and Kevin were sitting on the wooden decking that supported the garbage cans. As Anne and the two detectives approached, the little boy jumped to his feet.

“She’s right there!” he exclaimed, pointing to the portion of the cat that protruded from beneath the deck. “Boots found her, just like he found Mrs. Cot—”

“That’s enough.” Anne pulled her son to her and put her arms protectively around his shoulders.

“Has anyone touched it?” Mark asked, squatting down to take a closer look at the cat’s corpse.

Kevin shook his head. “I didn’t,” he reported. “And I wouldn’t let Heather or Rayette, either. I told them—”

“Maybe you should go back into the house, honey,” Anne suggested.

“Aw, Mom!” Kevin groaned. “Come on! It was me that found her!”

“Go
on,”
Anne told him. “If Detective Blakemoor has any questions, we’ll come and find you. And be nice to your sister,” she warned as Kevin reluctantly started back toward the house.

Easing the dead cat clear of the deck, Blakemoor studied the carnage that had been its chest. The rib cage had been cut open and the lungs pulled out, just as had those of both Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell. But somehow the mutilation of the cat looked different.

Neater
.

The word had come unbidden into his mind, but as he repeated it silently to himself, Blakemoor realized it was the only description that was truly appropriate. Whereas both Davis and Cottrell seemed to have been ripped apart in rage, the animal—at least where the cut up its chest and the opening of its rib cage had been performed—looked almost as if it had been dissected.

“Any idea what might have happened to it?” he asked Glen Jeffers, who was standing now, staring numbly down at the body of his daughter’s pet. Blakemoor watched him carefully, but saw nothing in his expression except shock at the mutilation.

Glen shook his head. “I didn’t even know she wasn’t in the house,” he said, his voice dull, his eyes fixed on the bloody corpse. “Christ, I feel like maybe this is my fault.”

“Your fault?” Lois Ackerly asked.

For a moment Glen made no reply to the detective’s question. Ever since Kevin had yelled out to Heather and Rayette and he’d gone to see what the fuss was about, he’d been trying to remember the last time he’d seen the cat. She’d been there this morning, after he’d gotten back from the park and the kids had left for school. But after that?

He didn’t know. But he’d been in and out of the house a lot that morning, and Kumquat could have slipped out any time the door was open. He hadn’t bothered to check on her whereabouts when he’d stretched out to take a nap. Nor had he looked for her when he woke up, after sleeping a lot longer than he’d intended to.

As he remembered the care with which Heather checked each morning to make sure there was no way her pet could escape from the house, his sense of guilt increased. All he’d had to do was keep half an eye out.

Instead he’d slept half the day away. “She probably got out this morning,” he said finally. His gaze shifted to Mark Blakemoor. “It might even have been when you were leaving.”

“You mean you weren’t even watching her?” Anne asked. “For God’s sake, Glen! You know how careful Heather always is! The least—”

“Hey, look!” Glen protested, suddenly angry. “I said this might be partly my fault, okay? But it’s not like I killed her. Jesus!”

“Oh, God, I know,” Anne sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just upset, and—” Leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken, she turned to Blakemoor. “I know I shouldn’t have asked for you, but when the kids told me what happened, it just seemed like too much of a coincidence.”

“It’s okay,” Blakemoor assured her. He turned questioningly to his partner. “Think we’d better take it downtown?” he asked, inclining his head toward the body of the cat. “And what about pictures?”

Lois Ackerly shrugged, no more certain than Blakemoor as to proper procedure. One thing she did know—if someone was going to call for a full forensics team, it wasn’t going to be her. Not for a dead cat. “I don’t think we need them,” she said. “We both know where the cat was, right?” She turned to Anne. “Do you have a plastic trash bag?”

Anne, her eyes fixed on the cat, made no reply, and finally her husband spoke again. “I’ll get one.”

As Glen headed toward the house, Anne glanced up just in time to see Mark Blakemoor watching him, a speculative look in his eyes. “Come on, Mark. You don’t think Glen did this, do you?”

“Hey,” Mark replied, trying to inject a light note into his tone, which he was very far from feeling. “He was the last person to see the victim alive, right?”