Black Lightning (33 page)

CHAPTER 47

“H
oly Jesus,” Mark Blakemoor swore as he gazed at the ruined body of Rory Kraven. “What the hell is going on?”

He and Lois Ackerly had been reviewing the files on Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell, searching without success for anything that might link the two women together—a friend in common, a distant relative, even a casual acquaintance—when the call came in.

Now, lying naked in his bathtub in a crappy apartment, was Rory Kraven, the kid brother of the man whose crimes had been copycatted by whoever had killed Davis and Cottrell.

Just like Davis and Cottrell, Rory Kraven’s chest had been cut open, and his lungs and heart had been torn out. But unlike the mayhem to which the two women had been subjected, what had been done to Rory Kraven appeared to have been carried out with almost surgical precision.

Also unlike either Shawnelle Davis or Joyce Cottrell, Rory Kraven’s throat had been slashed. There was blood everywhere—pools of it on the carpet, dark stains on the furniture, even reddish smears on the walls. It was obvious that Rory Kraven hadn’t died instantly. From what they could see, it was clear that even after he was injured, he’d still been able to move around the apartment. Yet there didn’t seem to be much sign of a fight—none of the furniture was overturned, nothing was broken. From the appearance of the room, it looked as if Rory Kraven’s assailant had slashed his throat, then stood aside and let the mortally injured man lurch around the apartment until he finally bled to death. Still, given the victim’s hideous wounds, it seemed as if someone, somewhere, surely must have heard something.

As the team from the lab set to work photographing the scene and sifting for evidence that might have been left by Rory’s killer, Mark Blakemoor began the laborious job of checking the other apartments. Granted, most of the people in the building would have been at work, but all these buildings seemed to have at least a few tenants who rarely went out except to buy food. Lois Ackerly sat gingerly on the edge of the couch where Edna Kraven still huddled, her heavy breasts heaving as she tried to deal with what she’d seen in the bathroom.

“Do you need a doctor?” Lois Ackerly asked. Edna Kraven’s face was pallid, but Lois recalled that Richard Kraven’s mother, whom she’d interviewed at least four times in the past few years, always looked rather pale.

“What can a doctor do for a mother’s grief?” Edna asked, dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief she’d found deep in the bottom of her purse.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

Edna shrugged helplessly. “He was sick this morning. Then I kept calling him, and when he didn’t answer his telephone, I thought I’d better come over. He’s my son,” she added in a tone that struck Lois Ackerly as almost defensive. “What else could I do?”

Lois led Edna through her recitation of the day’s events twice more, but as she expected, the minor details never varied. Edna was uncertain exactly what time she’d gotten on the bus, or which bus she’d taken up Fifteenth, but Ackerly had long ago discovered that people too well-equipped with details are often the ones who are lying. She was just finishing when Mark Blakemoor beckoned to her from the door. Leaving Edna on the sofa, she joined him in the corridor.

“No one heard anything,” he told her. “I found two people who haven’t been out of their apartments all day, and neither of them seems to be deaf. If Kraven put up a struggle, why didn’t anyone hear it? And believe me, if the woman in 2B had heard a fight, she would have called the police. It just doesn’t jibe: if there wasn’t any struggle, how come there’s such a mess?”

Lois Ackerly had barely begun to think about her partner’s question when one of the techs stepped out into the hall. “Well, at least this one’s going to be pretty simple,” he said as he handed Blakemoor a transparent Ziplock bag. It contained a piece of yellow paper that Ackerly instantly recognized as a large Post-it Note on which someone had handwritten a message. “It was stuck on the refrigerator door, as if it were a shopping list. We got pictures of it in place, and we’ll check it for prints.” Blakemoor read the note, then wordlessly passed it to Lois Ackerly.

I hate a copycat
.

I especially hate an inept copycat
.

Killing for the reasons Rory killed is not simply immoral; it’s wasteful. Loathing waste, I have therefore put an end to Rory’s carnage. I doubt anyone will be too upset that Rory is gone. After all, he could never be me,
no matter how hard he tried
.

“Does this say what I think it does?” Ackerly asked as she finished reading the note. “It sounds like whoever whacked Kraven thinks Rory killed Davis and Cottrell. But how could he know? There isn’t even any absolute proof both of them were murdered by the same creep. So far, it’s all just speculation.”

“It’ll be easy enough to check now,” Blakemoor observed. “We’ve got a pretty good set of right-hand fingerprints from the knife at Cottrell’s, and there were a couple of smudges of a palm print from Davis’s kitchen. If they all match Rory, then it looks like we’ll have a bingo.” Blakemoor shook his head in disgust. “Some crappy world, huh? One creep thinks another creep did something, so he comes in and whacks him.”

“Except he didn’t just whack him,” Lois said almost distractedly, her eyes fixing on the note. “Something hinky’s going on here, Mark. What does this mean, ‘I hate a copycat’? Even if it turns out Rory Kraven did kill Davis and Cottrell, what’s this new guy’s beef with Rory? I mean, here’s this new perp doing the same thing to Rory that he claims Rory did to Davis and Cottrell. So who’s the copycat? Rory Kraven, or this guy?” She started back into the apartment, but the sound of footsteps coming quickly up the stairs stopped her. Turning, she saw Anne Jeffers, with a photographer in tow, emerge from the stairwell, only to stop short as she recognized the two detectives.

“Oh, God, I was right,” Anne said, paling. “Even after I heard the dispatch on the scanner, I hoped maybe …” Her words trailed off, and she tried to cover her fear by putting on her reporter’s dispassionate mien. She couldn’t do it. “It’s another one, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Like Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell?”

Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly glanced at each other, wordlessly agreeing that at least where this case was concerned, Anne Jeffers was more than simply a reporter.

“It’s Rory Kraven,” Mark Blakemoor told her. “Richard’s kid brother.”

Rory Kraven? Anne thought. But that was crazy. He was nothing but—And then, in a sudden flash of clarity, she remembered exactly where she’d been when she left the hospital after visiting Glen and felt someone watching her. Her gaze shifted from Mark Blakemoor to the open door to Rory Kraven’s apartment. Through the window in the opposite wall she could see the looming bulk of the hospital across the street.

“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

B
lood
.

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 platform 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.…