Black Lightning (34 page)

CHAPTER 49

T
he story would run on the front page. Anne knew that, even knew she should have been pleased. Instead she was terrified.

It was four-thirty, and she’d finished her account of Rory Kraven’s death. She’d talked to Mark Blakemoor one last time, half hoping he’d be able to tell her there had been a mistake, that Rory Kraven’s fingerprints hadn’t matched the ones lifted from the knife with which Joyce Cottrell had been killed.

He not only confirmed Rory Kraven as Joyce Cottrell’s killer, he told her that the lab had now matched parts of Rory’s right palm print to one of the smeared prints found in Shawnelle Davis’s kitchen.

Finally, Anne had dropped a note in Vivian Andrews’s E-mail suggesting they run only the bare bones of the story until they could penetrate at least part of the thick fog of questions that still cloaked the morning’s events in the drab apartment on Sixteenth Avenue.

Who?

And why?

Who could have known that Richard Kraven’s brother had killed Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell when the police hadn’t yet been willing to state unequivocally even that the same person had committed both those murders?

The questions were still tumbling through her mind as Anne walked out of the Herald Building into the gray afternoon and headed up Denny toward Capitol Hill and home. The worst of it—the part that threatened to drive her crazy—was the appearance of the notes. She’d finally told Mark Blakemoor about the message that had appeared when she’d booted her computer up the previous afternoon. Though he’d listened intently as she described every detail, in the end he’d had some questions she wasn’t prepared to answer:

He’d still been in her backyard when it had occurred yesterday afternoon. Why hadn’t she told him about it then?

She hadn’t mentioned the fishing fly to Blakemoor, either.

Why not?

Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel.
Because it didn’t mean anything, that’s why. And it didn’t have anything to do with the note on her computer screen, or Kumquat being killed, or anything else! Glen had explained to her where it had come from, hadn’t he? He’d bought it! It was nothing but a coincidence that it happened to be made out of feathers and fur that could have come from her children’s pets. For God’s sake, what was she thinking? That someone—some stranger who was pretending to be Richard Kraven—had come sneaking into her house, made a fishing fly, killed her cat, and then left a note on her computer?

Anne decided the whole idea was insane; she was starting to sound paranoid even to herself. Two blocks from home she cut over to Sixteenth and cursed out loud as she crept past the big motor home somebody had parked on her block, taking up the parking spot she normally used, and another one as well. Finally finding an empty spot in the next block, she walked back to the house, glaring at the motor home one more time before going inside.

“Hello?” she called out. “Anybody home?”

“Back here,” Glen called from the den.

Anne dropped her gritchel under the table by the stairs and went into the den. Glen was sitting at the drafting table, and he looked up almost guiltily as she came in. “I’m not working,” he assured her. “I’m just doodling.”

Moving around the table, she kissed him. “Is that what you’ve been doing all day? Doodling?”

She felt him stiffen, but then he nodded.

“Pretty much,” he said. “What about you?”

Dropping into her desk chair, Anne told Glen about Rory Kraven’s murder.

And as he listened to his wife, an image came into Glen’s mind.

An image from the dream he’d had this afternoon.

An image that was, in every detail, a perfect portrayal of Anne’s description of Rory Kraven’s body when it had been found in his bathtub that afternoon.

But he had only dreamed it, Glen thought. Surely, he had only dreamed it.

CHAPTER 50

Serial Killer’s
Younger
Brother Found Dead
Rory Kraven Linked to New Series of Capitol Hill Deaths

The body of Rory Kraven, 41, brother of recently executed serial killer, Richard Kraven, was found in his Capitol Hill apartment yesterday afternoon. The victim of a thus-far-unknown assailant, the younger Kraven suffered multiple stab wounds. His unclothed body, mutilated in a manner that police sources concede was similar to the mutilations inflicted on victims of Richard Kraven, was found in the bathtub of the apartment by his mother, Edna Kraven, 66.

As part of their investigation into this most recent Capitol Hill slaying, police have found evidence conclusively linking Rory Kraven to the killings of both Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell. Detective Mark Blakemoor confirms that Rory Kraven’s fingerprints match those found …

E
dna Kraven glared at the article on the front page of the morning
Herald
. She had sat up all night long, afraid even to go to bed, so certain was she that she would be robbed of her sleep by the image of poor Rory. It was a vision she knew would stay with her for the rest of her life. Even now it was almost more than she could bear just to think about it—the way his eyes had stared at her, and the terrible slashes in his throat and chest! If only she hadn’t pushed the door to his apartment open! She’d known something was wrong, had felt it from the moment she came up those stairs. And she’d told Anne Jeffers about it, too.

Not that the woman had printed anything she’d said! Edna thought angrily. She’d only written more lies. And as though it wasn’t enough to hash over the falsehoods about Richard again—now the bitch was making up things about poor Rory, too!

The very idea of Rory killing those two women!

It was ridiculous—Rory could barely even bring himself to speak to women.

Edna had seen the photographs of those women on television. Cheap, both of them.

One of them had been a whore, and the other some kind of recluse. What would Rory have had to do with women like them?

Wasn’t it obvious that whoever had killed them had killed Rory, too?

Incompetence, that’s what it was, Edna told herself. The police couldn’t find the killer, so they’d blamed poor, stupid Rory. And then that reporter, who had always been out to get her darling Richard, had gone and printed it! Edna shuddered as she thought of her neighbors reading the slander smeared all over the front page of this morning’s paper.

Well, there might not be anything she could do about the police, she decided, but she could certainly give that Jeffers woman a piece of her mind!

Though it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, Edna scrabbled through the yellow pages until she found the number for the
Seattle Herald
. She dialed it and demanded to speak to Anne Jeffers. Her lips tightened as she listened to the operator tell her the reporter hadn’t come in yet that morning. “No, I certainly do not want to leave a message,” Edna said when the girl offered to connect her to the reporter’s voice mail. “I want to talk to her!”

Her anger growing steadily, Edna reached for the white pages and began searching through the J’s.

 … on the knife that killed Joyce Cottrell, while a partial palm print taken from the apartment of Shawnelle Davis matches a portion of Kraven’s right hand.

An unsigned note was found at the scene of this latest death, but police have so far refused to make its contents public, except to say that neither the note nor the wounds inflicted on the dead man are consistent with a suicide. At the same time, police department sources confirmed that they have no suspects in this killing.

It is, however, believed that his assailant was familiar to Rory Kraven, as no signs of a struggle or of forcible entry were found at the murder scene. Three neighbors, whose names are being withheld at their own request, denied hearing anything unusual yesterday morning. Police are requesting that anyone having any information regarding this murder contact the Homicide Division at…

As the phone rang, Glen Jeffers looked up from the copy of the
Herald
that lay unfolded on the kitchen table. He waited to see if either Heather or Kevin would answer on the extension in the upstairs hall, then finally reached for the wall phone mounted over the end of the counter.

“Hello?”

“I want to speak to Anne Jeffers.” The voice spiking through the phone—a woman’s voice—made the hair on the back of Glen’s neck stand on end. “Is she there?”

He felt his flesh crawl as goose bumps broke out on his arms. “I—No, she isn’t,” Glen said. “She went out—” He cut his words short. He had no idea to whom he was speaking, but something about the woman’s voice made him feel … what?

Frightened? Not quite.

Nervous? Closer, but still not quite right.

Filled with a sense of unease, he decided that until he knew exactly who the caller was and what she wanted with Anne, he wasn’t about to tell her that his wife, heedless of recent events, had gone jogging in Volunteer Park. “May I take a message?” he asked.

There was a moment of hesitation, then: “This is Edna Kraven.”

A clammy sweat broke out over Glen’s body, and he felt a wave of dizziness. He reached out to the counter to steady himself, but as his fingers closed on the hard surface, the dizziness worsened. Blackness began to close around him, as if he were about to faint.

The voice that replied to Edna Kraven’s self-identification had changed.

“Oh, Mrs. Kraven,” the voice said smoothly into the telephone. “My wife was talking about you only a few minutes ago. I’m sure she’ll want to talk to you. Perhaps we can arrange something?”

A buzzing … There was a buzzing in Glen’s ear, and he felt utterly confused. Then his mind cleared, the last of the dizziness left him, and he began to remember. He’d been drinking a cup of coffee and reading the paper when the phone had rung. He’d answered it, and someone—a woman—had asked for Anne. He frowned, trying to remember. He’d gotten dizzy then, and now couldn’t remember if the woman on the phone had identified herself or not.

“Hello?” he said now, holding the receiver against his ear. But all he heard was the repeated buzz of a phone that’s been off the hook too long. He frowned and hung up the receiver.

This morning, he decided, he would definitely call Gordy Farber and tell him what was happening.

The latest blackouts, the steadily worsening nightmares, the memories he was having of things he couldn’t possibly have seen … If Gordy said he had to go back into the hospital, so be it. Too many strange things were happening to him, and yesterday, when he’d blacked out at the top of the Jeffers Building, he could have killed himself.

But when Anne came back from her morning jog a few minutes later and, seeing the worried look on his face and the sheen of sweat on his skin, asked him how he was, he only shrugged and insisted nothing was wrong. And though he could see the hurt in her eyes when she left for work an hour later after seeing Heather and Kevin off to school, he found himself unable to do or to say anything to soothe her pain.

Nor did he call Gordy Farber.