Black Lightning (44 page)

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

H
eather 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.

“Dad! What’s wrong with you?” Heather demanded as they passed the Factoria exit without even slowing down. “You could have turned around there.”

“What makes you think I want to turn around?” her father replied. He’d looked directly at her while speaking, and with a start Heather realized he didn’t look anything like her father now. He had a weird look on his face, the kind of look she’d always imagined a crazy person would have, and when he fixed his eyes on her, it made her skin get all crawly.

“Dad, what’s going
on
with you?” she demanded. “How come you didn’t get off on Mercer Island?”

“Because that’s not where we’re going,” he replied.

“But you said—”

“It doesn’t matter what I said. We’re not going to Mercer Island.”

“Then where are we going?” Heather asked.

“Somewhere else. Somewhere where we can be by ourselves.”

It was those last words—
somewhere we can be by ourselves
—that had dissolved Heather’s growing anger into sudden fear.

By ourselves
.

Why did he want them to be by themselves? But she already knew the answer to that—ever since she’d been a little girl, she’d been warned about not going anywhere with men who said they were going to take her somewhere where they’d be by themselves.

But this was her father!

Then she remembered Jolene Ruyksman, who had been in her class until last year, when she’d tried to kill herself, and it turned out that her father had been getting in bed with her since she was only four, telling her that he’d kill her if she ever told anyone what they’d been doing.

But her own father wasn’t like that—he’d never even looked at her funny, or done any of the things the counselors had warned her and her friends to watch out for when they’d talked about what had happened to Jolene.

Now she remembered something else, something her mother told her after her father had come home from the hospital. She had to get used to the idea that her father was going to be different, that he’d almost died, and that it would be a long time before he was completely recovered. But he couldn’t have changed this much, could he?

As they passed through Issaquah and started up toward Snoqualmie Pass, she glanced at him again. A bolt of lightning shot across the sky, and for an instant the interior of the motor home was as bright as day. The white light turned her father’s face ashen, and when he turned to look at her, his eyes fixed on hers with an intensity that sent a chill through her.

“Can you feel it?” he asked. “Can you feel the electricity?”

Mutely, Heather shook her head.

“You will,” he said. “And when you do—”

The rest of his words were cut off by a crash of thunder that struck the motor home with enough force to make it shake.

“D-Dad?” Heather asked as the thunder faded away. “Dad, what are you going to do to me?”

The man who no longer bore any resemblance to her father turned to look at her once again.

He said nothing.

All he did was smile.

And the smile made Heather shudder with pure terror.

CHAPTER 66

A
nne and Mark were alone in the car.

When they first left the house, she followed Mark blindly, but even as she and Kevin had gotten into his car—an unmarked sedan with a magnetized set of flashers that could be put onto the top in a couple of seconds—she started to wonder exactly what they could do. With no idea of where the motor home had gone, how were they going to follow it?

“I’d be willing to bet he heads back to the mountains,” Mark told her. Picking up the microphone he issued some quick—and to Anne, barely intelligible—orders into the car’s radio, alerting every police unit in the county to look for the motor home. Given the weather, though, he knew the odds of it being spotted were next to nil. “Now tell me what you think is going on,” he asked Anne, unwilling to let her know just how bad the odds of locating Glen were.

Kevin’s presence in the backseat had kept Anne silent, and instead of telling him what she thought had happened, she gave him directions to Alan and Arlene Cline’s house. Glen’s partner had agreed to keep Kevin for the rest of the evening, even overnight if it became necessary. The look in Anne’s eyes as she led Kevin inside had been enough to tell both Alan and Arlene that whatever had happened was serious, and that she didn’t have time to explain. It wasn’t until she and Mark were back in the car that she finally told him her theory. Even then, she refused to elaborate before calling Gordy Farber, who had pulled Glen’s medical records up on the computer he kept at home. Not only had he confirmed what Anne only suspected, but he told her about the blackouts Glen had been having, and the strange dreams. Dreams, Anne instantly understood, that had not been dreams at all. Rather, they were glimpses of what the other entity within him was doing.

“It’s not Glen in the motor home,” she finally told Mark. “It’s Richard Kraven.”

“Richard Kraven is dead,” Mark said flatly, his eyes staring out the windshield of the car he was guiding toward Highway 520. Kevin had already told him where they’d gone fishing, and how they’d gotten there, and Mark was pretty certain that whatever Glen was doing, he was following a pattern. When the motor home was found, he was sure it would be very close to where Glen had taken Edna Kraven just a few days ago and Kevin only this morning.

“His body’s dead,” Anne agreed. Then she related the story of Vaslav Nijinsky, the story that Richard Kraven himself had told her years earlier.

“So even if Nijinsky wasn’t a nutcase—and I’m not saying he wasn’t—how does it relate? Glen isn’t into out-of-body experiences, is he?” Mark asked.

“Glen was dead for almost two minutes,” Anne said, her voice as flat as the detective’s had been a moment earlier. “The morning he had his heart attack, they lost him in the ambulance on the way to Group Health. They had to stop so both of the medics could work on him. It’s all in the records, Mark. They used CPR, drugs, and the defibrillator. And it happened at almost exactly nine
A.M
., Pacific Time.”

Mark glanced at her. Pacific Time? What was
that
all about? But before the question was fully formed in his mind, he knew the answer. Nine
A.M
. Pacific Time was noon Eastern Time.

The exact moment that Richard Kraven had been executed.

Blakemoor remembered the words Anne had uttered only a few moments before, quoting what Richard Kraven had said in one of the interviews she’d reread only a little while earlier:
“Nijinsky stopped dancing because he thought another spirit was entering his body while he was out of it.”
Repeating the words to himself, he still couldn’t put them together into anything he could understand. “Anne, it doesn’t make any sense,” he began, but his voice had lost a little of its confidence.

“Doesn’t it? What about all the stories you hear? All the people who have had near-death experiences? They’re all the same, Mark. They leave their body, and they float above it. They see what’s happening, and they hear what people are saying. Some of them feel like they have a choice about coming back or not.…”

Her voice trailed off, but Mark Blakemoor already knew where she was going. “And if Richard Kraven were dying at the same instant,” he said, “and wanted to come back badly enough—”

“He hated me,” Anne burst out. “I could see it in his eyes, I could hear it in his voice.” She kept talking, telling Mark what she’d pieced together from the old interviews, what had finally come to make sense. “He was different from other serial killers,” she finally finished. “He wasn’t killing them because he wanted them dead, Mark. He was trying to figure out how to bring them back to life after they died.”

“That doesn’t account for Rory and Edna,” Mark countered.

“He was punishing Rory. And I suspect he just plain hated his mother. Besides, his motive is different now. He’s finished experimenting. Now he’s getting even. With me.” She stared out at the storm that was raging around them as they left 520 and started through Redmond, working their way farther east, following the route Kevin had described. “Oh, God,” Anne sighed, “why can’t they find him?”

“They will,” the detective replied. “Or we will. One way or another, we’re going to get Heather back.” But even as he said the words, Mark Blakemoor wasn’t sure he believed them. And he sure didn’t believe the weird story Anne had just told him.

At least, he didn’t think he did.