Black Lightning

  Anne found Heather and Rayette still in the living room, still on the sofa, Heather crying quietly as Rayette did her best to comfort her.

  Kevin was nowhere to be seen, but Anne was pretty sure she knew where he was: up in his room, watching from his window as Lois Ackerly and Mark Blakemoor finished their work.

  Knowing there was nothing she could say to Heather right now, Anne went into the den, dropping morosely into the chair in front of her computer. For a moment she simply sat there, her eyes focused on nothing, her mind numbly trying to sort out all the events of the day, futilely attempting to make sense of the utterly senseless.

  Write it, she finally told herself as her thoughts continued to tumble chaotically. Write it all down. It’s the only way to put it in order.

  She switched on the computer and waited while it booted up. The orders issued by the autoexec file scrolled by, then the familiar Windows screen appeared. But instead of stopping to await her orders, the computer kept working.

  Her word processing program opened, but still the computer didn’t stop.

  An image appeared, framed in the familiar border of a graphics box. Inside the frame was a note:

  Too bad about the cat.

  Some experiments just don’t work.

  That’s when things die.

  I’ll try to do better with you.

  By the time the words had registered on Anne’s mind, the screen had gone blank. For a moment Anne wondered if she had seen the note at all.

  The hard knot of terror in her belly assured her that she had.

  CHAPTER 41

  There was a fresh stack of the morning Herald in the box in front of the 7-Eleven on Broadway, so at least he hadn’t had to walk all the way up to the QFC store to find one. But even now, gazing at the box with his heart beginning to race as he thought of the story that was bound to be on the front page, he felt a cold chill of apprehension. What if someone were watching?

  He glanced around and instantly regretted the action: even that simple movement would be enough to betray his nervousness to watching eyes.

  There had been watching eyes all night long. How many times had he gotten up from his bed to peer out into the street below, only to see a police car cruising by?

  Were they just looking because there had now been two murders on Capitol Hill?

  Or were they looking for him?

  Looking for the Butcher.

  The Butcher.

  The name had come to him sometime during the night, when he’d been thinking about what Anne Jeffers might have written about him. He’d committed two murders now, so they would be giving him a nickname. There had been the Son of Sam, and the Boston Strangler, and the Green River Killer. Of course, Richard Kraven had never had a nickname, but that was good.

  Having a nickname himself would mean he was even more famous than Richard Kraven.

  He was the Butcher.

  The name had a strength he liked. Maybe he should send a note to Anne Jeffers tomorrow morning, and sign it that way. Then everyone in Seattle would be using it within a day or two.

  The Butcher.

  He’d thought about it all night long, savoring it, making it his own as he’d lain awake, waiting for morning to come.

  Morning, and the early edition of the Herald. He would have gone out long before dawn, but with all the police cars out there, it would have been far too risky. So he’d waited. Waited until the shift at the hospital was changing and he could walk over to the 7-Eleven without being the only one on the street.

  But now it was too late to buy a paper here—too late, and too dangerous, especially since he’d slipped, giving away his nervousness to anyone who might have been watching. Now he’d have to walk up Fifteenth the three blocks to the QFC.

  Quality Food Center. Queens’ Food Center they called it on Broadway, which was why the Butcher never went to the one over there. But the QFC on Fifteenth was all right—he’d been there lots of times, and even if someone asked him why he wasn’t at work, he knew he looked pretty bad after the sleepless night. He’d just plead the flu, like he would when he called in sick for the third day in a row.

  All he had to do was act normal. Normal and casual. Maybe pick up some magazines and soup, like he would have if he’d really had the flu.

  All he had to do was be smart. And he knew he was smart, no matter what his mother thought. All he had to do was be careful and think everything through, and pretty soon he’d be famous.

  At least as famous as Richard Kraven. Maybe even as famous as Ted Bundy.

  As long as he didn’t get caught.

  So he couldn’t just walk away from the 7-Eleven, either. He had to look like he’d come here for something. Turning casually away from the newspaper box, he went into the convenience store, wandered over to the magazine rack and pretended to be scanning the titles while he checked the store out to see who might be watching him.

  Except for the clerk behind the counter, it was empty. Still, someone might be outside, maybe watching from a car.

  He abandoned the magazine rack—better to buy them at the QFC when he got the paper—and went to the counter. He picked up a roll of Clorets and paid for them. By the time he emerged from the front door, he was busy unwrapping the cylinder of mints, and anyone who might be observing him wouldn’t know he was actually checking out every car in the area.

  All of them were empty except for one black Cadillac he was pretty sure belonged to a drug dealer. Anyway, he’d seen it in the neighborhood a lot, and judging by the people who hung around it, it sure wasn’t a police car. Popping one of the mints into his mouth, he crossed the street against the light and started up the east side of Fifteenth to the QFC. He picked up a basket as he went inside, then found the soup section, where he took three cans of Chunky Chicken Noodle. Then he headed for the checkout counter. Sure enough, there was a stack of the Herald, and when he picked one up, his hands weren’t trembling much at all. He flopped it down on the counter along an Enquirer, a Globe, the Post-Intelligencer, and the three cans of soup. He was just reaching into his pocket for his wallet when the checker spoke.

  “You hear about the murder?” The man’s heart raced. He felt his hands turn cold and clammy.

  “Murder?” he echoed. What should he say? Should he already know about it? But it had been on the radio all day yesterday, and the TV news last night. “Oh, you mean the body they found up in Volunteer Park yesterday?” he asked. That had been good. His voice had sounded just right—interested; but not too interested.

  “She was in here night before last,” the checker said.

  The man felt his knees weaken. When he pulled his wallet out, his trembling fingers lost their grip on it and it fell to the floor. “Aah, shit,” he groaned as he bent down to pick it up. But that was all right, too. At least it gave him a couple of seconds to try to come up with a response. Then he had it. When he straightened up again, his eyes were wide. “You mean here?” he asked. “She was right here?”

  The checker nodded eagerly. As soon as he spoke again, the man began to relax—it sounded like the guy had already told the story a dozen times. “Ms. Cottrell,” the checker said. “She came in here practically every night for a latte on her way home.”

  “You mean you knew her?” the Butcher asked, giving just enough emphasis to the word “knew” to let the clerk know he was impressed.

  “Well, I didn’t really know her,” the clerk said quickly, his own eyes now darting around the store as if he had suddenly realized that anyone who might have known the murdered woman would now be considered a possible suspect. “I mean, not any better than anybody else here did, you know?”

  His own nerves calming as the clerk turned edgy, the Butcher handed him a twenty dollar bill, waited for his change, then picked up the bag into which the checker had put his papers and the cans of soup. Barely able to restrain himself, he started home, willing himself to leave the Herald in the bag until he was safely back in his apartment. But no matter how
hard he tried, he couldn’t keep his pace at the slow amble he was attempting, and finally he gave it up in favor of a purposeful stride down the street, as if he were late for an appointment. After three minutes that seemed to him like an hour, he at last closed his door behind him and yanked the paper out of the bag, letting the chicken soup cans roll unnoticed to the floor. Unfolding the paper, he scanned the front page, then scanned it again.

  It wasn’t possible! It had to be on the front page.

  But there was nothing. Nothing! Nothing but some crap about the park the city wanted to build between downtown and Lake Union.

  Who the fuck cared about that?

  Moving to the battered Formica-topped table that served as both a desk and a dining table, he flipped through the newspaper, his frustration mounting as he turned page after page and found nothing.

  Then, on the third page of the second section, he finally found it.

  And almost exploded with rage.

  They’d buried it!

  Bad enough they hadn’t put it on the front page, or even the second page of the first section!

  He began reading the article, and with every word his rage increased.

  Woman Found Slain Near Volunteer

  Park Reservoir

  The nude body of a woman was found in Volunteer Park early this morning. The victim, identified as Ms. Joyce Cottrell, 57, was a receptionist in the emergency room at the Group Health facility on Capitol Hill.

  According to police sources, the victim, who was single and lived alone, was slain in her Capitol Hill home sometime between 11:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M. yesterday morning. The body appears to have been placed near the reservoir in Volunteer Park shortly before dawn, where it was discovered by jogger Anne Jeffers (a staff reporter for this paper).

  While the investigation is not yet complete, police sources stressed that there appears to be no connection between the deaths of Ms. Cottrell and of Shawnelle Davis, whose body was discovered last week in her rented apartment.

  As he finished the article, the Butcher’s fingers tightened on the flimsy paper until it was crumpled into a wad.

  No connection?

  How could they say that? Hadn’t they even looked at what he’d done?

  The two killings had been alike! Exactly alike! And he’d done it even better on Joyce Cottrell than he had on Shawnelle Davis!

  Well, next time it wouldn’t be like this. Next time they would know what they were dealing with.

  His anger erupting, he hurled the ruined newspaper to the floor. Maybe he should go out right now and do it again! That would show them—maybe he should just go out and find someone, and follow her home, and—

  No!

  That wasn’t the way to do it at all! He had to be smart! He had to be careful, and calm.

  No matter what happened, he couldn’t let himself get angry.

  Breathing deeply, he struggled to get himself under control. He reached down and picked up the crumpled newspaper. Spreading it out again, he smoothed the pages as best he could, then carefully tore out the article that had so offended him. Taking it to the dresser that served not only to hold his clothes, but to support his television as well, he opened the top drawer and added the article to the folder in which he’d already placed everything that had been written about Shawnelle Davis.

  Tomorrow, or maybe even later on today, he’d buy an album and start putting the clippings in order.

  And the next time he killed, it wouldn’t be a woman, even though murdering Joyce Cottrell had given him more pleasure than he’d ever felt before in his life.

  He couldn’t let himself give in to the lure of that pleasure.

  After all, that wasn’t why he was killing.

  He was killing to please his mother.

  It was the killing that counted, not the pleasure.

  So better not to let himself be tempted. Next time he killed, it wouldn’t be a woman at all.

  It would be some other kind of person.

  In fact, from now on he’d kill all kinds of people.

  Maybe later on, when he went out to buy an album, that wouldn’t be all he did.

  Maybe he would go hunting, too.

  CHAPTER 42

  Anne had no memory of having slept at all the night before, though she knew she must have since her eyes didn’t have the awful gritty feel that had always resulted from her staying awake all night. But she had clear memories of lying in bed, wide-awake, staring at the ceiling as she tried to figure out the source of the briefly flashing note that had appeared on her computer when she’d turned it on.

  The mechanics of it hadn’t taken her long to unravel: a simple macro file would have done it, triggered by practically anything:

  A line in the autoexec.bat file, for instance.

  The macro could easily have brought up a file, displayed it for a few seconds, then closed it, immediately erased it, wiped all traces of it from her hard drive with one of the utilities she herself used to make sure certain files could never be recovered, then erased itself as well.

  Or it could have arrived as a virus, coming into her computer through the modem anytime she’d left the machine on, but unattended. It would have sat dormant on her hard drive, set to attack the first time the computer was turned on after a specific date and time.

  And attack it had. But not her computer. No, this was much more invidious. This virus had attacked her, rising up out of the guts of the machine to lash out at her, filling her with a terror she hadn’t been able to talk about at all, lest it spread from her into her whole family.

  Bad enough they had been frightened by someone killing their pet and leaving it in their own backyard. How would they cope if they knew the unseen enemy had penetrated into the house itself?

  She had searched the house, using the pretext of hunting for a misplaced box of old clippings on Richard Kraven. In both the attic and the basement she had searched for signs of a stranger’s presence, but had found nothing.

  On the kitchen table she had found the fishing fly, and for a moment thought she recognized fragments of one of Hector’s feathers and a tuft of fur that could have come from Kumquat. But who could have made the fly? Certainly not Glen—he was notoriously clumsy with his hands, which was why the ship model downstairs had never been finished; Glen had proved even more awkward than Kevin at attaching the planks to the framework of the hull. Still, just before Glen had turned off the light to go to sleep, she’d asked him about the fly. He’d told her he bought it at the same time he bought the fishing rod, but something in his voice had struck her wrong.

  When she’d pressed him, though, his mood had instantly blackened, and they’d almost had a fight.

  He had gone to sleep while she stared at the ceiling, remembering the look of suspicion Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly had cast in her husband’s direction after they’d pulled poor Kumquat’s body from beneath the low deck behind the garage.

  No! Glen couldn’t have killed Kumquat—he just couldn’t have!

  And so she’d lain awake, stewing, trying to find answers, trying to make sense out of senseless horrors.

  In the morning, tired, but knowing she must have slept at least a few hours, she’d gotten up and once again concealed her fear from her family, contenting herself with instructing Heather to make certain she walked Kevin to his school before going on to her own, and extracting a promise from Kevin that he wouldn’t leave school until Heather arrived to escort him home.

  He argued, but she stood firm.

  Then, after reading Vivian Andrews’s essentially fictional account of the Joyce Cottrell story with growing anger, she went to the office.

  When no silence fell over the city room of the Herald as she walked in, Anne felt something that she wasn’t willing to admit even to herself: disappointment. But what had she expected? This wasn’t a ladies afternoon card club—this was a big city newspaper, whose staff wasn’t about to express public shock over much less than mass murder. Still, she would have thoug
ht someone would ask her how she was doing and if her family was all right. There wasn’t even so much as a momentary drop in the decibel level as she threaded her way toward her desk. Perhaps it was that simple fact—that practiced callousness that she knew perfectly well was not only a tool of a reporter’s trade, but practically a badge of honor as well—that stopped her from sitting down at her desk. But it wasn’t just that, of course.

  It was the note that had appeared on her computer last night. Not telling her family about it was one thing. Not telling Vivian Andrews was another. Picking up all her notes from her research on the rapid transit issue, she headed for Vivian Andrews’s office, pushed the door open, stepped through it, and closed it behind her before the editor could possibly object.

  “I gather you didn’t like my editing?” Vivian asked with studied casualness, barely even glancing away from the monitor on which she was already reviewing stories for tomorrow’s edition.

  “It wasn’t editing, Viv,” Anne told her. “It was butchery. It was a good story, and it was an honest story. And I’m taking it back.” She dropped the sheaf of notes onto the editor’s desk, forcing Vivian to shift her attention from the monitor to the reporter who stood opposite her, pale and drawn.

  “Toning down an irresponsible story is one of my primary functions around here,” she began. But as she finally took a good look at Anne Jeffers, her words died on her lips. “Anne? Are you okay? You look like you’ve been up all night.”

  “I might as well have been, for all the sleep I got,” Anne confessed. As quickly as she could, she filled Vivian in.

  “Your cat?” Vivian asked as Anne described what had been done to Heather’s pet. “My God, who would do something like that?”

  Anne shook her head. “And what kind of a world do we live in when people react more strongly to what happens to a cat than they do to what happens to other people?”

  Vivian Andrews reddened. “I didn’t mean—” she began, but then dropped back in her chair. “Oh, God, maybe I did.” She sighed. “What did the police say?”