Black Lightning

  “I’m fine, Ma,” the man replied, the words already out of his mouth before he remembered he was supposed to be sick. “I mean, I was feeling kinda sick earlier, but I’m better now.”

  “You weren’t home when I called earlier,” his mother accused. “Did you go to the doctor?”

  “No, Ma,” he replied, feeling the way he had when he was ten years old and his mother had accused him of faking an illness so he wouldn’t have to go to school, in spite of the fact that his temperature had been 102. “I went to the QFC and bought some soup. Chunky Chicken.”

  “Well, don’t ask me to come and fix it for you,” his mother told him. “Did you see the paper this morning?”

  The man’s heart began to pound. “What about it?”

  “That woman. The one that got killed up by you the other night. Did you know her?”

  The Butcher’s chest tightened as if a band of metal had been wound around it. “Why would I have known her?” he asked, his voice catching despite his effort to keep it steady.

  “She worked across the street from you, didn’t she? And she lived up the street from you, didn’t she?”

  His head started throbbing. “I didn’t know her, Ma. And I didn’t do anything to her! I swear I didn’t! Why don’t you just leave me alone?” A sob closing his throat, he slammed the receiver down, the bravado he’d felt only a few minutes before evaporating. How could she have found out? Was she going to tell the police?

  Of course she would—she didn’t love him! She’d never loved him. The only one she’d ever loved was his brother!

  He paced back and forth in the apartment, trying to figure out what to do. When the phone rang a second time, he froze where he was, across the room from the loudly jangling instrument. He broke into a sweat—an icy sweat that made him feel as if a freezing slime were covering his body. His legs threatened to give out on him.

  Should he answer the phone, or just let it keep ringing?

  What if it was his mother again?

  Worse, what if it was the police? What if she’d called them, and now they were calling him? But they wouldn’t, would they? If they wanted him, they’d just come and arrest him, wouldn’t they?

  So if it wasn’t the police, it had to be his mother—no one else ever called him!

  His legs still threatening to buckle beneath him, he went to the phone and picked it up. “Hello?”

  No answer.

  “Hello?”

  There was a soft click as whoever had called him hung up.

  His terror rose another notch. His first instinct was to get out of his apartment, to run to his car, get in, and drive away. Away from Capitol Hill, away from the police, away from his mother, away from Seattle. But where? There was nowhere for him to run to.

  Besides, the police were probably already outside, surrounding the building, waiting for him to come out. He went to the window and peered out, his heart pounding so hard he could hear it thumping in his ears.

  The street looked normal.

  But that’s the way they would do it, wasn’t it? They wouldn’t be right out in plain sight, would they? Their cars would be parked around the corner where he couldn’t see them, and the cops themselves would be hiding.

  Breathing hard, he turned away from the window. He had to think—had to figure out what to do! What could his mother have told them?

  He began pacing the apartment again, the room shrinking with each step. He felt the walls closing in on him, and the air seemed stuffy.

  He sat down in his chair—an old La-Z-Boy with stained velour upholstery that he’d found in a used furniture store ten years ago. He tried to calm himself.

  He went back over everything he’d done, first with Shawnelle Davis, then with Joyce Cottrell. He’d been careful—as careful as he knew how. But what if he’d left fingerprints?

  He’d been cautious in Joyce Cottrell’s house—he hadn’t touched anything. Or had he? Oh, God, he couldn’t remember! But he had to remember.

  His skin felt itchy now, and he couldn’t sit still any longer. Abandoning the chair, he went back to the window and gazed out.

  There was a man across the street! A man who was looking up at him! Staring right at him, as if he knew him!

  As the stranger started across the street toward his building, he backed away from the window.

  The band he’d felt around his chest when his mother had called seized him again, tighter than ever. He could feel cold rivulets of sweat running down his back and trickling from his armpits down his sides.

  The nausea was back in his belly, and now his guts were aching as he felt the first pangs of diarrhea grip his intestines.

  Hunched against the pain, he had started for the bathroom when he heard the knock at the door. He froze.

  Images flashed through his mind, remembered images from things he’d seen on television.

  Would they break his door down?

  Would they shoot him through it?

  A strangled whimper escaped his lips as he imagined a .45 slug ripping through the door, then slashing through his flesh, tearing his guts open. He staggered as the pain of the imagined bullet ripped at his mind, and he lurched toward the door. Better to open it willingly than to have them break in on him.

  Pulling the door open, he found himself looking at the man he’d seen gazing up at him from across the street only moments before. A pleasant enough face, with even features.

  Not the face of a cop.

  His lips worked; he tried to speak and failed.

  The stranger was looking at him, his eyes boring into him, and suddenly he had the feeling that he did know this man after all, that he had, indeed, seen him somewhere before.…

  Moments passed in deadly silence as the Butcher stared at the stranger who had come to his door. Then he knew. It was Anne Jeffers’s husband! He had seen him the day before yesterday, when he’d been casing Joyce Cottrell’s house. But Jeffers hadn’t seen him—he was sure of it!

  Then something in Jeffers’s face changed, and the man gasped, for he suddenly recognized the eyes he was looking into.

  They were his brother’s eyes!

  But that was crazy—Jeffers didn’t look anything like his brother! And besides, his brother was dead!

  Then Glen Jeffers spoke, and the man’s terror peaked. “Hello, Little Man,” he heard his brother’s voice say, using the name he’d hated all his life. “You’ve been bad, Little Man, and I’ve come to punish you.”

  His mind reeled, then cracked. It was impossible! This man couldn’t possibly be his brother—he was the wrong age, and he had the wrong face, and he wasn’t even the same size.

  But it was his brother!

  The voice was his brother’s, and the coldness of the eyes was his brother’s.

  And the words were definitely his brother’s.

  Rory Kraven, cowering with terror, backed away from the impossible presence of his older brother.

  Richard Kraven—the Experimenter—stepped into his younger brother’s shabby apartment and silently closed the door behind him.

  CHAPTER 46

  Edna Kraven let the telephone ring twenty times before she hung up. When he was in one of his moods, Rory sometimes wouldn’t answer until he realized she simply wasn’t going to give up. But this was the fifth time she’d called him, and she was starting to worry. After all, he had said he was sick when she’d talked to him earlier, and although he hadn’t sounded that bad (and had always been the kind of boy who malingered—not like Richard at all!) she supposed it was just possible he’d taken a turn for the worse.

  Either that or he really wasn’t at home, in which case he’d have to answer not only to the nice people at Boeing’s who were decent enough to give him steady work, but to her as well. If she trekked all the way up to Capitol Hill only to find that he was out gallivanting somewhere, she would have a lot to say to him. Still, she had always been a good mother, Edna Kraven told herself, no matter what people might have said behind her back, so
what choice did she really have? Rory wasn’t much, but he was all she had left.

  She left her house at one o’clock, climbed off the bus in front of Group Health at a little after two, and trudged the block to Rory’s apartment building, her annoyance with her younger son growing with every step she took. Why couldn’t he have been more like Richard, who had never caused her a day of grief in his entire life?

  A martyr, that’s what Richard was. Just a Christian martyr!

  Edna had prayed about Richard many times, and over and over the same message came to her: Richard had been an innocent lamb, unjustly led to slaughter. Only his own mother had believed in him. Well, someday they’d find out. After all, weren’t those terrible murders happening again right now? Just a week or so ago there had been that woman over on Boylston. Not that Edna felt very sorry for her; after all, she was a whore. But then just the night before last there had been that poor woman who lived up the street from Rory. And both of them killed just the way those others had been, the ones they blamed poor Richard for. If only they hadn’t killed Richard, they’d know the truth now, and he’d be able to come home to his mother where he belonged. But it was too late. Sighing heavily under the burden of her sorrows, Edna Kraven pulled the front door of Rory’s building open, went in, and climbed the steep flight of stairs to the second floor.

  Pausing on the landing to catch her breath, she peered with distaste around the dimly lit corridor. The paint on the walls was peeling and the strip of threadbare carpet that ran down the cramped hallway was curling back at the edges. What had she done to deserve a son who would live in a place like this? She’d told him before that it wasn’t a fit place for her to visit; today she would put her foot down. If he didn’t move, he needn’t expect her to visit him again.

  She plodded down the hall to Rory’s door, lifted her hand to knock, then realized that the door wasn’t quite closed. Just like Rory to go out somewhere and not even bother to lock his door—anyone could rob him blind! Pushing the door wider, Edna stepped inside.

  “Rory?”

  There was no answer, but Edna suddenly felt uneasy. The place just didn’t feel empty. Scowling, she moved toward the open bathroom door, but before she’d gone more than a step or two, she stopped short.

  The walls—the grubby beige walls she’d never been able to get Rory to paint—were streaked with red.

  Bright red.

  Bloodred.

  “Rory?” Edna Kraven said again, but this time the name of her younger son was uttered softly, almost inaudibly, as if she already understood what had happened here. “Rory?” she repeated. “It’s Mommy, Rory, come to take care of you.”

  As if guided by an unseen force, Edna edged toward the bathroom door, terrified of what she might find there, but unable to keep herself from looking. When she was finally able to see exactly what lay in the bathtub, Edna Kraven’s stomach heaved. She lurched into the bathroom, bent over, and threw up into the sink. Only when her stomach had completely emptied itself was she finally able to creep back out to the single room in which her younger son had died and call the police.

  CHAPTER 47

  “Holy 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.