Black Lightning (9 page)

CHAPTER 10

T
he Experimenter lay in near darkness, the walls of his room only faintly illuminated by the pale glow of the streetlamps outside. Though he lay still, he was not asleep, although he knew that soon he would have to sleep.

But not yet. Right now, he wanted to hear the report just one more time.

His fingers stroked the smooth plastic of the remote control, and he could almost imagine that the satiny texture was that of skin.

The skin of one of his subjects.

So long.

It had been so long since he’d dared let himself even think about conducting another experiment, but now it would be safe again.

Safe, at least for a while.

His forefinger pressed gently on one of the control buttons, and the volume on the television rose just enough so he could hear the anchorman’s voice:

“Topping our stories today, Richard Kraven was executed yesterday at noon, Eastern Daylight Time, dying in the electric chair only hours after his final appeals for a new trial were denied. According to
Seattle Herald
reporter Anne Jeffers, the last person to talk with Kraven before he died, he expressed no remorse for what he’d done, even at the eleventh hour, continuing to proclaim his innocence despite the massive evidence presented in his trial.…”

The Experimenter, lying in the darkness, could barely suppress a gloating chuckle, and fleetingly wished there were someone he could share the joke with. Still, it wouldn’t be long before the whole world understood his joke.

How long had it been since he had carried out the last experiment?

So long ago he had almost forgotten how it felt to see the look in his subjects’ eyes when they began to feel sleepy and he assured them that they mustn’t worry, that all was going to be well.

He could remember more clearly the keening whine of the saw as it cut through their sterna, and his fingers moved reflexively as he recalled the warm pleasure of sinking his hands deep within the thoracic cavity, slipping them between the two warm masses of the lungs, closing them around the strongly beating hearts.…

The Experimenter uttered an all but inaudible groan of remembered pleasure.

Now he could begin again.

Now he would prove to them that they’d executed the wrong man.

For more than two long years—ever since they’d finally made their arrest, finally acted on all the evidence he’d let pile up—he’d been waiting for this day.

This day, and the ones to come when he would begin his experiments anew, expanding his knowledge, exercising his power, proving to the mindless fools who had executed Richard Kraven that they’d made a mistake, that they had been wrong. Not for the first time, the Experimenter wished he could play the fly on the wall and watch their expressions as they examined his newest subjects.

They would recognize his work immediately—of that there was no question whatsoever. But there was also no question whatsoever that they would deny the truth. Instead they would search for inconsistencies, search for differences in technique, no matter how slight, search for anything that would allow them to keep their pride—and their reputations—intact.

It would be worst for Anne Jeffers, for she would not only be forced to retract everything she’d ever said about Richard Kraven, she would have to take the responsibility for his execution as well.

She’d hounded Kraven, hounded him to his execution, though neither she nor anyone else had ever heard him confess.

Now he would pursue Anne Jeffers. He would toy with her for a while, let her think perhaps she’d been right all along.

Then he would plant the seeds of doubt in her mind, and in the end, after she knew the precise truth of what had happened, he would add her to his list, making her his final subject.

His fingers caressed the satiny texture of the remote control, and there was a soft click as the television screen went blank, the picture contracting into a tiny white dot in the center of the black screen, only to die away completely a moment later.

Die away as his subjects had died away.

But their deaths had not been in vain, for out of those deaths—no, not deaths, but merely failed experiments—had come knowledge. The Experimenter had long ago decided that knowledge was far more important even than life itself. Where Socrates had once observed that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, the man in the darkened room knew better: for him, it was the examination of the very phenomenon of life that made his existence possible. Indeed, as he’d thought about it during the long hiatus during which the authorities—those pitiably small minds who were far too simple to understand his work—built their case against Richard Kraven, the Experimenter had come to understand that even the subjects who’d died during his investigations could not truly be considered failures. After all, even in their deaths they’d contributed to the body of knowledge he had been building as painstakingly as the authorities had been building their case against Richard Kraven.

Now—now that Richard Kraven had been executed—the time had come for him to begin again. The body of his knowledge would expand, and at the same time he would prove once and for all just how much smarter he was than those who sought to judge him.

Outside the window, a movement caught his eye. He glanced down at the street below.

A woman was walking along the sidewalk.

Going to work?

Returning home from a completed shift?

Did it matter? Not really. All that mattered was that the woman had caught his eye. Perhaps, now that the time was right and he could soon begin again, he would begin with her.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps he would begin again with someone else entirely.

The Experimenter smiled to himself as he remembered how it had been the last time, when all the investigators—and the teams they’d put together to examine the scattered bodies—had carried out their fruitless searches of his subjects’ backgrounds, looking for a common denominator that would tie them all together, tie the victims to the single person who had caused their deaths. Of course they had never found that common denominator, so now when it all began again, they would go running back to their records, searching yet again.

Searching for something they would never find.

The thought of the havoc his new experiments would cause brought a smile to his lips, and he finally turned away from the window. The day had been long, and filled with excitement, and now it was time for him to sleep.

Tomorrow he would begin designing the next series of experiments.

Unconsciously, the Experimenter flexed his fingers once more, this time in anticipation.…

CHAPTER 11

A
gray sky hovered low over Seattle the next morning, and as people all over the city huddled over their first cups of coffee, newspapers were opened to the editorial page. In kitchens, coffee shops, snack rooms, and offices, nearly everyone in the city began the day by reading the column that had been dictated from the Group Health Critical Care Unit on Capitol Hill the day before:

Anne Jeffers … 
A Few Last Thoughts
About Richard Kraven

At noon yesterday, a reign of terror that spanned five years, as many states, and a dozen cities and towns came to an end when Richard Kraven was electrocuted. Though convicted of three slayings, Kraven was the prime suspect in many others, including at least seven still unsolved cases in his native city of Seattle. At the request of the condemned man, this reporter was among the last people to speak to him before his execution. During the course of that conversation …

“What the hell does this broad think she’s doing?”

The booming voice that filled his office in the Public Safety Building was familiar enough that Mark Blakemoor didn’t even have to look up from the report he was studying. From the moment he’d scanned Anne Jeffers’s column in this morning’s
Herald
, the detective had been expecting Jack McCarty to come barging into the office Blakemoor shared with Lois Ackerly. McCarty’s own copy of the paper would be crushed in his huge fist, his normally ruddy face flushed to the point where anyone who didn’t know him might suspect that the white-haired chief of detectives was about to suffer a terminal stroke. Sure enough, here he was. Mark smoothly moved his coffee cup aside just as the chief slammed the offending newspaper onto the desk.

“ ‘At least
seven unsolved cases’?” McCarty demanded. “What is this crap? And when did she write it? I thought you said her husband was in the fuckin’ hospital!”

“He is,” Blakemoor replied mildly, leaning back in his chair to savor his boss’s rage. “I sent her some flowers this morning. Thought it might cheer her up.” McCarty’s face turned even redder, causing Mark to wonder if it could actually be possible for a human head to explode. Then, as a vein began to throb in McCarty’s neck, he decided a little extra agitation might just be in order. “You know, if Ackerly heard you call Anne Jeffers a ‘broad,’ she’d have a sexism citation in your jacket before lunchtime.”

The jab had the intended effect. Jack McCarty spun around, his eyes searching the area outside Blakemoor’s office for any sign of Blakemoor’s partner. But if Lois Ackerly had arrived at the unit yet, she was nowhere to be seen. “Jeez, Blakemoor, don’t say things like that. I only got three more years to retirement, and the last thing I need is another chauvinist-pig chit.” He dropped heavily into the battered wooden chair that sat in the corner of the detective’s cubicle, his eyes fixing malevolently on the small picture of Anne Jeffers that accompanied the column. “You know she was going to do that?”

Blakemoor shrugged. “She had to write something, didn’t she? She’s a reporter, remember? Why else would she have gone to the execution?”

“The way she writes it, you’d think she got an engraved invite from that creep Kraven.” His blue eyes took on a look of eagerness. “Did he suffer, Mark?” he asked. “Tell me he did, goddammit. Tell me the son of a bitch shit his pants before they whacked him.” McCarty’s right fist slammed into his left palm. “Christ, I wish I coulda done it to him myself!”

Mark Blakemoor shifted uneasily in his seat, wishing now he hadn’t goaded his boss into an even more vindictive mood than the one Anne Jeffers had induced. On the other hand, there wasn’t a man or woman in the department who hadn’t wanted Richard Kraven to suffer after they’d seen the pictures of his victims. Even Mark, who after fifteen years on the homicide unit had thought he was inured to anything, had found his stomach heaving the first time he attended an autopsy of one of Kraven’s victims. Actually, he’d been okay until the medical examiner had told him that it appeared the victim had still been alive when Kraven cut open his chest and began tearing him to pieces. At that point Mark had excused himself, hurried to the men’s room, and deposited his lunch into one of the toilets. Still, Kraven had been executed, and Mark Blakemoor found himself strangely discomfited by McCarty’s words. Then, as more members of the unit drifted into his office to complain about Anne’s column, he remembered their conversation on the plane the day before. Was that what was worrying him? Some slight nagging doubt that everyone might have been wrong?

“Why’s she want to kick a dead horse?” Frank Lovejoy asked, dolefully shaking his bald head. “She’s been living off Kraven for five years now—can’t she let it go?”

“Let her write whatever the hell she wants,” McCarty groused. “Time for us to get on to other things. What about the DOA they took into Harborview last night, Frank? Anything I need to know about? The mayor gonna be calling me?”

Lovejoy shook his head. “Just another drive-by. Sometimes I think we ought to just let ’em all go at each other till they wipe themselves out. Fuckin’ scumbags.”

McCarty grunted his agreement, then turned his attention back to Mark Blakemoor. “So what are you on to now that Kraven’s been burnt?”

Although it wasn’t yet eight
A.M
., Blakemoor sighed tiredly as he gestured to the stack of open cases on his desk. In the corner, occupying half a dozen brown corrugated boxes, were his copies of every scrap of information pertaining to every single case in which Richard Kraven had been a suspect, not just in Seattle, but everywhere else as well. It had been more than two years since he and Lois Ackerly had spent all their time investigating the kind of killings that had stopped with Kraven’s arrest, but he still found himself going back to the boxes over and over again, searching one folder after another for something—anything—he might have missed that would tie at least one of the local cases indisputably to Richard Kraven. The evidence was there; he was certain of it. Buried somewhere in the depths of one of those boxes there was something he hadn’t yet spotted; some insignificant fact that would let him at last put to rest the nagging feeling he had that something was wrong, that there was something about this case nobody yet understood. In the two-plus years that Kraven had waited to die, Blakemoor hadn’t found it. And maybe, he had to admit on the days when the frustration of the case threatened to overwhelm him, he hadn’t found that little fact because it simply wasn’t there. Still, why did his gut consistently tell him that Richard Kraven was as guilty as the courts had found him? Mark Blakemoor had been operating on his guts every day for the last twenty years, and they had never failed him yet. He sighed again. Maybe it was finally time to let it all go, move the files down to the storeroom in the bowels of the building, get them out of his sight, remove them from the corner of his office, where they taunted him every day. He looked up at McCarty, nodding toward the stack of boxes. “First, I guess I’ll get all that crap out of here.”

Jack McCarty’s head bobbed in gruff agreement. He started out of Blakemoor’s office, then wheeled around to glare once more at the open newspaper that had started his day so badly. “You think that Jeffers broad is going to keep harping on this?” he asked.

Mark Blakemoor, still remembering his conversation with Anne, shrugged in a carefully calculated display of ignorance. No point putting the homicide chief in an even fouler mood. “How would I know?” he asked. “I can’t read her mind.”

Grunting, McCarty turned and shambled out of Blakemoor’s office, already feeling his ulcer start to act up. Another day of milk for lunch, another day in which he would not dare eat one of the pastrami sandwiches he loved so much. Well, what the hell. Nobody ever said life was going to be a pastrami sandwich anyway.

As the chief made his exit, Lois Ackerly arrived, precariously balancing two Starbucks cups on top of what looked very much like a box of doughnuts. “What’s wrong with McCarty?” she asked, putting the box down on Mark’s desk. “The look he gave me would have killed a lesser woman.” Then her eyes fell on the ruined newspaper protruding from beneath the doughnut box, and she understood. “Oh. Anne Jeffers.” Her gaze shifted inquiringly to her partner. “Did you know this was coming?”

“Sort of,” Mark replied. He pulled the top off one of the coffee cups and helped himself to a particularly sticky-looking, chocolate-covered pastry.

“And?” Lois Ackerly pressed when it became obvious that Mark wasn’t going to tell her anything else.

“And what?”

Ackerly flopped into the chair behind the desk her partner always described as “compulsively neat” and fixed him with the look that meant he might as well tell her everything he knew or be prepared to subject himself to a day of nagging far worse than anything his ex-wife had ever dished out. Reading her expression perfectly, Mark closed the door to their office and recounted the events of the previous day.

“So what do you think?” Ackerly asked when he was through. “Is it over, or isn’t it?”

Blakemoor hesitated, then decided to go with his gut feeling. He picked up the newspaper, tore it into shreds, and dropped the whole mess into the wastebasket. “It’s over,” he told her. “As far as I’m concerned, the case is closed.” But as he reached for his cup of coffee, he found himself glancing down into the wastebasket, where Anne Jeffers’s picture seemed to be staring back at him.