John Saul - Black Lightning

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.

… Richard Kraven still insisted that he was innocent of all charges that have ever been brought against him. Even on his last morning, he still protested his innocence, and as I listened to him, I had to wonder what motive he could possibly have for lying, knowing that in only a few more hours he would surely be dead.

Did he expect a last-minute reprieve?

Surely not, for despite the hopes of the anti-capital-punishment forces gathered in front of the prison, both the courts and the governor of Connecticut had made it clear there would be no further intervention in the case.

What, then, would Richard Kraven have to gain by lying to me?

Perhaps it was simply his way of attempting to make me his last victim, by leaving me with questions in my mind, questions that remain unanswered …

“How dare she write such filth?” Edna Kraven’s voice quavered with anger and the newspaper rattled in her shaking hand. Finally, she had to set it down on the kitchen table. Really, it was simply too much to be borne! Richard — her wonderful, perfect Richard — dead not even twenty-four hours, and that awful Jeffers woman was already writing about him again, repeating yet again all the terrible things she’d written for the last five years.

It was bitterness, of course. Edna had long ago come to understand that Anne Jeffers had fallen in love with Richard, and that when Richard had spurned her, her love had turned to hatred. Why else would she have pursued Richard the way she had, making up all those terrible lies about him? For years Edna had written letter after angry letter to the editor and the publisher of the Seattle Herald, protesting that Anne Jeffers was slandering her son, but they had never even responded to her. Once, though, they’d printed one of her letters, but then they’d let Anne Jeffers write an article with the disgusting insinuation that somehow the relationship between Edna and her son might have led to the awful things she’d claimed Richard had done. When Edna read that particular article, she’d actually felt faint — the very idea of what Anne Jeffers had implied fairly set her skin to crawling. To sully the perfect love between a mother and son that way …

Even now, just remembering that article made Edna Kraven’s blood boil, and she glared across the table at her other son, Rory.

Rory!

She’d named him after Rory Calhoun, who had been one of her favorite movie stars. So handsome, so strong.

And so different from her own Rory.

Her Rory had taken after his father, that shiftless no-good with his beady eyes and that weak chin, who had walked out on her right after Rory had been born, leaving her with no one to care for her except Richard. And Richard had cared for her, too. He’d helped her with the baby, and done all the housework, and still managed to have time to get perfect grades in school.

A genius, that’s what Richard had been.

But Rory …

Her lips tightened with annoyance as she watched him eat the cereal — her cereal, to which he’d simply helped himself — just as if nothing had happened, just as if his brother hadn’t been murdered yesterday. Yes, murdered, she repeated to herself. That’s what they did to Richard, no matter what they called it in the newspapers or in those terrible Star Chamber affairs they’d claimed were legal hearings. They’d lynched Richard, and deep in her heart of hearts Edna Kraven had a terrible feeling that Rory — his own brother — didn’t care.

Why else would he have brought the paper with that disgusting article into the house this morning? “Well?” she demanded, her lips pursing, her eyes glittering with fury.

Rory Kraven looked up from the sports pages he’d been perusing as he ate his cereal. Goddamn bitch was gonna start carping at him yet again. Nothing ever satisfied the bitch. Even after thirty goddamn years, nothing he ever did pleased her. Yesterday afternoon and last night had been the worst. He’d arranged to take the day off work to be with her, certain she would want his support when the time finally came for Richard to die, but by the time he’d gone to sleep on the Hide-A-Bed in the guest room that had once been his, he wondered why he’d come at all. All day long he’d had to listen to his mother rant on about Richard — how smart he was, how perfect he was, what a good son he’d always been. Rory had listened to it all, just the way he always listened to it, and he’d known what it really meant, because half the time she said it right out loud. Even now her words echoed in his ears:

Richard was smart — not like you!

Richard was perfect — not like you!

Richard was a good son — not like you!

All his life he’d known who she really loved. Even when he was a little boy, she’d always held Richard up to him as the ideal of perfection. Why can’t you get as good grades as Richard gets? Why can’t you behave yourself, the way Richard always does?

Richard could talk before he was eight months old!

Richard could walk when he was less than a year!

Richard is a genius!

Richard, Richard, Richard!

He’d heard it every day as he was growing up, even after Richard went to college, then moved into a house of his own. Rory himself moved out of the house as soon as he could, renting the little apartment on Capitol Hill where he still lived today, twelve years later. But moving out of his mother’s house hadn’t changed a thing. Edna had been glad to be rid of him, and she’d proved it by showing him his old room the first time he came back to visit her.