John Saul: Black Lightning

Once she’d even found herself cradling the broken body of a ten-year-old who had just been pulled from the wreckage of his father’s car on I-5. Anne had stanched the flow of blood from his neck with her handkerchief as she prayed for the medics to arrive in time, and sobbed in frustrated fury when the ambulance lost the race for the boy’s life to a crowd of rubber-necking onlookers who had choked traffic on the freeway to a standstill.

The same kind of crowd who waited outside now, waited for the stroke of noon and the announcement that justice had been served.

Justice, or Anne Jeffers?

Was that why she was shuddering?

Suddenly wanting to be alone to examine her feelings, Anne rose from the hard chair in the makeshift pressroom hastily set up for the fifty-odd journalists who had descended upon the prison to cover the execution of Richard Kraven. She made her way between two rows of long tables whose surfaces were littered with notebook computers and phones. She rapped once on the door of the single rest room that served all the men and women in the pressroom, then went inside, locking the door behind her. Stepping up to the cracked sink that was bolted to the wall next to a stained toilet, she stared at her reflection in the rectangle of polished metal screwed to the wall above the worn basin.

At least her feelings weren’t showing, she thought with some relief. Her reflection — the image of an oval face with deep brown eyes and a straight nose — gazed steadily back at her, only slightly distorted by the ripples and dents in the makeshift mirror.

She searched her features again, then turned away, annoyed with herself. What had she expected to find? Some brilliant insight into her conflicted feelings written across her forehead? The fact was, she knew perfectly well why she had found herself shuddering as she waited for Richard Kraven’s execution.

She had shuddered because this time, when she watched someone die, she would know that she was at least partly responsible for his death.

“Not true!”

Anne spoke the words out loud, so sharply that they reverberated in the tight confines of the rest room.

And it wasn’t true that Richard Kraven was being executed because of her.

He was being executed because of what he had done.

He was dying as punishment for his sins, and his sins were great enough that he should be executed ten times over.

How many people had Richard Kraven actually killed as he roamed the country in pursuit of his “research,” as he called it, selecting victims for his horrific experiments?

No one knew.

Kraven had steadfastly denied killing anyone, but that was nothing more than the typical insistence of a sociopath that he’d done nothing wrong.

Anne Jeffers knew better. In addition to the three people here in Connecticut, of whose murders Kraven had actually been convicted, she was certain there were scores more. The bodies of men and women, young and old, had been scattered across the country from Kraven’s home in Seattle down the coast to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and across the continent through Denver, Minneapolis, and Kansas City to Atlanta. Sometimes it seemed as if there wasn’t a major city in the country that Kraven’s cold shadow hadn’t fallen over; even now the list of crimes in which Richard Kraven was the prime suspect still grew.

Yet even as Richard Kraven’s evil had spread, there had always been people to defend him, several of them among Anne’s own colleagues in the press. Some suggested the evidence presented in court hadn’t been strong enough to convict him; others sagely opined that Kraven should be kept alive to study. But every time someone had written a story advocating that Richard Kraven be allowed to live, Anne Jeffers answered it.

Instantly, and strongly.

In the end it was her view that prevailed. Richard Kraven had been sentenced to die.

Now, two years after the sentencing, all the appeals had been filed, all the motions for new trials had been considered and denied, and all the other states having claims against Richard Kraven had agreed to save themselves the not inconsiderable expense of trying him for crimes indistinguishable from those for which he had already been convicted. Yet, in the years since he’d been convicted and sentenced, Richard Kraven had become steadily more famous, and the clamor to save his life had grown ever louder.

Anne Jeffers had listened in amazement to the growing cacophony of protest. Were there really people who thought a man who had been convicted of murdering and dissecting a ten-year-old girl could be rehabilitated?

How could anyone insist that Kraven was innocent in the face of all the evidence against him?

Evidence that Anne Jeffers had recounted over and over again during the years she had covered this case.

Evidence that Richard Kraven coldly insisted had been concocted, constructed, manipulated, or planted for the sole purpose of convicting him of crimes of which he was totally innocent.

Not, of course, that Kraven had ever been able to present evidence of the nefarious plot that he insisted had made nearly a dozen separate states conspire to frame him. Anne was familiar enough with the paranoid mind to know that motive never entered into the certainty of persecution.

The persecution was simply there.

And Richard Kraven — to Anne’s mind the personification of the handsome and charming sociopath — had been able to convince thousands of people that the persecution was real and he would be executed wrongly.

He’s guilty. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Anne told herself, consciously straightening her back as she turned once more to gaze at her reflection in the warped metal above the sink. Richard Kraven had been tried, convicted, and sentenced, and it was the wisdom not only of the judge who had heard the case, but also of the appeals court that had reviewed it, that Richard Kraven should die today.

And she would watch the execution, and she would not shudder as the executioner threw the switch. Yet even as she steeled herself for what was to come, her eyes burned and her vision blurred with tears.

As she pulled a rough paper towel from the dispenser on the wall to blot the dampness under her eyes, a rap sounded at the door, immediately followed by a voice Anne recognized as belonging to the warden’s assistant.

“Mrs. Jeffers? He wants to see you.”

Crumpling the paper towel and dropping it into the wastebasket, Anne brusquely ran her fingers through her hair, glanced briefly at her reflection, then opened the door.

“The warden?” she asked. “Why does he want to see me?”

The assistant hesitated for a second, looked confused, then shook her head. “It’s not Mr. Rustin. It’s Richard Kraven. You’re on the list of people he wants to talk to this morning.”

Anne felt a tightening in her belly as she entered the pressroom. Why would Richard Kraven want to talk to her today? What could he possibly have to say that he hadn’t already said in the numerous interviews she’d already conducted with him over the years? Was it possible that finally, at the last minute, he was going to confess? As the questions tumbled through her mind she became aware that the sound of fingers tapping keyboards had ceased. Silence fell over the pressroom as all her colleagues turned to look at her.

Once again she steeled herself.

If she could watch him die, certainly she could also listen to whatever he wanted to tell her before it happened.

“All right,” she said to the assistant, who had followed her. Immediately, she wondered whether she’d spoken the words too loudly in the silence of the room. “Now?”

The assistant shrugged. “I’m not sure. I was just told to bring you to the office. Mr. Rustin thought you might want to wait there.”