John Saul - Black Lightning

She had returned home to lick her wounds and pick up the broken pieces of her emotional life.

Now, almost thirty years later, she was still at it. Her parents, who had provided refuge during the long months when she was too ashamed of her failure even to leave the house, had finally died. Joyce’s few friends had long ago tired of her woeful tale of betrayal, and stopped calling her.

The years had stretched into decades, and though she eventually secured a job as a receptionist on the swing shift at Group Health, she had also turned slowly into a strange kind of recluse. While she rarely left her house except to go to work, trash did not build up in Joyce Cottrell’s house as it did in those of older recluses, nor did paint begin to peel, or furniture grow stained and threadbare. Joyce Cottrell kept her house meticulously clean, immediately redecorating any room in which paint began to fade, choosing colors and fabrics from catalogs, finally venturing forth to make her purchases only when the newly redecorated room was complete in her mind down to the last detail.

Over the years, she had become expert in stripping paint from old wood, paper from old plaster, and worn fabric from the excellent frames with which her parents had furnished the house. She had become even more expert in applying the new materials she bought on her rare shopping expeditions, and in time the house had evolved into an eclectic assortment of rooms, each of them reflecting whatever fashion had been in vogue at the precise moment Joyce had most recently decided to redo it.

No one, though, had seen the interior of the house in years, for whenever one of her neighbors — the only people who saw her with any regularity at all — asked if they might see what she was doing, Joyce would always protest that the house wasn’t done yet. Nor was it a lie: one or more of the house’s ten rooms was always in some stage of redecoration.

Joyce herself was in a steady state of redecoration, too, as she dreamed and planned for the glittering party she would throw when the house was finally ready, a Martha Stewart-perfect party to celebrate the completion of the redecorating and mark her reemergence into the social world. She spent hours and days imagining herself as the beautiful, charming hostess, throwing open the doors to her elegant home to hordes of admiring friends.

Unfortunately, Joyce had not developed the same knack with herself that she had with the house. Her figure could best be described as “full,” a circumstance that Joyce concealed as well as she could by wearing loose-fitting clothing in bright colors, and her hair was, at age fifty-three, even blonder than it had been half a century earlier. Joyce’s taste in makeup hadn’t changed since she was a teenager, running to the same bright lipsticks and eye shadows — a riot of reds and oranges, blues and greens — that she loved in both her clothes and her interior decoration.

People who chose to be charitable might have said Joyce Cottrell looked a little blowzy.

Those who chose not to be charitable could have said she looked like an over-the-hill hooker.

It was precisely what attracted the man to her.

That, and the fact that she lived next door to Anne Jeffers.

Sources within the police department will neither confirm nor deny that they are investigating the possibility that Richard Kraven did not act alone, and that his execution may have triggered the beginning of a new wave of murders, with Kraven’s accomplice now acting by himself. The same sources also refused to discuss rumors that in light of Miss Davis’s career as a prostitute, the long-disbanded task force investigating the Green River murders might be reconstituted. Police are, for the moment, treating the Capitol Hill slaying as an isolated event, and are so far refusing to entertain the possibility that it could mark the first incident in a new wave of serial killings. In the meantime …

The man felt utter rage when he read Anne Jeffers’s article in the paper that morning. For one thing, it had been buried deep in the second section, when it clearly belonged on the front page. After all, it was a murder he had committed, and it had been every bit as gruesome as any that Richard Kraven had ever performed.

Hadn’t he done it the very same way?

Hadn’t he cut open the girl’s chest and hacked out her heart and lungs?

But the other murders made the front page, while his had barely shown up at all.

And he knew why. It was the reporter, Anne Jeffers. She didn’t think he was important enough. That was why she hadn’t put any of her stories about Shawnelle Davis where they belonged. He’d stewed about it for more than an hour, his anger growing steadily.

A little before nine the idea had come to him.

He had to get Anne Jeffers’s full attention.

And he knew exactly how to get it:

He would find out where she lived, and the next time he did something, he’d leave her a little souvenir.

Something on her doorstep …

Picking up the phone book, he flipped through the pages then ran his finger down a column until he found it. He could barely believe it — the bitch reporter lived right up the street from him!

Before he even thought about what he might do when he got there, the man set out, quickly walking north. It wasn’t long before he emerged from the district of shabby apartment buildings around Group Health into the slightly less run-down area that bordered the better neighborhood where Anne and Glen Jeffers lived.

He walked past the Jeffers house on the other side of the street, gazing at it almost surreptitiously. It was large, and stood at the top of a slope, well back from the sidewalk.

And it had a large porch.

Large enough so that he could toss something onto it from the curb if he had to. He wouldn’t even have to risk approaching the house, which might leave footprints, or something else that could identify him.

The man walked up the street another block, circled around a second block, then started back toward home, still on the opposite side of the street from the Jeffers house.

He was almost abreast of it when someone emerged from the house next door.

A woman, stepping out onto her front porch to pick up the morning paper.

The man stared at her high-piled blond hair, her overbright makeup, and her green and yellow dress.

Cheap.

Just like Shawnelle Davis.

Now a new idea — an even better idea — was developing in his head.

When the woman disappeared back into her house a moment later, the man remained, rooted to the spot, studying the house, then moved around to view the structure from the alley behind.

Several times the man left the area. But drawn to the house next to Anne Jeffers’s like a moth to a flame, he kept coming back.

Finally, in midafternoon, the woman came out again.

She started down the sidewalk, and the man followed her.

He followed her all the way to the Group Health complex and into the emergency room on Thomas Street.

He pushed through the main doors after her, pausing in the foyer just long enough to see her take her place at the reception desk and slip her nameplate into a holder: JOYCE COTTRELL.

The name fixed in his memory, the man pushed deeper into the hospital, moving through the corridors until he came to the main entrance in the new wing facing Sixteenth. Leaving the building, he crossed Sixteenth and was soon back home. He picked up the telephone book again.

There she was, Joyce Cottrell, listed with an address on Sixteenth Avenue North. Right next door to the Jefferses.

The man dialed the number, let it ring twenty times, and hung up.

For the rest of the afternoon and through the evening the man kept calling the number, never getting an answer. Each time he dialed, his confidence grew. By nine-thirty, when he left his apartment to walk the few blocks north for the second time that day, he knew what he would find.