John Saul - Black Lightning

“Any reason why you might have thought of her?” Blakemoor asked with studied casualness.

There was no way to keep from telling the detective the rest of the story. “Well, she did tell Anne she saw me out in the backyard yesterday,” he said. “She claimed I was naked.”

Blakemoor gazed steadily at him. “Your backyard, or hers?”

“Mine,” Glen assured him. “But I wasn’t naked.”

The detective shrugged dismissively. “So what if you were? It’s your backyard, isn’t it?”

“But I wasn’t naked,” Glen insisted, though even as he uttered the words he knew they might not be true.

The detective let just the tiniest hint of a smile — a congenial smile — play around the corners of his lips. “So I guess you must have been pretty pissed at her, huh?” Glen opened his mouth to reply, then saw the direction the conversation was going. Abruptly he closed his mouth, and at the same time saw the faint smile disappear from Blakemoor’s lips. “Weren’t you pissed at her?” the detective repeated. “I know if someone accused me of something like that, I’d sure be mad as hell.”

“Mad enough to kill her?” Glen asked. “Is that what you’re suggesting?”

Blakemoor’s expression hardened. “I’m not suggesting anything,” he said. “I’m just asking questions.”

“And I’m just answering them,” Glen said. “And yes, I suppose I was pissed off at Joyce. But certainly not enough to have killed her.”

“But you instantly thought of her this morning when you heard a body’d been found,” Blakemoor reminded him. “Why?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Glen said angrily. “But now I’m wondering if maybe I shouldn’t call my lawyer. If you’re going to accuse me of killing Joyce Cottrell—”

Blakemoor held up his hands as if to fend off the torrent of angry words. “Hey, slow down! I’m not accusing you of anything. And if you want to call your lawyer, go right ahead. We can call this talk off right now, if that’s what you want. All I’m doing is looking for information. I’m not accusing anybody of anything.”

Glen’s lips twisted into a wry parody of a smile. “ ‘But anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law’?” he asked, parroting the phrase he’d heard used on television so often it had become a cliché.

Blakemoor seemed to back off even further. “We only do a Miranda when we’re arresting someone,” he said tersely. “But you still have a right to have a lawyer present.”

Glen thought it over quickly, and sensed that things were about to get out of hand. If he insisted on calling a lawyer, wouldn’t that make him look guilty? But he wasn’t guilty. He’d neither heard nor seen anything, let alone done anything! But what about the blackouts? What about yesterday, when he’d obviously gone out and dumped the shaver into the trash, although he had no memory of it? If he’d done that—

He cut the thought off, seeing where it was going and not wanting to follow it.

Finally he made up his mind: he’d done nothing, and he didn’t need a lawyer.

“All I was thinking was that there must have been some reason why I thought of Joyce this morning, and the only thing I can come up with is that maybe I did hear something last night, but just don’t remember it. I mean, if I was sound asleep and I heard something, maybe in my subconscious I remembered it and put it together when I heard about the body. I mean, if I heard a noise when I was half asleep …” Once again Glen’s words trailed off, and once again he wished he’d said nothing.

The two men’s eyes met, and though neither of them said anything, the unspoken question hung between them: What if it wasn’t just a noise that Glen didn’t remember hearing? What if it was a scream?

What if it was a killing!

When Mark Blakemoor left the house a few minutes later, those questions had still not been asked.

But both men were wondering what the answers might be.

Body Found In

Volunteer Park

Latest in New Series of Killings?

The nude and mutilated body of a woman was found in Volunteer Park early this morning. According to police, the victim, Joyce Cottrell, was slain in her Capitol Hill home sometime between 11:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M. Though police are so far denying it, there appears to be a connection between last night’s slaying and that of Shawnelle Davis …

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Vivian Andrews groaned, flopping back in her chair. She looked up from the monitor on her desk to glare impatiently through the window at the gray afternoon outside. Taking the kind of deep breath her mother used to tell her would help keep her temper under control, she grabbed the phone and stabbed the digits of Anne Jeffers’s extension. Her fingers were already drumming impatiently on her desktop when Anne picked it up on the second ring. “My office,” Vivian snapped. “Now.” Dropping the phone back on the cradle, she shifted her attention to the monitor and the offending article she had pulled up from the file server only a few seconds before summoning Anne. By the time Anne appeared in her office, the editor had read through the entire article three

An equal number of deep breaths had done nothing for her temper, despite what her mother had taught her.

“What the hell is this?” Vivian demanded as Anne came into the small office and shut the door behind her.

Anne edged just far enough around the desk to catch a glimpse of the headline glowing on the editor’s computer screen. “My story on—”

“I know what it is!” Vivian Andrews interrupted sharply. “What I want to know is what you think it is!”

Anne felt her temper rising at Vivian’s tone, but she bit back the first reply that came to mind. For the moment, Vivian would tolerate no sarcasm but her own. “I intended it to be a simple report of the body I found this morning—” she began, but once again the editor cut her off. This time, though, Vivian softened her interruption of Anne’s words by gesturing to a chair.

“Sit down, Anne.”

Warily, knowing that Vivian often invited people to sit down only so that they would have a slight cushioning against the blast they were about to receive, Anne dropped onto the edge of the single uncomfortable chair the editor provided for visitors to her office.

Placing the tips of her fingers together in an unconscious gesture that invariably signaled trouble to whomever sat opposite her, Vivian glanced briefly at the offending article hovering on the screen, then sighed and dropped her hands onto the desktop. Though Anne gave no outward sign of it, she relaxed slightly; the change in her boss’s body language was a sure sign that Vivian had decided on a softer approach than she’d originally planned. Vivian’s next words, though, made Anne wish her editor had stuck with Plan A.

“You look terrible,” she said. “Maybe you should take some time off.”

“It hasn’t been the easiest day,” Anne replied. “Most of us don’t really look forward to finding a body on their morning run, let alone having to write a story about it.” As Vivian’s eyes flicked toward the computer screen, Anne decided that while her editor might have chosen to avoid a direct approach, she wouldn’t. And she would also risk a touch of sarcasm of her own. “I gather from your typically loquacious phone call that there’s a problem?”

Vivian shrugged. “Maybe I ought to assign the story to someone else—”

This time it was Anne who interrupted. “On the same theory that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client?”

“You don’t agree?” Vivian countered.

“I don’t see the parallel.”