John Saul - Black Lightning

The mechanics of it hadn’t taken her long to unravel: a simple macro file would have done it, triggered by practically anything:

A line in the autoexec.bat file, for instance.

The macro could easily have brought up a file, displayed it for a few seconds, then closed it, immediately erased it, wiped all traces of it from her hard drive with one of the utilities she herself used to make sure certain files could never be recovered, then erased itself as well.

Or it could have arrived as a virus, coming into her computer through the modem anytime she’d left the machine on, but unattended. It would have sat dormant on her hard drive, set to attack the first time the computer was turned on after a specific date and time.

And attack it had. But not her computer. No, this was much more invidious. This virus had attacked her, rising up out of the guts of the machine to lash out at her, filling her with a terror she hadn’t been able to talk about at all, lest it spread from her into her whole family.

Bad enough they had been frightened by someone killing their pet and leaving it in their own backyard. How would they cope if they knew the unseen enemy had penetrated into the house itself?

She had searched the house, using the pretext of hunting for a misplaced box of old clippings on Richard Kraven. In both the attic and the basement she had searched for signs of a stranger’s presence, but had found nothing.

On the kitchen table she had found the fishing fly, and for a moment thought she recognized fragments of one of Hector’s feathers and a tuft of fur that could have come from Kumquat. But who could have made the fly? Certainly not Glen — he was notoriously clumsy with his hands, which was why the ship model downstairs had never been finished; Glen had proved even more awkward than Kevin at attaching the planks to the framework of the hull. Still, just before Glen had turned off the light to go to sleep, she’d asked him about the fly. He’d told her he bought it at the same time he bought the fishing rod, but something in his voice had struck her wrong.

When she’d pressed him, though, his mood had instantly blackened, and they’d almost had a fight.

He had gone to sleep while she stared at the ceiling, remembering the look of suspicion Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly had cast in her husband’s direction after they’d pulled poor Kumquat’s body from beneath the low deck behind the garage.

No! Glen couldn’t have killed Kumquat — he just couldn’t have!

And so she’d lain awake, stewing, trying to find answers, trying to make sense out of senseless horrors.

In the morning, tired, but knowing she must have slept at least a few hours, she’d gotten up and once again concealed her fear from her family, contenting herself with instructing Heather to make certain she walked Kevin to his school before going on to her own, and extracting a promise from Kevin that he wouldn’t leave school until Heather arrived to escort him home.

He argued, but she stood firm.

Then, after reading Vivian Andrews’s essentially fictional account of the Joyce Cottrell story with growing anger, she went to the office.

When no silence fell over the city room of the Herald as she walked in, Anne felt something that she wasn’t willing to admit even to herself: disappointment. But what had she expected? This wasn’t a ladies afternoon card club — this was a big city newspaper, whose staff wasn’t about to express public shock over much less than mass murder. Still, she would have thought someone would ask her how she was doing and if her family was all right. There wasn’t even so much as a momentary drop in the decibel level as she threaded her way toward her desk. Perhaps it was that simple fact — that practiced callousness that she knew perfectly well was not only a tool of a reporter’s trade, but practically a badge of honor as well — that stopped her from sitting down at her desk. But it wasn’t just that, of course.

It was the note that had appeared on her computer last night. Not telling her family about it was one thing. Not telling Vivian Andrews was another. Picking up all her notes from her research on the rapid transit issue, she headed for Vivian Andrews’s office, pushed the door open, stepped through it, and closed it behind her before the editor could possibly object.

“I gather you didn’t like my editing?” Vivian asked with studied casualness, barely even glancing away from the monitor on which she was already reviewing stories for tomorrow’s edition.

“It wasn’t editing, Viv,” Anne told her. “It was butchery. It was a good story, and it was an honest story. And I’m taking it back.” She dropped the sheaf of notes onto the editor’s desk, forcing Vivian to shift her attention from the monitor to the reporter who stood opposite her, pale and drawn.

“Toning down an irresponsible story is one of my primary functions around here,” she began. But as she finally took a good look at Anne Jeffers, her words died on her lips. “Anne? Are you okay? You look like you’ve been up all night.”

“I might as well have been, for all the sleep I got,” Anne confessed. As quickly as she could, she filled Vivian in.

“Your cat?” Vivian asked as Anne described what had been done to Heather’s pet. “My God, who would do something like that?”

Anne shook her head. “And what kind of a world do we live in when people react more strongly to what happens to a cat than they do to what happens to other people?”

Vivian Andrews reddened. “I didn’t mean—” she began, but then dropped back in her chair. “Oh, God, maybe I did.” She sighed. “What did the police say?”

Anne repeated most of what Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly had told her, holding back only the few words that had been spoken — and not spoken — about Glen. “And as for your changing my story to say that the police aren’t connecting the Davis and Cottrell killings, that simply isn’t true,” she finished. “They told me off the record that they’re definitely treating them as related, and that they’re going to have the same medical examiner who autopsied Davis and Cottrell look at our cat, too.”

Vivian Andrews sourly eyed the array of papers that Anne had dropped onto her desk. “May I assume you’ve decided to take yourself off this particular mess?” she asked, tilting her head toward the transit plan notes.

“It seems to me that there are a lot of people around here who could do that story perfectly well.”

“I’m not sure that’s the point,” Vivian replied. “I can also think of half a dozen people who could deal with these new killings in a more objective fashion than you.”

“Maybe. But there’s something else — something I haven’t told anyone else yet.” Struggling not to let her voice betray the extent of the fear she’d felt last night — still felt, she realized as she repeated the story — she told Vivian about the note that had appeared on her computer, then disappeared almost as quickly as it had come. “Look,” she finished. “Put someone else on the story with me, if you want to. But you have to let me stay with it.” When she saw the editor wavering, she pushed harder. “Vivian, something’s going on here. This isn’t just a copycat. Whoever’s doing this has something going against me personally. Maybe he’s trying to scare me off, or maybe he’s seen a picture of me and just likes the way I look. For some reason, he’s fixated on me, and even if you don’t think it’s a good idea for me to stay on the story, you know damned well that we can slant it to sell more papers than the P.I. and the Times combined. Picture the headline, Viv: ‘Killer Stalks Herald Reporter.’ I can write it without getting Blakemoor and Ackerly into trouble — I was there, Viv! It was my next-door neighbor. My cat. And my computer he left his damned note on!”