John Saul - Black Lightning

“That’s another story.” The detective’s expression tightened. “There are similarities to both the women. But the cut is—” He hesitated, then used the same word that had come into his mind the previous day, when he’d first examined the cat. “It’s a neater cut. Cosmo says it was done with a sharper instrument — a razor blade, possibly a scalpel. And he says the incision is straighter.” He paused again, his eyes avoiding Anne’s when he finally went on. “He says it could be the same guy, and that by the time he got to the cat he’d had more practice.”

“I see.” Anne felt numb.

“Or someone else could have done the cat,” Blakemoor finished. There was something in his voice that made Anne look up.

“Someone else, like my husband?” she asked, still remembering the silence that had fallen over Blakemoor and Ackerly as Glen had returned from the house with the plastic bag. When Blakemoor made no reply, Anne decided it was time to tell him about the note on her computer. “Whoever killed poor Kumquat put the note there,” she finished. “And whoever put the note on my computer knew a lot more about programming than Glen does. He can operate a couple of programs, but he doesn’t know the difference between an autoexec.bat and a config sys. At our house, I even install the programs.”

“But you thought of him,” Blakemoor pointed out.

Anne almost wished she hadn’t told the detective about the note at all. But it was too important to keep from him. “How could I not have?” she countered. “He was there by himself all day.” A dark and hollow sound that wasn’t quite a chuckle emerged from her throat. “I even searched the house, looking for signs that someone else had been there.”

“And you didn’t find anything,” Blakemoor surmised.

Anne shook her head. “So what’s next?” she asked.

“The same thing that’s always next in a case like this,” Blakemoor told her. Though she’d heard the words before — practically knew them by heart — this time they made Anne’s blood run cold. “We keep looking, even though we don’t have much of anything to go on.” He stopped speaking, and it was Anne herself who finished the recitation.

“And we wait for him to kill someone else, and hope that next time he makes a mistake.”

Blakemoor nodded, but said nothing. The silence between them stretched on until finally Anne could take it no longer.

“What if it’s me?” she asked, rising to her feet. “What if it’s me he kills, or one of my family?”

Without even thinking about what he was doing, Mark Blakemoor put his arms around Anne. “It won’t be you,” he said. “I won’t let it be.”

Struggling against an almost overpowering urge to cling to the big detective — even if just for a moment — Anne pulled away from him and picked up her coat and her large leather satchel. They left the medical examiner’s office in silence.

Neither of them could think of anything else to say.

Glen Jeffers knew something was wrong the moment he woke up that morning. It was a feeling that flooded not only his brain, but his body as well — a feeling that although he was wide-awake, his mind was only half conscious; that although he’d slept through the night, his body was still exhausted. How could he possibly be so tired when he hadn’t done much of anything except rest since coming home from the hospital?

The reality was that he was just plain bored. He’d spent his life being active, rising early for his morning jogs with Anne, putting in long days at the office — days that were often broken only by a fierce lunchtime game of racquetball with Alan Cline — then coming home to work in the evening at the drafting table in the den, or, if it was summer and the evenings long, going up to the park to throw a ball around with Kevin.

What he wasn’t used to was inactivity, and this morning, after Anne and the kids had finally left, the house had begun to close in around him. Part of it, he reflected as he set about cleaning up the kitchen, was simply cabin fever. But there was more to it than that. It seemed to him that everything was getting tangled up in his mind. Just before he’d come fully awake this morning, he’d had a dream — one of those half-waking dreams in which you are unpleasantly aware that you’re dreaming, but are powerless to stop the unwelcome images parading before you.

This one had been a jumble of scenes: Joyce Cottrell, and Kumquat, and Mark Blakemoor staring at him as though the detective thought he’d killed not only his daughter’s cat, but his next door neighbor as well. By the time Glen came fully awake, he felt as surrounded by death and violence as he had when Anne was spending so much of her time on the Richard Kraven story.

That was another thing that was starting to get to him. The whole Kraven thing should have ended when the killer was executed, but it seemed to be rising up all over again. Anne was already looking for a connection between Kraven and the two new killings, and if he knew Anne, she’d find one, no matter how implausible it might seem.

Finished in the kitchen, Glen wandered into the den: maybe he’d just spend a few minutes at the drawing board, not working, really, but just sketching and thinking, seeing if any new ideas came to him. Before he even reached his drafting table, however, his eye was caught by the thick file on Anne’s desk.

The Richard Kraven file — the one he’d made Kevin bring to him when he was still in the hospital.

Why had he done that? Now, he couldn’t even remember having read the stuff. He leafed through a few pages of the file, but none of the articles struck him as something he’d read recently. And he certainly wasn’t interested in reading the pieces this morning.

The mood of restless boredom that had been gathering around him since the moment he’d awakened coalesced into an oppressive claustrophobia. Suddenly he had to get out of the house, had to escape the confines of walls that suddenly seemed to be closing in on him. But where should he go?

A walk?

Forget it. Despite his promise to Gordy Farber, he’d always hated walking just for the sake of walking. What he needed was a destination to give the exercise purpose.

The office?

Forget that, too. If he so much as showed up there, Rita Alvarez would not only send him home, but call Anne, too.

But what about the Jeffers Building? He hadn’t been to the construction site since his heart attack. A quick look at its progress, he thought now, would be the perfect antidote for his mood, and unless Alan happened to be there, no one on the job would even know about Farber’s orders that he stay away from work. His mind made up, Glen pulled on a jacket against the chill of the overcast morning, locked the house, and set out.

A little less than an hour later he was standing on the sidewalk across the street from the soaring skeleton of the Jeffers Building. Even the quickest glance told him that the work was on schedule despite his not being there to supervise it. He felt a twinge of insecurity that they seemed not to need him at all, but then decided the signs of progress were actually something of a tribute — obviously, he and the huge design team working under him had done a good enough job that Jim Dover hadn’t needed to call him.

The building — his building — drew him like a magnet. Crossing the street, he let himself through the door in the fence around the site, and headed for the office, a large trailer that would become unnecessary as soon as the ground floor had been enclosed and could be properly lit and heated. The young woman behind the desk, whose name was Janie Berkey, glanced up from the purchase orders she was working on, looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled.