John Saul - Black Lightning

Once again he’d blacked out.

Once again he’d lost hours out of the day.

Obviously, he’d gone somewhere.

But where?

And what had he done?

The blood-soaked nightmare rose out of his memory.…

The story would run on the front page. Anne knew that, even knew she should have been pleased. Instead she was terrified.

It was four-thirty, and she’d finished her account of Rory Kraven’s death. She’d talked to Mark Blakemoor one last time, half hoping he’d be able to tell her there had been a mistake, that Rory Kraven’s fingerprints hadn’t matched the ones lifted from the knife with which Joyce Cottrell had been killed.

He not only confirmed Rory Kraven as Joyce Cottrell’s killer, he told her that the lab had now matched parts of Rory’s right palm print to one of the smeared prints found in Shawnelle Davis’s kitchen.

Finally, Anne had dropped a note in Vivian Andrews’s E-mail suggesting they run only the bare bones of the story until they could penetrate at least part of the thick fog of questions that still cloaked the morning’s events in the drab apartment on Sixteenth Avenue.

Who?

And why?

Who could have known that Richard Kraven’s brother had killed Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell when the police hadn’t yet been willing to state unequivocally even that the same person had committed both those murders?

The questions were still tumbling through her mind as Anne walked out of the Herald Building into the gray afternoon and headed up Denny toward Capitol Hill and home. The worst of it — the part that threatened to drive her crazy — was the appearance of the notes. She’d finally told Mark Blakemoor about the message that had appeared when she’d booted her computer up the previous afternoon. Though he’d listened intently as she described every detail, in the end he’d had some questions she wasn’t prepared to answer: He’d still been in her backyard when it had occurred yesterday afternoon. Why hadn’t she told him about it then?

She hadn’t mentioned the fishing fly to Blakemoor, either.

Why not?

Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. Because it didn’t mean anything, that’s why. And it didn’t have anything to do with the note on her computer screen, or Kumquat being killed, or anything else! Glen had explained to her where it had come from, hadn’t he? He’d bought it! It was nothing but a coincidence that it happened to be made out of feathers and fur that could have come from her children’s pets. For God’s sake, what was she thinking? That someone — some stranger who was pretending to be Richard Kraven — had come sneaking into her house, made a fishing fly, killed her cat, and then left a note on her computer?

Anne decided the whole idea was insane; she was starting to sound paranoid even to herself. Two blocks from home she cut over to Sixteenth and cursed out loud as she crept past the big motor home somebody had parked on her block, taking up the parking spot she normally used, and another one as well. Finally finding an empty spot in the next block, she walked back to the house, glaring at the motor home one more time before going inside.

“Hello?” she called out. “Anybody home?”

“Back here,” Glen called from the den.

Anne dropped her gritchel under the table by the stairs and went into the den. Glen was sitting at the drafting table, and he looked up almost guiltily as she came in. “I’m not working,” he assured her. “I’m just doodling.” Moving around the table, she kissed him. “Is that what you’ve been doing all day? Doodling?” She felt him stiffen, but then he nodded.

“Pretty much,” he said. “What about you?”

Dropping into her desk chair, Anne told Glen about Rory Kraven’s murder.

And as he listened to his wife, an image came into Glen’s mind.

An image from the dream he’d had this afternoon.

An image that was, in every detail, a perfect portrayal of Anne’s description of Rory Kraven’s body when it had been found in his bathtub that afternoon.

But he had only dreamed it, Glen thought. Surely, he had only dreamed it.

Serial Killer’s Younger

Brother Found Dead

Rory Kraven Linked to New Series of Capitol Hill Deaths

The body of Rory Kraven, 41, brother of recently executed serial killer, Richard Kraven, was found in his Capitol Hill apartment yesterday afternoon. The victim of a thus-far-unknown assailant, the younger Kraven suffered multiple stab wounds. His unclothed body, mutilated in a manner that police sources concede was similar to the mutilations inflicted on victims of Richard Kraven, was found in the bathtub of the apartment by his mother, Edna Kraven, 66.

As part of their investigation into this most recent Capitol Hill slaying, police have found evidence conclusively linking Rory Kraven to the killings of both Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell. Detective Mark Blakemoor confirms that Rory Kraven’s fingerprints match those found …

Edna Kraven glared at the article on the front page of the morning Herald. She had sat up all night long, afraid even to go to bed, so certain was she that she would be robbed of her sleep by the image of poor Rory. It was a vision she knew would stay with her for the rest of her life. Even now it was almost more than she could bear just to think about it — the way his eyes had stared at her, and the terrible slashes in his throat and chest! If only she hadn’t pushed the door to his apartment open! She’d known something was wrong, had felt it from the moment she came up those stairs. And she’d told Anne Jeffers about it, too.

Not that the woman had printed anything she’d said! Edna thought angrily. She’d only written more lies. And as though it wasn’t enough to hash over the falsehoods about Richard again — now the bitch was making up things about poor Rory, too!

The very idea of Rory killing those two women!

It was ridiculous — Rory could barely even bring himself to speak to women.

Edna had seen the photographs of those women on television. Cheap, both of them.

One of them had been a whore, and the other some kind of recluse. What would Rory have had to do with women like them?

Wasn’t it obvious that whoever had killed them had killed Rory, too?

Incompetence, that’s what it was, Edna told herself. The police couldn’t find the killer, so they’d blamed poor, stupid Rory. And then that reporter, who had always been out to get her darling Richard, had gone and printed it! Edna shuddered as she thought of her neighbors reading the slander smeared all over the front page of this morning’s paper.

Well, there might not be anything she could do about the police, she decided, but she could certainly give that Jeffers woman a piece of her mind!

Though it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, Edna scrabbled through the yellow pages until she found the number for the Seattle Herald. She dialed it and demanded to speak to Anne Jeffers. Her lips tightened as she listened to the operator tell her the reporter hadn’t come in yet that morning. “No, I certainly do not want to leave a message,” Edna said when the girl offered to connect her to the reporter’s voice mail. “I want to talk to her!”

Her anger growing steadily, Edna reached for the white pages and began searching through the J’s.

… on the knife that killed Joyce Cottrell, while a partial palm print taken from the apartment of Shawnelle Davis matches a portion of Kraven’s right hand.

An unsigned note was found at the scene of this latest death, but police have so far refused to make its contents public, except to say that neither the note nor the wounds inflicted on the dead man are consistent with a suicide. At the same time, police department sources confirmed that they have no suspects in this killing.