John Saul - Black Lightning

An icy numbness spreading through her, she read the note a second time, then a third. She felt panic rising in her, felt an insane urge to run through the house locking the doors and windows and pulling the curtains. But it was broad daylight outside — eleven o’clock on Saturday morning. What could happen to her? Besides, if Richard Kraven—

No! Not Richard Kraven! Richard Kraven was dead!

She took a deep breath. If whoever had written the note really intended to come into her house, why would he warn her?

He was only trying to scare her.

Her panic of a moment before now yielding to anger, Anne carefully reinserted the note into the envelope, then picked up the telephone and dialed the number Mark Blakemoor had given her after their last meeting. “Call me any time,” he’d told her. “If anything happens, or you find something, or you even think of something, call me.”

She let the phone ring a dozen times — didn’t he even have a machine? What kind of cop was he? Finally, she hung up, and dialed his office number from memory. On the fourth ring someone picked it up.

“Homicide. McCarty.”

Jack McCarty? What would the chief of Homicide be doing in the office on a Saturday? “I’m looking for Mark Blakemoor,” Anne said. “This is Anne Jeffers.” When there was no immediate reply, she added, “It’s important. It’s about the Richard Kraven killings.” She hesitated, then took a gamble: “The new ones.”

“What did Mark tell you about them?” McCarty growled suspiciously.

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Anne said quickly, remembering Mark’s warning not to repeat anything he’d told her. “But I have something to tell him. He gave me his home number, but he’s not there.”

“He damn well better not be,” McCarty replied. “He’d better be up on the Snoqualmie, doing his job.”

“The Snoqualmie?” Anne echoed, feeling a chill of apprehension creep over her skin. “What’s going on up there?”

There was another silence, then McCarty spoke again, his voice dripping with the contempt he held for every member of the press. “You’re a reporter, Jeffers. Why don’t you go find out?”

The phone went dead in her hand. “I’ll do that, Jack,” she said out loud. “I’ll just do that.” Leaving a message for Heather, although her daughter had said she’d be gone until five, Anne shut off the computer, locked the house, and went out to get into her car. But, stepping onto the front porch, she found herself remembering the note she’d stuffed into the depths of her gritchel.

I can come into your house any time, you know. Any time at all.

Though she fought against the impulse, furious that anyone who might actually be watching her would know how well he’d succeeded in terrifying her, she couldn’t resist scanning the street.

Empty, except for a few kids playing on the sidewalk a couple of houses down.

And the motor home.

Its massive form squatted near the end of the block, the sight of it sending a chill through her.

Who owned it? Where had it come from?

Why was it here?

Could someone be inside it even now, watching her? Instead of going directly to her car, parked in front of the house, Anne walked down the sidewalk toward the suddenly ominous vehicle. She circled it slowly, finally venturing close enough to peer into its windows.

Empty.

But for how long?

As her memory of Richard Kraven’s love for his motor home rose in her mind, she dug into her gritchel for her dog-eared notebook and a pen. Jotting down the li-should go back into the house right now, and start the mechanics of putting a trace on it.

Later, she told herself. Plenty of time for that later. Right now she had to find out what sent Mark Blakemoor up to the Snoqualmie River. She slid behind the wheel of the Volvo and twisted the key in the ignition, already knowing the reason. Only one thing would have sent Mark up there this morning.

A body.

They had to have found another body.

The river was fairly shallow as it made its way around the wide bend, deepening only on the far side, where the force of the current had cut the bottom deep into the granite bed. The fly rod, just as it had in his dream the day before yesterday, felt familiar in Glen’s hand. On his very first cast, he flicked the fly nearly halfway across the river, then whipped it back and forth a couple of times before letting it settle onto the surface of the water while he reeled the line back in.

“Wow,” Kevin breathed. “How’d you do that?”

“It’s simple,” Glen explained, covering his own amazement at the skill with which he’d cast the fly. “It’s all in the wrist.”

Laying his own rod on the rocky beach, he went over to Kevin and stood behind him, guiding his son’s hands with his own. As soon as he touched Kevin, something happened.

He felt a rush of energy stream into him, as if some kind of electricity were pouring out of his son’s body and into his. And something happened inside him, too: The voice began whispering to him again. You feel it, don’t you, Glen? You feel the life inside him. And you want to know where it comes from, don’t you? He jerked his hands away from Kevin as if he’d touched a hot iron, and his son looked up at him, frowning.

“You okay, Dad? You look kinda funny.”

“I’m all right,” Glen replied, but even to himself his voice sounded strained. And the voice was talking to him again, whispering to him: We could do it. We could do it right now. It’s an experiment, the voice whispered. It’s just an experiment. We won’t hurt him. He’ll be fine. You’ll see. The gray fog was drifting around the edge of his consciousness again, and once again fear rose inside of Glen, the same terrible fear he experienced when he’d been afraid he might fall asleep at the wheel. What if he couldn’t fight it off again? What if it closed in on him this time? “T-Tell you what,” he stammered, the words almost strangling in his throat as he struggled against the softness of the fog and the seductive sound of the words. “Why don’t you go downstream a ways, and I’ll go up. That way our lines won’t get tangled. Okay?”

Kevin, who’d been watching his father out of the corner of his eye, nodded quickly, reeled in his line, and began working his way downriver, jumping from one rock to another. A couple of times he looked back, but his father was going in the other direction, and even when Kevin called out to him, Glen didn’t turn around. Kevin felt a twinge of fear. What if his father was sick? What if he had another heart attack? What would he do? “Dad?” he called again, but again his father didn’t seem to hear him. Kevin paused. Should he go after his father, in case something really was wrong? Or should he do as his father had told him? Then he remembered the funny look he’d seen in his father’s eyes just now. It had been kind of scary.

Kevin made up his mind. For a while, at least, he’d poke around farther downstream. Maybe see if he could catch a frog, or even a turtle. Because right now, for some reason he didn’t understand, he just didn’t want to be around his dad.

Right now his father just didn’t seem like his father.

He seemed like someone else.

Someone Kevin decided he really didn’t like.

As Glen moved farther upstream, the strange sense of déjà vu that he’d experienced on the road upriver came over him again, even stronger than before. Though he was certain he’d never been here — except in the dream, which meant he’d never been here at all — there was still something very familiar about the place. The river curved again farther upstream, but between the two bends there was a straight stretch of perhaps a quarter of a mile where the water ran wide and shallow. The beach was a little narrower across the river, and beyond the rocky strip bordering the stream the bank rose steeply. Perhaps ten feet up above the beach, on what looked like a shelf of the bank, there was a pile of rocks.