John Saul - Black Lightning

“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Anne asked.

Glen shrugged. “I didn’t. Turns out it’s easy. Want to try?” He offered her the knife, but Anne shook her head.

“Where’s Kev?”

“Over at Justin Reynolds’s. Where’ve you been? I thought you said you were going to be glued to your computer all day.”

“There was another killing,” Anne said. “This time it was Edna Kraven — Richard and Rory’s mother. They found her up in a campground on the Snoqualmie.” For a split second — a moment so brief she wasn’t sure it had happened at all — she thought she saw something in Glen’s eyes.

Fear?

Anger?

But it was gone so quickly, she dismissed it a second later.

“So that was it,” Glen said. “We passed a campground on the way up that was crawling with cops.” He grinned. “Needless to say, Kevin wanted us to stop and find out what was going on.”

“Thank God you didn’t,” Anne replied, shuddering. “It was horrible.” She hesitated, wondering if she shouldn’t tell him about the note that had arrived, while they were alone in the house. But even as she thought about it, Mark Blakemoor’s suggestion that Glen himself might have written it popped back into her mind, and she knew if she got started right now, she’d wind up blurting out the whole bizarre scenario the detective had come up with.

That — justifiably — would send Glen into a fury, which was the last thing he needed right now. Better to wait until later, when she was completely calm. Maybe tonight, before they went to bed.

“So how was the fishing?” she asked, deciding to change the subject. “You still haven’t told me why you came back so early.”

Glen hesitated. An odd look came into his eyes, but then, as before, it cleared almost before Anne was certain she’d seen it. “It was okay,” he said at last. He seemed to think it over for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, it was okay. But I don’t think Kevin liked it very much. Next time, I think I’d better go by myself.”

A few minutes later Anne headed upstairs. There was something he wasn’t telling her. Something had happened — and obviously it had something to do with Kevin — but for some reason he didn’t want to talk about it.

She went up to their room, only to find a pile of clothes dumped in the middle of the floor.

Soggy clothes.

Picking them up, she turned and started down the stairs to put them into the washing machine, automatically checking the pockets as she went. In the right front pocket of the sodden khakis she found something.

A knife.

A pocketknife, with a tarnished silver handle that had been inlaid with turquoise.

The flat edge of the folded blade was stained as if it had been lying out in the elements for months, even years.

A knife, with a silver handle inlaid with turquoise. And then it came to her:

Danny Harrar had had a knife like that — his mother had listed it as something he always carried with him when she’d reported him missing, even told Anne about it.

But that was ridiculous. It couldn’t be the same knife.

Could it?

“Glen?” she called as she came back down to the basement to put the wet clothes into the washing machine. He paused in the midst of cleaning up the workbench and looked inquiringly at her. “Where’d this come from?”

He looked at the knife, and once more she thought she saw a flicker of something in his eyes. He shrugged. “I found it by the river,” he said. “I was going to give it to Kevin, but I guess I forgot.”

As he went back to clearing away the mess from the fish he’d just cleaned, Anne looked at the knife once again.

Then, instead of giving it back to Glen, she slipped it into her own pocket.

Anne had been sitting at the computer for almost two hours, though when she’d first come up from the basement, it was her intention to do no more than reconfirm her memory of Sheila Harrar’s description of her son’s pocketknife. When it checked out, she considered going down to Pioneer Square to find Sheila Harrar, but the memory of those strange, fleeting looks she’d seen in Glen’s eyes stopped her. She hadn’t been able to forget those brief glimpses she’d had of — what? Fear? Or something else?

Something, obviously, had happened while Glen and Kevin were fishing. Something that led Glen to cut the trip short.

Or had it been Kevin?

Could something have frightened Kevin and made him demand to be taken home?

As questions — unwelcome, unwanted questions — popped into her mind, all of them springing from the incredible tale Mark Blakemoor had woven over her uneaten lunch, Anne tried to think about other things. But the questions lingered, keeping her from going downtown in search of Danny Harrar’s mother. If something had happened between Kevin and Glen, she wanted to be there when her son came home. So she forced herself to stay at the computer and concentrate on the transcripts of the interviews she’d conducted years earlier.

The same themes kept coming up over and over again. Biology. Electricity. Metaphysics.

The more she read, the stronger the themes became, until it struck her what Richard Kraven’s true fascination had been.

Life!

He had been utterly consumed with analyzing every aspect of life itself! But if he’d been enthralled with life, why had he killed?

Then, her neck aching and her eyes stinging, Anne came across an interview she’d conducted with a former neighbor of the Kravens, a woman named Maybelle Swinney:

A.J.: What about when he was a boy, Mrs. Swinney? Do you have any memories that might have new significance, given what he’s been accused of?

M.S.: Well, now, I don’t like to speak ill of anyone, and Edna Kraven and I were always good friends. But I always thought his fascination with taking things apart was real strange. Always wanted to find out how things worked, that boy did. Couldn’t ever just enjoy them for what they were — oh, no, not him. He always had to take them apart.

A.J.: What about putting them back together again?

M.S.: Oh, sure, he was always real good at that, too. Why, he could put almost anything back together. Except the things he … (Pause) Now what do they call it when they cut animals up in a lab?

A.J.: Dissecting?

M.S.: Dissecting! That’s it. Anyway, I don’t suppose he ever managed to put the things he dissected back together. (Laughing) Though I daresay he tried. Oh, I bet he tried!

The passage remained on Anne’s screen. Staring at it, she thought, What if Maybelle Swinney hadn’t laughed years ago before suggesting that Richard Kraven might have tried to put the animals he’d dissected back together again? Would I have thought more about the words then?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But what if that was exactly what he’d been trying to do? Now a new idea began to take shape in her head, an idea so vile she found herself wanting to back away from it even as it was forming. What if—

“Mom?”

Anne jumped, startled by the unexpected interruption, and looked up from the monitor, rubbing at her stinging eyes until she was able to focus on Kevin, who was standing just inside the den door. “Kev! You startled me!”

“What’re you doing?” the boy asked, moving closer.

Anne reached out, closed the file with a couple of quick clicks of the mouse. “Nothing much,” she said. Then, trying to keep her voice totally neutral: “How was the fishing expedition? Did you have a good time?”

Kevin’s open features tightened into a guarded expression. “I guess,” he said.

“You guess? What does that mean?” Kevin glanced around, and it took Anne a second to realize what he was doing: looking for his father. So she’d been right — something had happened. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ve got an errand to run in Pioneer Square. How about if you go with me, and you can tell me all about the fishing trip on the way?”