John Saul - Black Lightning

As they passed through Issaquah and started up toward Snoqualmie Pass, she glanced at him again. A bolt of lightning shot across the sky, and for an instant the interior of the motor home was as bright as day. The white light turned her father’s face ashen, and when he turned to look at her, his eyes fixed on hers with an intensity that sent a chill through her.

“Can you feel it?” he asked. “Can you feel the electricity?”

Mutely, Heather shook her head.

“You will,” he said. “And when you do—”

The rest of his words were cut off by a crash of thunder that struck the motor home with enough force to make it shake.

“D-Dad?” Heather asked as the thunder faded away. “Dad, what are you going to do to me?”

The man who no longer bore any resemblance to her father turned to look at her once again.

He said nothing.

All he did was smile.

And the smile made Heather shudder with pure terror.

Anne and Mark were alone in the car.

When they first left the house, she followed Mark blindly, but even as she and Kevin had gotten into his car — an unmarked sedan with a magnetized set of flashers that could be put onto the top in a couple of seconds — she started to wonder exactly what they could do. With no idea of where the motor home had gone, how were they going to follow it?

“I’d be willing to bet he heads back to the mountains,” Mark told her. Picking up the microphone he issued some quick — and to Anne, barely intelligible — orders into the car’s radio, alerting every police unit in the county to look for the motor home. Given the weather, though, he knew the odds of it being spotted were next to nil. “Now tell me what you think is going on,” he asked Anne, unwilling to let her know just how bad the odds of locating Glen were.

Kevin’s presence in the backseat had kept Anne silent, and instead of telling him what she thought had happened, she gave him directions to Alan and Arlene Cline’s house. Glen’s partner had agreed to keep Kevin for the rest of the evening, even overnight if it became necessary. The look in Anne’s eyes as she led Kevin inside had been enough to tell both Alan and Arlene that whatever had happened was serious, and that she didn’t have time to explain. It wasn’t until she and Mark were back in the car that she finally told him her theory. Even then, she refused to elaborate before calling Gordy Farber, who had pulled Glen’s medical records up on the computer he kept at home. Not only had he confirmed what Anne only suspected, but he told her about the blackouts Glen had been having, and the strange dreams. Dreams, Anne instantly understood, that had not been dreams at all. Rather, they were glimpses of what the other entity within him was doing.

“It’s not Glen in the motor home,” she finally told Mark. “It’s Richard Kraven.”

“Richard Kraven is dead,” Mark said flatly, his eyes staring out the windshield of the car he was guiding toward Highway 520. Kevin had already told him where they’d gone fishing, and how they’d gotten there, and Mark was pretty certain that whatever Glen was doing, he was following a pattern. When the motor home was found, he was sure it would be very close to where Glen had taken Edna Kraven just a few days ago and Kevin only this morning.

“His body’s dead,” Anne agreed. Then she related the story of Vaslav Nijinsky, the story that Richard Kraven himself had told her years earlier.

“So even if Nijinsky wasn’t a nutcase — and I’m not saying he wasn’t — how does it relate? Glen isn’t into out-of-body experiences, is he?” Mark asked.

“Glen was dead for almost two minutes,” Anne said, her voice as flat as the detective’s had been a moment earlier. “The morning he had his heart attack, they lost him in the ambulance on the way to Group Health. They had to stop so both of the medics could work on him. It’s all in the records, Mark. They used CPR, drugs, and the defibrillator. And it happened at almost exactly nine A.M., Pacific Time.”

Mark glanced at her. Pacific Time? What was that all about? But before the question was fully formed in his mind, he knew the answer. Nine A.M. Pacific Time was noon Eastern Time.

The exact moment that Richard Kraven had been executed.

Blakemoor remembered the words Anne had uttered only a few moments before, quoting what Richard Kraven had said in one of the interviews she’d reread only a little while earlier: “Nijinsky stopped dancing because he thought another spirit was entering his body while he was out of it.” Repeating the words to himself, he still couldn’t put them together into anything he could understand. “Anne, it doesn’t make any sense,” he began, but his voice had lost a little of its confidence.

“Doesn’t it? What about all the stories you hear? All the people who have had near-death experiences? They’re all the same, Mark. They leave their body, and they float above it. They see what’s happening, and they hear what people are saying. Some of them feel like they have a choice about coming back or not.…”

Her voice trailed off, but Mark Blakemoor already knew where she was going. “And if Richard Kraven were dying at the same instant,” he said, “and wanted to come back badly enough—”

“He hated me,” Anne burst out. “I could see it in his eyes, I could hear it in his voice.” She kept talking, telling Mark what she’d pieced together from the old interviews, what had finally come to make sense. “He was different from other serial killers,” she finally finished. “He wasn’t killing them because he wanted them dead, Mark. He was trying to figure out how to bring them back to life after they died.”

“That doesn’t account for Rory and Edna,” Mark countered.

“He was punishing Rory. And I suspect he just plain hated his mother. Besides, his motive is different now. He’s finished experimenting. Now he’s getting even. With me.” She stared out at the storm that was raging around them as they left 520 and started through Redmond, working their way farther east, following the route Kevin had described. “Oh, God,” Anne sighed, “why can’t they find him?”

“They will,” the detective replied. “Or we will. One way or another, we’re going to get Heather back.” But even as he said the words, Mark Blakemoor wasn’t sure he believed them. And he sure didn’t believe the weird story Anne had just told him.

At least, he didn’t think he did.

The rain slashed out of the sky in a torrent that cascaded off the motor home’s windshield in a rippling sheet, distorting everything outside almost to the point of invisibility. Now all that Heather could see were the wavering headlights of oncoming cars, but even those were getting fewer, and farther between. It was as if the night and the storm had conspired to drive everyone but them off the road, and the farther from home they drove, the more frightened Heather became. “Can’t we stop?” she pleaded. “Please?”

Richard Kraven let his eyes leave the road ahead just long enough to glance quickly at Heather Jeffers. Her features were barely visible, but as a westbound truck bore down on them from the opposite direction, her face was lit for a quick second.

It was enough: Kraven could clearly see the terror in the child’s expression, and even as he shifted his attention back to the road, he savored the fear he had instilled in her.

She knew something was wrong, knew she was in danger.

But she didn’t yet know what danger lay ahead, and that uncertainty — and the added terror it produced in Heather — made the moment even sweeter for Richard Kraven. His one regret was that Anne was not here, too.