Black Lightning by John Saul
This report just in. A body has been found in the brush near the reservoir in Volunteer Park. In a bizarre coincidence, the nude and mutilated corpse was discovered by Seattle Herald reporter Anne Jeffers, well-known nationally for her coverage of the series of killings reputed to have been committed by Seattleite Richard Kraven. Police are withholding identification of the woman pending notification of relatives. More details at the top of the hour. In other stories …
The man was no longer listening. It was even better than he’d hoped for—Anne Jeffers herself had found the body! Now there was no question it would make the front page. Soon—very soon—he’d be famous. But of course for a while he wouldn’t be able to enjoy seeing his name in the paper. After all, they didn’t yet know who had killed Joyce Cottrell. And for a while—he wasn’t sure yet exactly how long—he’d make sure they didn’t find out who did.
Not until he’d killed at least two more people.
Maybe even three.
The newscaster’s words still echoing in his head, the man thought feverishly. How soon should he strike again?
A month?
A week?
Once again he felt the rush he experienced as he’d ravaged Joyce Cottrell’s body, and now he shivered in anticipation. Perhaps he wouldn’t wait even a week. Perhaps, now that he understood the pure joy and power of the act of killing, he’d strike again within a few days.
If he could find the right victim.
The man was still savoring the feeling, still reveling in the exaltation of what he’d done, when the phone rang. His hand trembling, he picked it up.
“Is that you?” he heard his mother’s voice demand. “Why aren’t you at work?”
The man felt his exhilaration begin to fade. “I called in sick, Mama.”
“Well, I know that,” his mother told him.
Why couldn’t she use his name? Why couldn’t she ever use his name, unless she was criticizing him to someone else?
“They told me that at Boeing,” she went on. “Did you hear the radio this morning? That reporter found a body in Volunteer Park.”
As the man listened numbly, his mother talked on and on. She was talking about his body, the woman he’d killed, but she wasn’t talking about him!
Well, maybe one of these days he’d just stop her from talking about anything at all.
CHAPTER 36
Glen hadn’t intended to waste two hours of the morning gossiping with his neighbors about Joyce Cottrell’s death, but that was the way it turned out. When the first police car arrived to set up the yellow tape around Joyce’s property, only a couple of people crossed the street to watch. Within ten minutes, though—and not merely coincidentally with the arrival of two more blue-and-whites and one unmarked sedan whose very plainness proclaimed it a police vehicle—a dozen people were clustered on the sidewalk. One of them finally came up and knocked on the Jefferses’ front door. It was Marge Hurley, whose family had moved in across the street and three doors down four years ago. Marge had been unsuccessfully attempting to organize block parties ever since, as though operating under the illusion that Capitol Hill was the same kind of cozy cul-de-sac which she claimed to be fleeing when she left the great suburban morass of Lake Washington’s Eastside.
Refusing to accept a simple statement that Anne had found Joyce Cottrell’s body in Volunteer Park that morning, Marge drew Glen first out onto the porch, then into the midst of the crowd on the sidewalk. There, he found himself repeating the tale while his neighbors, having received no information from the police inside the house, proceeded to speculate about what might have happened. That Joyce Cottrell had been the neighborhood’s best-known eccentric for years did not stand her in good stead now that she had been murdered. Her neighbors disassembled her character bit by bit, until soon someone suggested that she’d been dealing in drugs (perhaps stolen from the pharmacy at Group Health?) or perhaps even in pornography—now, that would certainly explain why she kept people out of her house! Once all the permutations of Joyce’s possible venality had been thoroughly explored, speculation turned to the matter of who might have killed her. Immediate neighbors were instantly dismissed: “We all know each other in this neighborhood,” Marge Hurley insisted after introducing herself to the dozen people she’d never met before.
At last, tired of the gossip and guesswork, Glen retreated to the quiet of his house, only to hear the doorbell ring a few minutes later. He ignored it at first, assuming it was Marge Hurley wanting him to repeat his tale of the body’s discovery one more time, but the ringing was insistent. Finally he opened the door. A man with a police badge stood on the porch.
The man smiled. “So we meet at last.” When Glen only looked at him blankly, the smile faltered and the man reddened slightly. “You are Glen Jeffers?” Glen nodded, but still said nothing. “I’m Detective Blakemoor. Mark Blakemoor?”
Finally, Glen got it. Pulling the door open, he gestured the detective into the foyer. “Anne’s friend,” he said. His eyes flicked toward the house next door and the crowd of onlookers, smaller now, whose attention had momentarily shifted from Joyce Cottrell’s house to the Jefferses’. “But I assume this isn’t a social call.”
“I wish it were.” Mark Blakemoor sighed. “I’m afraid I have to ask you a few questions about last night.”
Glen nodded, and led the detective to the kitchen, where he poured them each a cup of coffee. “I’m not supposed to be drinking this, and I’m counting on you not to tell Anne. Deal?”
Mark Blakemoor felt himself blush, but Glen seemed not to notice. “Deal,” he agreed, accepting the coffee. “Basically, I just need to know if you heard anything last night.”
Glen hesitated. Instead of answering the question directly, he asked one of his own. “What time?”
Blakemoor shrugged. “No particular time,” he said. “But we know the Cottrell woman left work at eleven, and walked home. Even if she stopped for coffee, she would have gotten home by midnight, probably a half hour earlier. So let’s say any time after eleven-fifteen.”
Still Glen hesitated, remembering the image of Joyce Cottrell that had come into his mind as soon as he’d heard a woman’s body had been found in the park. Then he shook his head. “I wish I could help you, but I don’t think I can. Was she killed in the house?”
“Upstairs, in her bedroom,” Blakemoor told him. “There aren’t any signs of a forced entry, but that doesn’t mean much. A lot of people hide keys around their houses, and a whole lot of creeps know exactly where to look for them. What about friends? Did she have many?”
“None at all, that I know of,” Glen replied. “If you talked to any of the people out on the sidewalk, you must already know that Joyce was an odd bird.”
Mark Blakemoor’s expression gave no clue to his thoughts. “Odd?” he asked blandly. “How do you mean?”
“Just—well, odd.” Glen floundered, wishing he hadn’t used the word. “She was the kind of woman you assumed was living in a house full of trash. You know—saving everything, letting stuff pile up. She never seemed to go anywhere except work, and she sure never invited anyone into the house.” He shrugged helplessly. “I guess we just assumed …” he began again, but his voice trailed off.
“Well, you assumed wrong,” Blakemoor said, remembering the pristine condition of the interior of the house.
Pristine, anyway, except for the bloodstains. He had found them not only in the bedroom, where it was obvious that Joyce Cottrell had been killed and partially disemboweled, but through most of the rest of the house as well. The killer had made no attempt to keep her body from dripping blood as he carried her from the bedroom down the stairs, through the dining room and kitchen to the utility room, then out the back door. From there on, the rain had washed the trail away. “If anything, she was a neat freak.”
“So much for Anne’s and my judgment of character, huh?”
“A lot of people aren’t what they seem to be,” Mark Blakemoor observed. “But you still haven’t
Glen started to shake his head, then changed his mind. Why not just tell the detective exactly what had happened? “I’m not sure,” he said. “I don’t think so, but on the other hand, something weird happened when I went up to the park to look for Anne this morning.” As clearly as he could, he told Blakemoor exactly why he’d gone to the park, and about the strange image of Joyce Cottrell that had come into his mind the moment he heard that a woman’s body had been found in the bushes.
“Any reason why you might have thought of her?” Blakemoor asked with studied casualness.
There was no way to keep from telling the detective the rest of the story. “Well, she did tell Anne she saw me out in the backyard yesterday,” he said. “She claimed I was naked.”
Blakemoor gazed steadily at him. “Your backyard, or hers?”
“Mine,” Glen assured him. “But I wasn’t naked.”
The detective shrugged dismissively. “So what if you were? It’s your backyard, isn’t it?”
“But I wasn’t naked,” Glen insisted, though even as he uttered the words he knew they might not be true.
The detective let just the tiniest hint of a smile—a congenial smile—play around the corners of his lips. “So I guess you must have been pretty pissed at her, huh?” Glen opened his mouth to reply, then saw the direction the conversation was going. Abruptly he closed his mouth, and at the same time saw the faint smile disappear from Blakemoor’s lips. “Weren’t you pissed at her?” the detective repeated. “I know if someone accused me of something like that, I’d sure be mad as hell.”
“Mad enough to kill her?” Glen asked. “Is that what you’re suggesting?”
Blakemoor’s expression hardened. “I’m not suggesting anything,” he said. “I’m just asking questions.”
“And I’m just answering them,” Glen said. “And yes, I suppose I was pissed off at Joyce. But certainly not enough to have killed her.”
“But you instantly thought of her this morning when you heard a body’d been found,” Blakemoor reminded him. “Why?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Glen said angrily. “But now I’m wondering if maybe I shouldn’t call my lawyer. If you’re going to accuse me of killing Joyce Cottrell—”
Blakemoor held up his hands as if to fend off the torrent of angry words. “Hey, slow down! I’m not accusing you of anything. And if you want to call your lawyer, go right ahead. We can call this talk off right now, if that’s what you want. All I’m doing is looking for information. I’m not accusing anybody of anything.”
Glen’s lips twisted into a wry parody of a smile. “ ‘But anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law’?” he asked, parroting the phrase he’d heard used on television so often it had become a cliché.
Blakemoor seemed to back off even further. “We only do a Miranda when we’re arresting someone,” he said tersely. “But you still have a right to have a lawyer present.”
Glen thought it over quickly, and sensed that things were about to get out of hand. If he insisted on calling a lawyer, wouldn’t that make him look guilty? But he wasn’t guilty. He’d neither heard nor seen anything, let alone done anything! But what about the blackouts? What about yesterday, when he’d obviously gone out and dumped the shaver into the trash, although he had no memory of it? If he’d done that—
He cut the thought off, seeing where it was going and not wanting to follow it.
Finally he made up his mind: he’d done nothing, and he didn’t need a lawyer.
“All I was thinking was that there must have been some reason why I thought of Joyce this morning, and the only thing I can come up with is that maybe I did hear something last night, but just don’t remember it. I mean, if I was sound asleep and I heard something, maybe in my subconscious I remembered it and put it together when I heard about the body. I mean, if I heard a noise when I was half asleep …” Once again Glen’s words trailed off, and once again he wished he’d said nothing.
The two men’s eyes met, and though neither of them said anything, the unspoken question hung between them: What if it wasn’t just a noise that Glen didn’t remember hearing? What if it was a scream?
What if it was a killing!
When Mark Blakemoor left the house a few minutes later, those questions had still not been asked.
But both men were wondering what the answers might be.
CHAPTER 37
Body Found In
Volunteer Park
Latest in New Series of Killings?
The nude and mutilated body of a woman was found in Volunteer Park early this morning. According to police, the victim, Joyce Cottrell, was slain in her Capitol Hill home sometime between 11:00 P.M. and 4:00 A.M. Though police are so far denying it, there appears to be a connection between last night’s slaying and that of Shawnelle Davis …
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Vivian Andrews groaned, flopping back in her chair. She looked up from the monitor on her desk to glare impatiently through the window at the gray afternoon outside. Taking the kind of deep breath her mother used to tell her would help keep her temper under control, she grabbed the phone and stabbed the digits of Anne Jeffers’s extension. Her fingers were already drumming impatiently on her desktop when Anne picked it up on the second ring. “My office,” Vivian snapped. “Now.” Dropping the phone back on the cradle, she shifted her attention to the monitor and the offending article she had pulled up from the file server only a few seconds before summoning Anne. By the time Anne appeared in her office, the editor had read through the entire article three
An equal number of deep breaths had done nothing for her temper, despite what her mother had taught her.
“What the hell is this?” Vivian demanded as Anne came into the small office and shut the door behind her.
Anne edged just far enough around the desk to catch a glimpse of the headline glowing on the editor’s computer screen. “My story on—”
“I know what it is!” Vivian Andrews interrupted sharply. “What I want to know is what you think it is!”
Anne felt her temper rising at Vivian’s tone, but she bit back the first reply that came to mind. For the moment, Vivian would tolerate no sarcasm but her own. “I intended it to be a simple report of the body I found this morning—” she began, but once again the editor cut her off. This time, though, Vivian softened her interruption of Anne’s words by gesturing to a chair.
“Sit down, Anne.”
Warily, knowing that Vivian often invited people to sit down only so that they would have a slight cushioning against the blast they were about to receive, Anne dropped onto the edge of the single uncomfortable chair the editor provided for visitors to her office.
Placing the tips of her fingers together in an unconscious gesture that invariably signaled trouble to whomever sat opposite her, Vivian glanced briefly at the offending article hovering on the screen, then sighed and dropped her hands onto the desktop. Though Anne gave no outward sign of it, she relaxed slightly; the change in her boss’s body language was a sure sign that Vivian had decided on a softer approach than she’d originally planned. Vivian’s next words, though, made Anne wish her editor had stuck with Plan A.
“You look terrible,” she said. “Maybe you should take some time off.”
“It hasn’t been the easiest day,” Anne replied. “Most of us don’t really look forward to finding a body on their morning run, let alone having to write a story about it.” As Vivian’s eyes flicked toward the computer screen, Anne decided that while her editor might have chosen to avoid a direct approach, she wouldn’t. And she would also risk a touch of sarcasm of her own. “I gather from your typically loquacious phone call that there’s a problem?”
Vivian shrugged. “Maybe I ought to assign the story to someone else—”
This time it was Anne w
“You don’t agree?” Vivian countered.
“I don’t see the parallel.”
Vivian leaned forward and her fingertips came ominously together again. “Then let me elucidate for you,” she said, putting just enough emphasis on the word “elucidate” to make it sting like the tip of a flicking whip. “It seems to me that your proper function in this particular story is interviewee rather than interviewer. As for the story itself, it reads far more like an editorial than even your usual stuff does, and unless you have a lot more backup material than I suspect you do, the whole thing reeks of supposition. You’re supposed to be a reporter, Anne. When I want opinion pieces from you, I’ll let you know.”
Anne felt a vein in her forehead throbbing, and hoped it didn’t show. “Would you like to tell me exactly where the problems are?”
“The whole tenor bothers me. To begin with, I don’t think you should be suggesting this is a serial killing. Until the police see some parallels between this Cottrell woman and—”
“This ‘Cottrell woman’ was my next-door neighbor,” Anne interjected, her voice rising in anger.
Vivian Andrews blinked. “Your neighbor?” she echoed. “Good God, Anne, what are you doing? You found your neighbor dead in Volunteer Park this morning, and you not only came to work, but you wrote about it, too?”
“Writing about things like this is my job,” Anne replied. “And as for parallels between this and Shawnelle Davis, I think there are plenty. For one thing, neither place seemed to be broken into—”
“Which proves nothing,” Vivian cut in. “You know as well as I do that half the people in the city still leave keys hidden all over the place.”
Anne dipped her head in acknowledgment of the criticism. “So they do. But it goes a lot further than that. Both women were butchered in the same way. Their chests were cut open and their hearts were cut out. Furthermore, they both lived on Capitol Hill, only a few blocks apart.”