Black Lightning

Chapter 40


Mark Blakemoor was considering whether to knock off at five like a normal human being, or go on working until he’d caught up with the stack of files that seemed to grow on his desk at an inexorable rate. Glancing up at the clock on the wall of the tiny cubicle he and Lois Ackerly shared, he saw that he still had ten minutes before he’d actually have to make a decision. He returned his attention to the open folder in front of him. It was nothing more interesting than a copy of Joyce Cottrell’s Group Health personnel record, in which he’d been hunting for something—any little scrap of information that might indicate she’d had an enemy. The problem with Cottrell, though, was that she not only didn’t appear to have any enemies, but hadn’t appeared to have any friends, either. Even her employment jacket didn’t have much to say about her. She’d been working at Group Health for better than twenty years, and in all that time, had accumulated neither praise nor criticism. Apparently she did her job well enough to keep it, but never showed enough initiative to be promoted, either.
Tossing the file aside, he turned his attention to Lois Ackerly, who was already clearing her desk in preparation for an on-time departure, instantly annoying him, though he couldn’t have said whether it was the fact that she was leaving on time that irritated him or that she had someone to go home to.
Reflexively, he glanced at the spot where a picture of his ex-wife had once sat. Except, instead of seeing a picture of Patsy Blakemoor in his mind, it was Anne Jeffers’s image that popped out of his subconscious. Got to stop that, he told himself. More to get Anne’s image out of his mind than because he really wanted to talk about it, he asked Lois Ackerly if she’d had any more luck with her investigation into Joyce Cottrell’s background than he’d had with his.
Lois shook her head in a combination of sympathy and disbelief. “That woman lent new meaning to the phrase ‘Get a life,’ ” she said. “Not only can’t I find anyone who will admit to being her friend, I can hardly find anyone who even knew her. All I’ve found out is that she went to work and she went home. At work, she did her job and kept to herself. She didn’t have any friends—even took her breaks by herself. It’s like she was a complete cipher.”
“Same with her personnel jacket,” Blakemoor agreed. “Ever seen a record with no pluses and no minuses?” He tossed it across, and Lois Ackerly flipped it open, scanning through the evaluation forms that Blakemoor had already found abnormally dull.
“No friends and no enemies.” Ackerly sighed, dropping the file back onto her partner’s desk. “No gossip, either. It’s like she existed in a void.”
“So who killed her?” Blakemoor asked. As he asked the question, another image came into his mind. Glen Jeffers. He had been thinking about Jeffers all afternoon. Though he was sure there was something Anne’s husband hadn’t told him, he’d finally come to the conclusion that even if he wanted Glen out of the way—and he kept insisting to himself that he didn’t, not really—it still didn’t add up. Whoever did the Cottrell woman would have been drenched with blood, and if she’d screamed even once, she damned near would have had to awaken someone in the house next door. If your whole family was asleep in that house, would you risk that? Mark Blakemoor didn’t think so. In fact, he was damned well sure of it. Still, he might just ask Glen Jeffers for a set of prints, if for no other reason than to eliminate him as the person who’d left a few smudged but matchable traces in Cottrell’s bathroom, where he’d apparently washed his hands. “Who killed her?” he repeated, sighing in frustration.
“Same creep who did Shawnelle Davis?” Lois Ackerly suggested. “You know Anne Jeffers is going to tie them together, and you know we’re going to have to deal with it.”
Blakemoor leaned back in his chair, propped his feet up on the desk and clasped his hands behind his head. “So what are you suggesting?” he asked, and it was clear to Ackerly that he was settling in for a long discussion of the case. “Is Anne right? Are you starting to buy her nutty idea that maybe Richard Kraven really didn’t do all the others by himself, and that all that shit’s starting up again? Or is it just a copycat? Except if it’s a copycat, how come he dipped his wick in Cottrell but not in Davis?”
Before Lois Ackerly could answer, the phone on her partner’s desk rang. Grateful for the opportunity to stall on Blakemoor’s questions, she snatched up the receiver before Mark’s feet had dropped back to the floor. As she listened, a frown creased her forehead, and for a moment Blakemoor had a sinking feeling that another corpse had turned up. But then the frown cleared, replaced by a broad smile.
“A cat?” the detective asked. “Come on, Phil—what are you calling us for? We don’t do cats. We’re homicide, remember? Not—what would it be? Felicide?” Clamping her hand over the mouthpiece, she spoke to Blakemoor. “Would you believe they’re calling us about a dead—” But even before she finished the sentence her smile faded and she swore softly. “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Okay, we’ll catch it. We’re on our way.”
Mark Blakemoor stared at her in disbelief as she dropped the receiver back onto the cradle. “A cat?” he demanded. “Did I just hear you tell them we’d go out on a dead cat?”
Lois Ackerly nodded unhappily. “It’s not just any dead cat,” she replied. “It’s Anne Jeffers’s cat.”
“Anne’s?” Blakemoor echoed. “And she asked for us?”
Lois Ackerly nodded. “From what Phil said, it sounds like it’s cut up the same way Cottrell and Davis were.”
Mark Blakemoor swore silently. If it were true—and he hoped it wasn’t—he was pretty sure he knew exactly what it meant: they didn’t simply have a serial killer loose; they had a serial killer who was going to start playing grisly games.
But playing with whom?
The police, or his next victim?
There was another possibility, of course: it could be someone’s idea of a sick joke. After all, Anne’s name had been on the radio all day long, with every newscaster in town talking about the oddity of a reporter discovering a body. If someone didn’t like Anne, what better way to throw a scare into her than to kill her cat the same way her neighbor had been killed? What else could she think but that she was being warned that she might be the next victim? Christ, she must be falling apart! A wave of fury at whoever had done this to Anne rose within him, and for the briefest of moments Mark wondered if he should take himself off this whole case. But he knew he wouldn’t—if anything, he would work even harder to find this particular creep.
It wasn’t until they were in the car, headed for Capitol Hill, that Ackerly glanced over at him, her lips curving in an ironic smile. “Well, at least you don’t have to go home.”
Blakemoor felt himself reddening. “I don’t mind going home,” he muttered gruffly.
“Which is why you always manage to start a conversation at just a minute or two before five, right?” Lois Ackerly observed, then relented. “Hey, it’s okay. Loneliness is a bummer. If I didn’t have Jake—”
“Look, can we talk about something else?” Blakemoor broke in.
But they finished the drive in silence. They had pulled up in front of the Jefferses’ house when Lois spoke again. “If you want, I can take this one alone,” she offered.
Shit! Blakemoor thought. Is it that obvious? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said out loud, getting out of the car and slamming the door harder than necessary. Taking the steep flight of steps up to the porch two at a time, he was about to ring the bell when the door opened and Anne Jeffers let him in, her ashen face making clear just how frightened she was.
“I suppose you think I’ve really gone around the bend this time,” she said with a not very successful attempt to make the words sound bantering.
“I don’t even know what happened yet,” Mark replied, hoping nothing in his own voice betrayed his urge to put his arms around her. “What happened?” he asked as Lois Ackerly stepped into the foyer. In the living room he could see a teenage girl who he assumed was Anne’s daughter huddled on the sofa, crying, while a black girl of about the same age tried to comfort her.
“In back,” Anne said quietly, leading the two detectives through the dining room and kitchen, then outside into the backyard. As they crossed the lawn, Mark Blakemoor caught himself glancing over at the house next door and wondering if it were really possible that there was a connection between the brutal murder that had occurred there the previous night and the cat that now lay dead behind Anne Jeffers’s house.
Both Glen and Kevin were sitting on the wooden decking that supported the garbage cans. As Anne and the two detectives approached, the little boy jumped to his feet.
“She’s right there!” he exclaimed, pointing to the portion of the cat that protruded from beneath the deck. “Boots found her, just like he found Mrs. Cot—”
“That’s enough.” Anne pulled her son to her and put her arms protectively around his shoulders.
“Has anyone touched it?” Mark asked, squatting down to take a closer look at the cat’s corpse.
Kevin shook his head. “I didn’t,” he reported. “And I wouldn’t let Heather or Rayette, either. I told them—”
“Maybe you should go back into the house, honey,” Anne suggested.
“Aw, Mom!” Kevin groaned. “Come on! It was me that found her!”
“Go on,” Anne told him. “If Detective Blakemoor has any questions, we’ll come and find you. And be nice to your sister,” she warned as Kevin reluctantly started back toward the house.
Easing the dead cat clear of the deck, Blakemoor studied the carnage that had been its chest. The rib cage had been cut open and the lungs pulled out, just as had those of both Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell. But somehow the mutilation of the cat looked different.
Neater.
The word had come unbidden into his mind, but as he repeated it silently to himself, Blakemoor realized it was the only description that was truly appropriate. Whereas both Davis and Cottrell seemed to have been ripped apart in rage, the animal—at least where the cut up its chest and the opening of its rib cage had been performed—looked almost as if it had been dissected.
“Any idea what might have happened to it?” he asked Glen Jeffers, who was standing now, staring numbly down at the body of his daughter’s pet. Blakemoor watched him carefully, but saw nothing in his expression except shock at the mutilation.
Glen shook his head. “I didn’t even know she wasn’t in the house,” he said, his voice dull, his eyes fixed on the bloody corpse. “Christ, I feel like maybe this is my fault.”
“Your fault?” Lois Ackerly asked.
For a moment Glen made no reply to the detective’s question. Ever since Kevin had yelled out to Heather and Rayette and he’d gone to see what the fuss was about, he’d been trying to remember the last time he’d seen the cat. She’d been there this morning, after he’d gotten back from the park and the kids had left for school. But after that?
He didn’t know. But he’d been in and out of the house a lot that morning, and Kumquat could have slipped out any time the door was open. He hadn’t bothered to check on her whereabouts when he’d stretched out to take a nap. Nor had he looked for her when he woke up, after sleeping a lot longer than he’d intended to.
As he remembered the care with which Heather checked each morning to make sure there was no way her pet could escape from the house, his sense of guilt increased. All he’d had to do was keep half an eye out.
Instead he’d slept half the day away. “She probably got out this morning,” he said finally. His gaze shifted to Mark Blakemoor. “It might even have been when you were leaving.”
“You mean you weren’t even watching her?” Anne asked. “For God’s sake, Glen! You know how careful Heather always is! The least—”
“Hey, look!” Glen protested, suddenly angry. “I said this might be partly my fault, okay? But it’s not like I killed her. Jesus!”
“Oh, God, I know,” Anne sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just upset, and—” Leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken, she turned to Blakemoor. “I know I shouldn’t have asked for you, but when the kids told me what happened, it just seemed like too much of a coincidence.”
“It’s okay,” Blakemoor assured her. He turned questioningly to his partner. “Think we’d better take it downtown?” he asked, inclining his head toward the body of the cat. “And what about pictures?”
Lois Ackerly shrugged, no more certain than Blakemoor as to proper procedure. One thing she did know—if someone was going to call for a full forensics team, it wasn’t going to be her. Not for a dead cat. “I don’t think we need them,” she said. “We both know where the cat was, right?” She turned to Anne. “Do you have a plastic trash bag?”
Anne, her eyes fixed on the cat, made no reply, and finally her husband spoke again. “I’ll get one.”
As Glen headed toward the house, Anne glanced up just in time to see Mark Blakemoor watching him, a speculative look in his eyes. “Come on, Mark. You don’t think Glen did this, do you?”
“Hey,” Mark replied, trying to inject a light note into his tone, which he was very far from feeling. “He was the last person to see the victim alive, right?”
“That’s not funny, Mark,” Anne said, her voice tight.
Her words stung, and Blakemoor instantly regretted his attempt at humor. “Look, why don’t you just let us take the cat down and have someone look it over, all right? I can see exactly why you’re so upset, but we don’t know that there’s any connection at all between this and—”
“Don’t we?” Anne interrupted, her shock at the sight of the dismembered cat fading in the face of the detective’s obvious attempt to dismiss what had happened. “I didn’t see Shawnelle Davis, but I did see Joyce Cottrell. I found her, remember? And you can’t tell me that poor Kumquat wasn’t mutilated exactly the same way that she was. So first there was Shawnelle Davis, whom I admit I don’t know, but next was my next-door neighbor. Now it’s my daughter’s cat. This is literally in my backyard, Mark. I want some answers.” She turned to Lois Ackerly. “I know what you think about what I’ve been writing—” she began, but Ackerly silenced her with a gesture.
“What we might have thought yesterday doesn’t mean a thing today,” she said. “We’re going to take this seriously. Whether this creep had anything to do with Richard Kraven or not, it sure looks like he’s trying to copy his style. If this had been reported from somewhere else in town, we would’ve sent someone out to take a cruelty report. But after what happened last night, believe me when I tell you that we want to know what happened to this cat just as badly as you do.”
Anne’s jaw setting and her eyes narrowing, still not positive that Ackerly was doing anything more than placating her, she turned back to Blakemoor.
“We’ll call you,” he promised. “We’re not going to take the cat to the pound. We’re going to have the same medical examiner look at it who worked on Davis and Cottrell—”
“Davis and Cottrell?” Anne cut in, her reporter’s instincts suddenly surging. “Are you saying you are treating them as being connected?”
Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly exchanged a look, then Mark sighed. “Off the record, of course we are. The M.O.’s aren’t identical, but they’re close enough that we aren’t about to rule out a serial killer. And very much off the record,” he went on, his eyes moving to Kumquat’s bloodied corpse, “I’m going to tell you that I’m going to have a very hard look at what happened to your cat. But if you write so much as a single word implying I’m investigating a cat’s death as a murder, I swear I’ll make sure no cop ever talks to you ever again. About anything. Clear?”
Anne hesitated, then nodded agreement. “Clear.” She glanced around, then, satisfied that she was still alone with the two detectives, said, “What should we do?” Her gaze fixed on Kumquat’s body. “Is this a warning? Does it mean he’s coming after me or one of my kids next?” Her eyes were troubled, a mirror of the emotions churning within her. She shifted back to Mark Blakemoor. “I’m scared. I’m really scared.”
Again Blakemoor had to resist the impulse to put his arms protectively around her and gently stroke her hair. And again, when he spoke, he was careful to keep his tone perfectly even, the matter-of-fact inflection of any policeman talking to any frightened citizen. “Let’s not get too worried until we know what’s going on,” he told her. “This could be someone’s idea of a sick joke, or someone just wants to scare you and figured out the best way to do it. For now, we’ll make sure you have a steady parade of cars going by all night, and if anything frightens you—anything at all—call 911. I personally guarantee there’ll be someone here in less than a minute.”
“But my kids,” Anne said, the last of her hard reporter’s shell cracking. “What about my kids? What should I tell them?”
“If it were me,” Lois Ackerly said, “I think at least for tonight I’d tell them we think a raccoon did it.” When Anne started to object, Ackerly pressed on. “Look, there’s no sense scaring your kids to death. You’ll be worried enough without them having nightmares about it. Tomorrow we should be able to tell you a lot more.”
Before Anne could ask anything else, the back door of the house opened and Glen emerged, carrying a white plastic garbage bag.
Though she hated herself for it, and felt utterly disloyal, Anne did nothing to break the silence that fell over the two detectives as her husband approached. Instead, turning finally away from the grisly remains of her daughter’s pet, she returned to the house.
As Glen handed Mark Blakemoor the plastic bags he’d finally found in one of the kitchen drawers, he felt the detective’s eyes boring into him. Though no words were spoken, none were needed. Desperately, Glen tried to sort out exactly what had happened. Was it really possible that he himself had disemboweled his daughter’s pet?
But he had no memory of it.
Except that there was a memory—a vague memory—of a dream.
He’d been in a place of darkness, but there had been a pool of light.
In the middle of the light, something had been happening.
He’d moved closer, wanting to see, but there had been something in the way, something blocking his view. He had a fragmentary recollection of trying to move in the dream. To get away? To see? He couldn’t remember.
Then another fragment of the dream floated up into his consciousness. Red. Bloodred. And with the memory of the color came a strange sensation in his fingers. Warmth. No, more than warmth. Heat. His hands felt hot, and slimy.
Shuddering both at the memory and at the strange feeling in his fingers, Glen slid his hands into his pockets as if to hide them, then quickly pulled them out again. What was wrong? He had nothing to hide—he couldn’t even remember what the dream was about.
All that had really happened was that Mark Blakemoor had given him a look that made him feel guilty.
Still, a coldness seized Glen that had nothing to do with the damp chill of the afternoon.
Who was the stranger in the dream?
Could someone have come into the house while he slept? He remembered yesterday, and the inexplicable appearance of the shaver and the fishing rod. He must have bought them, but he couldn’t remember!
Could he also have killed Kumquat and not remembered that, either?
It wasn’t possible. Surely he hadn’t done this to Kumquat. He couldn’t have! It had only been a dream!
Or was he losing his mind?
Anne found Heather and Rayette still in the living room, still on the sofa, Heather crying quietly as Rayette did her best to comfort her.
Kevin was nowhere to be seen, but Anne was pretty sure she knew where he was: up in his room, watching from his window as Lois Ackerly and Mark Blakemoor finished their work.
Knowing there was nothing she could say to Heather right now, Anne went into the den, dropping morosely into the chair in front of her computer. For a moment she simply sat there, her eyes focused on nothing, her mind numbly trying to sort out all the events of the day, futilely attempting to make sense of the utterly senseless.
Write it, she finally told herself as her thoughts continued to tumble chaotically. Write it all down. It’s the only way to put it in order.
She switched on the computer and waited while it booted up. The orders issued by the autoexec file scrolled by, then the familiar Windows screen appeared. But instead of stopping to await her orders, the computer kept working.
Her word processing program opened, but still the computer didn’t stop.
An image appeared, framed in the familiar border of a graphics box. Inside the frame was a note:
Too bad about the cat.
Some experiments just don’t work.
That’s when things die.
I’ll try to do better with you.
By the time the words had registered on Anne’s mind, the screen had gone blank. For a moment Anne wondered if she had seen the note at all.
The hard knot of terror in her belly assured her that she had.