Black Lightning

Chapter 42


Anne had no memory of having slept at all the night before, though she knew she must have since her eyes didn’t have the awful gritty feel that had always resulted from her staying awake all night. But she had clear memories of lying in bed, wide-awake, staring at the ceiling as she tried to figure out the source of the briefly flashing note that had appeared on her computer when she’d turned it on.
The mechanics of it hadn’t taken her long to unravel: a simple macro file would have done it, triggered by practically anything:
A line in the autoexec.bat file, for instance.
The macro could easily have brought up a file, displayed it for a few seconds, then closed it, immediately erased it, wiped all traces of it from her hard drive with one of the utilities she herself used to make sure certain files could never be recovered, then erased itself as well.
Or it could have arrived as a virus, coming into her computer through the modem anytime she’d left the machine on, but unattended. It would have sat dormant on her hard drive, set to attack the first time the computer was turned on after a specific date and time.
And attack it had. But not her computer. No, this was much more invidious. This virus had attacked her, rising up out of the guts of the machine to lash out at her, filling her with a terror she hadn’t been able to talk about at all, lest it spread from her into her whole family.
Bad enough they had been frightened by someone killing their pet and leaving it in their own backyard. How would they cope if they knew the unseen enemy had penetrated into the house itself?
She had searched the house, using the pretext of hunting for a misplaced box of old clippings on Richard Kraven. In both the attic and the basement she had searched for signs of a stranger’s presence, but had found nothing.
On the kitchen table she had found the fishing fly, and for a moment thought she recognized fragments of one of Hector’s feathers and a tuft of fur that could have come from Kumquat. But who could have made the fly? Certainly not Glen—he was notoriously clumsy with his hands, which was why the ship model downstairs had never been finished; Glen had proved even more awkward than Kevin at attaching the planks to the framework of the hull. Still, just before Glen had turned off the light to go to sleep, she’d asked him about the fly. He’d told her he bought it at the same time he bought the fishing rod, but something in his voice had struck her wrong.
When she’d pressed him, though, his mood had instantly blackened, and they’d almost had a fight.
He had gone to sleep while she stared at the ceiling, remembering the look of suspicion Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly had cast in her husband’s direction after they’d pulled poor Kumquat’s body from beneath the low deck behind the garage.
No! Glen couldn’t have killed Kumquat—he just couldn’t have!
And so she’d lain awake, stewing, trying to find answers, trying to make sense out of senseless horrors.
In the morning, tired, but knowing she must have slept at least a few hours, she’d gotten up and once again concealed her fear from her family, contenting herself with instructing Heather to make certain she walked Kevin to his school before going on to her own, and extracting a promise from Kevin that he wouldn’t leave school until Heather arrived to escort him home.
He argued, but she stood firm.
Then, after reading Vivian Andrews’s essentially fictional account of the Joyce Cottrell story with growing anger, she went to the office.
When no silence fell over the city room of the Herald as she walked in, Anne felt something that she wasn’t willing to admit even to herself: disappointment. But what had she expected? This wasn’t a ladies afternoon card club—this was a big city newspaper, whose staff wasn’t about to express public shock over much less than mass murder. Still, she would have thought someone would ask her how she was doing and if her family was all right. There wasn’t even so much as a momentary drop in the decibel level as she threaded her way toward her desk. Perhaps it was that simple fact—that practiced callousness that she knew perfectly well was not only a tool of a reporter’s trade, but practically a badge of honor as well—that stopped her from sitting down at her desk. But it wasn’t just that, of course.
It was the note that had appeared on her computer last night. Not telling her family about it was one thing. Not telling Vivian Andrews was another. Picking up all her notes from her research on the rapid transit issue, she headed for Vivian Andrews’s office, pushed the door open, stepped through it, and closed it behind her before the editor could possibly object.
“I gather you didn’t like my editing?” Vivian asked with studied casualness, barely even glancing away from the monitor on which she was already reviewing stories for tomorrow’s edition.
“It wasn’t editing, Viv,” Anne told her. “It was butchery. It was a good story, and it was an honest story. And I’m taking it back.” She dropped the sheaf of notes onto the editor’s desk, forcing Vivian to shift her attention from the monitor to the reporter who stood opposite her, pale and drawn.
“Toning down an irresponsible story is one of my primary functions around here,” she began. But as she finally took a good look at Anne Jeffers, her words died on her lips. “Anne? Are you okay? You look like you’ve been up all night.”
“I might as well have been, for all the sleep I got,” Anne confessed. As quickly as she could, she filled Vivian in.
“Your cat?” Vivian asked as Anne described what had been done to Heather’s pet. “My God, who would do something like that?”
Anne shook her head. “And what kind of a world do we live in when people react more strongly to what happens to a cat than they do to what happens to other people?”
Vivian Andrews reddened. “I didn’t mean—” she began, but then dropped back in her chair. “Oh, God, maybe I did.” She sighed. “What did the police say?”
Anne repeated most of what Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly had told her, holding back only the few words that had been spoken—and not spoken—about Glen. “And as for your changing my story to say that the police aren’t connecting the Davis and Cottrell killings, that simply isn’t true,” she finished. “They told me off the record that they’re definitely treating them as related, and that they’re going to have the same medical examiner who autopsied Davis and Cottrell look at our cat, too.”
Vivian Andrews sourly eyed the array of papers that Anne had dropped onto her desk. “May I assume you’ve decided to take yourself off this particular mess?” she asked, tilting her head toward the transit plan notes.
“It seems to me that there are a lot of people around here who could do that story perfectly well.”
“I’m not sure that’s the point,” Vivian replied. “I can also think of half a dozen people who could deal with these new killings in a more objective fashion than you.”
“Maybe. But there’s something else—something I haven’t told anyone else yet.” Struggling not to let her voice betray the extent of the fear she’d felt last night—still felt, she realized as she repeated the story—she told Vivian about the note that had appeared on her computer, then disappeared almost as quickly as it had come. “Look,” she finished. “Put someone else on the story with me, if you want to. But you have to let me stay with it.” When she saw the editor wavering, she pushed harder. “Vivian, something’s going on here. This isn’t just a copycat. Whoever’s doing this has something going against me personally. Maybe he’s trying to scare me off, or maybe he’s seen a picture of me and just likes the way I look. For some reason, he’s fixated on me, and even if you don’t think it’s a good idea for me to stay on the story, you know damned well that we can slant it to sell more papers than the P.I. and the Times combined. Picture the headline, Viv: ‘Killer Stalks Herald Reporter.’ I can write it without getting Blakemoor and Ackerly into trouble—I was there, Viv! It was my next-door neighbor. My cat. And my computer he left his damned note on!”
She fell momentarily silent, then spoke again, no longer making any attempt to keep her voice steady. “My God, Viv—he’s been watching me! He as much as said so!” Her voice rose. “ ‘See you soon!’ That’s what he said, Viv: ‘See you soon.’ He might even have taken Joyce Cottrell up to the park and dumped her there because he knew I jog there.” She shuddered. “Oh, God, I wonder how long it’s been going on—how long he’s been out there.” Again she fell silent, for now a memory was stirring. A faint memory, of having felt as though she were being watched. But where …?
Misreading Anne’s silence as a demand for a decision, Vivian Andrews made up her mind. Even as she committed herself, she knew she was doing it for the wrong reasons. Every instinct within her told her to assign someone else to this story. But she also knew that she was no more immune to the lure that Anne had held out than anyone else would be. How often did any reporter anywhere get a chance to go after a murder story where she herself might be one of the intended victims? They would, indeed, sell a lot of papers. “All right,” she said. “Keep on it. But be very careful, and keep in mind that I’m going to be going over every word you write with a fine-tooth comb. Keep it fair, keep it objective, and you can keep the story. Agreed?”
Anne stood up. “Agreed.” She started out of the editor’s office, already composing a mental list of the phone calls she needed to make. But then she turned back, and her eyes met her boss’s. “Thanks,” she said quietly.
Vivian Andrews gazed steadily at her. “Anne, I hope you’re smart enough to realize that all this should be scaring you to death.”
“I am,” Anne replied. “Right now, I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. And I don’t even know why this guy’s mad at me. What could I ever have done to him?”
“What makes you think you did anything to him at all?” Vivian Andrews asked. “It’s probably not even about you, Anne. It could still all be just a coincidence. But even if it isn’t, don’t start thinking it has anything to do with something you did, or even didn’t do. It’s just him, Anne. It’s just some nut.”
Anne left the editor’s office and returned to her desk, where she riffled through the short stack of messages that had come in overnight, then checked her E-mail, half expecting to find a duplicate of the note that had been left on her computer at home. She wasn’t sure whether she felt relief or disappointment when she found nothing.
Nothing in the way of a note, and nothing pertaining to the murders of either Shawnelle Davis or Joyce Cottrell.
Lots pertaining to the rapid transit mess, which she rerouted to Vivian Andrews for reassignment.
She was about to reach for the phone to call Mark Blakemoor when she changed her mind: it had long been her experience that people found it far easier to lie over the phone than in person, a phenomenon she attributed more to her own ability to read people’s facial expressions and body language than to any peculiar compunctions on the part of those she was interviewing.
Face-to-face, she could reel in practically any fish. On the phone, they could wriggle off the hook.
Retrieving her coat from the rack that served her own and half a dozen other desks, she scooped up her gritchel, slung the strap over her shoulder, left the office, and headed downtown.
Twenty minutes later—her car maybe-not-quite-completely-illegally parked in a passenger zone whose white paint was sufficiently worn away for her to think she might be able to argue the case—she entered the Public Safety Building and strode directly to the cramped office Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly shared.
“They’re not here,” a detective whose name Anne couldn’t remember said as she was about to knock on the closed door. He grinned at her, his eyes glinting with malicious humor. “Would you believe they’re down at the M.E.’s office, checking out a dead cat?” Not bothering to reply, Anne turned on her heel and walked out of the Homicide Division. She did, however, make a mental note to find out the detective’s name, just in case she ever got the opportunity to make fun of him in the paper.
She arrived at the medical examiner’s office, only to be told there was no more chance of her attending the autopsy of her cat than there would be of her attending that of a human being.
“But it’s a cat!” Anne protested. “And it’s my cat! Doesn’t that make any difference at all?”
The young man behind the desk, whose name was David Smith according to a chipped plastic plaque propped up against a pen holder, shook his head. “Not around here. The rules are the rules. Only our staff and other authorized personnel can attend an autopsy.”
“Come on,” Anne began, using her best wheedling and subservient tones. “Surely just this once you could let me—”
“No exceptions,” David Smith told her in a voice filled with the kind of smug self-satisfaction that only career bureaucrats seem capable of producing.
Frustrated, but certain that there would be no changing David Smith’s mind, Anne dropped onto a hard bench, prepared to wait for the rest of the morning if that’s what it took. It turned out to be only forty-five minutes before Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly emerged from the double doors that led to the labs from which Anne had been denied admittance.
There was an uncomfortable moment as the reporter and the two detectives regarded each other uncertainly, their long-standing professional relationship having suddenly taken on a new aspect.
“Why don’t I meet you back at the shop,” Mark Blakemoor told his partner, breaking the silence. “I’ll have a cup of coffee with Anne and fill her in.” Lois Ackerly gave him a strange look, started to say something, then seemed to change her mind.
“See you when you get there,” she said. Nodding a greeting to Anne, she disappeared out the main door.
Mark led Anne to a small room equipped with two Formica-topped tables, a half-dozen chairs, and a counter on which sat a grease-splattered microwave oven and a crusted coffeepot. Fishing two mugs out of a badly stained sink, the detective rinsed them out, filled them with coffee, and handed one to Anne. “Not exactly a latte, but so far no one’s been able to convince Starbucks to take over this space. Sit?”
Anne settled onto a flimsy vinyl chair; Blakemoor leaned against the counter.
“So what’s the deal?” Anne asked. “What did you find out?”
“Nothing conclusive,” the detective replied. “In fact, no one’s even willing to say the same person who did the women did the cat, too.”
Anne’s brows arched as she recognized what she suspected was only the first of a series of noncommittal statements. Before she could begin questioning him, Mark Blakemoor went on.
“Here’s how it lays out,” he told her. “We’re pretty sure the same guy did both women. We’re pretty sure Shawnelle Davis let him into her apartment voluntarily—probably she picked him up thinking he was going to be a score. As for Cottrell, we found a key with a thumbprint on it, and the print isn’t Cottrell’s. So either she gave him the key or, more likely, he found it hidden in one of the usual places—the doormat, a planter. Everyone knows where to look, right?” Without waiting for Anne to reply, he went on. “Anyway, the only thing we really have to go on are the cuts, and they’re pretty much alike on both women. He used knives he found in their own kitchens, so the wounds aren’t exactly alike. But they’re close enough that Cosmo—that’s the M.E. who’s working this for us—is willing to say it’s the same perp in both homicides.”
“And my cat?” Anne asked as Blakemoor finished.
“That’s another story.” The detective’s expression tightened. “There are similarities to both the women. But the cut is—” He hesitated, then used the same word that had come into his mind the previous day, when he’d first examined the cat. “It’s a neater cut. Cosmo says it was done with a sharper instrument—a razor blade, possibly a scalpel. And he says the incision is straighter.” He paused again, his eyes avoiding Anne’s when he finally went on. “He says it could be the same guy, and that by the time he got to the cat he’d had more practice.”
“I see.” Anne felt numb.
“Or someone else could have done the cat,” Blakemoor finished. There was something in his voice that made Anne look up.
“Someone else, like my husband?” she asked, still remembering the silence that had fallen over Blakemoor and Ackerly as Glen had returned from the house with the plastic bag. When Blakemoor made no reply, Anne decided it was time to tell him about the note on her computer. “Whoever killed poor Kumquat put the note there,” she finished. “And whoever put the note on my computer knew a lot more about programming than Glen does. He can operate a couple of programs, but he doesn’t know the difference between an autoexec.bat and a config sys. At our house, I even install the programs.”
“But you thought of him,” Blakemoor pointed out.
Anne almost wished she hadn’t told the detective about the note at all. But it was too important to keep from him. “How could I not have?” she countered. “He was there by himself all day.” A dark and hollow sound that wasn’t quite a chuckle emerged from her throat. “I even searched the house, looking for signs that someone else had been there.”
“And you didn’t find anything,” Blakemoor surmised.
Anne shook her head. “So what’s next?” she asked.
“The same thing that’s always next in a case like this,” Blakemoor told her. Though she’d heard the words before—practically knew them by heart—this time they made Anne’s blood run cold. “We keep looking, even though we don’t have much of anything to go on.” He stopped speaking, and it was Anne herself who finished the recitation.
“And we wait for him to kill someone else, and hope that next time he makes a mistake.”
Blakemoor nodded, but said nothing. The silence between them stretched on until finally Anne could take it no longer.
“What if it’s me?” she asked, rising to her feet. “What if it’s me he kills, or one of my family?”
Without even thinking about what he was doing, Mark Blakemoor put his arms around Anne. “It won’t be you,” he said. “I won’t let it be.”
Struggling against an almost overpowering urge to cling to the big detective—even if just for a moment—Anne pulled away from him and picked up her coat and her large leather satchel. They left the medical examiner’s office in silence.
Neither of them could think of anything else to say.