Chapter 5
The crowd of demonstrators had begun gathering the day before, and every hour since the first arrivals had set up their makeshift camps, more of them had poured into the field across from the prison, until now the entire space was filled with tents, trailers, cars, and people. All night long a bonfire had burned, the demonstrators clustering around it as they sang songs of protest and chanted their conviction that the condemned man must not die, that somewhere some nameless lawyer was feverishly working in an ill-lit office, finding new grounds upon which to challenge Richard Kraven’s sentence of death.
Perhaps there would be an error discovered in the court records, or some piece of evidence could be newly challenged.
Or perhaps the governor would have a change of heart and commute Kraven’s sentence at the last minute.
But as night faded into morning and the bonfire burned lower, until all that was left of it were glowing coals smoldering angrily beneath a thick layer of ash, a watchful silence had descended on the crowd.
Anne Jeffers gazed down upon the scene from the window of Wendell Rustin’s office on the top floor of the prison’s administration building. A few curling wisps of smoke still rose from the last embers of the night’s bonfires, and the demonstrators still stood facing the prison, waiting in bitter anticipation for the last moment of Richard Kraven’s life.
How many were there—five hundred? A thousand?
And who was to say that their feelings about what was going to happen here today were any less valid than her own? An image of her daughter came to mind, and she saw once more the earnest expression on Heather’s fifteen-year-old face a few nights before, when they had once more debated capital punishment over the dinner table. With the absolute certainty of her youth, Heather had insisted that there was not—could not—be any justification for a government executing anyone.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” she’d insisted. “And besides, aren’t we always making a big deal about being a Christian nation? What about the ten commandments? The Bible says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Which means that capital punishment is just plain wrong!”
Now, her daughter’s words ringing in her ears, Anne wondered just when it was that she’d lost her own innocence, had lost the ability to see the world in black and white. It had not, she reflected, been that many years since she’d agreed with Heather wholeheartedly.
Except that somewhere along the line she’d begun to believe that in some cases—cases like Richard Kraven’s—there was no other real choice. To some extent, she supposed that her work had hardened her, that her many years of observing and reporting on man’s cruelty to his own species had changed her.
As she gazed down at the demonstrators in front of the prison, scanning their faces, she saw among the crowd scores of people her own age, and just as many who were twenty years older. Even as she watched, an elderly woman sitting in a wheelchair, swathed in a long peasant skirt and a rainbow-colored shawl, proudly waved a sign that read CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS MURDER.
I should talk to her, Anne thought. Before I go home, I should talk to that woman.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the jangling of a telephone. She turned away from the window just as Wendell Rustin picked up the receiver on the second ring, spoke for a moment, then hung up. “It’s time,” he said. Pushing himself heavily to his feet, the warden came around the desk, strode to the door, and held it open for Anne. When she made no move to go through it, he hesitated for a moment, then gently reclosed it. “Are you going to be all right?”
Anne frowned as she tried to formulate an answer to the question, and finally shrugged. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I—Oh, God, I don’t know what I feel right now. I thought I was absolutely clear on this, but now …” Her voice trailed off.
“You don’t have to witness it,” Rustin offered. “If you’d like, you can wait here.”
For the slightest fraction of a second Anne felt tempted to take the warden up on the offer, but almost immediately shook her head. “This is something I have to do,” she said. “What kind of a hypocrite would I be if I refused to watch what I’ve been arguing for all this time?”
Wendell Rustin’s head bobbed slightly. “I know,” he said. “But I have to tell you, Anne, believing in capital punishment and watching it are two different things. Take it from someone who knows.”
In spite of herself, Anne hesitated. How much easier it would be simply to wait here in the relative comfort of the office until it was all over. Resolutely, she faced him and said, “I’ll be all right.” But even as she passed through the door into the hallway outside, she wondered if she’d spoken the truth. Conflicting emotions were still roiling inside her, but this time she reminded herself that she was here to do her job, and purposefully shifted her mind into work mode, a trick she’d learned years ago when she discovered that there were times when she simply had no choice but to separate herself from the task at hand.
Entering the gallery adjacent to the execution chamber, she was surprised at how many people had already gathered. Some of them she recognized: most of the lawyers who had been involved in Kraven’s various appeals were there, as were a number of policemen she recognized from various states.
Mark Blakemoor, who had headed up Seattle’s own task force when it became obvious that a serial killer was working in the city, sat in the front row, and as Anne came in, he nodded to her and gestured for her to take the seat next to him. Feeling an oddly incongruous sense of relief at seeing Blakemoor, she moved quickly down the aisle and slipped into the empty seat.
And found herself staring directly into the small chamber that held the electric chair.
Mutely, she stared at the executioner’s toy.
It was wooden, constructed in what struck Anne as a cruelly simple design.
No cushioning, not even slightly relaxing angles.
Wide, flat arms equipped with heavy straps to hold the victim’s arms in place.
More straps to hold the torso immobile, and still more to bind the legs and ankles.
Two electrodes, attached to thick cables.
All of it illuminated by the harsh white light of four powerful incandescent lamps suspended from the ceiling.
Anne stared at it wordlessly, her mouth going dry. Abruptly, the lights in the gallery dimmed, almost as if they were in a theater, and then a door to the left of the chair opened. A moment later Richard Kraven appeared in the doorway. He paused, his eyes fixing on the chair.
As Kraven stared at the instrument of death, Anne thought that a flicker of a smile crossed his lips, but if so, it was gone so quickly she couldn’t be certain she’d seen it at all.
With two guards escorting him, Richard Kraven moved into the chamber and took his seat. He was barefoot, and wearing only a loose-fitting pair of pants and a short-sleeved shirt. Though she loathed this cold-blooded killer, the clothing struck Anne as unseemly, as if someone had decided it wasn’t enough simply to execute him, but that he must be stripped of his last vestiges of dignity before being sent to his death.
The guards began strapping Richard Kraven to the heavy wooden chair.
His ankles were bound to the legs of the chair, his wrists to its arms, his torso to its back.
A priest came into the room and spoke to Kraven, but Anne could hear nothing through the heavy glass that separated the killing chamber from the viewing gallery. Whatever the clergyman said seemed not to affect Kraven in the slightest, and he made no reply.
After lingering for only a few more seconds, the priest left.
The guards dampened one of the electrodes with saltwater, and taped it securely to Richard Kraven’s shaved scalp.
They attached the second electrode to the calf of his right leg.
After checking their work one last time, the two guards left the chamber, closing the door behind them.
It was only after the guards had left that Anne realized an eerie silence had fallen over the gallery.
She glanced up at the clock.
Thirty seconds before noon.
Now she found herself glancing around for a telephone, and realized she was half expecting that the event she was witnessing would suddenly be ended by a loud ringing, just as it used to happen in the movies.
But there was no phone; if it existed at all, it was somewhere beyond her field of vision.
Beyond Richard Kraven’s, too?
Was he, too, waiting for the last minute reprieve that would release him from the chair?
She made herself look once more at Kraven, and though she had been told that the glass was a one-way mirror and he wouldn’t be able to see the execution’s witnesses, she nonetheless had the sensation that his eyes were focused on her, and that he knew exactly at whom he was staring.
Those cold, expressionless eyes had lost their deathly flatness. In the last moments of Richard Kraven’s life, his eyes had at last come alive and were projecting an emotion.
A strong, powerful emotion.
Hatred.
Anne could feel it burning out from him, searing through the thick glass of the window, snaking toward her—
She recoiled from Kraven’s hate-filled gaze as from a striking cobra, and had to fight against a powerful impulse to abandon her chair and escape from the scene that was unfolding in front of her eyes. But before she could move at all, Richard Kraven jerked spasmodically as every muscle and nerve in his body reacted to the two thousand volts of electricity that shot through him.
Anne gasped, and then her whole body responded to the horror she beheld.
She stopped breathing as every fiber in her went momentarily rigid. Then an anguished moan escaped her throat as Kraven’s body jerked again and again.
Next to Anne, Mark Blakemoor’s eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched as he watched Richard Kraven die. Every muscle tensed, the detective silently counted the seconds, only relaxing when two full minutes had finally gone by and he was certain that Richard Kraven was dead. Then he spoke quietly to Anne Jeffers.
“That’s it,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
Anne shifted slightly in her seat, but made no move to get up. As the room slowly emptied, she stayed where she was, watching silently as the guards returned to the execution chamber, this time pushing a gurney and accompanied by a doctor. After the doctor confirmed that Richard Kraven was dead, the guards removed the electrodes from his leg and scalp, unfastened the straps that bound him, and lifted him onto the gurney.
But even after Richard Kraven’s body had been taken away, Anne Jeffers remained where she was.
She knew that what she had just witnessed had changed her, but she didn’t yet know quite how.
She knew she would never forget watching Richard Kraven die, nor ever get over the terrible feeling she had experienced as his final glare of pure hatred had burned through her.
Then she thought of Glen, and was instantly consumed by a desire to be held by him, to feel his arms around her, his lips on hers, his strength pulling her close to him.
She would be all right. In a few hours she would be with Glen again; in a few days, a few weeks, she would begin to forget the clinical precision of what she’d just seen.
But would she ever be able to forget the terrible hatred that had poured forth from Richard Kraven even as he’d died?