Black Lightning

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 who interrupted. “On the same theory that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client?”

“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.”

“And one of them was a hooker and the other worked at Group Health. One was in her thirties, the other in her fifties. You know as well as I do that serial killers stick to a type—”

“Richard Kraven didn’t.”

“And nothing was ever proven against him in this state,” Vivian reminded her.

“Whether Richard Kraven was proven guilty in Washington State or not, he was a killer, and you know it as well as I do,” Anne flared. “And I’m just as sure that whoever killed Shawnelle Davis also killed Joyce Cottrell.”

“You were also sure that Shawnelle Davis’s death was somehow connected to Richard Kraven,” Vivian Andrews retorted. “I don’t get it, Anne. What are you trying to prove here? It seems as though you want to have it every way possible. If the Davis and Cottrell murders are connected to the ones you claim Richard Kraven committed, where does that leave Kraven? You claim he was guilty, but now it sounds as if you think someone else did it.”

“If he had an accomplice—”

“If he had an accomplice, don’t you think he’d have cut a deal? Call me cynical if you want to, but I’ve been around long enough to know that the first thing most of these creeps do who get hit with a murder charge, is blow the whistle on their friends! And if that doesn’t work, you pull a Menendez and blame the victims.”

Anne sank back into the chair as if the air had just been let out of her. “I know.” She sighed. “That’s what makes me so crazy. I don’t really believe Kraven had an accomplice. But I still think there’s some kind of connection.” Her eyes fixed on Vivian. “You haven’t seen the bodies, Viv. And I’ll admit I didn’t see Shawnelle Davis’s, but I saw pictures. It’s weird — they’re not like what Kraven did. They don’t have that surgical quality about them, as if they’d been dissected, but the mutilation is basically the same. It’s as if whoever killed Shawnelle and Joyce is trying to pick up where Kraven left off.”

Vivian Andrews’s lips pursed sourly. “That’s not reporting, Anne. That’s editorializing. And I don’t think I can let it go on any longer.” She rummaged around on the cluttered surface of her desk, found what she was looking for and handed it to Anne. “I’ll clean up your story and run it,” she said, “but that’s it. We run this paper on facts, not on speculation. So until something real happens that turns these two deaths into genuine serial killings, I want you to go to work on that.”

Anne looked down at the piece of paper in her hand. It was a notice of a planning meeting for a proposed regional light-rail system that would stretch from Everett to Tacoma, a proposal that had been endlessly kicked around among various governmental agencies for most of a decade. Anne looked at Vivian with utter disbelief. “This?” she asked. “You’re asking me to cover this?”

“I’m not asking at all,” Vivian calmly replied. “I’m ordering you to.”