Black Lightning

CHAPTER 25

… the police are “satisfied” that Richard Kraven was solely responsible for the series of murders that seemingly came to a halt when he was arrested and charged in another state. But the detective also pointedly repeated that “it has yet to be fully proven that all the victims attributed to Kraven have been discovered.” Nor would Blakemoor go so far as to absolutely rule out the possibility that Kraven did not act alone in the crimes attributed to him.

Sheila Harrar gazed at the paragraph through bleary eyes, the hangover from last night’s party making her feel as if someone were pounding spikes through her skull. Squinting even against the gray daylight in Pioneer Square, Sheila tried to concentrate on the rest of the words in the stained piece of the morning paper she’d found abandoned on the bench along with almost half a cup of not-quite-cold coffee. But it didn’t matter if she finished the article or not — she’d already read enough.

There was at least one body they hadn’t found yet — Danny’s. And now it wasn’t just the police who didn’t care — it was the paper, too. Sheila had waited all day for that woman to call back. What was her name? Then she remembered that she’d saved the other article, stuffing it into the canvas bag with the rest of her important papers. Still clutching the remainder of the cup of tepid coffee in one hand, Sheila burrowed deep into the tote bag with the other, feeling around until her fingers finally closed on the crumpled scrap of newspaper. Spreading it out flat on the wooden bench, she forced her eyes to focus on the print.

Anne Jeffers. Yeah, that was the name of the woman she’d left a message for. When had it been? Sheila wasn’t sure, but she knew she’d waited all day long for the woman to call back, only going out when she had to scrounge up something to eat. But the woman had never called back, and Sheila knew why.

It was because she was an Indian.

A drunken Indian.

Sheila’s fist closed on the paper cup, crumpling it. She hadn’t felt very good that morning when she called the newspaper. Not as bad as this morning, but not good, either. Maybe the woman had tried to call her back, but she hadn’t been there to answer the pay phone in the hall. And if someone else had answered it, they sure wouldn’t have bothered to give her the message.

Nobody who lived in the hotel gave a damn about anybody else.

Suddenly Sheila wanted a drink. She heaved herself to her feet and immediately a wave of dizziness and nausea struck her. Gripping the back of the bench with both hands, she bent over and retched onto the bricks of the square.

Not much came up, and she was left feeling just as bad as she had before, except now her mouth was filled with the sour taste of vomit. Wishing she could sink through the bricks and disappear into the ground, but knowing it wouldn’t happen, Sheila Harrar shuffled over to the drinking fountain at the corner and filled her mouth with water, swirled it around, then spit it out. This time, though, she spit carefully into the catch basin around the fountain’s mouthpiece rather than spew more of her expectoration onto the sidewalk.

What the hell good was she like this? If she was ever going to find out what had happened to Danny, she had to pull herself together.

She burrowed into her tote bag again, this time finding a few stray coins hidden among the odds and ends that had gathered in its corners. She gazed at the money, automatically calculating how much wine she could buy with it.

An image of Danny came into her mind, and she determinedly ignored her body’s craving for alcohol. Making her way down to First Avenue, she went into one of the cafés that catered to the neighborhood derelicts as long as they had the price of one of its cheap meals, and ordered a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Though her stomach threatened to rebel once again at the unaccustomed intrusion of food so early in the day, she consumed the entire pastry, washing it down with two cups of coffee. As she ate she had a long talk with Danny, even though he wasn’t really there to talk to her:

Maybe she never got the message, Danny’s voice suggested. Or maybe you didn’t wait by the phone as long as you think.

“I waited,” Sheila muttered, then made herself stop talking out loud, as the person two stools away glanced at her.

Maybe you only waited a couple of minutes, then went out and got drunk, Danny’s implacable voice went on.

Sheila didn’t try to argue with him — she knew he was right. In fact, she might not even have left the right number for Anne Jeffers to call her at.

Better call her again. She got off the stool and started toward the rest rooms at the back of the café, where she knew there was a pay phone. Leafing through the phone book in search of the number of the Herald, she suddenly had an idea.

What if Anne Jeffers had never even gotten her message at all? What if it had just gone into one of those machines, and no one had ever listened to it? Dropping the yellow pages, Sheila picked up the white pages and began thumbing through them. A minute later she found it. “Jeffers, Glen & Anne,” were listed, up at the fancy end of Capitol Hill.

Dropping a quarter into the slot, Sheila dialed the number. On the eighth ring, just as she was about to hang up, someone answered.

“Hello?”

“Is Anne Jeffers there? The one who works for the paper?”

“This is her residence, but she’s at work now. May I take a message?”

Sheila hesitated, but then made up her mind. At least this time she was talking to a real person, and if it was Anne Jeffers’s house, then she’d probably get the message. “I left a message at the paper, but she didn’t call me back,” Sheila said, pronouncing each word very carefully in the hope that whoever she was talking to wouldn’t know how drunk she’d been last night. “Are you her husband?”

Sheila didn’t notice the slight hesitation before the voice replied with a single terse word: “Yes.”

“It’s my son,” Sheila went on. “Danny Harrar. That man Richard Kraven killed him, but the police didn’t do anything. They said he was just a drunken Indian, but that isn’t true. Danny was a good boy. He worked, and he went to school, and he never drank at all.” Sheila felt her eyes sting with tears, but she wiped them away with her sleeve, determined not to let her emotions get the better of her. Not this time. “All I want is to find my boy. All I want is to find my son so I can bury him.”

Sheila heard a silence. Then the man spoke again. “And you want Anne to help you find him?”

Sheila’s breath caught in her throat. He hadn’t hung up! “Do you think she would?” she asked, her voice trembling with anxiety. It had been so long since anyone had even listened to her that she could barely believe this man’s wife might actually be willing to help her.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” the man asked. “Just tell me what you think happened to your son, and how my wife can get in touch with you.”

Suddenly, Sheila Harrar’s hands were shaking and a sheen of sweat covered her skin. Where should she start? What should she say? “He was going fishing,” she began. “With that man, Richard Kraven. I told the police, but they didn’t believe me, because I’m an In—” She hesitated, then took a deep breath. “The police never believe Native Americans,” she went on. “They say we’re all drunks, but that isn’t true. Danny wasn’t a drunk, and neither was I, not back then. But they didn’t believe me anyway.”

“Just tell me what happened,” the man said. “Tell me everything you know and everything you think.”

Speaking slowly and carefully, Sheila Harrar began to relate what she suspected had happened on the day Danny disappeared.

And the man at the other end of the line listened.

Listened, and remembered.…

The sound of his own heartbeat throbbed so loudly in his ears that the Experimenter could barely believe it was audible to no one but himself. But who else would hear it?

He was by himself, sealed alone into his private world.

A mobile world made of metal and glass in which he was in total command, in utter control of his environment.

Free to do anything he wanted, free to roam wherever his mood took him, free of all the distractions of the larger world beyond, in which he had little control at all.

It was good to be alone.

But soon he would be alone no longer, for through the windshield he saw what he’d been looking for.

A boy — perhaps seventeen or eighteen — standing on the corner half a block ahead. A boy holding a fishing rod. Waiting for him.

At the same time he began to slow the motor home to a gentle stop, the Experimenter also tried to slow his heartbeat But it was impossible: the thrill of anticipation was too much.

But the boy wouldn’t notice — none of his subjects ever noticed.

The vehicle came to a smooth and silent stop, and the door opened.

The boy smiled at him, showing a double row of even teeth whose whiteness was accentuated by his bronze skin.

The Experimenter smiled back, waving the boy into the motor home.

“Where we going?” the boy asked.

“The mountains,” the Experimenter replied. “I know a great spot along the Snoqualmie River.” Automatically he glanced around, but the streets were empty.

No one had seen the motor home. No one had seen him.

If anyone had seen the boy standing on the corner by himself, it wouldn’t matter.

He drove the van carefully, seldom changing lanes, never exceeding the speed limit.

In the seat beside him, the boy talked, just as all the other subjects had talked. But he found the boy much more interesting than most of the rest of them, for the boy was a Native American, though of what tribe the man wasn’t sure.

“Did you know our people believe the first woman came from a fish?”

The Experimenter shook his head.

“It was a salmon,” the boy said. “And it must have been a big one, because when the man who caught it pulled it out of the river and tore it open, there was a woman inside.”

“Tore it open?” the Experimenter asked, his heartbeat once more quickening as a thrill of excitement went through him.

“Its belly,” the boy explained. “The man sliced the fish’s belly open to clean it, but instead of its guts coming out, the first woman came out. That’s why our people revere the salmon. Because it was from them that our own ancient mother came.”

“And the man who cut the fish’s belly open?” the Experimenter asked, his voice betraying nothing of the excitement that stirred in his own belly. “What happened to him?”

The dark-skinned boy shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “In the legend, the only important thing is that the first woman emerged from the belly of a salmon. Sort of like Eve being created out of Adam’s rib, you know?”

“But it wasn’t a man who opened Adam,” the Experimenter said. “It was God.”

Again the boy shrugged.

The Experimenter’s excitement grew.

The city was behind him now, and the motor home was making its way up into the foothills. Fog closed in around them, fading the morning’s light to a colorless gray, and the world inside the van grew smaller, more private.

The boy seemed to sense it. “It’s weird. It’s like there’s no one left in the whole world but us.”

“Maybe there’s not,” the Experimenter suggested. “Maybe there’s never been anyone but us.”

“Or maybe one of us doesn’t exist?” the boy asked, grinning as he picked up the thread of the postulation. “But which one of us is the figment of the other’s imagination?”

The Experimenter said nothing, knowing that for himself, at least, the boy’s question had long ago been answered.

Only he existed.

All others were nothing more than subject matter for his experimentation.

He slowed the motor home, scanning the fog-shrouded forest for the gap in the trees that marked the entrance to one of his favorite fishing holes. Finally he found what he was looking for, and turned into the narrow lane with the easy expertise born of repetition.

The same easy expertise with which he now carried out his experiments.

The vehicle bumped along the dirt track, and the Experimenter gently applied the brakes against the acceleration generated by the downhill slope. As the road leveled out, the trees gave way to a small clearing next to the river, which was, as he had known it would be, deserted.

“I’ll make coffee,” the Experimenter told the boy. “By the time we’re done, the fog will have burned off and the fish will be feeding.”

As he switched the generator on, its droning hum finally drowned out the beating of his heart, and the Experimenter relaxed a little. Filling a teakettle with water, he put it onto one of the three burners in the motor home’s small galley.

Twenty minutes later, as the fog finally began to burn off and the morning sun cast its golden light through the towering treetops, the boy’s head dropped to his chest and his breathing took on the steady rhythm of a deeply narcotized sleep.

The Experimenter lowered the blinds over the windows of the motor home and switched on its interior lights. Opening one of the cupboards below the galley counter, he took out a roll of transparent plastic sheeting. Working slowly and methodically — so practiced now that he barely had to think about what he was doing at all — the Experimenter began lining the interior of the motor home with plastic.

First the floor, running the edges of the plastic a few inches up the walls.

Then the walls themselves, letting the plastic hang down so it overlapped the coverings on the floor.

Finally the bed. Two sheets here, folded together twice where they joined, and carefully taped so they couldn’t come apart.

The Experimenter began to disrobe, removing one garment at a time, carefully folding each item and storing it in one of the drawers beneath the bed.

When he was finally naked, he at last turned his attention to the boy who was slumped in the passenger seat at the front of the vehicle.

He undressed the unconscious boy almost as easily as he had peeled the clothing from his own body.

This time, though, each garment was methodically put into a plastic bag before he removed the next.

When the boy was as nude as he was himself, the Experimenter lifted him in his arms and carried him to the plastic-shrouded bed.

Working with all the skill he had developed over the years, he made the initial incisions, using a new scalpel that he would dispose of as soon as this morning’s research was concluded. The razor-sharp blade sliced through the skin of the boy’s chest, and as blood began to ooze from the open wound, the Experimenter stanched it with beeswax.

A moment later the thrumming of the generator was drowned out by the high-pitched keening of the electric saw. As his practiced hand held the saw steady above the boy’s incised and naked chest, the Experimenter felt the same thrill of anticipation he always experienced before making the first deep cut into the interior of a new subject.

His heartbeat increased, as did the rate of his respiration.

He could feel a sheen of sweat covering his skin, oozing down between his shoulder blades just as a thin trickle of blood was making its way down the boy’s belly.

Gently — reverently — he lowered the whirling blade, reveling in the change of its pitch as it bit into the gristle and bone of the boy’s sternum.

Soon … soon …

Soon he would be deep inside the boy, discovering the secret of his existence.

Soon he would feel the energy of the boy’s body with his fingertips, feel the heat of it enveloping his hands.

Feel the tingling energy of the youth’s life force—

Soon … soon …

But then it was over, and he was standing naked in the morning sun, the boy’s lifeless body clutched in his arms, his own body trembling with the frustration of his failure.

Angrily, he dropped the corpse to the ground and began covering it with rocks, working steadily until the body had entirely disappeared beneath the rough construction of a rocky cairn that could as easily have been built by the river in flood as by the hands of the Experimenter in his fury.

Then he was in the forest, dousing the clothes with gasoline and setting fire to them, prodding and stirring them with a stick until they were consumed by the flames.

Finally he returned to the river, plunging naked into the icy water to wash himself clean of all traces of the latest of his experiments. And as the icy water sluiced over his skin, he screamed out loud, partly from shock, but even more from the frustration of having failed yet again.