Black Lightning (10 page)

CHAPTER 12

 … Richard Kraven still insisted that he was innocent of all charges that have ever been brought against him. Even on his last morning, he still protested his innocence, and as I listened to him, I had to wonder what motive he could possibly have for lying, knowing that in only a few more hours he would surely be dead.

Did he expect a last-minute reprieve?

Surely not, for despite the hopes of the anti-capital-punishment forces gathered in front of the prison, both the courts and the governor of Connecticut had made it clear there would be no further intervention in the case.

What, then, would Richard Kraven have to gain by lying to me?

Perhaps it was simply his way of attempting to make me his last victim, by leaving me with questions in my mind, questions that remain unanswered …

“H
ow dare she write such filth?” Edna Kraven’s voice quavered with anger and the newspaper rattled in her shaking hand. Finally, she had to set it down on the kitchen table. Really, it was simply too much to be borne! Richard—her wonderful, perfect Richard—dead not even twenty-four hours, and that awful Jeffers woman was already writing about him again, repeating yet again all the terrible things she’d written for the last five years.

It was bitterness, of course. Edna had long ago come to understand that Anne Jeffers had fallen in love with Richard, and that when Richard had spurned her, her love had turned to hatred. Why else would she have pursued Richard the way she had, making up all those terrible lies about him? For years Edna had written letter after angry letter to the editor and the publisher of the
Seattle Herald
, protesting that Anne Jeffers was slandering her son, but they had never even responded to her. Once, though, they’d printed one of her letters, but then they’d let Anne Jeffers write an article with the disgusting insinuation that somehow the relationship between Edna and her son might have led to the awful things she’d claimed Richard had done. When Edna read that particular article, she’d actually felt faint—the very idea of what Anne Jeffers had implied fairly set her skin to crawling. To sully the perfect love between a mother and son that way …

Even now, just remembering that article made Edna Kraven’s blood boil, and she glared across the table at her other son, Rory.

Rory!

She’d named him after Rory Calhoun, who had been one of her favorite movie stars. So handsome, so strong.

And so different from her own Rory.

Her Rory had taken after his father, that shiftless no-good with his beady eyes and that weak chin, who had walked out on her right after Rory had been born, leaving her with no one to care for her except Richard. And Richard
had
cared for her, too. He’d helped her with the baby, and done all the housework, and still managed to have time to get perfect grades in school.

A genius, that’s what Richard had been.

But Rory …

Her lips tightened with annoyance as she watched him eat the cereal—
her
cereal, to which he’d simply helped himself—just as if nothing had happened, just as if his brother hadn’t been murdered yesterday. Yes, murdered, she repeated to herself. That’s what they did to Richard, no matter what they called it in the newspapers or in those terrible Star Chamber affairs they’d claimed were legal hearings. They’d lynched Richard, and deep in her heart of hearts Edna Kraven had a terrible feeling that Rory—his own
brother
—didn’t care.

Why else would he have brought the paper with that disgusting article into the house this morning? “Well?” she demanded, her lips pursing, her eyes glittering with fury.

Rory Kraven looked up from the sports pages he’d been perusing as he ate his cereal. Goddamn bitch was gonna start carping at him yet again. Nothing ever satisfied the bitch. Even after thirty goddamn years, nothing he ever did pleased her. Yesterday afternoon and last night had been the worst. He’d arranged to take the day off work to be with her, certain she would want his support when the time finally came for Richard to die, but by the time he’d gone to sleep on the Hide-A-Bed in the guest room that had once been his, he wondered why he’d come at all. All day long he’d had to listen to his mother rant on about Richard—how smart he was, how perfect he was, what a good son he’d always been. Rory had listened to it all, just the way he always listened to it, and he’d known what it really meant, because half the time she said it right out loud. Even now her words echoed in his ears:

Richard was smart—
not like you!

Richard was perfect—
not like you!

Richard was a good son—
not like you!

All his life he’d known who she really loved. Even when he was a little boy, she’d always held Richard up to him as the ideal of perfection.
Why can’t you get as good grades as Richard gets? Why can’t you behave yourself, the way Richard always does?

Richard could talk before he was eight months old!

Richard could walk when he was less than a year!

Richard is a genius!

Richard, Richard, Richard!

He’d heard it every day as he was growing up, even after Richard went to college, then moved into a house of his own. Rory himself moved out of the house as soon as he could, renting the little apartment on Capitol Hill where he still lived today, twelve years later. But moving out of his mother’s house hadn’t changed a thing. Edna had been glad to be rid of him, and she’d proved it by showing him his old room the first time he came back to visit her.

It hadn’t been his room anymore. His bed was gone, and so was everything else that had been his. Now there was a Hide-A-Bed against one wall, a TV set against the other, and a big leather chair in the corner where his bureau had been. The words she’d uttered as he stood in the doorway, his stomach hollow as he stared at the room that had once been his, were burned into his mind forever: “Isn’t it nicer now? Richard and I did it. His house is so small, you know, and we just thought it would be nice for him to have a special room here, all to himself. Someplace where he can come when he just needs to think.”

Rory had wanted to hit her that day, wanted to put his face into hers and scream at her.

But he hadn’t.

Instead he’d done as he’d always done.

He’d agreed that the room was nice and that Richard certainly did need it.

He’d kept his peace, hoping that if he didn’t ask for anything, didn’t demand any attention from her, didn’t do anything she could criticize, maybe she would love him the way she loved Richard.

The years had gone by, and the pain had festered in Rory, but he stoically held it all in, certain that sooner or later his mother would love him, too. Then, when the murders started, and people started thinking Richard had committed them, he’d been sure his mother would start appreciating him.

Instead, she’d just given more and more of her attention to Richard, telling anyone who would listen that Richard couldn’t have done what they said he did.

Richard was a good boy.

Richard was perfect. Richard! Richard! Richard!

And now, even the day after Richard had finally been executed, it was going to be the same! Richard was perfect, and Rory was an idiot, and even with Richard dead, nothing was going to change at all.

Why?

Why couldn’t she love him?

Why couldn’t she defend him the way she defended Richard?

What had he done that was so terrible?

Instead of asking her the questions that were boiling in his brain, Rory only looked up from his paper, his eyes wary. “What, Mother? I was reading.”

“The
sports
section?” Edna demanded. Her scathing voice made Rory wince, but she barely noticed it. “How can you care about sports after what’s happened to your brother? Don’t you even care what they did to him?” Now she picked up the newspaper and flung Anne Jeffers’s column at him. “Don’t you
care
what that woman is doing to your brother’s memory?”

Rory picked up the paper, glanced at it, then stood up. “
They
didn’t do anything to Richard, Mother,” he said. “He did it himself. He killed those people, and they proved it, and they made him pay for it. That’s what really happened, Mother.” He started out of the kitchen.

Edna rose to her feet, clutching the collar of her favorite chenille bathrobe tight around her neck. Her black hair—hair he was pretty sure she dyed, since it didn’t show even a trace of gray—hung lankly over her shoulders, and there were still traces in the wrinkles around her eyes of the makeup she’d fallen asleep in last night. Grabbing Rory’s arm, she pulled him around so he couldn’t avoid her glaring eyes. “Don’t say that,” she hissed, pushing her face close to his. “Don’t ever talk about your brother that way! Never!”

Rory’s mouth went dry and his stomach started to hurt the way it always did when she got really angry with him. Mutely, he nodded his head, and tried to pull away from her, but she wouldn’t let him go.

“Say you’re sorry,” Edna demanded. “Say it!”

And Rory did.

After his apology, his mother released him and he left the house to go to the job he’d worked at ever since he finished high school, on the assembly line at Boeing.

And, as always, he wondered how he was ever going to get his mother to love him the way she’d loved Richard. He knew that was never going to happen, though, because no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t be Richard.

But maybe he could at least be
like
Richard.

CHAPTER 13

Richard Kraven is dead, but in the minds of the families of his victims, questions still linger, wounds still fester.

Richard Kraven’s final challenge hangs like a dark cloud above us all. For if Kraven was telling the truth—which this reporter does not believe—then a killer may still be living among us.

This reporter therefore intends to take up Richard Kraven’s final challenge, but not, as he hoped, with the intention of exonerating him.

This reporter intends to take one more look at the entire sequence of murders that have come to be known as the Kraven Killings.

This reporter intends to answer some of the questions that still remain:

Do we even know exactly how many died? Is it not possible that hidden away in the mountains and valleys that surround us, more victims are waiting to be discovered?

And might not one of those hidden victims provide the direct link to Richard Kraven that has always eluded the police, thus finally laying to rest all our doubts? Is it too much to ask that the police keep working on this grisly chapter in our civic history until the full truth is finally known?

This reporter thinks not. This reporter thinks the specter of Richard Kraven will hang over the city until …

“T
alk to her. I gotta talk to her.”

Though Sheila Harrar spoke the words out loud, there was no one to hear them. Not that anyone would have known what she meant anyway, for in the worn-out, wood-framed firetrap of a hotel into which Sheila had moved two months ago, no one knew his neighbors, and nobody
wanted
to know them. Most of the people in the building were just like Sheila—living from hand to mouth, telling themselves every morning when they got up that today they were going to get it together and find a job. But then the day just sort of closed in on them. Most days, Sheila didn’t get much farther than the park in Pioneer Square, where someone would offer her a drink out of a bottle wrapped in a stained brown paper bag. And Sheila, just like all the rest of them, would tell herself it was only going to be one swallow, and then she’d get on with the day.

Somewhere there had to be someone who would hire her.

But after the first mouthful of whatever kind of fortified wine happened to be in whatever bottle was offered, Sheila would realize it was already too late. Anywhere she went, they’d smell the alcohol on her breath, then give her that look they always gave Indians.

“Not Indians, Ma. We’re Native Americans. We’ve been here a lot longer than the whites, and they owe us! They murdered us, and stole our land, and they owe us!”

As she heard the voice of her son echo in her mind, Sheila Harrar’s eyes flooded with tears. This morning, though, instead of giving in to them she wiped them away with the dirty sleeve of her best blouse and choked back the sob that rose in her throat. Taking a deep breath that rattled in her croupy lungs, she looked up from the paper she’d snitched from the lobby when she’d come home a few hours ago, and stared out the grimy window into the street outside. No point looking at the room itself; Sheila already knew every crack in the plaster, every curl in the peeling paint.

What would Danny think of her if he could see her now?

But he wasn’t going to see her, because he wasn’t ever going to come home.

So what did it matter where she lived? What did it matter if she didn’t still live in the little apartment they used to share in Yesler Terrace, back when they still thought things were going to get better for them? Danny didn’t know where she lived, because Danny was dead.

And Sheila knew who killed him.

Richard Kraven had killed her eighteen-year-old son, just like he’d killed all those others. Sheila knew it deep inside her guts, where the knowledge burned away at her, consuming her spirit just the way the wine she drank to try to quench the fire was consuming her body.

But without Danny, who cared?

Nobody.

Nobody had cared when she’d tried to get the police to do something about Danny. She’d done all the right things. Every day, she’d gone to the Public Safety Building, and filled out all the right forms, and talked to all the right people. But she could see that nobody cared, and she knew why.

Because she was an Indian.

Not a Native American. Not one of those proud people Danny had always talked about.

No, Sheila Harrar was just an Indian from the projects, and even though they didn’t tell her right to her face, she knew what they were thinking. Her son was just like her—just another Indian. Probably got drunk and walked out, and didn’t even bother to say good-bye to his own mother. When she shouted that it wasn’t true, that Danny went to school, and worked, they hadn’t believed her. If Danny had been white—if
she
had been white—it would have been different. Then they would have cared, they would have tried to find him. But she and Danny were Indians, and nobody gave a damn what happened to them.

After Danny didn’t come home that day, Sheila stopped caring what happened, too. The ache of not having him anymore hurt so much that she started drinking just to dull the pain, and after a while she was drinking so much she couldn’t make it to work sometimes. Then she’d gotten a job that only started in the afternoon, and that was okay for a while, until she started sitting up drinking all night, and sleeping all day. After that there’d been other jobs, but they didn’t last very long, because Sheila’s drinking was getting worse and worse. Finally she’d had to move out of the project, down here into the hotel in the International District. Since then, one day was just like another. She slept in her tiny room, promised herself that the next day she’d get it together, but every day turned out just like the one before.

Now, as she reread the article about the man who’d killed her son, she knew that today would be different. Today she really would get it together, and not drink, and maybe even find a job.

But most important, she would talk to Anne Jeffers, and Anne Jeffers would listen to her, and believe her, and even though it wouldn’t bring Danny back, at least it might help.

If she knew someone else at least cared what had happened to Danny, maybe some of the pain would go away.

Leaving the paper lying on her unmade bed, Sheila went out into the hall and shuffled down to the pay phone at the far end. She fumbled with the tattered telephone book that hung from a chain beneath the phone, praying that the page she needed wouldn’t be torn out. Then, when she found the number she was looking for, she reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out one of the quarters she’d cadged from someone the night before. As she held the quarter up to the slot, she hesitated, and for a moment thought of the wine it could buy her. Danny was more important.

She dropped the coin into the slot, waited for the dial tone, then punched in the number of the
Seattle Herald
. Minutes later, after being moved from one extension to another, she came to the end of her search.

“To leave a message for Anne Jeffers, push ‘one’ now.”

Sheila Harrar pushed the button on the phone and began to speak: “My name is Sheila Harrar, and Richard Kraven killed my son. If you care, you can come and see me.”

Mumbling her address and the number of the pay phone, Sheila Harrar hung up the receiver and trudged back to her room. She would wait for a while, just to see what would happen.

Maybe Anne Jeffers would care.

Or maybe she was just like all the others.