Black Lightning (18 page)

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.

CHAPTER 26

A
nne Jeffers ducked through the front door of the Red Robin on Fourth Avenue just before the rain that had been threatening all morning finally began to fall in earnest. If it didn’t let up within the hour—and she was pretty sure it wouldn’t—she’d have the devil of a time getting a cab back to the paper. Well, maybe she could beg a ride with Mark Blakemoor, unless he’d gotten chewed out over letting himself be quoted in this morning’s paper. But when Mark himself hurried through the door a second later, peeled off his raincoat, and proceeded to shake water not only all over her, but onto a couple of complete strangers as well, she knew his mood wouldn’t matter.

“Did you drive?” he asked, confirming her certainty that he’d left his car in the garage. “ ’Cause if you didn’t, I’m going to get completely soaked going back to the office.”

“We’ll split a cab if we can find one,” Anne told him, relieved that he hadn’t mentioned the story in the
Herald
. Moving deeper into the restaurant, she asked the hostess for a table for two. As she threaded her way through the restaurant behind the waitress, she decided that maybe Mark wasn’t going to chew her out over this morning’s story after all. Surely he couldn’t think she’d happily give him a ride back to his office if he spent an hour ragging on her for suggesting that the department might not be doing its job quite perfectly. On the other hand, there was another possibility, which might be even worse than getting chewed out.

Mark Blakemoor, she’d noticed, had been giving her a little more help with her search of the Kraven files than she would have expected. In fact, he’d been giving her a
lot
more help, especially given that anything she found that might be worth a story would almost by definition be critical of the department. After all, if she unearthed something that was news, it would have to be something the department had overlooked.

So why was Mark Blakemoor helping her, and why had he asked her to have lunch with him?

Obviously, he’d developed some kind of crush on her. She already knew what the proof of it would be—if he didn’t give her a hard time over the story, he was definitely getting the hots for her.

As she seated herself at the table, she realized that the idea of his infatuation with her didn’t offend her at all. Indeed, it was flattering, especially since she knew she would never admit to him that she was aware of his feelings, let alone doing anything to encourage them. What’s more, the detective wasn’t bad-looking, and it was nice to know that Glen wasn’t the only man in the world who found her attractive. As Mark Blakemoor dropped into the seat opposite her, Anne had to check a sudden urge to flirt with him, and felt herself starting to blush.

“Don’t worry,” Blakemoor assured her, misreading her blush. “I’m not going to ride you about the story. I’m not saying Ackerly and some of the others aren’t pissed—not to mention McCarty—but what the hell. You’re only doing your job, right?”

Suspicions confirmed, Anne thought. So now what do I do? “Well, if you’re not going to chew me out, to what do I owe this lunch? What was it you couldn’t just tell me over the phone?”

Blakemoor didn’t answer until they’d both given their orders. Then: “Sheila Harrar.”

Anne pursed her lips. The name was familiar, but she couldn’t quite … Then it came to her. “The woman who called me, whose number was all garbled.”

Blakemoor nodded. “It took a while, but I finally found it in my case notes. Except there wasn’t much to find. She’s an Indian—pardon me, a Native American—and she made a lot of calls to the task force a few years ago. Claimed Kraven killed her son, and wanted us to go right out and arrest him.”

“Which you obviously didn’t do,” Anne observed dryly, though her words apparently had no effect on Blakemoor.

“No reason to,” the detective replied. “No body, no signs of foul play, not much of anything.”

“But her son is really gone?”

“Depends on what you mean by gone,” Blakemoor countered. “If you mean is he still around Seattle, the answer is no. Or if he is, there doesn’t seem to be any record of him being here. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean much. The boy was eighteen when he disappeared, which means he could have simply taken off, and it really isn’t a police matter. Despite what you hear to the contrary, adults in this country still have the right to go where they please, and tell or not tell whoever they want, even including their mothers.”

“Whomever
,” Anne said.

Mark gazed at her sourly and shrugged. “Whatever.”

“So the police did nothing?” Anne asked in the journalist’s tone she’d carefully honed over the years until she could make even the simplest question sound like an accusation.

Blakemoor’s big hands spread in a dismissive gesture. “What was there to do? The kid went to school at the university—Kraven taught there. Big deal. He was never a specialist in students—in fact, it seems to me he generally steered pretty clear of them. And it turned out Danny Harrar was one of Kraven’s very own students, and as far as I’m concerned, that almost eliminates him. His pattern was strangers.”

“His pattern was to have no pattern,” Anne observed, her brows arching with skepticism. “Which means he could have done one of his students, and it would have fit in just fine. What’s the deal on the mother?”

“A drunk,” Blakemoor sighed. “For all I know, she could have been one all along. Who knows? Maybe that’s why the kid split.” Quickly, he sketched out Sheila Harrar’s recent history, which hadn’t taken him more than a few minutes of asking questions, first in the Yesler Terrace projects up at the foot of Broadway, then down in the bars around Pioneer Square. Pulling his notebook out of his jacket pocket, he copied an address onto a clean page, tore it out and handed it to Anne. As she took the page, their fingers touched, and Mark’s face instantly flushed a bright red. “Sorry it took so long,” he mumbled, obviously flustered by his reaction to their contact.

“I’d almost forgotten it,” Anne admitted, tucking the sheet of notepaper into her gritchel and deliberately taking enough time to let Mark recompose himself. For the rest of the lunch, both of them were careful to see that their hands stayed well away from each other, and that the conversation never veered toward a personal level. And although it was still raining when they left the restaurant an hour later, neither of them suggested sharing a cab. Mark turned and hurried off in one direction, while Anne hurried just as quickly in the other. A brief flirtation was one thing, she told herself as she searched the street for an empty taxi, but from now on she would keep that particular relationship on a strictly professional level. The next time she needed help with the Kraven files, she would ask Lois Ackerly.

Who, Anne was fairly certain, would turn her down flat.

Well, what the hell—she’d just do it all herself. The last thing she needed in her life right now was a Seattle detective mooning over her.

Still, it
was
flattering.…