Black Lightning (7 page)

“Where’s Glen?” he asked. “Is he okay?”

Alan shrugged. “He’s in cardiac care,” he said. “Find out where it is while I call the office.”

Leaving Dover to get the information from the nurse, Alan crossed to the pay phones that lined one wall of the emergency room, found one that wasn’t broken and dialed the number that would bypass the switchboard and ring directly at the desk of Rita Alvarez, Glen’s secretary. As briefly as he could, he told her what had happened.

Sitting at Glen’s desk, where she had answered Alan Cline’s call, Rita Alvarez glanced at the small television her boss had told her to set up in the office that morning in case his wife showed up on CNN. Now, as she listened to Alan’s disjointed account of Glen’s heart attack, she found herself gazing at Anne, who, along with the warden and the rest of the witnesses to the execution, had just entered a room filled with reporters, cameras, and lights. “Go find out what’s happening,” she said. “Just stay with Glen, and let me know what’s going on. I’ll take care of everything else.” Hanging up the phone, Rita Alvarez went to work, first making a list of the people who had to be notified immediately, starting with Anne and progressing quickly through clients who had appointments with Glen that day, the firm’s attorney, and some of his closest friends. Less than a minute later she was speaking to the operator at the prison where Anne had just witnessed Richard Kraven’s execution.

“It’s an emergency,” she explained. “I need to talk to Anne Jeffers right away. She’s there at the prison. She was one of the witnesses—”

“Everyone wants to talk to everyone who witnessed the execution,” the operator interjected. “And everyone says it’s an emergency. If you’d like me to add your name to the list—”

“I’m secretary to Mrs. Jeffers’s husband,” Rita interrupted. “He’s just had a very bad heart attack. He may be dying.”

Anne hung up the phone but lingered over it, her hand unconsciously resting on the receiver as if maintaining physical contact with the instrument could somehow keep her connected to Seattle and whatever was happening there. A heart attack? Glen? But how was that possible? He wasn’t even forty-five yet! And he jogged every day, watched his weight—both of them were the quintessential Seattleites, spending as much time as they could out-of-doors, skiing at Crystal Mountain and Snoqualmie in the winter, rowing on the lake and exploring the San Juan Islands in sea kayaks in the summer. People like Glen didn’t have heart attacks!

Then she remembered the day almost ten years ago when she’d heard that Danny Branson had dropped dead while jogging, and Danny, only thirty-two at the time, had always been a major jock, running track all through their high school years. So what was life, anyway? Just a big lottery? Even if you did everything right, did you just drop dead?

The terrible feeling of fear and helplessness that had come over her as she listened to Rita Alvarez’s report of Glen’s heart attack began to transform into a calm determination: what had happened to Danny Branson would not happen to Glen. He would recover; together, they would learn everything there was to know about heart attacks, and they would see to it that he didn’t have another one. As the last of the terror faded from her mind, her fingers finally left the phone and she turned around to find Mark Blakemoor watching her, his eyes betraying a concern he rarely allowed to be exposed, either on the job or off.

“Has something happened, Anne?” the detective asked.

“It’s my husband,” she replied. “He’s had a heart attack. I have to get home right away. My flight’s not till tomorrow.” She felt panic rise. “I
have
to get home!”

Mark Blakemoor reached into the inside pocket of his rumpled gabardine jacket and handed her an envelope. “My flight leaves in a couple of hours,” he told her. “If there isn’t room for both of us, you fly, and I’ll go home on your ticket tomorrow.”

Anne’s brows rose a fraction of an inch. “And in return?” she asked. There had to be a catch: in all her years of dealing with cops, Mark Blakemoor had been the single individual who refused to divulge anything unless he was promised a future favor as the price. Now, to her surprise, he shook his head.

“This isn’t work,” he said. “This is personal. With personal, everything’s a freebie. Okay?”

“Let’s go,” Anne replied, instinctively knowing that he didn’t want to be thanked for the offer.

Five minutes later they were out of the prison, being driven through the crowd of demonstrators and reporters in a car the warden had supplied.

At least, Anne reflected as she heard the muffled questions the press was shouting after the closed vehicle, I don’t have to keep talking about the execution. One more article for the
Herald
and then, perhaps, she would take a leave of absence, and concentrate on Glen’s recovery.

As the car sped away from the prison, the thought lingered in her mind, and the more she thought about it, the more it appealed to her.

After all, soon it would be summer, and school would be out, and the whole family would be together. Then her mood darkened: how much of the family would there still be?

What if Glen didn’t make it? What would she do? How would she cope? How could she live without Glen?

CHAPTER 7

T
otal silence hung over the tenth grade journalism class at Maples School, named for the grove of trees within which it had been constructed back in 1923. Heather Jeffers and her classmates gazed fixedly at the television set that had been brought into the room so they could watch and discuss the coverage of Richard Kraven’s execution; the set had been on since eight-thirty, and until the stroke of nine—noon in Connecticut, where the execution was taking place—several of the students had been speculating on how close to the deadline it would get before the execution was stayed. Maude Brink, who had been leading the discussion of both the media coverage of the execution and capital punishment itself for the last week, had warned them that this time a stay was unlikely, but some of the kids clung to their hopes right up until the end. What struck Mrs. Brink as most interesting was that those students most strongly opposed to capital punishment were the most certain that the execution would inevitably be delayed, while those who were the execution’s strongest supporters were convinced it would take place as scheduled.

Obviously, each faction believed that in the end the system would validate his or her own view.

Yet when the execution had taken place and the first word had come out of the prison that Richard Kraven was dead, the entire class had finally experienced the reality of it. This was not a television show, or a movie, or a book, in which the execution affected only a man who was the invention of a writer’s mind. This time it was real, and a man who had only a few seconds ago been as much alive as each of them was now dead. As they all watched numbly, the news anchor on the screen began cutting to correspondents around the country, each of them interviewing someone whose life would be directly affected by the execution.

First there was Edna Kraven, being interviewed in her small home in the south end of Seattle, not far from Boeing Field.

As the camera’s relentless eye zoomed in on the tear-stained face of Richard Kraven’s mother, Heather and her friends squirmed uncomfortably, watching the woman’s most private emotions exposed for all the world to watch.

“He was always a good boy,” Edna whispered, her fingers twisting a crumpled handkerchief with which she blotted at red-rimmed eyes every few seconds. “Smarter than all the other kids, always interested in everything, and always helping everyone. Everybody liked my Richard. How could they do this to him? Why did they want to? He never hurt anyone—never! It isn’t right! It just isn’t!” The camera held steady on the distraught woman as a fit of sobbing overcame her; then, in what seemed an almost reluctant retreat from her, so she could grieve in private, it cut away to Richard’s brother Rory, who sat across a worn coffee table from his mother.

“It must be almost as hard for you as for your mother,” the pretty blond correspondent said, her face carefully composed into an expression designed to tell the viewers that this job was not easy for her. “Tell us, what went through your mind as the clock at the prison struck noon?”

Rory Kraven, visibly nervous in front of the camera, glanced at his mother, then shrugged. “I—I guess I didn’t really think anything,” he stammered. “I mean, I know what my brother did, and—” But before he could continue, his mother cut him off.

“Nothing!” she flared. “My Richard did nothing, and you know it! How dare you speak ill of your brother? If you were half the man he was—”

As some invisible director at the network decided that Edna Kraven’s furious outburst was less compelling than her grief, the image on the screen abruptly switched to an elegantly dressed and perfectly coiffed woman of perhaps sixty, who was being interviewed by another attractive young network correspondent.

“I’m with Arla Talmadge in Atlanta. Mrs. Talmadge, how do you feel today?”

Arla Talmadge touched the corner of one eye with a perfectly pressed handkerchief, then sighed and shook her head. “I’m not sure what I feel anymore. Ever since Richard Kraven killed my son, I—well, there’s just an emptiness inside me. Did he say anything before they—well, before they did what they did?”

“Early indications are that he didn’t,” the reporter replied.

“Then we’ll never know why he did it, will we?” Mrs. Talmadge asked. “And I can’t help wondering, what was really accomplished today? After all, killing that man won’t bring my son or any of the others back, will it? I keep wondering if maybe he wouldn’t have—I don’t know—
explained
it all someday, I suppose. But now …” She drew in a shaky breath, let it out, then shook her head again. “I just don’t know,” she went on. “I suppose there’s nothing to do now except try to go on living.”

For almost fifteen minutes it went on, the images on the screen shifting as the families and friends of the victims were interviewed, some of them expressing relief that at last this grim chapter in their lives was over; others barely able to contain their rage that Richard Kraven hadn’t been tortured before he died; still others echoing Arla Talmadge’s sad sense of resignation in the face of the inevitable.

It was in the midst of one of those interviews that the network anchor cut in to announce that the warden was ready to speak to the press, and the scene dissolved to a room painted in a sickly green in which lights had been set up and several microphones placed on the shiny surface of a gray metal table.

The classroom buzzed with anticipation, and then the students began nudging each other as they recognized Heather Jeffers’s mother in the group of witnesses who followed Warden Wendell Rustin into the room. Her face pale, her expression strained, she hovered near the wall just inside the door.

“It’s really
her
, Heather,” someone said from the back of the room. “It’s your mom! Cool!”

As the warden started to speak, Heather ignored her classmate’s comment, her eyes fixing on the screen.

“At noon today, Richard Kraven was executed,” Wendell Rustin began. “He entered the chamber at 11:55, and was strapped into the chair. The electrodes were applied, and at exactly noon he was exposed to a charge of two thousand volts. At two minutes past noon he was pronounced dead.” The warden fell silent for a moment, then appeared to look directly into the camera. “Are there any questions?”

Instantly, a babble of voices emerged from the television speakers, but then Rustin pointed to someone, and the rest of the crowd subsided into a restless silence. “Did he say anything? Did he confess?”

The warden glanced toward Anne Jeffers, who shook her head and seemed about to speak when suddenly a door opened and a uniformed guard stepped inside and whispered into Anne’s ear. A look of surprise crossed her face and she rushed from the room.

In the classroom, Heather Jeffers’s schoolmates all turned to gaze curiously at her, as if by dint of being Anne Jeffers’s daughter, she should be able to explain her mother’s sudden departure. Maude Brink, seeing the look of worry that had now come over Heather’s face, switched off the television. “All right,” she began as she moved briskly to the front of the room and faced the class. “What do we think? Was the coverage fair? Was it justified? Was it responsible reporting of news, or was it sensationalism? Who wants to start?”

Three hands instantly went up, and Mrs. Brink nodded to Adam Steiner, who sat in the back row and rarely spoke in class.

“How come they always have to talk to the families?” he asked. “I mean, Mrs. Kraven didn’t do anything—why couldn’t they just leave her alone?”

“How do you know she didn’t do anything?” someone else asked. “She must have done something to have raised a nut-case like Richard Kraven!”

“Maybe he had something wrong with his genes,” a third voice suggested. “Nobody knows what causes people to do things like that.”

“I heard he was a Satanist,” someone else called out, and Mrs. Brink finally raised her hand to bring some order back into the discussion.

“For now, let’s stick to the coverage, and not speculate on Richard Kraven’s motives, all right? This is a class in current events and journalism, not criminology—” The teacher fell silent as the door to her classroom opened. One of the principal’s secretaries came in, nodded curtly to her, and without any apology for disrupting the class, spoke directly to one of the students.

“Heather? Could you come with me, please? Mrs. Garrett would like to speak with you for a moment.”

Maude Brink was about to object that whatever it might be could surely wait until her class was over, but then she remembered Heather’s mother’s mysterious disappearance from the press conference, and gave the teenager an encouraging smile as she left the classroom. Something, obviously, had gone very wrong.

As Heather entered Olivia Garrett’s office, the principal gestured her onto the sofa, then sat in the wing-backed chair instead of returning to her desk.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,” she said, approaching the subject with the directness for which she was famous throughout the school. “Your father’s secretary just called.”

“Rita?” Heather breathed. “Rita Alvarez?”

Mrs. Garrett nodded. “Your father has apparently had a heart attack. He’s been taken to the hospital, and your mother wants you to go there right away. Mrs. Alvarez is picking your brother up at his school, then she’ll come—”

But Heather Jeffers was no longer listening to Olivia Garrett. Instead she was trying to absorb what she had just been told. Her father? In the hospital?

A heart attack?

If her mother wanted her to go to the hospital—and Kevin, too—it must be serious! But just this morning he’d been fine! He’d gone out jogging, and when he’d come back, he hadn’t even been out of breath. So how could he have a heart attack?

Suddenly fifteen-year-old Heather felt far younger than she was, and far more vulnerable.

Was her father going to die?