Black Lightning Part 16

CHAPTER 31.

Sources within the police department will neither confirm nor deny that they are investigating the possibility that Richard Kraven did not act alone, and that his execution may have triggered the beginning of a new wave of murders, with Kraven's accomplice now acting by himself. The same sources also refused to discuss rumors that in light of Miss Davis's career as a prost.i.tute, the long-disbanded task force investigating the Green River murders might be reconst.i.tuted. Police are, for the moment, treating the Capitol Hill slaying as an isolated event, and are so far refusing to entertain the possibility that it could mark the first incident in a new wave of serial killings. In the meantime...

The man felt utter rage when he read Anne Jeffers's article in the paper that morning. For one thing, it had been buried deep in the second section, when it clearly belonged on the front page. After all, it was a murder he he had committed, and it had been every bit as gruesome as any that Richard Kraven had ever performed. had committed, and it had been every bit as gruesome as any that Richard Kraven had ever performed.

Hadn't he done it the very same way?

Hadn't he cut open the girl's chest and hacked out her heart and lungs?

But the other murders made the front page, while his had barely shown up at all.

And he knew why. It was the reporter, Anne Jeffers. She didn't think he was important enough. That was why she hadn't put any of her stories about Shawnelle Davis where they belonged. He'd stewed about it for more than an hour, his anger growing steadily.

A little before nine the idea had come to him.

He had to get Anne Jeffers's full attention.

And he knew exactly how to get it: He would find out where she lived, and the next time he did something, he'd leave her a little souvenir.

Something on her doorstep...

Picking up the phone book, he flipped through the pages then ran his finger down a column until he found it. He could barely believe it-the b.i.t.c.h reporter lived right up the street from him!

Before he even thought about what he might do when he got there, the man set out, quickly walking north. It wasn't long before he emerged from the district of shabby apartment buildings around Group Health into the slightly less run-down area that bordered the better neighborhood where Anne and Glen Jeffers lived.

He walked past the Jeffers house on the other side of the street, gazing at it almost surrept.i.tiously. It was large, and stood at the top of a slope, well back from the sidewalk.

And it had a large porch.

Large enough so that he could toss something onto it from the curb if he had to. He wouldn't even have to risk approaching the house, which might leave footprints, or something else that could identify him.

The man walked up the street another block, circled around a second block, then started back toward home, still on the opposite side of the street from the Jeffers house.

He was almost abreast of it when someone emerged from the house next door.

A woman, stepping out onto her front porch to pick up the morning paper.

The man stared at her high-piled blond hair, her overbright makeup, and her green and yellow dress.

Cheap.

Just like Shawnelle Davis.

Now a new idea-an even better idea-was developing in his head.

When the woman disappeared back into her house a moment later, the man remained, rooted to the spot, studying the house, then moved around to view the structure from the alley behind.

Several times the man left the area. But drawn to the house next to Anne Jeffers's like a moth to a flame, he kept coming back.

Finally, in midafternoon, the woman came out again.

She started down the sidewalk, and the man followed her.

He followed her all the way to the Group Health complex and into the emergency room on Thomas Street.

He pushed through the main doors after her, pausing in the foyer just long enough to see her take her place at the reception desk and slip her nameplate into a holder: JOYCE COTTRELL JOYCE COTTRELL.

The name fixed in his memory, the man pushed deeper into the hospital, moving through the corridors until he came to the main entrance in the new wing facing Sixteenth. Leaving the building, he crossed Sixteenth and was soon back home. He picked up the telephone book again.

There she was, Joyce Cottrell, listed with an address on Sixteenth Avenue North. Right next door to the Jefferses.

The man dialed the number, let it ring twenty times, and hung up.

For the rest of the afternoon and through the evening the man kept calling the number, never getting an answer. Each time he dialed, his confidence grew. By nine-thirty, when he left his apartment to walk the few blocks north for the second time that day, he knew what he would find.

A dark house, totally empty.

But when he got there, the house was not dark at all. Lights glowed in two of the downstairs rooms and one of the upstairs ones.

The man lingered on the sidewalk across the street, watching. And then, at exactly ten, one of the downstairs lights went off, as did the upstairs one, and another light upstairs came on. All at the same instant.

The man smiled. Either three people inside all had thrown light switches at exactly the same moment, or the lights were on a timer.

Walking quickly over to Volunteer Park, the man found a pay phone by the conservatory. He dialed Joyce Cottrell's phone number one final time.

As before, the phone rang on and on but no one picked it up.

Joyce Cottrell lived alone.

Returning to the empty house, he began looking for a way to get inside.

Within less than a minute he'd found it.

Joyce Cottrell had never moved the extra key from the hiding place where her mother had always left it, under the mat on the back porch. Just like his own mother and hundreds of thousands of others.

The man liked Joyce Cottrell's house. It was much bigger than any house he'd ever been in before-big enough that his entire apartment could have been put into just its living room-though it wasn't at all what he'd expected it to be. Shawnelle Davis's apartment had looked just as he would have imagined a wh.o.r.e's place to look-the furniture had been as cheap-looking as Shawnelle herself. But Joyce Cottrell had nice furniture, and everything looked clean and fresh, like it was brand-new.

The man prowled slowly through the house, looking at everything, touching only one thing. Then, as it grew close to the time when Joyce Cottrell would come home from work, he slipped into the master bedroom.

As he waited in her closet for Joyce to come up to her room, his nose was filled with the scent of sachet. The lavender sweetness instantly triggered a memory from when he was a little boy.

His mother's closet had smelled like this.

He inhaled deeply, immediately transported back to a day long ago when he had gone into his mother's closet to play dress-up in her shoes, doing his best to balance on her high heels.

She had caught him.

Caught him, and spanked him, even though he'd been very careful not to touch any of her clothes or hurt the shoes.

He'd been forbidden ever to go into his mother's room again, closed out of her bedroom as coldly as he'd been closed out of the rest of his mother's world.

Now, as the man listened to Joyce Cottrell's footsteps coming up to the second floor, his temples throbbed with rage.

Pressing his eye to the crack in the door he had left slightly ajar, he watched Joyce undress, his anger growing with each pa.s.sing second.

The fingers of one hand clutched the knife the man had brought up from the kitchen; his other hand unconsciously stroked the hardness that had grown between his legs.

By the time Joyce Cottrell had stripped down to her underwear and moved to the closet to hang up her dress, the man was ready.

Today, Joyce Cottrell had seen a naked man in the backyard next door.

Tonight, she found a fully clothed one waiting in her closet.

The one in the backyard next door had been holding a broken shaver.

The one in her closet was grasping a knife. But all Joyce saw as she pulled her closet door open was a glint of light reflecting off the long blade that hovered above her, and a pair of eyes, flas.h.i.+ng with the pent-up fury the man had been suppressing so long.

"Love me!" he commanded as the knife slashed down to plunge deep into Joyce Cottrell's breast. "Just love me!"

Joyce Cottrell died before the man's words registered in her mind, collapsing to the bedroom floor like a sagging balloon.

Now, fully caught up in his fantasy, seeing his mother's face instead of Joyce's, the man set to work. Laying open Joyce Cottrell's chest, tearing at her heart, his rage poured forth. He talked as he worked, saying all the things to Joyce Cottrell that he had never been able to say to his mother.

Finally, the hardness between his legs no longer to be denied, the man pulled down his pants and mounted Joyce Cottrell's body, barely able to keep from screaming out in ecstasy as for the first time in his life he experienced s.e.xual release.

CHAPTER 32.

The Experimenter's eyes bored into the darkness.

The night was silent, yet something had awakened him. Even during the times when most men wouldn't have been able to sleep at all, the Experimenter had always been able to close his eyes to the world beyond his own mind, to retreat within himself to rest undisturbed.

But tonight some outside force-a force over which he had no control-had roused him. With the silence of a phantom, he explored the upper floor, but all he could hear was the slow, steady breathing of the family who lay in their beds, sleeping in peace, blissfully unaware of his presence. At the top of the stairs he paused, not out of any sense of indecision, but to collect data with his acutely honed senses.

Whatever had awakened him was not in the house, for other than the normal creaks and groans of an ancient structure s.h.i.+fting uncomfortably in the night, all was quiet. Satisfied that whatever had roused him from his rest was beyond the protecting walls, he moved down the stairs and through the rooms of the lower floor, gazing out the windows into the comparative light of the urban night, searching for.... something. If he saw it-even sensed it-he would recognize it at once. But all was quiet beyond the windows; nothing moved; he felt no hidden presence lurking in the shadows.

Yet something had awakened him. He would not rest until he had identified that which had intruded into his sleep.

He moved into the kitchen, then out onto the back porch. The night air was cool against his skin, and unbidden memories of other times when he'd stood naked in the cool of the night flooded into his mind.

Nights when, his experiment finished but the ruined remains of his subject still to be disposed of, he'd stepped out of his laboratory into the refres.h.i.+ng cool of the night, sometimes to vent his frustration at failure in a howl of rage; sometimes simply to wash himself in the river even before beginning the tedious-but very necessary-clean-up process.

Sometimes, though, he'd simply stood naked beneath the eternity of stars sparkling above him, feeling like a newborn child of the universe, his skin glittering darkly with a glowing sheen of blood released only moments earlier from the heart of his latest subject. On those nights he would suck hungrily at the cold night air as if by inhaling deeply enough he might somehow take in enough of the life-sustaining oxygen to support not only himself, but also the ruined body that still lay inside the motor home. But even as he filled his lungs, he'd always known that oxygen was not enough. Without the spark, without the black, invisible lightning that emanated from somewhere deep within the body itself, no amount of air put back into his subject's lungs could restore its body to life. That was when despair always overcame him, when the cool of the night air that had felt like the caress of a lover only a moment earlier became a dark cloak concealing an unseen enemy.

Tonight, though, the darkness was neither lover nor enemy. Tonight it was an enigma, bearing within its folds something that he needed to discover.

He stood still, waiting.

He felt the night, all his senses reaching out, searching for some clue as to exactly what had awakened him. Then, out of the steady drone of insects, frogs and traffic, a new sound emerged.

A latch clicking.

Hinges creaking.

Another latch opening.

A spring stretching, then the soft clack of a screen door striking wood siding.

Next door.

Though no light showed, someone was coming out of the house next door.

The Experimenter stood motionless, the patience of a scientist serving him now. No need to turn, no need to move at all. All he need do was wait, concealed in the dark shadows of the porch.

Soon, the source of his disturbance would reveal itself.

He had not long to wait, for within less than half a minute he heard the heavy tread of thick-soled shoes on wooden steps feeling their way tentatively through the darkness. The mind of the Experimenter automatically began applying the laws of logic. Whoever was descending the steps next door was not familiar with them, had not become accustomed to their width or their height.

Ergo, whoever it was did not belong there.

Perhaps that had been what awakened him; the unexpected sound of someone forcing entry to the house next door. From long experience he knew that it was possible to sleep through any noise, as long as it was an expected norm, while an unexpected sound could banish sleep instantly from an attentive mind. As long as he had existed he had been in possession of an attentive mind. Yet still he did not move, for now his interest was piqued. He hung in the shadows of the night like a phantom, waiting for the intruder to show himself.

A dark figure appeared, carrying a burden which for a moment was nothing more than a gray and shapeless ma.s.s barely visible in the blackness that surrounded it. But as the figure moved farther from the house, it came closer to the dim light that glowed above a narrow alley. In this no-man's-land between two rows of opposing backyards, the intruder became more visible.

It was a man. The burden he bore was instantly recognizable to the watcher from the darkness.

A body.

A human body, held clumsily, with no wrappings to prevent blood from dripping to the ground.

As the figure carried the body closer to the alley, closer to the light, every muscle in the Experimenter's body tensed.

The body had been stripped naked, just as he himself had always denuded the bodies of his subjects.