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?
CHAPTER 8
They’d been in the air almost two hours, and if the uncomfortable silence between Anne Jeffers and him was going to go on for another three, Mark Blakemoor decided, he’d have a couple of drinks and then try to get some sleep.
He’d done far too much drinking lately, though, especially in the ten months since Patsy had left. Eighteen years and then the marriage had simply been over. All she’d said was that she couldn’t take it anymore, that she couldn’t deal with being a cop’s wife any longer. But what else could he do? He couldn’t change careers — didn’t even want to. On the other hand, Patsy had complained about his drinking, too, and if he wanted to be really honest about it, she was right — he had been drinking too much. Besides, even one drink on an airplane always left him with a hangover. Better to spend the time finding out what, if anything, Richard Kraven had told Anne Jeffers before he’d died.
“Anything you want to talk about?” he asked, shifting his muscular six-foot-two, 210-pound frame a fraction of an inch in a futile effort to make himself more comfortable in the cramped seat.
Anne had been staring out the window at the endless expanse of clouds that lay in an unbroken blanket a few thousand feet below the plane, and at first the detective’s words didn’t register. Then she sighed, rubbed at her stiffening neck and glanced over at him. “About Glen?” she asked, deliberately pretending she couldn’t read Blakemoor like a book. From what she’d gathered about his recent divorce, the man had barely paid any attention to his own wife when he’d been married to her; so why on earth would he now be interested in her husband, whom he didn’t even know? Then she relented: after all, Blakemoor had been willing to give up his seat on this flight, even though it hadn’t come to that. “Or is it Richard Kraven you want to talk about?”
“Either way,” Blakemoor replied. “But I guess I’m not real good with the sympathy thing. Patsy always used to say—” He cut his own words short, reddening slightly. “Oh, the hell with what Patsy used to say, right? So come on, give. What did Kraven say? I’ve got a lot of open cases back home. If you can close even one of them for me, it’d sure help.”
Anne shook her head. “Believe me, Mark, if he’d said anything relevant, I’d tell you. Even if I didn’t use it in a story, I’d still tell you. You’ve put too much effort into this for too many years. But it was the same old thing: he didn’t have anything to do with anything, he was framed, there’s a conspiracy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”