Now — now that Richard Kraven had been executed — the time had come for him to begin again. The body of his knowledge would expand, and at the same time he would prove once and for all just how much smarter he was than those who sought to judge him.
Outside the window, a movement caught his eye. He glanced down at the street below.
A woman was walking along the sidewalk.
Going to work?
Returning home from a completed shift?
Did it matter? Not really. All that mattered was that the woman had caught his eye. Perhaps, now that the time was right and he could soon begin again, he would begin with her.
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps he would begin again with someone else entirely.
The Experimenter smiled to himself as he remembered how it had been the last time, when all the investigators — and the teams they’d put together to examine the scattered bodies — had carried out their fruitless searches of his subjects’ backgrounds, looking for a common denominator that would tie them all together, tie the victims to the single person who had caused their deaths. Of course they had never found that common denominator, so now when it all began again, they would go running back to their records, searching yet again.
Searching for something they would never find.
The thought of the havoc his new experiments would cause brought a smile to his lips, and he finally turned away from the window. The day had been long, and filled with excitement, and now it was time for him to sleep.
Tomorrow he would begin designing the next series of experiments.
Unconsciously, the Experimenter flexed his fingers once more, this time in anticipation.…
CHAPTER 11
A gray sky hovered low over Seattle the next morning, and as people all over the city huddled over their first cups of coffee, newspapers were opened to the editorial page. In kitchens, coffee shops, snack rooms, and offices, nearly everyone in the city began the day by reading the column that had been dictated from the Group Health Critical Care Unit on Capitol Hill the day before:
Anne Jeffers …
A Few Last Thoughts
About Richard Kraven
At noon yesterday, a reign of terror that spanned five years, as many states, and a dozen cities and towns came to an end when Richard Kraven was electrocuted. Though convicted of three slayings, Kraven was the prime suspect in many others, including at least seven still unsolved cases in his native city of Seattle. At the request of the condemned man, this reporter was among the last people to speak to him before his execution. During the course of that conversation …
“What the hell does this broad think she’s doing?”
The booming voice that filled his office in the Public Safety Building was familiar enough that Mark Blakemoor didn’t even have to look up from the report he was studying. From the moment he’d scanned Anne Jeffers’s column in this morning’s Herald, the detective had been expecting Jack McCarty to come barging into the office Blakemoor shared with Lois Ackerly. McCarty’s own copy of the paper would be crushed in his huge fist, his normally ruddy face flushed to the point where anyone who didn’t know him might suspect that the white-haired chief of detectives was about to suffer a terminal stroke. Sure enough, here he was. Mark smoothly moved his coffee cup aside just as the chief slammed the offending newspaper onto the desk.
“ ‘At least seven unsolved cases’?” McCarty demanded. “What is this crap? And when did she write it? I thought you said her husband was in the fuckin’ hospital!”
“He is,” Blakemoor replied mildly, leaning back in his chair to savor his boss’s rage. “I sent her some flowers this morning. Thought it might cheer her up.” McCarty’s face turned even redder, causing Mark to wonder if it could actually be possible for a human head to explode. Then, as a vein began to throb in McCarty’s neck, he decided a little extra agitation might just be in order. “You know, if Ackerly heard you call Anne Jeffers a ‘broad,’ she’d have a sexism citation in your jacket before lunchtime.”
The jab had the intended effect. Jack McCarty spun around, his eyes searching the area outside Blakemoor’s office for any sign of Blakemoor’s partner. But if Lois Ackerly had arrived at the unit yet, she was nowhere to be seen. “Jeez, Blakemoor, don’t say things like that. I only got three more years to retirement, and the last thing I need is another chauvinist-pig chit.” He dropped heavily into the battered wooden chair that sat in the corner of the detective’s cubicle, his eyes fixing malevolently on the small picture of Anne Jeffers that accompanied the column. “You know she was going to do that?”
Blakemoor shrugged. “She had to write something, didn’t she? She’s a reporter, remember? Why else would she have gone to the execution?”
“The way she writes it, you’d think she got an engraved invite from that creep Kraven.” His blue eyes took on a look of eagerness. “Did he suffer, Mark?” he asked. “Tell me he did, goddammit. Tell me the son of a bitch shit his pants before they whacked him.” McCarty’s right fist slammed into his left palm. “Christ, I wish I coulda done it to him myself!”
Mark Blakemoor shifted uneasily in his seat, wishing now he hadn’t goaded his boss into an even more vindictive mood than the one Anne Jeffers had induced. On the other hand, there wasn’t a man or woman in the department who hadn’t wanted Richard Kraven to suffer after they’d seen the pictures of his victims. Even Mark, who after fifteen years on the homicide unit had thought he was inured to anything, had found his stomach heaving the first time he attended an autopsy of one of Kraven’s victims. Actually, he’d been okay until the medical examiner had told him that it appeared the victim had still been alive when Kraven cut open his chest and began tearing him to pieces. At that point Mark had excused himself, hurried to the men’s room, and deposited his lunch into one of the toilets. Still, Kraven had been executed, and Mark Blakemoor found himself strangely discomfited by McCarty’s words. Then, as more members of the unit drifted into his office to complain about Anne’s column, he remembered their conversation on the plane the day before. Was that what was worrying him? Some slight nagging doubt that everyone might have been wrong?
“Why’s she want to kick a dead horse?” Frank Lovejoy asked, dolefully shaking his bald head. “She’s been living off Kraven for five years now — can’t she let it go?”
“Let her write whatever the hell she wants,” McCarty groused. “Time for us to get on to other things. What about the DOA they took into Harborview last night, Frank? Anything I need to know about? The mayor gonna be calling me?”
Lovejoy shook his head. “Just another drive-by. Sometimes I think we ought to just let ’em all go at each other till they wipe themselves out. Fuckin’ scumbags.”
McCarty grunted his agreement, then turned his attention back to Mark Blakemoor. “So what are you on to now that Kraven’s been burnt?”
Although it wasn’t yet eight A.M., Blakemoor sighed tiredly as he gestured to the stack of open cases on his desk. In the corner, occupying half a dozen brown corrugated boxes, were his copies of every scrap of information pertaining to every single case in which Richard Kraven had been a suspect, not just in Seattle, but everywhere else as well. It had been more than two years since he and Lois Ackerly had spent all their time investigating the kind of killings that had stopped with Kraven’s arrest, but he still found himself going back to the boxes over and over again, searching one folder after another for something — anything — he might have missed that would tie at least one of the local cases indisputably to Richard Kraven. The evidence was there; he was certain of it. Buried somewhere in the depths of one of those boxes there was something he hadn’t yet spotted; some insignificant fact that would let him at last put to rest the nagging feeling he had that something was wrong, that there was something about this case nobody yet understood. In the two-plus years that Kraven had waited to die, Blakemoor hadn’t found it. And maybe, he had to admit on the days when the frustration of the case threatened to overwhelm him, he hadn’t found that little fact because it simply wasn’t there. Still, why did his gut consistently tell him that Richard Kraven was as guilty as the courts had found him? Mark Blakemoor had been operating on his guts every day for the last twenty years, and they had never failed him yet. He sighed again. Maybe it was finally time to let it all go, move the files down to the storeroom in the bowels of the building, get them out of his sight, remove them from the corner of his office, where they taunted him every day. He looked up at McCarty, nodding toward the stack of boxes. “First, I guess I’ll get all that crap out of here.”