“I don’t know,” Kevin began. “Me and Justin were gonna play ball in the park, but—”
“Tell you what,” Anne interrupted. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be stuck on this story this morning, so if you’ll visit Dad for me, I’ll spring for a movie tonight. Okay?”
“Justin, too?” Kevin bargained.
“Why not?” Anne agreed. She dug into her large leather bag once more, produced a ten dollar bill and handed it to her son, “Call the hospital before you go, and find out if there’s anything Dad wants.”
As his mother disappeared out the front door, Kevin gazed at the ten dollar bill in his hand. If his father didn’t want anything, was he going to be allowed to keep the ten?
By the time he walked into Room 308 at the hospital an hour later, though, most of the ten dollars was gone, spent on the magazines his father had asked for.
“So what’s this big story your mother’s working on?” Glen asked as his son handed him the copies of Architectural Digest and Newsweek, the two magazines that had nearly depleted the ten dollars. “I thought she was still rooting around in the basement down at the police department.”
Kevin flopped into the chair at the foot of his father’s bed, his eyes scanning the monitors on the wall above the bed. “It’s a murder,” he reported. “Something about the guy they electrocuted last week.”
Glen’s eyes clouded. What was Kevin talking about? What could a new murder have to do with someone who’d already been executed? “Richard Kraven?” he asked.
Kevin shrugged. “I guess. Mom said something about the Kraven task force, so I guess she must have been talking about that guy, huh?” When his father said nothing, Kevin shifted gears. “Hey, Dad? When are you coming home?”
Glen ignored his son’s question, instead reaching over to pick up the remote control from his bedside stand and flip on the television, surfing through the channels, then stopping when he saw an image of an ugly three-story apartment building. The sidewalk in front of it was cut off by bright yellow police tape, and a crowd had gathered across the street. An off-camera reporter was trying to fill a lot of time with very few facts. “The victim is Shawnelle Davis, an unemployed woman who lived alone in an apartment on the second floor. Early reports are that the body was mutilated in the same fashion as the victims of Richard Kraven, and that—”
Glen snapped the television off. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded, his voice so sharp that Kevin jumped in his chair.
“What do you mean?” the boy asked. “All I asked was—”
“Not that,” Glen interrupted, cutting Kevin off. “That murder! What the hell is going on?”
Kevin’s eyes darted around the room as if seeking some way of escape. What was going on with his dad? What was he so mad about? But before he could say anything else, his father spoke again, this time fixing on Kevin with a burning intensity the boy had never seen before.
“I want you to do something for me, Kevin. I want you to go home and get that file your mother’s been keeping. You know the one I mean? The one with all the stuff about Kraven in it?”
Kevin shifted nervously. He knew where the file was, but he also knew he wasn’t supposed to go into his mother’s desk. “I thought you didn’t care about that stuff,” he said. “You said it was—” Kevin hesitated, trying to remember the word his father had used when his mother started talking about going to the execution. Before he could think of his word, his father fixed him with that stare again, like he was angry.
“Maybe I changed my mind,” he said. Then he chuckled, but even the laugh didn’t sound right to Kevin. “Dr. Farber says I’m going to have to take at least a couple of months off work, and that I’m going to have to take up a hobby. So maybe I’ll just make your mother’s fixation on Richard Kraven my new hobby.” Once again his eyes bored into Kevin. “What do you think? Sound interesting?”
Kevin said nothing. What was going on? His father didn’t have hobbies — he didn’t even like hobbies! And then he remembered the word his father had used whenever his mom started talking about Richard Kraven.
Morbid.
That was the word. His father had always called it morbid.
So why was he suddenly so interested in Richard Kraven?
But then Kevin remembered what his mother had told him the day before yesterday, when she’d come home from talking to Dr. Farber: “It’s going to be rough for a while, kids. Your dad’s going to have to change his whole lifestyle. He’s going to have to work a lot less, and rest a lot more. And that means it’s going to be different for all of us, too. So what do you think? Can you make some adjustments? Get used to some changes around here?”
The day before yesterday, when he and Heather and his mother had all talked about it, it didn’t seem like a big deal at all. But now that he was all alone in the hospital room with his father, Kevin began to wonder. Suddenly his father didn’t seem like his father anymore. His mom had said his dad was going to be different, but if it meant his father would be mad all the time, and sounding weird, Kevin wasn’t sure how easy things were going to be after all.
“Well, how about it?” Glen asked as Kevin’s silence stretched on. “Does my new hobby sound interesting, or not?”
Kevin rose to his feet and edged toward the door. “Yeah, Dad,” he said, his eyes avoiding his father’s. “It sounds fine. And I’ll get the file for you, okay? I’ll be back in a while.”
As he left the hospital he wondered what would happen if he just sort of forgot about the file and didn’t come back at all. A couple of weeks ago he would have known exactly what would happen: his dad — the one he’d known all his life — would get mad at him for a minute, and then it would be all over. But now everything was different — since the heart attack, anything might happen.
He decided he’d better do as he’d been told.
CHAPTER 19
“I mean, like, Jeez, it’s not like she was committing a crime, you know? Like, so she was turning a few tricks — so who doesn’t? This is Capitol Hill, you know? If she got paid, like, good for her, know what I mean?”
Anne Jeffers was on the sidewalk across from the building where Shawnelle Davis had both lived and conducted her business. Though she had been talking to the man of the laissez-faire sexual-economic theories for nearly twenty minutes, she still wasn’t quite certain if he’d even known Shawnelle, let alone held the bosom-buddy status to which he’d laid claim. Still, she’d let the photographer snap some pictures of him. If nothing else, they’d at least wind up decorating the bulletin boards at the Herald, complete with appropriately off-color captions. Certainly he was one of the more flamboyant of the crowd that had gathered on Boylston Street, and he’d managed to pierce parts of his body that made Anne wince simply by thinking about the pain he must have undergone. In fact, as she talked to the young man, she wondered for the first time if perhaps she and Glen might want to think about moving a little farther from the Broadway area, at least until Heather and Kevin were safely past their teen years.
When a small eddy of whispered conversation rippled through the crowd, Anne cut the rambling interview short. Working her way to the front of the crowd, she saw that the door to Shawnelle Davis’s apartment had opened and a gurney was being wheeled out, its attendants taking as much care with it as they would have had its occupant been critically ill, rather than dead for more than two days. Glad for the excuse to cut the interview short, she stepped off the curb and crossed the street, unconsciously taking on the confident manner that often got her into crime scenes long before they’d been opened to the press. This morning, though, her jogging clothes undercut the act, along with the fact that Lois Ackerly was accompanying the gurney as the attendants bore it carefully down the stairs to the street level, then wheeled it toward the waiting panel truck that would convey it to the morgue.