Black Lightning Part 1

Black Lightning.

by John Saul.

PROLOGUE.

Five Years Ago- Experiment Number Forty-Seven

It was a ballet the man had danced so many times before that the first steps had become familiar enough to be performed automatically, with little if any thought at all. If he'd been asked, he couldn't have said exactly what it was about this particular subject that first caught his attention, what particularly had piqued his interest in including her in his study. Certainly not age-he'd never been interested in the relative youth of any of his subjects.

Nor did s.e.x matter. There were nearly as many men as women among his subjects; whatever gender imbalances existed in his study group were purely a matter of chance, and, he was certain, statistically insignificant. Not that his critics would ignore whatever imbalances existed when they began a.n.a.lyzing his work-he was all too aware that every possible nuance of his study would be minutely examined, that every possible interpretation, no matter how outlandish, would be applied to his choice of subjects.

But the fact was that he really hadn't come up with any standard criteria for selecting partic.i.p.ants in the experiments. Neither race nor gender, age nor s.e.xual orientation, had counted.

Nor had he ever been particularly concerned about whether he invited the subject to join his study, or whether the subject was the one to make the first contact.

His current subject had made the first contact herself, as it happened, and he had almost rejected her on the basis that she seemed somehow familiar to him, that he knew her from somewhere. Familiarity was the single grounds for automatic ineligibility for the project, for he could never be certain of his own objectivity if he had previously existing feelings for the subject, whether positive or negative.

He'd first become aware of the woman a couple of weeks ago, when he'd happened into a shop near the university for a cup of coffee. He'd briefly noticed her when he'd come in, sitting near the door alone, a copy of the Seattle Herald Seattle Herald spread out on the table before her. He'd paid little attention to her until he bought his own coffee and settled into a chair several tables away. spread out on the table before her. He'd paid little attention to her until he bought his own coffee and settled into a chair several tables away.

Had he subconsciously known even then that he would include her in the project? He would have to consider that.

It had been she who first smiled at him, then come over and asked if she could join him. As he recalled it now, she said something she seemed to consider witty, about them not taking up any more room on the planet than they absolutely had to, and he produced the expected smile for her. But instead of inviting her to sit down, he pleaded work, and she left.

For the next ten minutes he'd tried to figure out why she looked familiar, but it hadn't finally come to him until he opened his own paper to the editorial section and his eye had been caught by one of the columns: How Much Longer?

Police Fiddle While Seattle DiesAnother week has pa.s.sed, and the Special Task Force set up by the Seattle Police Department in cooperation with the King County Sheriff's Office and the Was.h.i.+ngton State Patrol seems no closer than ever to an arrest in connection with the series of bodies that has turned up in the foothills of the Cascades over the past five years. Indeed, thus far all the police seem to have determined is that all the victims appear to have been killed by the same person, a conclusion anyone who has seen the bodies couldn't easily have missed.Yet when I talked to several members of the task force this week...

It hadn't been the story that had caught the man's eye so much as the accompanying photograph of the column's author.

Anne Jeffers.

That was why the woman he'd spoken to a few minutes earlier had seemed familiar: she looked very much like the newswoman. He'd sat staring at the photograph for several seconds, considering.

The woman had been in her early forties, of medium height, with the same kind of even features reflected in the photograph. The woman's hair had appeared to be of a similar dark shade, too, though Anne Jeffers's was somewhat shorter.

Was it possible it had actually been Anne Jeffers he'd spoken to?

A patient man, he'd finished his coffee, refolded his paper, and gone on about his business. But he kept his eyes open, and a few days later, when he spotted the woman from the coffee shop, he realized that she was not Anne Jeffers, nor was she anyone else he knew.

Discreetly, he'd followed her.

She lived not far from the university, in an old Spanish-Moorish-style apartment building the man had always liked.

Afterward, he made a point of walking by the building every few days. He'd seen the woman several times, and nodded to her.

The dance had begun.

It had gone on for several weeks, the two of them circling around each other in a strange pavane that was almost like a courts.h.i.+p.

They began nodding to each other, then saying h.e.l.lo.

He had begun to absorb the routines of her life, and found her-as he found most people-to be pathetically predictable.

Today, for instance, being a bright and cheerful Sunday, he was almost certain the woman would take lunch in a bag and go to bask in the rare warmth on the lawn of the university, where she would pretend to be reading a book while actually watching for a man-nearly any man, he had discovered-to show interest in her.

Today he would be the man to show interest.

Today the dance would end.

He left his car at home that morning, taking the motor home he'd bought four years ago, when the study had commenced. Perfect for field trips, he often drove it into the mountains even on weekends when he wasn't working on his research, parking it near any one of hundreds of babbling streams while he indulged himself in his only pa.s.sion outside of his project: fly-fis.h.i.+ng.

Today he drove the motor home up to the university, parked it in the nearly deserted depths of the cavernous garage, and locked it. Taking his own lunch and two bottles of lemon-flavored sparkling water with him, he climbed the stairs to the surface and started across the lawn toward the spot that was the woman's favorite.

Half an hour later, after she'd consumed half the contents of the bottle of sparkling water he offered her, she frowned, then shook her head.

"Something wrong?" the man asked, his gentle voice freighted with benevolent concern.

"I-I'm not sure," the woman replied. "Suddenly I feel-" She hesitated, then stood up. "I'd better get home!"

The man scrambled to his feet and began gathering both their things. "Maybe I should drive you," he suggested.

The woman started to decline his offer, but a second later, changed her mind. He could see that the color had begun to fade from her lips.

"If you could..." she began, but then, feeling lightheaded and dizzy, her voice faded.

Gratefully, she accepted the man's proffered arm and let him lead her down into the garage, where his motor home waited.

Even before he drove it out into the bright daylight, the woman had drifted into unconsciousness, and was now spread out on the sheet of plastic he'd placed on the floor.

He pulled out of the garage, went west two blocks, turned right up to N.E. 45th Street, and headed west to Interstate 5. Taking the highway south, he exited at Route 520, heading east toward Redmond.

After a while he wound up into the foothills, looking for the right spot.

Somewhere off the road.

Somewhere secluded.

Somewhere near a stream, so he could do a little fis.h.i.+ng after his work was done.

Finally he found the spot: a narrow road, one he'd used before, but not for years. A half mile through the trees and he emerged into a clearing next to a fast-moving stream. He looked around.

He was alone.

Now he began his preparations.

First, he stripped naked, folding his clothes neatly and stowing them in the drawer beneath the queen-sized berth at the motor home's rear.

After pulling on a pair of rubber surgical gloves, he covered the bed with a sheet of plastic and moved the unconscious woman onto it.

He continued working with the sheets of plastic, methodically lining the entire interior of the motor home; one of his prime rules when carrying out an experiment was that nothing must be contaminated.

Finally he was ready.

Undressing the woman, he gazed at her naked body for a few moments, savoring the life that seemed to radiate from it even as she slept.

Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s moved rhythmically up and down as she breathed, and when he lay his fingers gently on her neck, he could feel the pounding of her pulse.

He laid out the tools he knew he would need, then picked up the instrument he'd purchased the day before for this specific experiment, and squeezed its trigger.

It squealed shrilly as its blade began to spin.

The man began his work.

The blade of the cordless saw sliced through skin and flesh, parting the woman's sternum in a single quick cut up the center of her chest.

Setting the saw aside, the man spread her ribs apart and closed off the largest of her severed blood vessels with some of the surgical clamps he'd bought years before, when the research was still in its planning stages.

The worst of her bleeding stanched, the man slipped his fingers into the cavity within. He felt the woman's lungs-still working strongly-and nodded in satisfaction. Once more he'd succeeded in making the primary cut so perfectly that the subject's diaphragm remained undamaged.

He slid his fingers deeper, working them around the lungs until both hands rested against the gently moving tissue. He paused, thrilling to the sensation of life pressing against his palms.

But now the woman's breathing was beginning to falter. Time was running short.

The experiment must begin.

His fingers probed deeper, until at last he felt the familiar contours of a human heart. Time seemed to stand still....

When he emerged from the motor home an hour later, the man's hands were covered with blood. More of the glimmering red fluid oozed from the body he carried in his arms, drizzling slowly down his torso and legs, dripping onto the ground he trod. He carried the body into a thicket of woods, waiting only until he was fully screened from the clearing before dropping it unceremoniously to the ground. He gazed angrily at the woman's remains.

Her organs were all there, but no longer in their original positions, for when he'd realized that once again the experiment had failed, a dark rage of frustration had come over him, a rage he'd released by plunging his fingers furiously into the woman's lifeless body, tearing her heart loose from its veins and arteries, then pulling more of her organs through the incision in her chest as he searched for the reason for his failure.

Now he glared down once more at the lifeless body, its chest torn open to offer the world an obscene view of the carnage within.

He turned his back and walked away, finally abandoning the subject for whom, only an hour ago, he'd had such wonderful hopes.

Emerging from the trees back into the clearing, he went to the river and plunged in, letting the rus.h.i.+ng water wash the blood from his skin and cool the burning rage that failure always caused him. Only when he was certain no trace of the woman's blood remained did he emerge from the river and return to the motor home, where, still naked, he carefully began folding the sheets of plastic in upon themselves. Soon the vehicle's interior was again pristine, all evidence of his experiment wrapped in the sheets of plastic, which in turn he placed inside a large white plastic garbage bag.

The man went back to the river and washed once more, then dried himself, dressed, and drove the motor home out of the clearing. Leaving it on the edge of the pavement, he returned to the clearing, broke a branch from a tree and swept it methodically across the ground, obliterating every tire print the motor home had left.

The branch he'd used to whisk away his tracks joined the soiled plastic sheets in the large trash bag.

As he started back down the highway, the man glanced at his watch and was pleased: there was still plenty of time to stop for an hour or so of fis.h.i.+ng before he went home.

And as he fished, he would begin thinking about the next experiment....

CHAPTER 1.

The cracked white face of the clock stood in stark contrast to the inst.i.tutional green of the wall upon which it hung.

Nine A.M A.M.

Three hours before noon.

High noon.

As the phrase went through her mind, a scene from the movie she still vividly remembered from her childhood came into Anne Jeffers's mind, and she saw again the black-and-white image of two men facing each other on a dusty street. She'd sat riveted in her seat at the old Coliseum Theater in Seattle as Gary Cooper, photographed from a low angle to make him seem even taller than he really was, had faced down...

Who?

Who had Cooper executed at high noon that day?

Though she still remembered the scene almost as clearly as if she'd seen it last week instead of more than three decades ago, she could not remember who played the bad guy. In those days, back when she was a little girl, it was the sheriff everyone had cared about, not the villain.

The question wasn't whether the villain deserved to be shot, but whether Gary Cooper would get him before he got killed himself.

Justice, pure and simple. Good guy versus bad guy, with everyone rooting for the hero in the white hat.

But today, when high noon came, there would be a different kind of showdown. This was no movie; this execution was going to be real. Further, the state of Connecticut had decreed that its first execution in almost forty years be carried out in the middle of the day, rather than in the dead of night-a decree Anne suspected was deliberately intended to remind the people that though they had the right to execute one of their fellow citizens, they couldn't expect to have the action carried out clandestinely behind the dark cloak of midnight. Nor would there be a Gary Cooper for her to root for today. Instead, there would be only a nameless, faceless man throwing a switch.

Then another man-someone whom Anne felt she had known for a very long time-would be dead.

Anne shuddered, and felt instantly ashamed. At forty-two, after spending the last twenty years working for the Seattle Herald Seattle Herald reporting on everything from fatal apartment fires to the AIDS epidemic, there shouldn't be much left to make her shudder. She'd seen people die before; her own mother had pa.s.sed away five years ago while she had held her hand, and Anne could still feel that last surge of strength that ran through her mother's body, giving the dying woman just enough power in the last moments of her life to offer her a final smile and an encouraging squeeze of her fingers. reporting on everything from fatal apartment fires to the AIDS epidemic, there shouldn't be much left to make her shudder. She'd seen people die before; her own mother had pa.s.sed away five years ago while she had held her hand, and Anne could still feel that last surge of strength that ran through her mother's body, giving the dying woman just enough power in the last moments of her life to offer her a final smile and an encouraging squeeze of her fingers.

Anne hadn't shuddered that day; indeed, as her mother's last breath emerged from her crumpled lips in a soft sigh of relief, and her wasted body finally retired from its long battle against the cancer that had inevitably defeated her, Anne felt only a quiet sense of grat.i.tude that her mother's pain had mercifully come to an end.

Nor was her mother the only person Anne had watched in the last moments of life. She had sat helplessly with friends as they succ.u.mbed to the plague of AIDS, and she'd stood by in mute horror as victims of gang shootings died in the emergency room of Harborview Hospital.

Once she'd even found herself cradling the broken body of a ten-year-old who had just been pulled from the wreckage of his father's car on I-5. Anne had stanched the flow of blood from his neck with her handkerchief as she prayed for the medics to arrive in time, and sobbed in frustrated fury when the ambulance lost the race for the boy's life to a crowd of rubber-necking onlookers who had choked traffic on the freeway to a standstill.

The same kind of crowd who waited outside now, waited for the stroke of noon and the announcement that justice had been served.

Justice, or Anne Jeffers?