“All right,” she said to the assistant, who had followed her. Immediately, she wondered whether she’d spoken the words too loudly in the silence of the room. “Now?”
The assistant shrugged. “I’m not sure. I was just told to bring you to the office. Mr. Rustin thought you might want to wait there.”
Anne hesitated, then saw the other reporters already starting to formulate the questions they would ask her to relay to Richard Kraven. For a moment she felt a flash of annoyance, then realized that if someone else had been summoned to Kraven’s presence, she too would be scribbling down a final question in the hope of getting one last exclusive out of the story.
But not now. Not this morning. As she walked through the room, she held up her hand against the proffered scraps of paper and the clamor of entreaties. At the door, she turned to face her colleagues. “I’m only going to listen to him,” she told the crowd of reporters. “I’m not going to ask him any questions. And whatever he says, believe me, I’ll give you every word of it. All I want is for this story to finally be over.” Then, before anyone could try to talk her into relaying just one question—“Come on Anne, be a sport!”—she slipped quickly out of the room.
As she walked down the echoing corridor, she was already preparing herself to face Richard Kraven for the last time.
CHAPTER 2
On the opposite side of the country from his wife, Glen Jeffers lingered an extra five minutes in bed, wondering if maybe he shouldn’t skip his morning jog just this once. It was the kind of Seattle morning he hated — overcast, with a drizzling rain that promised to go on all day; not heavy enough to warrant a raincoat and umbrella, but just heavy enough to be annoying. Especially today, when he was going to have to be out in it all morning, inspecting the framework of the first high-rise his company had designed solely within their own firm.
Jeffers and Cline, Architects.
No partners; no other architectural firms listed on the big sign on the last developable block of the downtown sector; no other architects with whom he would have to share the glory for the spectacular design he had created. Soaring up forty-five stories, the building would step back from Fourth Avenue in a series of terraces as it rose toward the sky. But the feature he loved most was the park he’d designed for the top of the skyscraper. Covering more than half the block, it would provide a spectacular view of the city, the Sound, and the Olympic Mountains for anyone who cared to use the glass elevator that would ascend the north end of the building, carrying passengers directly from the sidewalk to any of the terraced levels or the park on the roof. In his building, at least, the best views would be open to the public, rather than reserved for the high-powered attorneys who were already vying for office space in what was rapidly becoming known as the Jeffers Building. It was a source of quiet pride for Glen that his building would be named for its architect, rather than its prime tenant.
He lay in bed for another few minutes, savoring the feeling of well-being that warmed him this morning despite the rain, and listened to the creaking of the old house he and Anne had bought nearly twenty years before, when they’d first gotten married. The house had been bigger than they really needed, and in terrible condition, but Glen had talked Anne into it After all, he was an architect; he would turn it into a showplace for next to nothing. What he hadn’t told her was that his skills as a carpenter, plumber, electrician, plasterer, and roofer were nil. But Anne, of course, had known that all along, and was pretty good with a hammer herself. In the end, the crumbling wreck of a house they’d picked up for only forty thousand dollars was now worth the better part of a million, and the neighborhood had come back along with the house. Anne and Glen, and the two children they’d had along the way, were now smack in the middle of one of the better parts of Capitol Hill, only a block from Volunteer Park, on a tree- lined street filled with other houses that had also been restored over the years since the Jefferses had moved in.
Though Glen liked to think he’d been prescient enough to foresee the resurgence of the neighborhood, the truth was that the best he’d hoped for was to fix the old place up, make a few dollars selling it, and move on. But as they’d worked on the house, both he and Anne had fallen in love with it, and when first Heather had arrived, fifteen years ago, then Kevin, five years later, they’d decided simply to stay where they were. Though they got offers for the house every few months, it had been years now since either of them had thought of moving. Meanwhile, a calico cat named Kumquat, then a small black and white mutt named Boots, and finally an only somewhat raucous green parrot named Hector, had been added to the family, at which point the house no longer felt too big. Indeed, when Boots decided to tease Hector, the combined clamor of the dog and the bird sometimes made the house seem far smaller than it actually was.
Now, as the television downstairs went on — its earsplitting volume telling Glen that Kevin was in possession of the remote control — he reluctantly shoved the covers aside, swung his feet to the floor, and decided he felt just old and stiff enough that if he skipped jogging he’d suffer pangs of guilt all day. Pulling on some pants and a sweatshirt, he took the stairs two at a time, then paused to glance into the living room before heading out the front door.
Both his kids were sitting in front of the television set, glued to an image of the prison in Connecticut where Richard Kraven was scheduled to die three hours from now. “Don’t you guys think you’ve seen enough of that?” he asked, remembering how he’d finally had to order them to shut off the television last night, when it seemed they might be ready to stay up until dawn watching the live coverage of the vigil going on in front of the prison.
“Maybe Mom will be on,” Kevin said, using a gambit that had often worked in the past.
“Maybe she would, if this were a local station,” Glen agreed. “But somehow I don’t think even your mother is quite famous enough for CNN yet. Now why don’t you turn off that deathwatch and fix yourselves some breakfast?”
“It’s not a deathwatch,” Heather objected, fixing her father with a scornful glare. “It’s a protest. And I still don’t see why you wouldn’t let me go. I don’t believe in capital punishment, and I should be there!”
Glen decided to ignore the bait, unwilling to let himself be dragged into yet another recitation of the importance of school over a protest in which neither he nor Anne believed. Pointing out one more time that the protest in question was taking place an entire continent away would, he knew, gain him nothing more than another of Heather’s pronouncements that “right and wrong doesn’t have anything to do with geography.” Sometimes he wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to have a daughter who was caught up in the music scene and spent most of her time hanging out on Broadway. Still, he and Anne had raised Heather to have a social conscience, and the fact was, he didn’t believe in capital punishment, either.
Except for a couple of special cases.
Ted Bundy, for one, whose execution Glen had fully supported, being as certain as everyone else that had Bundy ever been given an opportunity, he would kill again and again and again.
And now Richard Kraven, who, like Ted Bundy, had apparently committed most of his crimes in Seattle, but had finally been caught, tried, and sentenced on the other side of the continent. This morning the state of Connecticut would free the country from Kraven in exactly the same way Florida had liberated it from Bundy. Anne, Glen suspected, was probably working on a final story about the strange parallels between the two killers even as he was thinking about them.
Heather, though, was still young enough not to let her ideals be tainted by any exceptions at all, and Glen didn’t feel like arguing the point this morning. “All right,” he sighed. “But do me a favor, okay? Put on some coffee, and make some orange juice? I’ll be back in half an hour.”
By the time he’d gone out the front door and started up the street toward the park, both kids had already shifted their attention back to the television set, and as he trotted into the park a few minutes later to join the other joggers making their regular laps around the reservoir across from the old Art Museum, he began marshaling all the arguments he would need to convince them that even this morning it was more important for them to go to school than to stay in front of the television “just in case Mom is on.”
Which, of course, she would be, since it had already been announced by one of the Seattle independent channels that “crusading Seattle Herald journalist Anne Jeffers” would be interviewed immediately after the execution.
If he hurried, he could finish the inspection of the building in plenty of time to catch the broadcast at the
