Anne had been his first choice, of course. But now he’d come to a new decision.
An elegant decision.
The kind of decision that was worthy of a man of his intellect.
Anne would stay alive.
And in his own final moment — or at least in the moment before he left this body to find a new one — he would see the expression on her face as she watched her husband clutch her daughter’s heart in his hand and tear it from her breast.
For the rest of her life Anne would live with that memory.
Richard Kraven’s reputation would be totally restored.
And Anne Jeffers’s entire life would be utterly destroyed. Justice would be served.
Sitting down at Anne’s desk, Richard Kraven began writing one last note. And this time he made no effort to keep from leaving Glen Jeffers’s fingerprints all over it. Then, leaving the note where Anne would be sure to find it, he left the house. There were preparations to make for his final experiment.
The one he would perform on Heather Jeffers.
CHAPTER 64
The worst of the thunderstorm had moved eastward, and the dismal gray of the rainy afternoon had given way to a glittering darkness. The wet pavement shimmered brightly beneath the streetlights. As Anne turned left from Highland onto Sixteenth, she braked a little too sharply and felt the rear end of the car drift slightly to the right. It wasn’t until she’d recovered from the brief skid that Anne noticed the empty spot on the right that had still been occupied by the motor home when she and Kevin had left the house nearly two hours before. At least they wouldn’t have to walk too far in the downpour. Locking the car, she followed Kevin up the sidewalk, then climbed the flight of steps to the house, arriving on the porch just as Kevin was opening the door. “Glen?” she called. “Heather? Anybody …” Her call died on her lips as she felt the emptiness within the house, the same kind of emptiness she’d experienced while Glen had been in the hospital.
Today, though, something had changed. Always before when she’d been alone in the house, the place was still filled with the vibrancy of her family. This evening that vibrancy was gone; the house had taken on the dead feeling that had pervaded it the first day they had walked in.
Trying to banish her rapidly growing uneasiness, Anne strode quickly through the dining room to the kitchen. No note posted on the refrigerator door; the message light on the answering machine was not flashing. But the door to the basement stairs stood open. Not quite certain why the open door struck her as foreboding, Anne went to the top of the stairs and peered down into the work area below. The white glare of the fluorescent light shone down on the cleared surface of the workbench. Frowning, Anne started slowly down the stairs, her gaze fixed on the workbench. Only when she’d come to the bottom of the stairs did she notice the other things that had been done.
The meticulously sorted containers of hardware.
The perfectly vacuumed floor.
For nearly two decades neither she nor Glen had even bothered to complain about the mess on the workbench, let alone clean it up.
Now it looked as pristine as an operating room.
Turning away from the workbench, Anne remounted the steps, searched the refrigerator door once more for a message from Glen, then went to the den. Maybe he’d left a Post-it on her monitor. But it wasn’t a yellow square that she found. It was an envelope with her name written on the outside.
Written in a familiar spiky script.
Recoiling from the envelope as if it were a coiled viper preparing to strike, Anne snatched up the telephone, her fingers punching at the buttons even as her mind tried not to imagine what the message inside the envelope might be, much less the terrifying significance of its presence on her desk. “Can you come over here?” Anne asked, the instant the phone was picked up at the other end. “Something’s happened—”
“Five minutes,” Mark Blakemoor replied. “Is that soon enough? Do you need me to call 911 for you?”
Anne gazed mutely at the envelope. “No,” she breathed. “I — We’ll be all right.” She laid the phone back on the hook, realizing only then that Kevin was standing in the doorway, his brow creased with worry as he watched her.
“Is something wrong, Mom?” the boy asked, sounding far younger than his ten years. Moving closer to his mother, he put his arms around her, and she, still staring at the envelope on her desk, held him close.
When the doorbell rang five minutes later, Anne had moved to the sofa in the living room, but her arms were still around her son. As the chimes sounded a second time, Anne gently disengaged herself from Kevin and approached the front door. Before she was halfway there, Kevin had scooted around her and pulled the door wide. Looking up, he gazed quizzically into Mark Blakemoor’s face. “I know you,” he said. “You came over when I found Kumquat in the alley.”
“Pretty good memory,” Mark Blakemoor said. He squatted down so his eyes were level with Kevin’s. “And now, since I’m a cop, I’m going to ask you a question. How did you know it was me before you opened the door?”
Kevin looked puzzled. “Wh-what do you mean?” he stammered.
“Well, you must have known who it was, or you wouldn’t have just opened the door like that, would you? So what was it? Did your mom tell you?” As Kevin glanced nervously at his mother, Blakemoor jerked his head toward one of the curtained windows that flanked the door. “Or did you peek, like I would have done?”
“I peeked,” Kevin cried, seizing the opportunity Blakemoor had offered him.
“Good for you,” Mark said, tousling Kevin’s hair as he rose to his feet. “Always best to know who’s outside before you open the door, right?” Finally he turned his attention to Anne. “What happened?” he asked. “On the phone you sounded—” Then, realizing that Kevin was listening to every word he uttered, he made a quick adjustment. “—worried,” he finished, feeling inordinately pleased at the glint of appreciation that came into Anne’s eyes as she realized that he’d avoided referring to her obvious terror in front of her son. Also, she’d obviously decided to forgive him for the theory he’d expounded at lunch, and the realization had the effect of lifting the depression that had fallen over him as he’d watched her speed out of the parking lot of the Salish Lodge.
“A lot has happened,” Anne said. As she led the detective through the living room to the den, she quickly told him about the knife Glen had found, and Sheila Harrar’s identification of it as having belonged to her son. “When Kevin and I got home, the motor home was gone, but that was on my desk.” She nodded toward the envelope, which Mark Blakemoor gingerly picked up, carefully holding it by its edges.
“You haven’t read it?” he asked, his voice betraying nothing of what he might be thinking. When Anne shook her head, he opened the unsealed flap of the envelope and carefully slid the single sheet of paper onto the desk’s surface. It was the same kind of paper, he noted, that had been used for the message that had been mailed to Anne. “Got a Baggie?” he asked. “Anything like that?”
“I’ll get one,” Kevin instantly volunteered. As he darted out of the room, Anne took the opportunity to speak quickly to Blakemoor.
“Everything’s crazy,” she told him, her voice shaking now. “The basement’s cleaned up to the point that it looks like some kind of laboratory, and Kevin said Glen was acting funny up in the mountains today.”
“Funny, how?” Mark asked.
Anne shrugged. “All he would say was that Glen kept looking at him in a way that made him nervous, then sent him off to fish all by himself. But he says he can tell us where they were, and he thinks he knows where Glen found the knife. And when I got home from lunch—” She fell silent as Kevin reappeared clutching a box of Baggies in his hand.
The boy watched in fascination as Mark Blakemoor carefully opened the folded note and sealed it inside one of the plastic bags even before reading it. Then, after scanning it himself, he handed it to Anne. Her hand trembling, she focused on the words:
Dearest Anne,
