His ankles were bound to the legs of the chair, his wrists to its arms, his torso to its back.
A priest came into the room and spoke to Kraven, but Anne could hear nothing through the heavy glass that separated the killing chamber from the viewing gallery. Whatever the clergyman said seemed not to affect Kraven in the slightest, and he made no reply.
After lingering for only a few more seconds, the priest left.
The guards dampened one of the electrodes with saltwater, and taped it securely to Richard Kraven’s shaved scalp.
They attached the second electrode to the calf of his right leg.
After checking their work one last time, the two guards left the chamber, closing the door behind them.
It was only after the guards had left that Anne realized an eerie silence had fallen over the gallery.
She glanced up at the clock.
Thirty seconds before noon.
Now she found herself glancing around for a telephone, and realized she was half expecting that the event she was witnessing would suddenly be ended by a loud ringing, just as it used to happen in the movies.
But there was no phone; if it existed at all, it was somewhere beyond her field of vision.
Beyond Richard Kraven’s, too?
Was he, too, waiting for the last minute reprieve that would release him from the chair?
She made herself look once more at Kraven, and though she had been told that the glass was a one-way mirror and he wouldn’t be able to see the execution’s witnesses, she nonetheless had the sensation that his eyes were focused on her, and that he knew exactly at whom he was staring.
Those cold, expressionless eyes had lost their deathly flatness. In the last moments of Richard Kraven’s life, his eyes had at last come alive and were projecting an emotion.
A strong, powerful emotion.
Hatred.
Anne could feel it burning out from him, searing through the thick glass of the window, snaking toward her —
She recoiled from Kraven’s hate-filled gaze as from a striking cobra, and had to fight against a powerful impulse to abandon her chair and escape from the scene that was unfolding in front of her eyes. But before she could move at all, Richard Kraven jerked spasmodically as every muscle and nerve in his body reacted to the two thousand volts of electricity that shot through him.
Anne gasped, and then her whole body responded to the horror she beheld.
She stopped breathing as every fiber in her went momentarily rigid. Then an anguished moan escaped her throat as Kraven’s body jerked again and again.
Next to Anne, Mark Blakemoor’s eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched as he watched Richard Kraven die. Every muscle tensed, the detective silently counted the seconds, only relaxing when two full minutes had finally gone by and he was certain that Richard Kraven was dead. Then he spoke quietly to Anne Jeffers.
“That’s it,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
Anne shifted slightly in her seat, but made no move to get up. As the room slowly emptied, she stayed where she was, watching silently as the guards returned to the execution chamber, this time pushing a gurney and accompanied by a doctor. After the doctor confirmed that Richard Kraven was dead, the guards removed the electrodes from his leg and scalp, unfastened the straps that bound him, and lifted him onto the gurney.
But even after Richard Kraven’s body had been taken away, Anne Jeffers remained where she was.
She knew that what she had just witnessed had changed her, but she didn’t yet know quite how.
She knew she would never forget watching Richard Kraven die, nor ever get over the terrible feeling she had experienced as his final glare of pure hatred had burned through her.
Then she thought of Glen, and was instantly consumed by a desire to be held by him, to feel his arms around her, his lips on hers, his strength pulling her close to him.
She would be all right. In a few hours she would be with Glen again; in a few days, a few weeks, she would begin to forget the clinical precision of what she’d just seen.
But would she ever be able to forget the terrible hatred that had poured forth from Richard Kraven even as he’d died?
CHAPTER 6
The wailing siren built to a deafening crescendo that was abruptly silenced as the ambulance braked to a stop in front of the construction site. Both doors flew open and two white-clad men leapt from the cab, one of them racing around to the back of the vehicle to pull out a stretcher, the other, carrying a small tank of oxygen and a face mask, breaking into a run toward the area where Glen Jeffers lay.
“Let me through,” the paramedic commanded as he pushed his way through the crowd gathered around the fallen man. “Who’s in charge here?” Without waiting for a reply, he knelt beside Glen’s body, quickly felt for a pulse, then put the mask on Glen’s face and turned the oxygen to high flow.
“We think he had a heart attack,” Jim Dover said. “We were all up on top. All of a sudden Glen started looking weird. We thought it was just fear of heights, but—”
His words were cut off as the second paramedic pushed through the crowd, unrolled the portable stretcher and lay it next to the unconscious body. “Myocardial infarction?”
“Looks like it,” the first medic said. “Let’s get him on the stretcher and into the truck.” Working together like a well-oiled machine, the two paramedics moved Glen onto the stretcher, then started back toward the ambulance. The construction crew fanned out ahead of the stretcher, clearing the way, while Alan Cline, together with George Simmons and Jim Dover, kept pace next to Glen.
“He’s a member of Group Health,” Alan Cline said, his voice trembling as he saw the bluish cast his partner’s face had taken on. “If you can take him up there—”
The paramedics slid the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, one of them climbing in to attach Glen to the waiting IV and heart monitor. “You can go with him,” the driver told Alan Cline. “There’s plenty of room, and if he wakes up—”
Alan Cline didn’t wait to hear the medic finish what he was saying, but scrambled into the back of the ambulance. The driver slammed the door shut, then dashed around to the driver’s seat. The ambulance started up the street, turned right up the steep slope of the hill, and then the siren came on.
Muffled by the walls of the ambulance, its wail took on a mournful, keening note, and as Alan Cline gazed at his partner, he wondered if it would be possible for Glen to survive at all.
It was like slowly coming awake in a pitch-dark room. Except the first thing that met him as he came into consciousness was pain.
Pain such as he’d never experienced before.
Pain that consumed him.
Pain that threatened to tear his mind apart.
Away!
He had to get away from the pain before it destroyed him.
Where?
Where was he?
His mind struggled against the blackness, and slowly it began to recede.
Now he could hear sound.
It seemed to be coming from somewhere far in the distance, but in a moment Glen was able to identify it.
A siren, like a police car, or an ambulance.
The dark receded further, and he was able to see. But it was odd — he seemed to be floating in some dimension he didn’t quite understand. Far below him, he could see two men crouching near a figure on a stretcher.
