differences in technique, no matter how slight, search for anything that would allow them to keep their pride — and their reputations — intact.
It would be worst for Anne Jeffers, for she would not only be forced to retract everything she’d ever said about Richard Kraven, she would have to take the responsibility for his execution as well.
She’d hounded Kraven, hounded him to his execution, though neither she nor anyone else had ever heard him confess.
Now he would pursue Anne Jeffers. He would toy with her for a while, let her think perhaps she’d been right all along.
Then he would plant the seeds of doubt in her mind, and in the end, after she knew the precise truth of what had happened, he would add her to his list, making her his final subject.
His fingers caressed the satiny texture of the remote control, and there was a soft click as the television screen went blank, the picture contracting into a tiny white dot in the center of the black screen, only to die away completely a moment later.
Die away as his subjects had died away.
But their deaths had not been in vain, for out of those deaths — no, not deaths, but merely failed experiments — had come knowledge. The Experimenter had long ago decided that knowledge was far more important even than life itself. Where Socrates had once observed that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, the man in the darkened room knew better: for him, it was the examination of the very phenomenon of life that made his existence possible. Indeed, as he’d thought about it during the long hiatus during which the authorities — those pitiably small minds who were far too simple to understand his work — built their case against Richard Kraven, the Experimenter had come to understand that even the subjects who’d died during his investigations could not truly be considered failures. After all, even in their deaths they’d contributed to the body of knowledge he had been building as painstakingly as the authorities had been building their case against Richard Kraven.
Now — now that Richard Kraven had been executed — the time had come for him to begin again. The body of his knowledge would expand, and at the same time he would prove once and for all just how much smarter he was than those who sought to judge him.
Outside the window, a movement caught his eye. He glanced down at the street below.
A woman was walking along the sidewalk.
Going to work?
Returning home from a completed shift?
Did it matter? Not really. All that mattered was that the woman had caught his eye. Perhaps, now that the time was right and he could soon begin again, he would begin with her.
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps he would begin again with someone else entirely.
The Experimenter smiled to himself as he remembered how it had been the last time, when all the investigators — and the teams they’d put together to examine the scattered bodies — had carried out their fruitless searches of his subjects’ backgrounds, looking for a common denominator that would tie them all together, tie the victims to the single person who had caused their deaths. Of course they had never found that common denominator, so now when it all began again, they would go running back to their records, searching yet again.
Searching for something they would never find.
The thought of the havoc his new experiments would cause brought a smile to his lips, and he finally turned away from the window. The day had been long, and filled with excitement, and now it was time for him to sleep.
Tomorrow he would begin designing the next series of experiments.
Unconsciously, the Experimenter flexed his fingers once more, this time in anticipation.…
CHAPTER 11
A gray sky hovered low over Seattle the next morning, and as people all over the city huddled over their first cups of coffee, newspapers were opened to the editorial page. In kitchens, coffee shops, snack rooms, and offices, nearly everyone in the city began the day by reading the column that had been dictated from the Group Health Critical Care Unit on Capitol Hill the day before:
“What the hell does this broad think she’s doing?”
The booming voice that filled his office in the Public Safety Building was familiar enough that Mark Blakemoor didn’t even have to look up from the report he was studying. From the moment he’d scanned Anne Jeffers’s column in this morning’s Herald, the detective had been expecting Jack McCarty to come barging into the office Blakemoor shared with Lois Ackerly. McCarty’s own copy of the paper would be crushed in his huge fist, his normally ruddy face flushed to the point where anyone who didn’t know him might suspect that the white-haired chief of detectives was about to suffer a terminal stroke. Sure enough, here he was. Mark smoothly moved his coffee cup aside just as the chief slammed the offending newspaper onto the desk.
“ ‘At least seven unsolved cases’?” McCarty demanded. “What is this crap? And when did she write it? I thought you said her husband was in the fuckin’ hospital!”
“He is,” Blakemoor replied mildly, leaning back in his chair to savor his boss’s rage. “I sent her some flowers this morning. Thought it might cheer her up.” McCarty’s face turned even redder, causing Mark to wonder if it could actually be possible for a human head to explode. Then, as a vein began to throb in McCarty’s neck, he decided a little extra agitation might just be in order. “You know, if Ackerly heard you call Anne Jeffers a ‘broad,’ she’d have a sexism citation in your jacket before lunchtime.”
The jab had the intended effect. Jack McCarty spun around, his eyes searching the area outside Blakemoor’s office for any sign of Blakemoor’s partner. But if Lois Ackerly had arrived at the unit yet, she was nowhere to be seen. “Jeez, Blakemoor, don’t say things like that. I only got three more years to retirement, and the last thing I need is another chauvinist-pig chit.” He dropped heavily into the battered wooden chair that sat in the corner of the detective’s cubicle, his eyes fixing malevolently on the small picture of Anne Jeffers that accompanied the column. “You know she was going to do that?”
Blakemoor shrugged. “She had to write something, didn’t she? She’s a reporter, remember? Why else would she have gone to the execution?”
“The way she writes it, you’d think she got an engraved invite from that creep Kraven.” His blue eyes took on a look of eagerness. “Did he suffer, Mark?” he asked. “Tell me he did, goddammit. Tell me the son of a bitch shit his pants before they whacked him.” McCarty’s right fist slammed into his left palm. “Christ, I wish I coulda done it to him myself!”
Mark Blakemoor shifted uneasily in his seat, wishing now he hadn’t goaded his boss into an even more vindictive mood than the one Anne Jeffers had induced. On the other hand, there wasn’t a man or woman in the
