department who hadn’t wanted Richard Kraven to suffer after they’d seen the pictures of his victims. Even Mark, who after fifteen years on the homicide unit had thought he was inured to anything, had found his stomach heaving the first time he attended an autopsy of one of Kraven’s victims. Actually, he’d been okay until the medical examiner had told him that it appeared the victim had still been alive when Kraven cut open his chest and began tearing him to pieces. At that point Mark had excused himself, hurried to the men’s room, and deposited his lunch into one of the toilets. Still, Kraven had been executed, and Mark Blakemoor found himself strangely discomfited by McCarty’s words. Then, as more members of the unit drifted into his office to complain about Anne’s column, he remembered their conversation on the plane the day before. Was that what was worrying him? Some slight nagging doubt that everyone might have been wrong?
“Why’s she want to kick a dead horse?” Frank Lovejoy asked, dolefully shaking his bald head. “She’s been living off Kraven for five years now — can’t she let it go?”
“Let her write whatever the hell she wants,” McCarty groused. “Time for us to get on to other things. What about the DOA they took into Harborview last night, Frank? Anything I need to know about? The mayor gonna be calling me?”
Lovejoy shook his head. “Just another drive-by. Sometimes I think we ought to just let ’em all go at each other till they wipe themselves out. Fuckin’ scumbags.”
McCarty grunted his agreement, then turned his attention back to Mark Blakemoor. “So what are you on to now that Kraven’s been burnt?”
Although it wasn’t yet eight A.M., Blakemoor sighed tiredly as he gestured to the stack of open cases on his desk. In the corner, occupying half a dozen brown corrugated boxes, were his copies of every scrap of information pertaining to every single case in which Richard Kraven had been a suspect, not just in Seattle, but everywhere else as well. It had been more than two years since he and Lois Ackerly had spent all their time investigating the kind of killings that had stopped with Kraven’s arrest, but he still found himself going back to the boxes over and over again, searching one folder after another for something — anything — he might have missed that would tie at least one of the local cases indisputably to Richard Kraven. The evidence was there; he was certain of it. Buried somewhere in the depths of one of those boxes there was something he hadn’t yet spotted; some insignificant fact that would let him at last put to rest the nagging feeling he had that something was wrong, that there was something about this case nobody yet understood. In the two-plus years that Kraven had waited to die, Blakemoor hadn’t found it. And maybe, he had to admit on the days when the frustration of the case threatened to overwhelm him, he hadn’t found that little fact because it simply wasn’t there. Still, why did his gut consistently tell him that Richard Kraven was as guilty as the courts had found him? Mark Blakemoor had been operating on his guts every day for the last twenty years, and they had never failed him yet. He sighed again. Maybe it was finally time to let it all go, move the files down to the storeroom in the bowels of the building, get them out of his sight, remove them from the corner of his office, where they taunted him every day. He looked up at McCarty, nodding toward the stack of boxes. “First, I guess I’ll get all that crap out of here.”
Jack McCarty’s head bobbed in gruff agreement. He started out of Blakemoor’s office, then wheeled around to glare once more at the open newspaper that had started his day so badly. “You think that Jeffers broad is going to keep harping on this?” he asked.
Mark Blakemoor, still remembering his conversation with Anne, shrugged in a carefully calculated display of ignorance. No point putting the homicide chief in an even fouler mood. “How would I know?” he asked. “I can’t read her mind.”
Grunting, McCarty turned and shambled out of Blakemoor’s office, already feeling his ulcer start to act up. Another day of milk for lunch, another day in which he would not dare eat one of the pastrami sandwiches he loved so much. Well, what the hell. Nobody ever said life was going to be a pastrami sandwich anyway.
As the chief made his exit, Lois Ackerly arrived, precariously balancing two Starbucks cups on top of what looked very much like a box of doughnuts. “What’s wrong with McCarty?” she asked, putting the box down on Mark’s desk. “The look he gave me would have killed a lesser woman.” Then her eyes fell on the ruined newspaper protruding from beneath the doughnut box, and she understood. “Oh. Anne Jeffers.” Her gaze shifted inquiringly to her partner. “Did you know this was coming?”
“Sort of,” Mark replied. He pulled the top off one of the coffee cups and helped himself to a particularly sticky-looking, chocolate-covered pastry.
“And?” Lois Ackerly pressed when it became obvious that Mark wasn’t going to tell her anything else.
“And what?”
Ackerly flopped into the chair behind the desk her partner always described as “compulsively neat” and fixed him with the look that meant he might as well tell her everything he knew or be prepared to subject himself to a day of nagging far worse than anything his ex-wife had ever dished out. Reading her expression perfectly, Mark closed the door to their office and recounted the events of the previous day.
“So what do you think?” Ackerly asked when he was through. “Is it over, or isn’t it?”
Blakemoor hesitated, then decided to go with his gut feeling. He picked up the newspaper, tore it into shreds, and dropped the whole mess into the wastebasket. “It’s over,” he told her. “As far as I’m concerned, the case is closed.” But as he reached for his cup of coffee, he found himself glancing down into the wastebasket, where Anne Jeffers’s picture seemed to be staring back at him.
CHAPTER 12
“How dare she write such filth?” Edna Kraven’s voice quavered with anger and the newspaper rattled in her shaking hand. Finally, she had to set it down on the kitchen table. Really, it was simply too much to be borne! Richard — her wonderful, perfect Richard — dead not even twenty-four hours, and that awful Jeffers woman was already writing about him again, repeating yet again all the terrible things she’d written for the last five years.
It was bitterness, of course. Edna had long ago come to understand that Anne Jeffers had fallen in love with Richard, and that when Richard had spurned her, her love had turned to hatred. Why else would she have pursued Richard the way she had, making up all those terrible lies about him? For years Edna had written letter after angry letter to the editor and the publisher of the Seattle Herald, protesting that Anne Jeffers was slandering her son, but they had never even responded to her. Once, though, they’d printed one of her letters, but then they’d let Anne Jeffers write an article with the disgusting insinuation that somehow the relationship between Edna and her son might have led to the awful things she’d claimed Richard had done. When Edna read that particular article, she’d actually felt faint — the very idea of what Anne Jeffers had implied fairly set her skin to crawling. To sully the perfect love between a mother and son that way …
Even now, just remembering that article made Edna Kraven’s blood boil, and she glared across the table at her other son, Rory.
Rory!
She’d named him after Rory Calhoun, who had been one of her favorite movie stars. So handsome, so strong.
And so different from her own Rory.
