Black Lightning Read Free

kind of crowd who waited outside now, waited for the stroke of noon and the announcement that justice had been served .
    Justice, or Anne Jeffers?
    Was that why she was shuddering?
    Suddenly wanting to be alone to examine her feelings, Anne rose from the hard chair in the makeshift pressroom hastily set up for the fifty-odd journalists who had descended upon the prison to cover the execution of Richard Kraven. She made her way between two rows of long tables whose surfaces were littered with notebook computers and phones. She rapped once on the door of the single rest room that served all the men and women in the pressroom, then went inside, locking the door behind her. Stepping up to the cracked sink that was bolted to the wall next to a stained toilet, she stared at her reflection in the rectangle of polished metal screwed to the wall above the worn basin.
    At least her feelings weren’t showing, she thought with some relief. Her reflection—the image of an oval face with deep brown eyes and a straight nose—gazed steadily back at her, only slightly distorted by the ripples and dents in the makeshift mirror.
    She searched her features again, then turned away, annoyed with herself. What had she expected to find? Some brilliant insight into her conflicted feelings written across her forehead? The fact was, she knew perfectly well why she had found herself shuddering as she waited for Richard Kraven’s execution.
    She had shuddered because this time, when she watched someone die, she would know that she was at least partly responsible for his death.
    “Not true!”
    Anne spoke the words out loud, so sharply that they reverberated in the tight confines of the rest room.
    And it wasn’t true that Richard Kraven was being executed because of her.
    He was being executed because of what he had done.
    He was dying as punishment for his sins, and his sins were great enough that he should be executed ten times over.
    How many people had Richard Kraven actually killed as he roamed the country in pursuit of his “research,” as he called it, selecting victims for his horrific experiments?
    No one knew.
    Kraven had steadfastly denied killing anyone, but that was nothing more than the typical insistence of a sociopath that he’d done nothing wrong.
    Anne Jeffers knew better. In addition to the three people here in Connecticut, of whose murders Kraven had actually been convicted, she was certain there were scores more. The bodies of men and women, young and old, had been scattered across the country from Kraven’s home in Seattle down the coast to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and across the continent through Denver, Minneapolis, and Kansas City to Atlanta. Sometimes it seemed as if there wasn’t a major city in the country that Kraven’s cold shadow hadn’t fallen over; even now the list of crimes in which Richard Kraven was the prime suspect still grew.
    Yet even as Richard Kraven’s evil had spread, there had always been people to defend him, several of them among Anne’s own colleagues in the press. Some suggested the evidence presented in court hadn’t been strong enough to convict him; others sagely opined that Kraven should be kept alive to study. But every time someone had written a story advocating that Richard Kraven be allowed to live, Anne Jeffers answered it.
    Instantly, and strongly.
    In the end it was her view that prevailed. Richard Kraven had been sentenced to die.
    Now, two years after the sentencing, all the appeals had been filed, all the motions for new trials had been considered and denied, and all the other states having claims against Richard Kraven had agreed to save themselves the not inconsiderable expense of trying him for crimes indistinguishable from those for which he had already been convicted. Yet, in the years since he’d been convicted and sentenced, Richard Kraven had become steadily more famous, and the clamor to save his life had grown ever louder.
    Anne Jeffers had listened in