“Except he didn’t just whack him,” Lois said almost distractedly, her eyes fixing on the note. “Something hinky’s going on here, Mark. What does this mean, ‘I hate a copycat’? Even if it turns out Rory Kraven did kill Davis and Cottrell, what’s this new guy’s beef with Rory? I mean, here’s this new perp doing the same thing to Rory that he claims Rory did to Davis and Cottrell. So who’s the copycat? Rory Kraven, or this guy?” She started back into the apartment, but the sound of footsteps coming quickly up the stairs stopped her. Turning, she saw Anne Jeffers, with a photographer in tow, emerge from the stairwell, only to stop short as she recognized the two detectives.
“Oh, God, I was right,” Anne said, paling. “Even after I heard the dispatch on the scanner, I hoped maybe …” Her words trailed off, and she tried to cover her fear by putting on her reporter’s dispassionate mien. She couldn’t do it. “It’s another one, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Like Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell?”
Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly glanced at each other, wordlessly agreeing that at least where this case was concerned, Anne Jeffers was more than simply a reporter.
“It’s Rory Kraven,” Mark Blakemoor told her. “Richard’s kid brother.”
Rory Kraven? Anne thought. But that was crazy. He was nothing but — And then, in a sudden flash of clarity, she remembered exactly where she’d been when she left the hospital after visiting Glen and felt someone watching her. Her gaze shifted from Mark Blakemoor to the open door to Rory Kraven’s apartment. Through the window in the opposite wall she could see the looming bulk of the hospital across the street.
“He was watching me one night,” she said, her voice so low that neither detective was certain whether she was talking to them or to herself. “I’d been visiting Glen in the hospital, and I was on my way home. I felt someone watching me. It must have been him.” She fell silent for a moment, then turned back to the two detectives. “What happened?” she asked.
Wordlessly, Blakemoor handed Anne the note.
She read it through, then looked up at Blakemoor. “He’s dead? Rory Kraven’s dead?”
The detective nodded. “He’s in the bathtub. Naked, just like Cottrell.”
Anne suddenly felt numb. Rory Kraven had killed her next door neighbor? But Rory had been nothing — the kind of man who plodded through life, using all his resources just to get by. She could still remember interviewing him years ago, when suspicion had first begun focusing on his brother. Rory hadn’t wanted to talk about Richard — all he’d said was that they didn’t get along very well, they weren’t close, they weren’t very much alike.
Which had certainly been the truth.
Where Richard’s features had been strong, even handsome, Rory’s face had been a study in weakness and ineffectuality. He’d had a low-level job at Boeing, if she remembered correctly, and he seemed to her the kind who never missed a day, never created a problem for anyone, could always be counted on to do his work steadily, if never brilliantly. But dull, uninspired Rory had also been the little brother of Richard Kraven. Richard, who was brilliant. Richard, who was everything Rory wasn’t.
Richard, who was the apple of his mother’s eye.
And that, she well knew, hadn’t stopped even after Richard had been executed. Even after her son’s trial, failed appeals, and execution, Edna Kraven still insisted that Richard had been innocent. Innocent, and perfect.
Richard must have been eating at Rory all his life, even if he’d never shown it. Richard, who had remained newsworthy even after he’d been executed. She herself—
And suddenly it made sense.
“He wanted the attention,” she whispered, barely even aware that she was speaking out loud. “All his life, everything was focused on Richard. And even after Richard was dead, it didn’t stop.”
Her eyes went back to the note she still held in her hand.
I hate a copycat … an inept copycat … I doubt anyone will be too upset that Rory is gone. After all, he could never be me …
She read the words again and again — read them so many times she was sure she could recite them in her sleep — staring all the while at the note.
It was the handwriting.
She kept staring at it, knowing she recognized it, but not wanting to admit it. Not without an explanation.
And there could be no explanation for this.
She had seen Richard Kraven die in the electric chair. She had watched as his body stiffened, his face contorted, and his eyes rolled back into his head.
It was impossible that Richard Kraven could have written the note that was now in her hand.
And yet there was no question.
The handwriting was his.
CHAPTER 48
Blood.
There was blood everywhere, but this time it wasn’t the blood of a cat.
This time it was human blood.
Glen Jeffers knew it was human blood, although he had no idea where it had come from. The blood was all over him — on his hands, on his face, smeared down the whole length of his naked body.
Naked?
Why was he naked?
Tearing his eyes away from the stains on his hands and torso, Glen scanned the walls that surrounded him. He was in a room he didn’t recognize — a shabby room, the kind he’d lived in years ago when he was a student in the architecture school at the university. But even that apartment, up in the University District just off Roosevelt, had been nicer than this one. Its walls had been cracked, and there’d been a hole in one of them where the previous tenant had let the closet door slam against the plaster every time he opened it. But at least the walls of that apartment had been white — a good, clean white that Glen had put on himself.
The walls surrounding him now were beige — the kind of drab, dirty beige that covers the walls of most cheap apartments. He could see a Murphy bed in one wall, and a sagging recliner, its upholstery so stained it was hard even to tell what color it might once have been.
A rickety-looking table with a couple of badly nicked painted metal chairs.
And more blood.
The walls were covered with it, and so was the furniture.
Blood everywhere.
He wanted to run from the room, but as he turned from one wall to another — and now they seemed to loom over him, imprisoning him — he couldn’t find a door.
Only more blood, dripping down the grimy walls, puddling on the floor.
Glen could feel it under his bare feet now, warm and sticky, and he tried to move away from it but his feet felt heavy, immobile, almost as if they were encased in concrete.
The walls seemed to be closing around him, and he reached out to push them away, but succeeded only in smearing their bloody surface. Blood, glistening scarlet, covered his fingertips, and he opened his mouth to vent his terror in a scream.
Nothing came out.
His throat constricted, and now he could barely even breathe, let alone howl out in terror.
He turned again, and finally there was a door.
An open door, leading into another room.
He worked his way toward it, his feet dragging, resisting him every step of the way. There was light flooding through the doorway, and inside he could see the shiny surface of white enamel on the other room’s ceiling, and a darkly mildewed grid of uncleaned grout surrounding the tile on the walls.
A bathroom.
There would be a shower there, and at least he could wash the blood from his body, get it off his face, out of his hair. A whimper bubbled out of his throat as he reached the door, but even that whimper died away as he gazed at the carnage in the bathtub.