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it’s all finally going to be over!”
    His flat gaze fixed steadily on her, but when Richard Kraven finally spoke, his voice again belied that strange dead look his eyes projected. “How can I tell you what I don’t know?” he asked in a tone that reminded Anne of an earnest child.
    Her jaw set as the heat of her anger suddenly turned ice cold. “Why did you want to see me?” she demanded. “What could you possibly have to say?”
    Richard Kraven smiled again, but this time there was no warmth to his smile at all; the cold, unblinking eyes fixed on her, the jaw tightened, and in that hard, grim look Anne Jeffers was certain she was at last seeing the true face of the evil that dwelt within Richard Kraven. “Today won’t end it. Killing me won’t end it,” he said, each word a chip of ice. “That’s what I wanted to tell you, Anne. How will you feel, Anne? When I’m dead, and it all starts again, how will you feel?” Suddenly he laughed, a mirthless cackle that reverberated through the cell block, coming back to batter at her eardrums again and again. “You’ve always wanted me to express remorse, haven’t you? Well, here’s some remorse for you—I am sorry about something. I’m sorry I won’t be here to see you suffer when you finally realize you were wrong about me.” His eyes bored into her and his voice began to rise. “It’s going to start again, Anne. Whoever really killed those people is just waiting until I’m dead. Then he’ll start again.”
    As Richard Kraven’s voice grew louder, Anne took a step backward, then turned and strode quickly down the corridor toward the exit. But even as the guard opened the door to let her out, the killer’s words echoed in her ears: “What will you do, Anne?” he bellowed after her. “Who will you apologize to when you finally find out you were wrong? Will you have the guts to kill yourself the way you’ve killed me?” His shout bounced off the concrete and metal walls of the cell block, echoing harshly, and his bitter laughter reached a crescendo. “That’s my regret, Anne,” he howled after her. “That I won’t get to watch you die the way you’re going to watch me!”
    Anne went through the doorway and slumped against the wall outside as the guard slammed the heavy metal door shut. She only wished she could close her mind to Kraven’s words as easily as the guard had closed the door against his voice.
    Straightening up, she started back toward Wendell Rustin’s office, her eyes automatically going to the clock on the wall.
    Eleven-thirty.
    Another half hour and it would finally be over.
    In her mind she began composing the first words of the piece she would write about Richard Kraven’s execution. But even as she put the lead together, Kraven’s words kept coming back, mingling with her own, worrying at her, creeping back into her consciousness no matter how hard she tried to shut them out.
    Suddenly she wished this day were over, so she could go away from the prison, away from Connecticut, away from Richard Kraven.
    Yes, that was what she needed.
    She needed to go back home, go back to Seattle.
    Go back to Glen.
    Holding firmly to the comforting thought of her husband, Anne focused her mind on the story she would write after the execution, after Richard Kraven was finally dead.
    After the horror was ended.



CHAPTER 4

    T he elevator jerked to a stop at the very summit of the iron skeleton of the Jeffers Building. For a single numbing second Glen was certain that the cage in which he felt claustrophobically confined was about to plunge downward, killing all of them as it smashed into the concrete bed forty-five stories below. For just that moment, the strange tingling in his left arm was gone and the queasiness in his belly and tightness in his groin forgotten. In the next second, though, as Jim Dover slid the elevator’s gate open and stepped out onto the wooden platform that seemed to Glen to hover precariously in midair, all the