Justice, pure and simple. Good guy versus bad guy, with everyone rooting for the hero in the white hat.
But today, when high noon came, there would be a different kind of showdown. This was no movie; this execution was going to be real. Further, the state of Connecticut had decreed that its first execution in almost forty years be carried out in the middle of the day, rather than in the dead of night—a decree Anne suspected was deliberately intended to remind the people that though they had the right to execute one of their fellow citizens, they couldn’t expect to have the action carried out clandestinely behind the dark cloak of midnight. Nor would there be a Gary Cooper for her to root for today. Instead, there would be only a nameless, faceless man throwing a switch.
Then another man—someone whom Anne felt she had known for a very long time—would be dead.
Anne shuddered, and felt instantly ashamed. At forty-two, after spending the last twenty years working for the Seattle Herald reporting on everything from fatal apartment fires to the AIDS epidemic, there shouldn’t be much left to make her shudder. She’d seen people die before; her own mother had passed away five years ago while she had held her hand, and Anne could still feel that last surge of strength that ran through her mother’s body, giving the dying woman just enough power in the last moments of her life to offer her a final smile and an encouraging squeeze of her fingers.
Anne hadn’t shuddered that day; indeed, as her mother’s last breath emerged from her crumpled lips in a soft sigh of relief, and her wasted body finally retired from its long battle against the cancer that had inevitably defeated her, Anne felt only a quiet sense of gratitude that her mother’s pain had mercifully come to an end.
Nor was her mother the only person Anne had watched in the last moments of life. She had sat helplessly with friends as they succumbed to the plague of AIDS, and she’d stood by in mute horror as victims of gang shootings died in the emergency room of Harborview Hospital.
Once she’d even found herself cradling the broken body of a ten-year-old who had just been pulled from the wreckage of his father’s car on I-5. Anne had stanched the flow of blood from his neck with her handkerchief as she prayed for the medics to arrive in time, and sobbed in frustrated fury when the ambulance lost the race for the boy’s life to a crowd of rubber-necking onlookers who had choked traffic on the freeway to a standstill.
The same 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.