Chapter 2
On the opposite side of the country from his wife, Glen Jeffers lingered an extra five minutes in bed, wondering if maybe he shouldn’t skip his morning jog just this once. It was the kind of Seattle morning he hated—overcast, with a drizzling rain that promised to go on all day; not heavy enough to warrant a raincoat and umbrella, but just heavy enough to be annoying. Especially today, when he was going to have to be out in it all morning, inspecting the framework of the first high-rise his company had designed solely within their own firm.
Jeffers and Cline, Architects.
No partners; no other architectural firms listed on the big sign on the last developable block of the downtown sector; no other architects with whom he would have to share the glory for the spectacular design he had created. Soaring up forty-five stories, the building would step back from Fourth Avenue in a series of terraces as it rose toward the sky. But the feature he loved most was the park he’d designed for the top of the skyscraper. Covering more than half the block, it would provide a spectacular view of the city, the Sound, and the Olympic Mountains for anyone who cared to use the glass elevator that would ascend the north end of the building, carrying passengers directly from the sidewalk to any of the terraced levels or the park on the roof. In his building, at least, the best views would be open to the public, rather than reserved for the high-powered attorneys who were already vying for office space in what was rapidly becoming known as the Jeffers Building. It was a source of quiet pride for Glen that his building would be named for its architect, rather than its prime tenant.
He lay in bed for another few minutes, savoring the feeling of well-being that warmed him this morning despite the rain, and listened to the creaking of the old house he and Anne had bought nearly twenty years before, when they’d first gotten married. The house had been bigger than they really needed, and in terrible condition, but Glen had talked Anne into it After all, he was an architect; he would turn it into a showplace for next to nothing. What he hadn’t told her was that his skills as a carpenter, plumber, electrician, plasterer, and roofer were nil. But Anne, of course, had known that all along, and was pretty good with a hammer herself. In the end, the crumbling wreck of a house they’d picked up for only forty thousand dollars was now worth the better part of a million, and the neighborhood had come back along with the house. Anne and Glen, and the two children they’d had along the way, were now smack in the middle of one of the better parts of Capitol Hill, only a block from Volunteer Park, on a tree-lined street filled with other houses that had also been restored over the years since the Jefferses had moved in.
Though Glen liked to think he’d been prescient enough to foresee the resurgence of the neighborhood, the truth was that the best he’d hoped for was to fix the old place up, make a few dollars selling it, and move on. But as they’d worked on the house, both he and Anne had fallen in love with it, and when first Heather had arrived, fifteen years ago, then Kevin, five years later, they’d decided simply to stay where they were. Though they got offers for the house every few months, it had been years now since either of them had thought of moving. Meanwhile, a calico cat named Kumquat, then a small black and white mutt named Boots, and finally an only somewhat raucous green parrot named Hector, had been added to the family, at which point the house no longer felt too big. Indeed, when Boots decided to tease Hector, the combined clamor of the dog and the bird sometimes made the house seem far smaller than it actually was.
Now, as the television downstairs went on—its earsplitting volume telling Glen that Kevin was in possession of the remote control—he reluctantly shoved the covers aside, swung his feet to the floor, and decided he felt just old and stiff enough that if he skipped jogging he’d suffer pangs of guilt all day. Pulling on some pants and a sweatshirt, he took the stairs two at a time, then paused to glance into the living room before heading out the front door.
Both his kids were sitting in front of the television set, glued to an image of the prison in Connecticut where Richard Kraven was scheduled to die three hours from now. “Don’t you guys think you’ve seen enough of that?” he asked, remembering how he’d finally had to order them to shut off the television last night, when it seemed they might be ready to stay up until dawn watching the live coverage of the vigil going on in front of the prison.
“Maybe Mom will be on,” Kevin said, using a gambit that had often worked in the past.
“Maybe she would, if this were a local station,” Glen agreed. “But somehow I don’t think even your mother is quite famous enough for CNN yet. Now why don’t you turn off that deathwatch and fix yourselves some breakfast?”
“It’s not a deathwatch,” Heather objected, fixing her father with a scornful glare. “It’s a protest. And I still don’t see why you wouldn’t let me go. I don’t believe in capital punishment, and I should be there!”
Glen decided to ignore the bait, unwilling to let himself be dragged into yet another recitation of the importance of school over a protest in which neither he nor Anne believed. Pointing out one more time that the protest in question was taking place an entire continent away would, he knew, gain him nothing more than another of Heather’s pronouncements that “right and wrong doesn’t have anything to do with geography.” Sometimes he wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to have a daughter who was caught up in the music scene and spent most of her time hanging out on Broadway. Still, he and Anne had raised Heather to have a social conscience, and the fact was, he didn’t believe in capital punishment, either.
Except for a couple of special cases.
Ted Bundy, for one, whose execution Glen had fully supported, being as certain as everyone else that had Bundy ever been given an opportunity, he would kill again and again and again.
And now Richard Kraven, who, like Ted Bundy, had apparently committed most of his crimes in Seattle, but had finally been caught, tried, and sentenced on the other side of the continent. This morning the state of Connecticut would free the country from Kraven in exactly the same way Florida had liberated it from Bundy. Anne, Glen suspected, was probably working on a final story about the strange parallels between the two killers even as he was thinking about them.
Heather, though, was still young enough not to let her ideals be tainted by any exceptions at all, and Glen didn’t feel like arguing the point this morning. “All right,” he sighed. “But do me a favor, okay? Put on some coffee, and make some orange juice? I’ll be back in half an hour.”
By the time he’d gone out the front door and started up the street toward the park, both kids had already shifted their attention back to the television set, and as he trotted into the park a few minutes later to join the other joggers making their regular laps around the reservoir across from the old Art Museum, he began marshaling all the arguments he would need to convince them that even this morning it was more important for them to go to school than to stay in front of the television “just in case Mom is on.”
Which, of course, she would be, since it had already been announced by one of the Seattle independent channels that “crusading Seattle Herald journalist Anne Jeffers” would be interviewed immediately after the execution.
If he hurried, he could finish the inspection of the building in plenty of time to catch the broadcast at the office. Picking up his pace, he completed his usual six laps in five minutes less than his normal time, and felt a sense of aerobic virtue flood through him as his heart pounded during the final two-block sprint home.
By the time he arrived at the construction site an hour and a half later, though, Glen’s feeling of well-being was fading. When he first began to feel an odd hollowness in the pit of his stomach as he gazed up at the skeleton of girders soaring above him, he attributed it to nothing more than excitement at the structure finally being topped out. But as he studied the network of beams, struts, and girders—and the open cage of the construction elevator that seemed to rise upward to nowhere—the hollowness in his belly congealed into a tight knot of pain, and he felt a clammy sheen of sweat break out over his whole body despite the cool of the morning.
Could he be coming down with some kind of bug?
But he’d felt fine just a couple of minutes earlier. Deciding to ignore the strange sensations in his body, he took a tour of the ground floor, talking rapidly to the contractor and the foreman as he inspected the building’s structural framework. Though his stomach lurched as they took the elevator to the fifth level, he focused his mind tightly on the job at hand, and managed to put down the slight wave of dizziness that broke over him when he neared the precipitous edge of the subflooring, unguarded by even the most vestigial of safety railings. “Shouldn’t there at least be warning tapes across here?” he asked the construction chief, trying not to let his voice betray the faint feelings of panic he was experiencing.
“Only gets in the crew’s way,” Jim Dover replied. “By the end of the first day, they’d all be torn out, and the whole street’d be littered with ’em.” The foreman eyed the architect uncertainly. “You okay, Glen? You look kinda green around the gills.”
“I’m okay,” Glen said quickly, but as they progressed up the next twenty floors, he suddenly realized what was happening to him.
Acrophobia.
But where had it come from? He’d never had trouble with heights before—he’d always loved the sensation of shooting up the sides of buildings in glass elevators, watching the ground drop away from him. But this morning, unaccountably, he found himself growing increasingly reluctant to get back into the elevator after each of the incremental inspections had been completed. He told himself it was nothing serious, that all he was feeling was the natural insecurity brought on by having nothing solid between him and the abyss below. He decided to ignore the fear growing inside him, determined that whatever it took, he would make it to the top of the building, where he himself would crack open the bottle of champagne Alan Cline had brought to celebrate the building’s topping out.
“Quite a view if you look straight down.” As George Simmons, the chief engineer on the project, spoke the words, Glen had to steel himself from automatically glancing down through the heavy grate that was all that separated him from a twenty-story plunge to the concrete floor of the shaft.
“You sure you’re okay?” Alan Cline asked as the elevator jerked to a stop and the contractor and foreman stepped off, leaving the two architects alone in the cage.
Up here, even the subflooring hadn’t been installed yet, and all there was to support them was a series of thick wooden planks laid in what looked to Glen like a very precarious manner across the huge I-beams of which the building was constructed. “You sure those are safe?” Ignoring Alan’s question, and struggling to control the terror that was now threatening to overwhelm him, he directed his question to Jim Dover.
Dover grinned. He was a ruddy-faced, six-foot-four-inch bear of a man who had worked his way up from a one-man odd-job operation to running one of Seattle’s biggest construction firms. “They’re fine, as long as they don’t collapse under your feet.” Then, seeing Glen’s face pale, his smile faded. “You look kind of sick, Glen.”
“I thought it was flu,” Glen replied. “But now it’s starting to feel a lot more like something else.” He forced a grin, trying to make light of his ballooning terror. “A high-rise architect with acrophobia—kind of like someone who’s scared of the water joining the navy, huh?”
“Want to go back down?” Dover offered. “Alan and I can finish the inspection.”
“I’ll be okay,” Glen insisted. He moved toward one of the planks that would carry him out into the open network of girders, but as he neared the edge of the small platform around the elevator shaft, panic rose up in him again. He reached out to clamp his fingers onto one of the building’s main supports. A terrible urge to stare down into the gaping void below gripped him, but he put it down, forcing himself to gaze straight outward, over the top of the building across the street and across Elliott Bay past West Seattle, toward Bainbridge Island and the Olympic Peninsula.
“Wait’ll you see it from the top,” Dover said, following Glen’s gaze with his own eyes. “Gonna be the best view in the city. Not so high that it flattens everything out like Columbia Center does, but high enough so you can see damn near the whole town. Well, come on—if we’re gonna do this, let’s get it over with.”
As Glen watched in growing terror, Jim Dover, followed by George Simmons and Alan Cline, set off along the planks. Dover moved swiftly, only steadying himself now and then by reaching out to one of the struts with one hand while he pointed out various features of the construction with the other. Glen, his stomach churning, his groin tingling, managed to follow only a few steps before he realized the acrophobia was going to win. Too terrified even to risk turning around, he gingerly crept backward until he regained the platform by the elevator. His knees trembling, both hands clutching the heavy mesh cage of the elevator, he struggled to control the paralyzing fear that was on the verge of overwhelming him. Slowly, taking one deep breath at a time, he got his breathing back to normal and felt a little strength come back into his muscles.
A few minutes later, when the rest of the group had completed the inspection of the twentieth level and returned to the elevator, Alan Cline gazed worriedly at his partner. “This is nuts, Glen,” he said, reading the terror in the other man’s face. “It’s only a building. It’s not worth scaring yourself to death over.”
“And my problem is only a stupid phobia.” Glen uttered the words through clenched teeth, then felt himself relax as the others surrounded him. “I’m not giving in to it, and the only way to get over it is to face it head on. Let’s go up to the top.” Standing to one side, he let the rest of the men precede him into the small cage, then stepped inside himself. Closing the mesh gate, he hit the up button, and instantly the metal contraption rattled to life.
As the cage ground upward, Glen felt the familiar terror surging inside him again.
He began to sweat once more, and then the worst part of the panic began: suddenly it felt as if metal bands were wrapped around his chest, and every second someone was screwing them tighter and tighter.
So tight, he could barely breathe.
Glen’s heart began to pound, harder than it ever had before.