I Will Come for You (10 page)

Carter is right. All they really have on Iverson is suspicion.

“I have a few people left on my list, that knew both Howe and Cowen,” Graham says. “I’ll get those.”

Graham looks at the clock.
Five-forty. They’re fast approaching twenty-four hours on the Iverson murder. He feels it in his gut, the fork of a hammer clawing his flesh.  All murder investigations work in negative time, and there’s no catching up, simply because no amount of time will bring back the dead.  When it’s serial murder, when the potential for another victim is just about guaranteed—and in a given number of hours—time takes on the steel edges of a skill saw blade.

Graham is on his seventh call, after a series of answering machines, one angry refusal to talk ‘
now
, what about four years ago?’ And a warbling conversation with Cowen’s mother, he hears Carter slapping his desk to get his attention.

“Really, ma’am?”
Carter is saying into the phone. “You’re sure about this?” He listens some, and then says, “She told you that herself? Hmm. Uh-huh. And was there anything about the two, when they were together, that made you think they were lovers?”

Graham’s mind starts working that.
A lover’s triangle? Were the two women seeing the same guy? Were they seeing each other?

Carter hangs up and turns a Cheshire grin his way. “Well, I think your right. Our killer
isn’t after just your run of the mill sinner. You have to be a ‘sexual sicko’ in order to make his list.”

“What makes Cowen a sicko?”

“According to a former friend and co-worker at the New Grind, you can gain that status by being a lesbian.”

“Really?”

“That’s right. She confirmed Howe and Cowen were lovers. She said she first noticed it at work. They were very ‘touchy-feely.’”

“Why didn’t she say anything four years ago?”

“She wasn’t on the island four years ago. She was living in Seattle with her loser boyfriend, whom, by the way, was also a sexual sicko. I didn’t ask her to elaborate.”

Graham nods. “It fits.
If you’re deranged.”

“Or a simple southern Baptist.”

Graham stands up, grabs his coat.

“Where are you going?”

“To feed my kid.” He starts toward the door. “You get something to eat, too. Make sure you get Edwards out to the Gresham house now. We need a statement from the girl’s parents supporting the date rape. See if Victoria has come up with anything on local pedophiles that will interest us. Then go eat.”

“Right boss.”

Chapter Eleven

Sunday, 6:10 pm

Isaac watches the man waiting for his father from the upstairs window of his bedroom. He’s a shaman. He looks like one, anyway, with his long white hair and those eyes. Clear, almost metallic, and persuasive. Isaac felt himself drawn to him, found himself moving toward the door without realizing he was pulled there by the shaman’s will. Isaac has heard that some of the Shinshi can do that. Use their minds to control people and objects. It’s a gift similar to hypnosis. Isaac has never seen it in practice. When he was a little kid he half-believed it, because everyone knew the stories, and all the stories were the same, all about the mind-grabbers who lived among them during the day, looking like everyone else, but at night turned into spirits and seeped into the minds of humans as easily as breath. Isaac stopped believing this when he was eight or nine years old. His father calls the stories local lore. Isaac also heard him call them crap.  Until tonight, he thought his father was probably right.

Whether the man is Shinshi or not, Isaac doesn’t doubt that he has a gift. The man practically admitted it. He told Isaac
that not everything is as it seems. Meaning that maybe the guy isn’t all bad? But Isaac has a hard time believing it. The shaman wants something from Isaac and he’s not asking for it. If he could, if he was able to, he would breech Isaac’s consciousness and take what he wants and more.

So far, Isaac escaped the man’s attempts.

He broke away when he watched his hand lifting toward the door, knowing he was going to open it, let the shaman in, even though his mind was screaming not to. It wasn’t that he was ordered to do it; more like the man’s will had tamed his own.

I
saac knows enough to get as far away from him as he can, but going outside is not an option. The man is part of the night, a spirit who can take on the shape of the wind and the trees. It’s not just the old ghost stories talking, Isaac carries the impression of the man in his mind. That’s the thing about intruding upon someone’s psyche--you leave as much as you take. Isaac suspected that he had the ability to enter a person, from the flashes of memory that rolled like film in his mind when he was attending to the dying. He knew their names, the names of their spouses, their children, their pets. It had to come from somewhere. And so Isaac is very careful not to submerge himself too deeply into the dying, fearing he’d be swept away with them.

He and this man seeking his father, share a similar gift. This troubles Isaac, because anyone can figure out that their
gifts come from the same source.  Isaac wonders if, beyond the pale light, lies a groping darkness. And he worries that at some point the two will meet, good and evil, like they always do in comic books and the movies, and that he is no match for what lies ahead.

He stands at the window and looks down on this man who could be his enemy, who could be here to harm him, and knows that running upstairs is not far enough. He still feels the shaman, prodding the seams of his mind.

He is sitting on the deck, facing the back yard, his fingers strumming the arm rest, not fast and impatient but a slow, steady rhythm. Isaac feels those fingers, the blunt, rough tips, needling for entry into his thoughts.

I won’t let him do it, Isaac thinks. He backs away from the window and looks around his room for a distraction. If he doesn’t think about the man, maybe he won’t be able to find Isaac.
Not on that level. Isaac knows that his approach to the dying is quickened by their urgency. For communication to exist outside the physical realm, both parties have to be willing.

He paces the length of his bed, watches his reflection pass through the mirror over his dresser,
thinks he should probably get a haircut. His mother, the way his mother was before her mind went south, would want him to. His bangs are in his eyes. He pushes them aside and looks for his mother in his face. He doesn’t like his freckles; his mother thinks they’re cute. Even now, when he does see her, she brushes her fingertips over his cheeks and says, “Sun-kissed.” She says it like it’s a prayer, then smiles so deeply Isaac can find it in her eyes.

His mother’s skin is smooth and white. She has a tiny scar under her lip, where she bit through her flesh during a fall. It’s so small he can only see it when she smiles and the skin stretches thin there. She was just a kid when it happened.
Six or seven and already in school. Isaac remembers that she hated the stitches and told him she walked around for two weeks with her hand over her mouth to hide them.

It isn’t hard for Isaac to imagine the kid his mother was.
In her worst moments, when she was folded up like a fist and shaking on the floor in her bedroom, her cries sounded like a little girl’s. She called for her father, mostly. And sometimes she said bad things about him. She screamed at him to go away, that he couldn’t live inside her anymore. Memories of him haunted his mother and long before her mind went soft she removed his pictures, wrapped them in newspaper and took them outside where she smashed them against the chop block.

So maybe her mind was already headed towards crazy at that point. Maybe that was the beginning.

Isaac wonders if her father, who died before Isaac turned one, put the scars on his mother’s body. There are more than the one under her lip. She has marks on her arms and legs, too. He doesn’t like thinking about his mother hurting. About a father who hit her. He tries not to think about the
after
mom, which is how he divides and packages the times in his life; good and bad are before and after. His mother’s laughter, her perfect face, even when she was smiling, are his best memories of her.

But even focusing on his mother doesn’t work a hundred percent.

He feels the shaman in his head, inside his skull, peeling at the layers of soft tissue. That’s what it’s like. The man has gained access into his physical person, and is searching persistently for entrance into Isaac’s self.

Natalie
pushed her food around on the tray. Egg noodles with turkey gravy and spinach. A sealed container held what looked like Jell-O. A meal fit for someone without teeth, or someone with no gag reflex. It was a no-choke dinner, except for the taste, which Natalie only guessed at. She couldn’t bring herself to try it. She held the spork in her hand, pushed it through the lump of cooling green leaves, and wondered, also, what was up with the spork? The plastic demi-tool was her only utensil.

She was beginning to think the hospital was trying
to save her from herself.

Earlier she’d gotten up to use the bathroom and found a sheet of reflective tin instead of glass in the mirror. She put on her bathrobe and searched for, but couldn’t find, the sash
for it.

She thought about asking the nurse for a nail file but knew she would truly freak out if she brought Natalie an emery board instead.

She’d convinced herself that she was still suffering from the effects of overexposure, a knock on the head, the loss of the little boy she’d tried to save. She refused to think about their conversation, not the one she’d thought they had in this room this morning, but the one they’d had on the ferry, before it sank, before she’d been hit with debris and chilled to a Popsicle.

The one where he had spoken and a jangling river of clashing swords had come out of his mouth.

No head injury to explain that away.

She had heard the words he had spoken and they had swirled around in her head, smacking against reason, making no sense at all.
At first. And then emerging from the rubble had been the warning. To believe in herself. Urging her to move forward, knowing that she may die.

Natalie had come to the island knowing that death might be her only release from the torment that was the aftermath of Steven’s death. She had come ready. Michael’s words hadn’t scared her on that level; they’d frightened her because she’d understood them, on a level that was primal. He hadn’t spoken in a language her mind recognized, but in words that she knew
intuitively. It was even possible they’d communicated without spoken language at all.

Graham
pulls up to the window at the Quick Chix and exchanges cash for a bucket of crispy chicken and some sides. He feels time slipping beyond his fingertips, that no matter how fast he runs, he’s always a mile short.

The KFK is hunting and killing those whom he feels are guilty of sexual misconduct. Graham doesn’t have to be a genius to figure out their killer was probably sexually abused as a child, that he is exorcising judgment against the man or woman who victimized him, sacrificing the innocent, or at least those innocent until charged and tried.

He doesn’t know how two small boys fit into this scenario. And he doesn’t know how to use fact and instinct to come up with the next possible victim. So they’re in damage control now. Before he left the station he asked the desk sergeant to spread the word to all officers: any recent complaints of sexual misconduct, big or small, going back three months, should be reported. Some complaints are minor, the charges dropped by the victim before even a report can be written. In these cases, the officer will make a note of the disturbance. Graham wants those notes. He wants all official reports culled from the active files and waiting for him when he returns from dinner. Carter is working the sex offender list. Additional men are alerting sub stations, briefing them on the possibility of their new theory and its implications. But even with all of this, they aren’t within striking distance. They’re closing in, spreading their nets, but there’s enough room for a killer as elusive as the KFK to slip through undetected.

Graham’s cell phone rings as he pulls away from the fast food joint. Caller ID displays his home phone number.

“Isaac?”

“Dad,” Isaac breathes the word through the phone. His son’s voice is thin, patchy, saturated
with fear, and Graham’s heart flutters with alarm.

“Isaac? You OK?”

“Are you coming home?” 

“I’m on my way.”

“Now, dad. You need to come home now.”

Graham turns onto the coast road and presses the gas pedal to the floor. Isaac isn’t one to panic. He can count on one hand the times he son has called him at work.

“What’s going on?”

“There’s someone here to see you
,” Isaac says. “Come home now.”

“I am, son,” Graham tries to assure him, but the line is dead. He looks at the cell screen and sees the signal faded. He presses speed dial but when the call connects it rings without answer.