I Will Come for You (13 page)

“I hope that’s where I’m going.” Blood begins to drain from the corner of his mouth. “I think I’ve been good enough. I ... hope...”

Isaac can clearly see the radiance surrounding this boy. As the blood drains from his body the light dims and when the boy leaves he’ll take it with him.

“You’re going to heaven,” Isaac promises.

He doesn’t know for sure, of course. But he feels it inside, in that part of him that never lies. This boy is going to Heaven. So he says it again.

“My name is Jeremy.”

It’s the last thing the boy says. Isaac remains at his side, waiting for the change, to suddenly find himself in his shower at home, fully clothed and drenched. He wants out. The killer is still here.
In the house. Isaac feels him and he wants to get as far away as he can. He looks for the rippling in the air around him, but nothing happens. He always leaves after the dying. He looks again at Jeremy, at his flat, vacant stare, and then places his hand under the boy’s nose. He isn’t breathing. The boy is definitely dead.

Isaac gets to his feet and catches his reflection in the window. He expects to find a dark image hovering behind him, perhaps, now, able to see Isaac, able to make of him another
sacrifice. It would explain why his heart is beating its way through his ribcage, why sweat is sliding down his face, why his skin is crawling.

But no one is there.

He rubs his arms, the back of his neck and then is pulled past his fear, past the body of the boy Jeremy and back into the hall. The sharp taste of iron is on his tongue, or maybe he just smells it, so strong, it seems like he’s tasting it. Sometimes, at the most destructive car pile-ups, when the blood is everywhere, the smell is like that. Like touching your tongue to an iron pole.

He is pulled from the inside out, lead through the house like he’s familiar with the layout. He comes upon a staircase and climbs it, finding himself in the dark shadows of a corridor. There are several rooms with their doors thrown open, and every one of them is well-lit and waiting to be explored.

Chapter Fourteen

Sunday, 7:15 pm

Graham scrapes his plate into the trash then rinses it and places it in the dishwasher. The shower is still running, so he loads the soap but doesn’t turn on the appliance. They need a new hot water heater; the one they have now limits a person to a ten minute shower and never are they able to run the washing machine at the same time as the dishwasher. Turning on either one when someone is in the shower is a guaranteed dash for rinse and run.

Shelley Iverson didn’t take advantage of his son. She didn’t take advantage of any of the boys in her care. Her crime, as far as the KFK is concerned, was self-inflicted. Maybe the killer knew she was a woman who got around too much; maybe she was pregnant and the killer knew it and didn’t approve. Out of wedlock pregnancies are no longer a social stigma, but they’re dealing with an unhealthy mind and a damaged perspective. Graham goes through a mental list of notes and regroups what he knows about the victims’ behaviors. So far, they have a pair of adulterers, an alleged date rape, a lesbian couple and a woman who may have changed partners as often as she changed her
underwear. Sometimes when he’s investigating a case, dark secrets are uncovered along with evidence. Some are criminal activities, others are quirks not punishable by law, but are frightening in their intensity for self-destruction. He has come upon situations that challenged him as a man, images that remain with him, testing his resilience. Crimes against children are the worst and he’s relieved he was wrong about Iverson.

He worries more now than he ever did about the time his son spends on his own. Twelve is such a between age. Isaac is too old for a baby-sitter, but too young to recognize and fight off some of the dangers of the world. He’s more vulnerable than kids from a two parent home and shouldn’t have to rely on himself as much as does. And it doesn’t give Graham one lick of comfort, knowing that divorced families
are the social norm.

He rubs a hand over his face and eases back into the comfort of knowing, for no
w at least, that Isaac is safe. He doesn’t torture himself with thoughts of ‘for how long,’ though he feels them crouching inside his mind, ready to pounce. His time now, his attention, must be focused outward on the King’s Ferry Killer.

The telephone rings, knocking Graham from his thoughts. He grabs up the receiver from the kitchen extension and announces himself.

“Hey, Chief, it’s Carter. The prelim is back. Confirms everything we already knew, which is nothing. The guy left the body clean. All except that strand of brown hair, which did
not
belong to Iverson. It’s male.”

“Great. What else do we know about it?”

“Blood type B positive. Caucasian. There’s an abnormality in the blood, like the guy might suffer from some kind of disease. I faxed the results to Oakes, hoping he can tell us something about that. Genetics sent the sample to the lab in Ontario for more complex tests.”

“Did forensics give any indication of what it might be?”

If the hair belongs to the King’s Ferry Killer, then the guy is ill. Graham hopes that means their killer is dying. He wonders if the disease is, in part, what drives him to kill. Some physical illnesses lead to mental deterioration.

“None.
The report states that an abnormality exists with the red blood cells which

indicates
a possible illness.”

“Thanks, Carter. You find anything else?”

“Nada. Still waiting to hear from the coroner.”

“I’m finishing up here,” Graham says. “I’ll see you in twenty.”

Graham hangs up the phone and props his shoulder against the wall. Until this break, their hard evidence amounted to very little. Really, only what the killer chose to leave behind—the mementos that condemned the victims. He wonders why a change in the MO now. The kneeling, the hair. Their murderer is scrupulous with details. He managed for sixteen years to leave not so much as one viable epithelia at the scene, and suddenly, they have shoe impressions in the victim’s blood and a strand of hair with the cuticle intact.

Could illness be making their killer careless? This Graham can believe. And if so, then more errors will follow, making capture eminent, if death doesn’t find the KFK first.

Graham pushes away from the wall and heads down the hall, toward the back part of the house where Isaac’s bedroom and bathroom are located. The shower is still running and it’s going on twenty minutes. Unusual, for his son, who has the two minute shower down to an art.

Isaac’s bedroom door is closed and Graham knocks twice before he opens it and pops his head inside.

Isaac is not in the shower. He is standing in the middle of his bedroom in the jeans and flannel shirt he was wearing at dinner. Only he’s not really standing, he’s suspended inches off the floor. His head is tipped back, baring his neck. No noose and nothing to hang it from anyway.

Still,
Grahams heart slams against his ribcage.

“Isaac!”

No response. No movement.

Graham takes Isaac’s hand, feels for a pulse in his son’s wrist, but can’t count past the thundering of blood in his head.

Chapter Fifteen

Sunday, 7:15 pm

Isaac wavers at the top of the narrow staircase, listens for movement in the rooms along the hall, and waits for the pull that always guides him to the side of the dying. Nothing comes to him.
But the smell. Blood.

Panic, as dense as cloud cover, settles on his brain, makes it hard for him to think. This is new. When he’s in this reality, knowing comes to him. He never has to work for it.

It was like this at Ms. Iverson’s house. Isaac felt the fear like it had a pulse.

Why isn’t he back home already?

He really wants to go home. Wishes he could just think his way there. But it doesn’t work like that. At the Iverson house, when Isaac felt the darkness, the shadow of evil, he wanted to turn back. But he’s never alone when he seeks the dying. Always a greater strength moves through him. Propels him forward when his feet refuse to move. Calms him. Like now, he feels it, warm and malleable, pulsing under his skin. An energy that keeps him standing, moving, acting.

There must be more dying, someone close by who needs him. He’s meant to find

them. Him. Isaac is pretty sure it’s a boy. Maybe a baby. This doesn’t come by vision but feeling. He doesn’t doubt it, as he never has and the gift has never let him down.

The boards beneath his feet creak as he moves forward. He reminds himself, no one can see him.
No one but the dying. He’s safe here.

The first door leads to a nursery. A baby lies in the crib, on his back, and kicks his feet as Isaac enters. Animals walk two-by-two across the nursery
walls, a rocking chair stands mute in a corner of the room. Isaac approaches the crib. He thinks the baby can see him--his big blue eyes seem to follow him and his small arms pump in the air above the mattress like a greeting. Isaac is two feet from the crib when he can draw no closer. He isn’t meant to disturb the natural flow of the world. He can’t prevent events, only assist those who die as a result.

As Isaac watches the baby, his lips part and reveal three small teeth in an otherwise gummy smile, and Isaac wonders if what he’s read about babies and small children, about the elderly, is true: that those closest to the dead zone are able to see the spirits that walk it. It makes sense to Isaac.
If the dying can see him, why not others?

Isaac smiles back at the baby. He pushes against the paralysis that makes his arms and legs dead weight. Growing
in his chest is the certainty that he must get to this baby. There must be a way to protect the little boy; for sure, there’s no way Isaac can leave him here to die.
That
couldn’t be asked of him.

He thinks about dragging the rocking chair to the door. If he can close the door and push the chair up under the knob, it would give the kid a fighting chance. He turns toward the chair, testing his mobility, and takes a step toward it before he catches movement in the window; the
light reflected there seems to flicker for a moment, turning the glass the black of night before the light reappears, vacant.

They are not alone. The weight of the air changes until he feels like he’s breathing

through the eye of a needle. The baby feels it, too. He rolls over on his stomach, his arms and legs batting the mattress. His small face turns pink before he is able to get a scream out of his terror-blocked throat.

Evil.
It wears the stench of blood, as though it is steeped in it. 

Isaac can see no more of this man than he did in Shelley Iverson’s home. He is a robe of black suspended in the air, a constantly fluid form that disguises body proportions. Isaac tries to find features, but looking at the man makes his eyes burn and tear. He resorts to using his peripheral vision. Still, he glimpses isolated pieces that don’t seem to go together, that make little sense to a mind that is human and essentially good:
beneath the black a white so blinding it causes red spots to dance in front of Isaac’s eyes; gnarled bones sheathed in a thin skin the deep-blood color of port stains. Then a hand, as anatomically correct as Isaac’s, reaches out and fingertips brush against the baby’s cheek.

“You are precious,” the intruder says.

Isaac is standing in the room with the devil himself. Fear releases a string of butterflies in his stomach that fly upwards, fluttering in and clogging his throat.

“No, not the devil.
I can’t take credit for that.”

A rasping laughter shakes the room. Isaac feels the breath of it move across his skin, scorches the fine hairs on his arms and his eyelashes.

He doesn’t recognize the voice. Not on a conscious level, but his mind, his heart, knows it, recoils from it, hunkers down and hides from it.

“You’re in here. I can feel you.” The black mass swirls, gyrates like a tornado. “I felt you the last time, too.”

Isaac forces himself to keep his gaze steady on the man, piercing through the

darkness
, searching.

“You’re another Elysian,” the other says. “When I
catch you, I’ll kill you, too.”

Isaac wonders what an Elysian is. He wonders what this thing is, that can read his mind, but not see him. Is he man or spirit? And why can’t Isaac get a good look at him?

“I’m human, all right. And something else, too. By the time you figure it out, it’ll be too late.” The black cloud settles above the crib and two hands reach from it, dangle above the baby. “Why does He always send the innocent for the innocent?”

More laughter slices the air. The baby whimpers. Isaac pushes against the internal restraints, grunts with the pressure to get closer to the boy, and the cackle that split the air becomes a full roar.

“You can’t get any closer to him than I can,” it says. “Don’t you know your place, Elysian? You’re here to attend death, not to stop it. You’re a shepherd; I’m the wolf.”