I Will Come for You (15 page)

He climbs out of the SUV, unsnaps his holster but doesn’t draw his weapon. The man sitting on the porch steps is sobbing. His arms are wrapped around a squirming infant. The baby Isaac told him about.
Alive.

“My boy.
My boy.” He pushes a hand into his hair, tears at his scalp, pours his tears into his baby’s neck where he cradles him. “You’re too late.”

Graham doesn’t recognize the father. Some people move to the island for the isolation.
Especially when they settle this far out, when the closest neighbor is a quarter mile down the road. In any case, King’s Ferry and its surrounding region is populated by more than eighty thousand people and he doesn’t know everyone. It doesn’t matter. This part of his job is never easy.

“Is there anyone in the house?”

Graham mounts the steps and stops beside the father. He lays a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Sir?”

The man lifts his head and looks at Graham. His eyes are glazed, not really seeing outward. The horror slams Graham in the chest. This man lost his son. Graham never wants to know that kind of pain.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Graham says. He squeezes the man’s shoulder, clears his throat. “Is

there anyone in the house?”

“My son is in there.”

“Your wife? Other children? Did you see or hear anyone?”

“No. My wife is picking up the girls. They had practice after dinner.
Dance.”

The man’s voice breaks and his words unravel until he is all emotion and unable to think beyond the reality of his loss.

“Stay here.”

Graham pulls his weapon as he approaches the open door. The
light in the foyer casts shadow down the hall. To the left an opening leads to what Graham believes is the living room; to the right three doors hang open, lit within. The house is silent and Graham pauses inside the door, listening for movement. The crying baby, and behind that the sharp blaring sirens of approaching police vehicles, but nothing from inside.

He paces himself slowly, stopping beside the wide arch and peering into the living room.
Furniture, fireplace, baby swing. No movement, no shadow. He passes, wades deeper into the hall, and gently pushes the first door back on its hinges. The boy is here, curled on the floor. His neck is arched, like he was pulling back to look at an approaching figure. Blood seeped from the carotid artery in his neck, from the corner of his mouth. His hands are stained with it. He probably cupped his throat to try to stop the bleeding. It’s a natural and sometimes final reaction to this kind of attack. But as far as Graham can see in this first pass, the boy’s hands hold no defensive wounds.

A surprise attack from a hidden adversary.

The sudden shock to the system weakens the joints and the bowels. The boy would have dropped within two to four seconds. He would have lost consciousness after two or three

minutes
and died in almost the same instant.

It’s the same M.O.

A second victim within twenty-four hours. This should be the KFK’s last, for now, if he keeps to form. If they ignore the depth of the wound, the increased agitation of the crime scene.

A boy not much more than a kid.
Graham feels physically—as the pinch in his lungs and in the sluggish beat of his heart. A boy not much older than Isaac.

Instinct kicks in and he leans deeper into the room, keeping his feet firmly planted, careful not to disturb what could be evidence.

Graham scans the corners of the room. The computer is on, reduced to a screen saver--a picture of Jesus of Nazareth in the last moments of His life.

Another religious memento they can add to their collection: one gold cross that was found
pressed into the victim’s hand--family later insisted that the victim was not religious; a handful of rosary beads plucked off their string; Lance and Steven Forrester were washed in holy water; Iverson and the Baby Jesus statuette.

They managed to keep this information from the media.

But there’s more here, too. Impressions, again, in the boy’s blood. So maybe they belong to Isaac. Maybe the hair, too. But then that would mean Isaac is sick, and Graham knows his son is healthy. He just had a physical for baseball.

Graham steps back, creeps further along the hall, stopping to scope out the remaining rooms. In the kitchen, the table is cluttered with the remains of dinner--just as Isaac said. The water is no longer running in the sink and the refrigerator door
is closed, but this could have been done by the father before he discovered his son’s body.

Graham steps out the back door, scans the yard, dwelling for a moment on the arrangement of toys. Isaac was here, with the King’s Ferry Killer. He held the hand of the dying boy. Spoke to him.

Isaac attended to Iverson, too. And how many others? And what exactly does he do when he’s called to the dying?

Fear of the unknown--the very unknown--blooms in his heart, dark and sharp. He doesn’t want Isaac to be anything other than a twelve year old boy thinking about friends, baseball and who to ask to the spring dance.

He doesn’t want his son anywhere near the King’s Ferry Killer.

Graham circles the house, shaking the shrubbery as he goes. He joins the father on the porch, remaining in an offensive stance, though he’s sure the KFK is long gone. The man is weeping silently; the baby is no longer crying. Two police cruisers pull into the gravel drive way. They’ll search the house again, a grid search. Forensics will come in, collect
samples, sketch and photograph the scene. The coroner will arrive, and by then, the reporters.

Chapter Eighteen

Sunday, 10:20 pm

Natalie didn’t have a car or luggage. Her Dodge Dakota was at the bottom of the strait, with her suitcase and cosmetic bag tucked into the metal box in the bed of the truck. She didn’t even have a toothbrush. She’d called her mother earlier that afternoon to assure her she had survived the sinking, that she was free of injury and was planning to make her way to King’s Ferry the next day. She asked her mother to cable her some cash and then spoke to the owners of the Inn where she had a reservation. Natalie’s plan was to rent a car in Victoria, using her credit card, which was also at the bottom of the strait, but was accessible online with a password. Tomorrow, she would walk out of the hospital in borrowed clothes, make a few necessary purchases, and find a coffee shop with internet access.

She added a final note to her list and set the pad and pen aside, feeling pretty good about her mental ability, at least when it came to planning her getaway.

It was evening and outside her window clouds of fog gathered against the pane, too thick to see beyond it to the moon or stars or even the lamp posts in the hospital parking lot. She was leaving first thing in the morning; the doctor promised he’d start his rounds at seven am. Several times throughout the day her reflexes had been tested with the little rubber mallet, her heart listened to with the pint-sized synthesizer, and her lids peeled back and her eyes examined using what had seemed light a strobe light. Except for a persistent headache, she was fine. According to the doctor, she was rebounding even faster than they had anticipated. He would make her his first stop before he saw what he called his “needy patients.” And that was fine by her. The sooner she was out and on her way, the better.

She’d slept on and off during the afternoon; not dreaming of Michael again, but of her brother. An array of photographs of Steven, some of him as he’d have been as a young man had he lived that long, appeared as icons on a computer screen and Natalie had maneuvered the mouse over each of them. She did
not
double click on any of them, knew she must not if she was going to live past the moment. But each photo had become animated as the small arrow touched it; animated but not lifelike. He sometimes laughed, throwing his head back in a mechanical, robotic way. The laughter had been hollow. Other times, he’d covered his face with his hands and wept. The tears fell from the screen, pooled on Natalie’s hands, colder than the water that had lapped around her in the strait. As she watched, her fingers grew numb, turned gray and fell from her hands. She’d tried to pick them up, but with only palms to work with, her efforts became frustrated, frantic until she was clapping her hands in a macabre applause.

She remembered attempting to intrude upon her dream, to break its spell, to free
herself from its morbid destruction, but then Steven began to speak. First her name, drawn out like a howling wind, trembling on the air like the final note of a strained aria. She couldn’t turn away from him. She woke up knowing she would continue looking for her brother’s killer, searching for a justice that was years overdue.

Natalie looked at the clock radio on the night stand. It was nearing ten. She wasn’t tired. The nurses had stopped the IV drip of pain medication after lunch and unaided Natalie doubted she would sleep much. She felt edgy, like a troop of ants was crawling in her blood. She pushed aside the blankets and looked for the footie-slippers the hospital had provided for her. She put them on, wrapped herself in the thin, cotton robe they’d hung on the bathroom door, and stood

before the window.

He was out there.
The man who had killed her brother. He had killed at least one other boy, too. Lance Marquette. Natalie remembered him, having trailed after them on a number of occasions, suffering from hero worship of the two. They had seemed so much bigger than they were. Sometimes, when Natalie looked at a little boy in passing, she was amazed at how small her brother had actually been when he’d been murdered. So small and open to possibility.

Conquering new lands had been their favorite game. They’d made swords out of box board and aluminum foil, hung them from their belt loops and worn bandanas around their heads. Steven and Lance were the best pirates a girl could hope have
kidnap her and feed her to the sharks.

She smiled, remembering how the boys had often “stolen” her, stowed her in the bow of their pirate ship and then dumped her overboard when the discovery of treasure measured far more important than a mere girl.

Rain began to splatter against the window. At first, Natalie thought they were her tears. She’d welcome a good cry to break up the tension in her chest, to mourn the brother she’d lost too soon, to embrace this life she’d been awarded a third time.

Third time.
The words tumbled in her head, not making sense. Thrown like a pair of dice, they continued to come up the same. She’d been given life three times. At birth; spared when Steven had been taken; surviving the downed ferry. Yes, it felt right. Spared when Steven had been taken. She believed it had come to that. That through the choice of another, she had continued to live. That she could have been extinguished as surely as Steven and Lance had been. Someone had intervened. Someone had saved her life in the hour that Steven had been murdered.

She remained still, hoping to sense something more. Hoping, now, for a vision to

accompany the thought. To ground her. To explain to her why she knew what she knew.

Nothing more came to her.

She pressed her hands to the window, welcomed the cold bite in the smooth glass. Had she and Steven stood together in the tall grass above the bay? Had they had a final moment, when they knew one of them would live and the other would not? Had Steven made the choice, in that stoic but boyish way he had, with his eyes steady, his teeth biting into his bottom lip?

She believed Steven had had a voice in it. And for a moment, after her thoughts settled and her mind shifted gears, she glimpsed him, aged ten, his blond hair lifting from his forehead as he stood in the grass, on the bluff, in the wind, and told her to “Go now. Go Natalie. Run.”

Whether the vision was real or contrived, she didn’t know. Was it a memory or had her mind created the moment?

She pushed away from the window and paced in front of the beds. She hadn’t had any company since Michael, and she didn’t know if he really counted. The nurses didn’t. They were efficient, sympathetic and quick to administer to her and le
ave. Budget cuts had reduced the hospital to a skeleton crew. Though the doctors and nurses were kind, they were also mindful of the next patient and a list of tasks that needed completing.

Natalie stepped out of her room and looked down the
corridor. It was illuminated by a bank of fluorescent lights that reflected off the tired linoleum floor. She’d thought hospitals had done away with the gray tile flooring years ago; it was the kind that looked like an explosion of vomit had erupted in a palette of pastel colors; the kind that was so popular in mental hospitals forty years ago.

The hall was sparsely populated. A nurse stood at a desk, beside a metal organizer that held patient charts. She flipped through one and didn’t look up. Several doors down an older couple, wrapped in trench coats, were saying their good-byes. Many doors stood open and light
poured out of them; Natalie heard a few whispered words of pain, a muffled sob. She hated hospitals and wavered for a moment in the doorway. She felt the emptiness of her room push at her back.

She wasn’t used to being still. She seldom took time off from work, and when she did, it was for something planned. A doctor’s appointment, and then she’d filled the rest of the day with errands; a vacation that was never the kind where you brought a beach towel and had endless hours for introspection. Being still, stuck in one place beyond its ability to entertain her mind, resulted in an exploration of memory and emotion. She’d feared that more than sudden death.