I Will Come for You (2 page)

Isaac hears the hitch in his breath; he’s moving
faster  now, pulled as a piece of metal by a magnet, to the side of the dying. Somehow a kind of osmosis takes place where Isaac feels their emotions in his heart and is moved by them. Greater than a common compassion, it compels him across the two lane coastal freeway and through the tall grass. The earth is slanted, uneven and potted. He slips going down. He tears at handfuls of brush to keep his footing. When he arrives at the SUV he hears a metallic ticking, and above it the labored, gurgling breath of someone clinging to the frayed edges of his life.

The SUV is on its side. Isaac approaches from the front of the vehicle, a hand raised to block the beams of light. He doesn’t recognize the truck. That sometimes happens, too. He
knows the victim. His first time, he transitioned into the kitchen of old Mrs. Whidden, who sat with him when he was a little kid and his father was out on a call. She was lying in a growing pool of her own blood and whispered to him, “I wondered who would come. I’m glad it’s you, Isaac.”

She fell down the stairs, breaking several bones and opening up a cut that slashed from ear to chin.  A blood clot exploded in her brain and he watched it eclipse in her eyes.

He thought it was a dream, but then he was home, standing in his bedroom, with a silver locket bunched up in the palm of his hand. He never saw Mrs. Whidden without that locket around her neck, and without opening it, he knew inside were pictures of Mr. Whidden and their daughter, Gloria. Mrs. Whidden pressed it into his hand before she slipped away. “They’re waiting for me,” she told him.

The SUV’s engine is still running. Isaac can’t reach the ignition through the
windshield and so he lets it idle and stares through the shattered, beaded glass at the man pinned to his seat. Blood is seeping through a cut in his head and mats his gray hair. One hand still clutches the steering wheel and Isaac reaches for it.

The man is startled. His eyes open, flare in the clutch of fear,
then relax.

“Is
help here?” he asks.

“I’m here.”

“Did you call for an ambulance?” Blood soaks his words, streams out the side of his mouth. Isaac is good now at quieting the part of him that scares easily at grievous wounds. He’s good, too, at maneuvering the dying through denial and into acceptance.

“We don’t need one, Mr. Conway.” Isaac’s voice is steady; his face is softened by compassion. Still, Conway won’t look into his eyes. Some of them put it off for as long as they can. Isaac thinks it’s through the eyes, the certainty there, that the dying
slip into the next world.

“I know you?” Conway asks.

He doesn’t. And Isaac doesn’t know him. Sometimes he sees film from their lives, common, ordinary scenes with loved ones and becomes aware that their reluctance to leave is rooted in their desire to stay with family. Isaac must address this.

And sometimes a name forms on his lips before he knows it.

“My wife is waiting for me, you know,” he says. “I put in another late night...work...”

The dying can’t be rushed. They move through their final moment at their own pace. He is here simply as companionship.
As ballast, to support them.

“She’ll have dinner for me...”

Isaac lets the man’s words float in the air untouched. He doesn’t feed denial. He waits.

Conway turns his hand palm-up and his grip on Isaac tightens. Isaac can feel the warmth of the man’s skin, the trembling in his fingers.

“I’ll miss her,” Conway says. “She was my life.”

“I know, Sir. She knows it, too.”

“You’ll tell her I didn’t want to go?”

Isaac tries not to make promises he won’t keep. He knows, also, that time is more about
perception than absolute value. It isn’t linear, but radiant.

“It won’t be long.”

The old man nods, but another moment passes before his hand loosens around Isaac’s and he surrenders his last breath.

Chapter Two

Sunday, 5:55 am

Graham steps onto the back porch and closes the door behind him. If he smoked he’d light up right now. And not because he knew the victim who lay bled on the floor in the living room, or because the murder was vicious or grisly. It was, in fact, a clean kill. The murder weapon, probably a twelve inch hunting knife, was used with more force this time, rendering a longer, deeper wound than they’ve seen from the King’s Ferry Killer. Still, there’s no evidence of a struggle, or that the victim had the warning or will to fight back. There never is such evidence. The killer moved silently through the house, approached the victim from behind, and slashed her throat. It was an act of rage. Anytime a knife is used, placing the perpetrator up close and personal to his victim, passion, dark and destructive, is the motivator.

The killer touched the victim. Maybe he whispered a final word in her ear. But forensics never picks up viable DNA. Not a trace of spittle. Not a foreign epithelial.
Nothing--until now--a single strand of brown hair recovered from the body of the victim and a set of footprints in her blood. And all Graham can think is, Why? What happened to compromise the killer’s careful removal of evidence?

Graham shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket and steps into the drizzle. Dawn is breaking to the east, a bleary eye behind the low fog swirls. Such is life on Vancouver Island, two months of sunshine, ten of rain. This island was both a sanctuary and a prison for him when
he was a teenager. And its hold on him has everything to do with the death of his brother and his current position: Chief Constable and head of the King’s Ferry Killer task force. He asked for the job. He lobbied for it, after serving nine years in the department. He took the promotion seven months ago, nearly four years after the KFK’s last attack and sixteen years since Graham’s brother, Lance, became the first victim.

He hears the door behind him open and the raspy thud of Carter’s shoes as he approaches.
Impractical shoes. The guy wears wing tips and then wonders why he has to buy a new pair every three months. Carter was assigned to the task force three years ago, transferring from the Ontario branch of the RCMP, and still hasn’t acclimated to island living.

“He didn’t die,” Carter says.

“No,” Graham agrees. “And he isn’t rotting in a prison cell somewhere.”

“So much for theory.”

“Wishful thinking,” Graham corrects. They hoped the King’s Ferry Killer died in a car crash or was serving time for an unrelated crime. It happens often enough.

The longest stretch of time between victims is seven years. That was after the first set of victims--his brother, Lance, and his summer friend, Steven Forrester. This time, there are forty-four months between kills and they began to wonder if the KFK was silenced. No such luck. No luck at all when it comes to this case. The guy strikes according to his own timetable and no amount of technology and combined intellect can figure out what becomes of the killer between murders.

“Number nine,” Carter says.
“And now more women than men.”

Five female victims, four male.

All victims living in or otherwise connected to King’s County.

A murderer venting his rage, according to the behavioral profile.

A mind twisted beyond human reason. Incapable of compassion.

And it all star
ted with Graham’s brother, sixteen years ago August tenth, and brought the island to a shrieking standstill. 

Graham was fifteen years old and watched the tales of murder unfold, first in the living room of his own home, and then on television. Two boys, aged ten and eleven, found on the
bluffs above Deep Bay. Graham saw the pictures after he became a cop. The sweet horror of them makes a full night’s sleep a dream and taunts the starts and ends of each day. Graham knows his brother was the first victim because the other boy, Steven Forrester, reached out and laid his hand on top of Lance’s. Then he, too, died.

Everything here at the Iverson scene matches the other victims, everything except the size seven footprint found in Shelley Iverson’s blood and a single strand of dark hair retrieved from her body. Someone stood beside her while she died; knelt in her blood when it was still fresh, in a position that suggests was a compassionate vigil. That doesn’t match the cold and calculated
killer known to Vancouver Island for more than fifteen years as the King’s Ferry Killer.

Forensics used the impressions in the woman’s blood to come up with an approximate weight and height of the person. It could have been a kid, or a small woman. Iverson was found by her father, a man who weighed as much as, if not more, than Graham. The doors and the windows were locked, with no sign of tampering. He knows they’ll find no fingerprints of interest.  The DNA evidence they recover will belong to the victim, her family or known visitors.
Probably this brown hair, too. 

But Graham will approach Saul Doss again anyway. The man is somewhat of a
local legend in psychological circles, having achieved new levels of success in reclaiming the lives and the minds of many thought lost to mental illness. The department consulted Doss on a number of occasions regarding the King’s Ferry Killer over the years. Graham spoke to him and made note of their conversations in the case file. Doss described a killer of cold thought and precise action.  When asked who he should be looking for, Doss replied, “A depleted soul. Evil dressed in human form.”

Well, welcome to the world of serial killers.
             

Graham pressed for a more concrete marker from Doss, something more tangible that would help him pick the killer out of a crowd of deviants, but the man was of little help. And there was something about him, maybe it was the way the man hesitated before answering Graham’s questions that he felt, on an instinctual level, was more than careful thought. Graham suspect
ed Doss of withholding information. When challenged, Doss rose in denial and in the end, Doss’ observations matched the psychological profile developed by the experts at the RCMP. But the man’s behavior continued to tease Graham’s suspicion, even after checking Doss’ whereabouts at the time of the murders and coming up with a hard alibi for each.

The original profile predicted white male, aged twenty-two to forty-seven at the first strike. It gave a probable description of the killer’s mind and even used some of the same vocabulary Doss used--cold and calculated, even the smallest
detail considered and accomplished.

Compassion, or any emotion like it, does not fit this crime.

Graham doesn’t believe the KFK took a partner, but he has to investigate the possibility anyway, because someone knelt beside Shelley Iverson as she died. 

Th
eir ninth victim in nearly sixteen years.

Graha
m’s brother and a friend in 1997. Then seven years later, a single victim, a fifty-two year old woman visiting the island during the summer tourist season. Another pair, man and woman, forty-two and twenty, known to be having an affair, were killed in December 2006. Then two women, co-workers aged nineteen and twenty-two, murdered three days apart in 2008.  In 2009, a high school senior, Simon Tuney, was murdered outside his home. Now Shelley Iverson, twenty-six, school teacher.

The King’s Ferry Killer is not the most prolific of
serial killers. Bundy, and even Dahlmer, have him beat.

But he is the most personal.
For Graham.

“Iverson doesn’t have kids,” Graham says.

“No. I interviewed her mother. Iverson was single, no children of her own.”

“Is she dating anyone?”

“Not that her mother knows about.”

“Did you see the kids’ clothing we bagged?”

“Yeah.”

“Boy’s clothing, the size a nine year old might wear. And a bigger pair of jeans, sized maybe for an eleven year old.”

“What are you thinking?”

“That’s the only thing that stands out. About her, specifically,” he stresses. And now Graham is thinking maybe they’re going about this investigation all wrong. Maybe it’s not so much about what the killer is doing and more about what the victims have been up to.

Was Iverson having inappropriate contact with her students? He doesn’t want to go there. He doesn’t want to think about the growing trend of impropriety in the schools or the frequency with which teachers are exposed on the news, in handcuffs or before the courts for crimes of this nature. He doesn’t want to think about Isaac, sitting in her classroom, vulnerable and needing

attention. But it’s possible.

They already have two adulterers in the mix. Who else, among their victims, were guilty of immoral or even criminal acts?

And how do Lance and Steven Forrester fit? What could two young boys have been up to that would result in their murders?

Graham shakes his head. This is where he stumbles.

They don’t fit. Not if Graham thinks logically. Not if he thinks with his heart. It’s always challenging, following the flawed and fatal reasoning of a serial killer. There are as many twisted paths in the criminal mind as there are lines on a map. Throw in Graham’s personal connection, and it’s like tiptoeing through quicksand.