I Will Come for You (25 page)

“Thanks, Molly,” Graham says but the words are so dry he almost chokes on them. “Excuse me.”

He walks toward Carter, the calls and greetings of diners bouncing off of him.

“Carter.” Graham stops beside his booth and watches the man look up, a fork of lettuce stalled on the way to his mouth. “Let’s go.”

Carter is fast. He drops his fork, peels a ten dollar bill from his wallet and drops that too, and stands up.

“Where to?”

Graham
turns the car into the parking lot at the medical examiner’s office. Carter sits up and braces his hands against the dash board. Everything about his body language screams no.

“What are we doing here?”

He doesn’t like visiting Oakes on his turf.

“Oakes has something he wants to show us.”

“Not a dead body, right?” Carter protests. “I’m wearing a new suit.”

Carter rummages through the glove compartment for his jar of Vick’s rub.

“You know I like a little advance notice when we take trips of this nature.”

“Advance notice doesn’t work for you,” Graham says. Carter complains about cold storage
from start to finish. He does fine when the body is still warm, but after rigor passes through the tissue and rot sets in, Carter teeters on the edge of vomiting their entire visit.

Sometimes, the sulfates and other chemicals are so strong they cling to their clothing and stay in the nose long after their departure from the morgue.

Graham parks in a space marked for official vehicles and looks through the windshield at the melting pot of reporters set up in front of the doors. He notices a camera with Pinyin characters and realizes their bad news has gone global. Great. It didn’t take forty-eight hours to attract interest from around the world.

Beside him, Carter is shrugging out of his jacket and tie.
He lays them over the back seat.

“You’re not going to strip down, are you?”

“This suit,” Carter stresses, “Fourteen hundred dollars.”

“That’s a mortgage payment.”

“Downtown,” Carter says. “I’m an uptown man.”

He starts on the buttons of his shirt.

“You’ll be a renter the rest of your life if you keep throwing money away on your wardrobe.”

“Your problem is you don’t understand the importance of first impressions.”

Graham is wearing a two piece suit, charcoal gray, which helps hide any coffee or food drips he might encounter during the day.

“This is dry clean only,” Graham says.

Carter shakes his head. “Someone played you.”

Graham shrugs. “Leave your pants on. There’s a pack of wolves at the door just waiting to get your backside on the six o’clock news.”

Carter turns and falls back into his seat.

“Look at that,” he says. “Half the world is tuned into our little problem. You think they’d have enough of their own
killing news they wouldn’t need to come over here for it.”

Carter reaches into the back seat for his jacket.

“Everyone loves a serial killer,” Graham says. “Remember, ‘No comment.’” They’re on a gag order from the department. The only time they answer reporter questions is at scheduled press conferences.

Graham slide
s out of the cruiser. He doesn’t wait for Carter, who is struggling with his tie. He enters reporter radar when he’s about ten feet from the doors. Graham leads with his

shoulder
and listens to his molars gnash as he wades into the pool of sharks. He repeats the department line three times before he passes through the doors and into the chilly interior of the medical examiner’s building.

Oakes is working on the body of Jeremy Kroeger when Graham walks into the autopsy suite.

“Mask.”

Oakes waves to a cabinet against the wall but Graham ignores the procedure and pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket. He presses it against his mouth, to keep from spreading any of his DNA in this sterile
environment. He also stays a good five feet back from the table.

Contaminated evidence breaks down more cases than unreliable witnesses and recanted confessions combined.

“What did you find?”

When Oakes called and invited him to his office, he baited
Graham with “The killer left a little more than he intended,” but wouldn’t elaborate over the phone.

Oakes pulls his hands out of the cavity he made in
Kroeger’s chest, steps back from the table, and peels off his gloves. “Come look at this.”

He removes a silver tray from an evidence chest. Graham steps closer. There are four pieces
of wood, so small they’re no bigger than a splinter.  And a steel chip with a smooth edge.

“What are they?” Graham asks.

“Pieces of the murder weapon.”

“Yeah?”

Oakes nods. “I pulled the steel out of the fifth vertebrae. It broke off when the killer made contact with the cervical column. The splinters I cleaned out of the soft tissue around the opening of the wound.”

“We have physical evidence,” Graham says.
And a way to tie the weapon directly to a victim. They wouldn’t have to rely on wound impressions, which are inconclusive at best.

“Exactly, my friend.”
Oakes smile uses his whole face. “We hit the jackpot.”

Oakes slides the tray back into the chest and waves Graham over to the body.

“Look at this,” he says, and applies pressure to the head, lifting it so that the gap in the boy’s neck opens. The cut is so deep the neck dangles from the body. “Increased pressure.”

“Hell, yeah,” Graham agrees.

Oakes steps back from the body and regards Graham. “The weapon is showing its age. That, and the increased violence of the attacks, is why we have evidence.”

Carter opens the door and steps into the room. He knows the drill and immediately reaches for a mask in the cupboard. He puts it on over the Vick's rub he wears like a mustache.

“What did I miss?” he asks.

“You’re going to have to get a belly for this,” Oakes says.

Carter shakes his head. “Not going to happen.”

Graham recalls Oakes’ attention. “Probably a hunting knife,” Graham says. They’ve been thinking as much all along.

“Maybe,” Oakes agrees. “More specifically, a Bowie knife. They have a unique wood grip that meets a steel hilt. When the knives get old, the grip can slip, causes splintering.” He nods, affirming his words. “That’s just my guess, but it’s a good one. Forensics is coming for it. You’ll get a lot more out of them than me as far as the weapon goes. But I have something else for you to look at.”

Oakes walks over to a microscope. “I’ve isolated the possible diseases that could be affecting our killer.” He adjusts the lens and invites Graham to take a look. “You see that? The red cell wall is breaking down.”

“What does that mean?” Carter asks.

“And how does it affect the KFK?”

All Graham sees are blotches of red that could be Rorschach Test.

“It looks like Hemolysis. That’s a kind of anemia
associated with an autoimmune disorder. The thing is, it usually impacts women or the elderly. It’s rare to see it in a young man, or even one in middle age, but it does happen.” Oakes shrugs. “The guy might not even know he has it. And it’s not something that would cause mental deterioration, or drive a person to kill.”

“So, what does that mean for us?” Carter asks. “Are we looking for an old guy or a woman? Is the guy
iron-deficient or a meat-eater?”

“We’re looking for a carnivore,” Graham says.
“Male or female. Of any age.”

Chapter Thirty

Monday, 1 pm

Natalie knocked on the door and as she waited felt her heart kick up a notch or two. The wind stirred the sea shell arrangement hanging from the roof over the wide porch, clatter, clatter, clatter. It wouldn’t take much convincing for her to believe she was really listening to her bones knocking nervously together under the thin sheathing of her skin.

Saul Doss. She had been here before, on this door step. She had watched her brother and Lance hang as if puppets from an invisible string, in this man’s living room. They had been suspended in time and consciousness while Doss puttered around them, doing what? Observing and taking notes. But Doss had also shuffled from a back room to the dining room table where he placed pottery and votives, traveling this route several times as Natalie watched. Then he had come for her. He had left the dining room and paced the wooden floor boards to the front door, unhurried. She had felt his confidence, had watched it play out in her mind, how he would open the door for her and she would slip inside without argument. And then Natalie had run, fear burning in her lungs. Her mind screamed for her to return. Something inside her, fingering through the files of her memory, called up images of her smiling, laughing brother, lured her through her love for Steven, and pulled at her to turn around and return. She hadn’t. Her will to
survive had been stronger.

When the door opened and Doss stood before her, his face bruised and his shoulders bent

slightly with age, Natalie stood her ground as fear pounded a beat in her wrists.

“You killed my brother.” The accusation felt right.
In that place insider her, where she ran on instinct, where emotion and fact blended to make truth the only possibility, it felt right.

Her hands curled into fists. She wanted to beat this man. She wanted to smash his face, to tear at his skin. She wanted him to cry for what he had done. She wanted, finally, to cry herself.

And she understood the anger she had sensed in Graham Marquette. She understood how he could act on it.

“Probably.”

Natalie watched his face splinter and thought her vision was blurred from her tears, but it was Saul Doss who let emotion get the better of him.

“I probably did,” he admitted. “Not that you know anything about it. Not yet.” He leaned heavily on the door. “You’re
remembering. That’s good. I can fill in the rest. Enough you’ll understand what’s happening. You may even come to understand your gift.”

He stood back, swung the door wider in a silent invitation to enter.

“I don’t trust you,” Natalie said.

“You shouldn’t,” he agreed. “But right now, I’m all you have. I’m the man with the answers.”

“How do I know you won’t lie to me?”

“We’re beyond that,” Doss assured her. “You’ve assembled.
All three of you. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. I should have known it was you. From all I carried with me these last twenty years, I should have figured it out. Not that I could have done anything about speeding you up. Evil conspires by itself; good is tempered by the Greater hand of God.”

Natalie felt her mind flinch, but she remained physically still, with no intention of moving beyond the porch. Doss’ words confused her. He was practically rambling. That was never any good. The insane rambled, the old and those with concussions. She let her eyes pick apart his
face, the bruises' on his brow, along the ridge of his cheekbone, wondering if he’d sustained serious injury when the ferry sunk.

“I’m not making any sense,” Doss admitted. “But I will. You need to give me that chance. It’s why you’re here. And I don’t mean on my door step. I mean, here, on the island. You didn’t
come of your own volition. By now you realize that?”

Natalie nodded. “I was called here.”

“Yes. Because the time is right. Finally. The end is coming and you will be at the center of it. You may lose your life, if you haven’t already.”

He retreated into the dim interior of the house and Natalie hesitated. She puzzled over his words. Did he mean she was already marked for death? She’d felt that way since the day Steven had died, so it didn’t come as a surprise to hear it from Doss.

Or did he mean that she was already dead? She had wondered that herself. She had sometimes thought, over the years, that she was alive only inside her mother’s heart.

But that didn’t make sense. Natalie had a body, a reflection when she looked in the mirror. People recognized her. She wasn’t able to pass unhindered through solid objects. She had none of the benefits of being a ghost, only that strange, drifting feeling that sometimes made her feel that she, like Steven and Lance, was floating above ground. She had the loneliness that came from never putting down anchor. She was not connected to anyone or anything, except her mother, and since her departure from the Napa Valley, that silken thread was unraveling.

Natalie stepped over the threshold and into Saul Doss’ living room. He was already seated on the couch and had pulled a wool blanket over his knees.

“Close the door,” he said. “It’s drafty, living by the sea. Not enough caulking in the world to keep this place airtight.”

Natalie did as he asked and then sat down in a leather recliner that was positioned in front of the large picture window. A lamp on a table in the corner of the room glowed with yellow light. The mantle above the fireplace was crowded with family pictures, but the walls were bare. She deliberately turned herself inward.