I Will Come for You (27 page)

“You over your s
nit about the suit?” Graham asks.

“
Not yet,” Carter returns. “But she goes a long way to getting me there.”

Graham turns. Natalie is standing inside the door to the conference room. And Carter’s grinning like a cat that got into the fish tank.

“Natalie.” Graham feels the pull toward her and resists it.

“Hi.” Her gaz
e skitters around the room, pausing on victim photographs, the words scribbled on the whiteboard, the stacks of files and sealed evidence bags.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” Graham says.

“Shouldn’t I?”

“
You been keeping something from me, Chief?” Carter interrupts.

Graham spares Carter a glance.
“I told you I was driving to Victoria.”

“You told me it was a bust.”

“I think I said, ‘Nothing yet.’”

“Well, I didn’
t really have anything then,” Natalie enters the volley.

“You do now?”
Graham steps closer, drawn by the promise in her words.

“It was Doss,” Natalie says. “Robert Doss. The guy Alana was with that summer.”

Graham feels that ticking in his blood; that part of him that knows a good lead kicks into full alert.

“You’re sure?”

Natalie nods. “And the tattoo, it’s a heart with the word ‘Mom’ written over it.”

“What brought this on?”

“I went to see Saul Doss.”

Graham hooks Carter’s gaze and says, “Go get him. Bring him in for questioning.”

“He was at the bait shop earlier.”

“You saw him?”

“Yes, I was looking for his father—”

“Did he recognize you?”

“No. I don’t think so.” She seems to be thinking back to that moment. “He said he was a Marine. A chaplain. And then he lost his faith.”

“Holy hell,” Carter whispers.

“A damn good connection.” It felt so right Graham wanted to scream. “Go,” he says to Carter. “Now. And take a uniform with you.”

Graham turns back to Natalie. “I want to hear more about your conversation, with both father and son.”

He moves around her, his arm brushing hers, the touch electric and skimming through his blood. He closes the door and then leans against it.

“Look at me, Natalie.”

He waits for her to turn, to lift her gaze to his.

“Did he feel like the one? When you were talking to him, did you get a memory? An emotion—fear or dread?”

“Nothing. He was. . .behind his words. . .absent, I guess is the feeling I got. Empty, maybe? He was a lot of wind, but not much else.”

“What did Robert Doss have to say?”

“He teased me mostly,” she admits. “I was looking for his father and he suggested that we had a personal relationship.”

She gives him the details and Graham feels tension weave his muscles into knots.
Charm is, perhaps, a serial killer’s most deadly asset.

“What about Saul Doss?” Graham wants to know.
“What did he have to say?”

“He approached me on the ferry,” Natalie reveals. “There’s something about him I don’t like. Don’t trust.”

He reads the hesitancy in her voice, watches her fingers play along the strap of her purse.

“He made you nervous.”
He steps closer, covers her fingers with his own. “Why?”

“
He. . .
knows
things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Or maybe it’s that he believes them and so they seem like a sure thing.”

“What, Natalie? What did he say to you?”

She opens her mouth. He can see the words forming on her lips, but then she changes her mind. She shakes her head. She would step out of his reach, but Graham follows her.

“Don’t be afraid,” he says and he’s not sure if he’s talking about Doss, or about himself. Because
he’s so close to her now that his words bathe her face. The first touch is fire. It’s that cold burn followed by an intense heat that could consume them. It’s hundred proof and volatile.

As wrong as a blood-red summer
. As right as redemption.

Her tongue slides
against his. Her hands curl into his shirt. And it rocks him. A totally off the axis moment quickly spinning out of control. He buries his hand in her hair, the other holds

her
hip, and he shapes her to his body. So soft it’s hard to believe that
this
could shred what is left of his sanity.

Salvation?
he begins to wonder.

Rescue or ransom?

He grasps for the fluttering ends of reason.

There’s no healing in this only more carnage.

This is a dead end. A car crash—one neither of them can survive.

Her hands flatten against his chest and push. She felt his disconnect or experienced it herself.
She knows the danger as well as he does.

When she steps out of his arms, he lets her.

“We can’t do this again,” he says.

“It will kill me.”

He feels
it too, the shifting in his heart, a darkness he could easily fall into. A never-ending descent into hell.

“Probably.” It will finish b
oth of them.  “When this is over you’ll leave the island.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t come back.”

He takes her elbow, ignores the sparks the touch evokes, and steers her toward a chair.
“Sit down.” He grabs a bottle of water from the middle of the table and hands it to her and then takes the seat next to hers. “Start at the beginning, when you got to Doss’ house.”

She settles into the chair, uncaps the water and drinks from it, and is slow to shift from the present to even the most recent past.

“That’s when the memory of Robert Doss came to me. I stood there before, at the gate, and wondered about Doss’ house. I was scared—when I was a little girl—I didn’t want to go into the yard.”

“But you did?”

“Yes. I knew Steven was there.”

“And Lance?”

“Yes.” She nodded and Graham watched her face tighten as she moved further into the memory. “They were both there, with Saul Doss.”

“What were they doing?”

Her fingers pick at the label on the water bottle, peeling the paper away in long strips.

“Doss said the boys were gifted,” Natalie reveals. “He said that Isaac is too.”

“He mentioned Isaac? By name?”

“Yes. He called us—you, Isaac, me—the Holy Trinity
.” She’s focused on the label, her thumb nail flicking the paper, but looks up at him, and holds his gaze. “He said our unity is what will capture the killer. That we’re the before, the during, and the after dead.”

Graham sits back, pushes his hands through his hair
, and regards her with a level gaze. There’s the religious connection again. Doss mapped it out for her, and though he hasn’t made sense of it yet, it makes Graham like him even more for the crimes. It could be father or son. Or both.

“What are you leaving out, Natalie?”

“What are you?”

He ignores her question.

“The before, the during, and the after dead? What is that?”

“You’re the after dead,” Natalie says. “
That’s the easy part. You come in, you investigate…”

“
I speak for the murdered,” he finishes.

“Yes.”

“And you? What part do you play in this?”

“The before.”
The admission isn’t a guess, a shot in the dark, a puzzling out of roles and responsibilities. She simply knows it as truth, Graham can hear it in her tone.

“Why?
How?”

“I see things.”

“Like premonitions? Or prophecies?” Doubt adds weight to his words. An uncomfortable wiggle, like the curl of a finger inside his mind, beckons him. He shakes his head. “No.”

“
I see the dying,” Natalie says, soft but insistent. “Only the dying.”

“
That’s a result of the trauma. Of losing Steven.” Of possibly witnessing her brother’s murder. But even as he searches for the science behind her revelation, he asks, “Did you
see
Steven and Lance? Did you know before it happened?”

“No.
I don’t think so. This is new. I didn’t believe it myself, not until I got here. And then it fell into place so perfectly, fighting it was futile.”

She leans toward him, her eyes piercing, seeking, determined.

“That leaves Isaac,” she points out. “What is his role?”

“He doesn’t have one. He’s a kid.”

“So were our brothers.”

“He’s my son.”

“Doss said the boys transcended. He said the ability was available only to the purest of hearts.”

“Steven and Lance?”

“And Isaac, too.”

Graham stands. He looks down a
t her as he slides into his jacket.

“Doss knows too much. Or thinks he does.”
And is baiting Graham. Only with Isaac dangling on the line, Graham isn’t playing. “I’m going to go pick up my son.” And keep him close. “And you’re going to stay put.”

The stubborn tilt of her
head tells Graham she has other plans.

“Doss is orchestrating something,” Graham points out. “He’s moving us around like puppets.
He’s setting us up.”

“Doss can only do what we let him,” she says. “
And the moment to come has always been our destination.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Monday,
2:40 pm

Natalie stood at the edge of the cliff, turned into the wind so that her hair streamed out behind her in ribbons the color of wheat. She listened to the sharp flap of her clothes, to the wind’s whispery rub against the blades of sea grass. Some things did not change. The shape of this island, though under constant erosion, fit perfectly into her remembrance of it. The jeweled water lapping at the rocks below, the gulls banking in the alabaster sky above, the salt-sweet smell, were the same. She had walked the beach below before making her way to the bluffs, and her world had tilted slightly. Memory knocked her off balance. Steven was more real to her here. They had lived on this beach, fed their imaginations in the measured lulls of time. Mostly, she had carried a shovel and bucket and built castles near the surf; or she had toted a bag full of books and settled in the powdery sand with Steven and Lance close enough she had listened to them play out their dreams around her.

Behind her, in the tall grass, she could hear their laughter, and if she turned she would see their small, charging bodies, faces lifted to the sun.
Steven and Lance, summer friends, adventurers, explorers of cape and cavern and plunderers of the oceans. True pirates.

She wanted to hate Saul Doss. Her skin no longer crawled with the need to curl her hands into his flesh and make him bleed. Even now, after listening to his story and knowing for sure that Saul Doss had a hand in the death of her
brother, she was unable to convict him. He was an old man now, steeped in the regret of actions he was unable to undo. Natalie was not one to doubt the existence of supernatural gifts. Not any longer. And she was still undecided about the nature of Doss’ intent. After all gifts, whether of this world or from beyond, could be used for good or bad. They could be had by those weak in character and those with moral strength. She thought Doss probably got carried away by the power in his gift and let it control him.

She’d left Doss unconvinced of his theory. She did not believe s
he was part of a holy trinity. People were moved to action out of a personal sense of morality and compassion; a lot of times out of selfishness. Doss may have released the devil himself into this world. And if he wasn’t the King’s Ferry Killer, but the catalyst through which this evil was set loose, Natalie was sure that Doss was as much a prisoner of this hell as she was.

She’d left Graham
sure of two things. The first was that she should never see him again. The feelings he inspired in her, the need and the wanting, the vision she’d had of him, in the woods, of firing his gun, of killing a man she now recognized as Robert Doss, made her feel like she was walking a sharpened blade. The second thing: she knew she would see him again and that it would be fatal.

She drew a deep breath and turned her back to the sea. She had avoided looking directly at the place where he
r brother’s body had been left. She stood a good twenty yards from the site, which was marked by a simple wooden cross. Doss had told her that he had carved the religious symbol himself, as he had many others. He remembered every victim, and over the years had kept up homage to them.

Steven and Lance had followed this path, were marched more than a dozen feet through ice plant and grass, cut and left to bleed where they wouldn’t immediately be found. Natalie moved slowly, feeling every footstep. The path was wide enough for two adults to walk abreast, but Natalie felt the world crowding her, squeezing closer until the pressure on her chest made breathing a sharp and torturous pain. The air thickened to the consistency of butter. She choked
on it, gasped, and felt the burn of tears on her face. She stopped with the toes of her boots at the base of the three foot tall cross.