I Will Come for You (5 page)

“You’re not the only one with super powers.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “You can fly?”

“That’s no big deal.”

“Travel faster than a speeding bullet?”

“Better,” he said. “Why didn’t you say something? About the ferry sinking?”

“It was a vision.” She sat back against the pillows and looked for a distraction.

“The gift of sight should be shared.”

“They have padded rooms for people who share that kind of thing. Anyway, I’m not always right.”

“Yes, you are,” he chided. “You’re always at least part right.”

“You’re a mind reader, too?”

She picked up the remote for the TV and pressed the power button. The black screen opened on the image of a woman in a blue, hooded jacket. She stood with the Strait of Juan de Fuca at her back and spoke into a microphone. Natalie pressed the mute button.

“Not so much,” he said. “I only know what I need to know.”

Natalie focused on the TV screen, where the ferry wallowed, and people, fully-clothed, struggled in the water. Natalie did not see herself.

“Remember what you came here to do,” Michael told her. “A lot of us are depending on you.”

His voice was deeper, didn’t match his youth and slender body.

Natalie turned to him.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

She watched his features change until his small face was the face of the brother she’d lost seventeen years ago.

“I’m counting on you, Nat.”

It was her father’s voice. Steven’s mouth opened, but it was her father speaking. He

was
the only one who called her Nat, the only one who expected the impossible from her.

She was hallucinating again.
The image, triggered by trauma. She’d survived the sinking of the ferry, another critical event, like Steven’s death, like discovering the murdered man in the woods. Her collection of the macabre was growing and her mind was making associations.

She grasped at the explanations the doctor gave her. She closed her eyes and counted herself backwards into sleep.

Chapter Five

Sunday, 8:30 am

Graham is in the conference room, adding preliminary forensic information to the boards set up to display the King’s Ferry Killer’s work. In the fourteen hours since the discovery of the school teacher’s body, they have learned little.

The door opens and Carter slides in, holding up a stack of papers.

“Just got these,” he says and takes a seat at the table, spreading out the faxed pages into tidy piles.

“What are they?”

“One is a prelim on the ferry.
Observations and passenger list.” He passes them to Graham. “The other is prelim from forensics. A total match to the King’s Ferry Killer. Like we didn’t already know that.  But the hair a techie pulled off the body, it’s human and not a match to the school teacher or her father. The strand is brown. Iverson was a red head--natural. Her dad is gray.”

Graham digests this. His gut refuses to believe it’s a lead. If the hair was accidental, if

the killer is becoming careless, this could be the break they’ve been hunting. But it doesn’t feel right.

“You’re not excited,” Carter says. “What’s your problem with the hair?”

“Why now? The guy has left us nothing. For years.”

Carter sits back in his chair. He rubs a hand over his face and suggests, “No one’s perfect?”

“True.”

“The killer made a mistake,” Carter reasons. “We knew it would happen.”

Graham nods. They hoped for this kind of break in the case.

“But you don’t believe it.”

“Not yet.”

Graham caps the marker he was using and tosses it on the table.

“The hair, the print impressions in Iverson’s blood. There’s something new in the mix. The MO is the same, but something or someone is disturbing our crime scene. I don’t think it’s the perp.”

“Maybe it’s deliberate. He wants us to chase snipe. Or he’s playing with us.”

Graham shakes his head. “Not his style. He’d have been planting evidence all along. He would have made this a game from the beginning. That’s not him.”

“Then what?”

Carter’s chin lifts in frustration, but Graham ignores the
challenge. It’s too early in the chase to start knocking heads.

“I think someone stumbled onto the scene before we got there. Before Iverson’s father discovered her body.”

“And said nothing?”

Graham nods.
“Yeah. And said nothing. I know it doesn’t seem likely, not in this tight community, but that’s my feel for it.”

Carter considers it, but places his money on the hard evidence.
“We’ll follow up with the hair.”

“Of course.
I want to know everything it can tell us. Gender, ethnicity, everything down to the shampoo used.”

“You think whoever breached the crime scene saw something?”

“Maybe. And if so, this person is our link to the killer. Maybe the only living link there is.”

“Not the only living link,” Carter says, throwing out an old bone.

Graham refuses to touch it.

“Maybe this person saw the killer through a window. Or saw him leaving. Maybe it’s a kid, as the foot impressions suggest, and he won’t come forward because he’s scared.”
Or ashamed. Graham read the case studies on victim abuse. Few ever come forward willingly.

“You mean, maybe it’s one of Iverson’s victims.”

“If she was criminally involved with some of her students.”

“Possible,” Carter concedes.
“If Iverson was abusing.”

“Those footprints belong to someone,” Graham stresses.

“Why not the killer?”

“Size seven shoes? ‘
A body weight no greater than one hundred, twenty pounds,’“ Graham repeats the preliminary evidence from forensics.

“It fits,” Carter says. “He approaches from behind.
No struggle because he would lose.”

Graham shakes his head. “My gut says no. Seventeen years without even trace evidence and suddenly we hit the jackpot? I’m not buying it.”

“My gut says talk to Natalie Forrester,” Carter challenges. “The only living witness we can identify.”

“We don’t know that Natalie Forrester was a witness.”

“I think she was,” Carter says.

“She says she wasn’t.”

“She was eight years old.”

“The last time we talked to her
she was fifteen and denied being present,” Graham reminds him.

“She’s a woman now. Twenty-four
years old. She and her mom run a bed and breakfast in the Sonoma Valley,” Carter says. “She drives a dodge truck, belongs to a fitness club and subscribes to
O
magazine.”

“You contacted her?”

“No, but one of us has to.”

Graham lets silence pile up between them. The truth is
, he doesn’t know how to handle Natalie Forrester. If they didn’t share the common bond of ‘left-behinds,’ would he question her, press her to search her memory, bring her to the brink of self-destruction just to catch their killer? Would he make her yet another victim of the King’s Ferry Killer? Probably.

“You’re too close to the case,” Carter says.

“You think?”

“I’m just saying--”

“My brother was the first victim. I’ve seen the photos. I’ve read the reports. That’s why I say Natalie Forrester is a dead end. Even if she was there, even if she watched the whole thing go down, survival kicked in. Psychologists say children that young don’t have the ability to receive that kind of violent imaging. There’s a real chance she went to black. Saw nothing. Or won’t remember it.”

“She’s older now.”

“The trauma destroyed any memory she has of it.”

No sense denying it. Graham believes Natalie was present. But he also believes the cost of her help is too steep.

“What if it hasn’t? I’ve read the studies, too, Graham. Maybe she’s been hiding from the memory all these years. Maybe every once in a while, it gets close. She sees a face. She sees the blood, or her brother or yours, in the grass and the killer standing over them. Small pieces of a puzzle she doesn’t understand because her parents told her she wasn’t there and she believes it. Thinks her mind is making it up.”

“What’s that going to do for us?”

“It would make her a good candidate for reactive therapy.”

Hypnosis.
Graham is not a big believer in it.

“It rarely works,” he says. “Success with that can be measured in single digits.”

“But it’s a possibility.”

“Not one worth the risks.”

“I think it is.”

“Because it’s not your brain being used as kitty litter.”

“We have to interview her,” Carter insists.

Graham feels his face harden. His jaw is clenched and a muscle there ticks. He doesn’t think the sister is the way to go. He doesn’t think disturbing that family is the right thing to do, and maybe that’s because he is too close to the case. Losing Lance was like an implosion inside his family. His
mother and father never recovered.

“Fine.
So call her.” Graham stands up, paces in front of the white board where they’ve spent the past hour grouping evidence, drawing connections between crime scenes and victims. “I’m sticking with the evidence. There’s more promise here.”

He turns his back to Carter, tries to focus on the names on the board.
Victims with no seeming connection.

“There’s one more thing,” Carter says.  He stands and
offers Graham a final communication. A fax from RCMP. The head office in Toronto.

“What does it say?”

“They’re sending reinforcements.”

Graham shrugs. “Great.”

The town will be crawling with cops, like last time. Most of them will stand around

holding
their dicks while the King’s Ferry Killer slips past them. Like last time.

“Not what you wanted to hear?”

“I expected it,” Graham says. RCMP is predictable. They’re good at moving people around on the board. They’re not so good at damage control.

Chapter Six

Sunday, 12:15 pm

Natalie woke again after noon. The TV was on, the sound muted and the news program paused to allow a series of advertisements to play. She surfaced slowly, through layers of sleep, watching the screen as actors pitched frozen foods, MasterCard and a popular brand of paper towels. Light seeped around the blinds in her window and softened the room. She turned her head, expecting to find Michael curled up in the other bed. It was empty. She searched the shadows, focused on a chair in the corner, the window, the bathroom door that was ajar but beyond which was dark and silent. She wondered if they’d moved him to the pediatric ward. He should have been there to begin with. In fact, she wasn’t sure he hadn’t been there all along and hadn’t just come to her for a visit.

An eerie visit. She tried to apply reason to their conversation, after all, children seemed to know things, were far more intuitive than adults. But Michael had known things about
her
. Things she hadn’t shared with anyone. Her gift.

She was not as enthusiastic as Michael about her ability to preview the catastrophic events of the world, big or small. No one needed to see the dead more than once.

She believed her gift was firmly rooted in the circumstances surrounding Steven’s death and once she knew what those were, her ability to
see
would fade.

Natalie remembered clearly only the aftermath of losing Steven.

She remembered standing with her parents as Steven’s body was loaded into the cargo hold of the commercial airliner. The same plane they would later board for the trip home. She remembered sitting between her parents as they rose through a dense cloud cover and into a flight marked by turbulence and silence; she remembered hovering on the porch of their home, suitcases in hand but no one willing to step over the threshold, to begin this different life.

Her mother had moved first. She’d unlocked the door and taken Natalie by the hand.

“He lives in our hearts now,” she’d said.

She’d passed through the door crying, was still crying as she helped Natalie prepare for bed that night, as she repeated for Natalie the words she’d decided to live by, “Remember, honey, when you’re missing him the most, look for him in your heart.”

Natalie’s father hadn’t come into the house that night. Nor the next day. She saw him at Steven’s funeral, where  he’d stood beside her mother, not touching her nor looking at her. He’d returned to the house afterwards, where family and neighbors had gathered. Natalie remembered watching them, and standing amongst them, but was unable to hear the words that were spoken. A pressure had built up in her ears, a static buzzed in her head, and she had walked off, into the yard, beyond the beds of rose and calamurie, and had wept for Steven.