I Will Come for You (6 page)

Her father had tried to talk to her. He’d wanted to know what she did about Steven and his friend Lance. What had they been up to that morning, before someone bad had found and killed them? 

She remembered, as though she had stepped outside herself and watched the scene as a spectator, sitting mute in a kitchen chair as her father spoke and gestured and finally cried for Natalie to open up. To say
something.

She had touched his tears, because they were proof of life and she had believed, up until that point, that when Steven died so had them all.

Her father hadn’t tried again.

When Natalie was nineteen she’d asked her mother about Steven, about King’s Ferry and why going back there was so important to her father.

“Your father’s work brought us to King’s Ferry,” her mom had said. “He was driven by the need to rehabilitate the lost souls of this world. And he was successful. For a while, very successful.” A frown settled in the notch between her eyebrows, until she dismissed her father. “You and Steven made friends fast. You looked forward to going back.”

“Did you like it there?”

She’d thought about it. “The first summer. But it wasn’t the same for me. Not a lot of the locals were looking to make new friends. They were a close group of people.” She’d sighed heavily, then surfaced from her memories and said, “I got a library card and made the best of it.”

Natalie had pressed her mother further, but had gotten nowhere.

“I don’t like to go into the particulars. It makes me think of him, in his final moments, about how frightened he must have been.” Her hands rose to her chest and twisted into a knotted ball of tension. “I can’t go into that, Natalie. I realized right away that imagining. .. it’s a form of torture. It’ll kill me.”

“But I found him? You’re sure that I found him?”

“Yes, honey. You found him. We’re sure of that.”

“But why?”

“Some hikers heard you. They followed the sound of your crying and found you with

Steven. You were patting his cheeks, hoping he would wake up.” She’d shaken herself out of the memory and said, “It’s all very sad. I’m sorry you found him. I wish you never had to see him like that.”

“I was alone when I found him?”

“Yes. It was a chaotic time. We were all looking for the
boys and I guess you wandered off. I think you must have remembered a place Steven and Lance liked to play. A place you forgot to tell the police about, and you went there looking.”

“The bluffs,” Natalie said. “But they never played there.”

“I think it might have been a place for them to play pirates,” her mother suggested. “The police found their spyglasses. . .”

But Steven and Lance had played pirates at the inlet, where they could board their own “ship” and plunder the seas. Natalie had let the subject drop. Her memory, by then more than a decade old, wasn’t enough to stand on.

Natalie
had fallen asleep with the sound on mute, but the news station ran a continuous loop of old and updated reports and Natalie caught a glimpse now of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where she had nearly lost her life. Where reality had unfolded exactly as she’d seen it, minutes before crisis, in her mind.

Someone had opened the blinds on the window while she slept and the sun, though diluted by a fine layer of mist, seemed too intense. She closed her eyes but the light seeped through her lids a mottled red.
Headache. It was beating at her temples.

She heard movement in the corridor.
Voices. They drew near and when the door to her room opened, Natalie turned toward it. A uniformed nurse approach her with a tray of food.

“You’re awake,” she said. “And hungry, I’m betting. It’s
not good, skipping meals.”

Natalie wasn’t hungry and she doubted that anything on the tray would tempt her.

“How’s Michael?” she asked and pushed herself up until she was sitting. She felt rested; the ache in her head was a dull, steady beat.

“Michael? Now, who’s that?”

“The little boy I came in with,” Natalie explained. “He was here this morning.”

“Well, I wasn’t here this morning,” the nurse said. “I’ve been off three days straight. That’s how we work this ward, four days on, three off.”

“Could you check on him, then?” Natalie asked. “I think they probably moved him to pediatrics.”

The nurse pulled a table over Natalie’s legs and laid the plastic tray on it. She removed the dome cover.

“Soft foods first,” she warned. “Until you’re back to yourself.”

Chicken broth, toast, and a slice of cantaloupe.
Not a very colorful plate. It didn’t appeal to Natalie at all.

“I smell coffee.”

“It’s coming. Do you take cream or sugar?”

“
Both, please.”

The nurse poured from a carafe, placed the cup on Natalie’s table and dropped a packet of sugar beside it.

“You need something, you press the button.”

“You’ll get back to me about Michael?”

“First thing,” the nurse promised as she moved toward the door.

“And maybe about when I can leave?”

“Tomorrow morning is what the doctor’s thinking. You can’t be too careful about hypothermia. And some of the symptoms you came in with raised an eyebrow or two around here.”

“What symptoms?”

“Body temperature at eight-two degrees. Not quite a Popsicle, but significantly below the human average,” she disclosed. “Your natural reflexes would have shamed a mummy.”

Natalie let that sink in. So she’d been cold and slow. She didn’t find either alarming, not after spending close to thirty minutes in the Pacific Ocean in January.

Natalie drank her coffee, took two bites out of the cold toast, then slipped into a light sleep, the whole time aware of Michael, standing just out of reach, as though she was looking in on a dream she could have had if she’d allowed herself to fall into REM. She rose from the cob webs of that dream-state when the nurse returned and began wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her arm.

“Did you find out about Michael?” she asked.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me about that,” the nurse tskked against her front teeth. Her brown eyes grew heavy. “He didn’t make it, you know. It’s always hard when God takes children. I guess he never did have a chance. Paramedics lost him in route.”

“In route?
But he was here this morning,” Natalie said. “He sat right here. Spoke to me. . .” about things he shouldn’t have known.

He had been real, not like the ethereal presence she had seen of her father. Michael had been a solid body sitting beside her in bed. She’d felt his warmth. Besides, she had not seen him in the water, before the ferry sank. He had not been one of the dead in her vision.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” the nurse said. “Maybe it was a dream. Could have been real. My own mother visited me the day she died, sat on the end of my bed and woke me from a sound sleep to say good-bye.” The nurse shrugged. “He was pronounced at 8:28 am.”

Chapter Seven

Sunday, 12:15 pm

Doss’ name is on the ferry’s passenger list. Next to it is a handwritten notation made by Graham’s secretary:
seen and dismissed, Victoria ER
. Further down the page, Graham finds another name he recognizes. The Rochettes. A couple in their senior years:
DOA
. He makes a note for his secretary to locate the next of kin and provide him with the phone number so he can make the call. Graham doesn’t like to put off this kind of duty. He refuses to assign it to another officer. Calls of this nature earned the respect of his office.

Doss and the Rochettes.
That’s it. No other residents of King’s Ferry boarded the vessel. The tension in his chest eases a little. This morning, at the press conference Graham called to address Shelly Iverson’s murder, he was interrupted by his second in command who broke news of the ferry’s sinking by scribbling it on a piece of paper he pushed into Graham’s hand. Graham read it and continued to field questions from reporters and citizens before closing the meeting. He directed questions about the ferry to the Victoria authorities and didn’t speculate on the possibility that some of their neighbors were caught in the tragedy. This was too much for his citizens, coming too close to the King’s Ferry Killer’s latest strike.

Nearly four years
have passed since the last killing, just enough time that many of the townspeople have started to hope that the menace moved on, left King’s Ferry and Vancouver

Island.
Some people spoke of victims on the mainland, in Saskatchewan and Ithaca, but these were stories. Graham investigated every possibility, reaching past borders into California, Arizona and even Mexico. He chased shadows. The people here want to believe they’re safe. Graham wants to give them that peace of mind, but not by creating a false sense of security.

He released Shelly Iverson’s name and the crowd erupted in denial.

Most wanted to know how sure Graham was that the KFK was back. Was Shelly Iverson bled in the same way as the other victims? The memory of seventeen year old Simon Tuney, who was found on his family’s back porch in a suburb of King’s Ferry in 2009, was still fresh.

“Yes,” Graham told them.
“Exactly the same.”

He watched hope die in the eyes of residents, a slow, steady extinguishing of light. The reporters were a different story: excitement pumped in their expressions, making them look like a macabre group of puppets.

Simon Tuney was the eighth victim and the third child taken by the KFK.

The victims don’t fall into a pattern. The first kill involved two children, the sec
ond a single woman. Then in 2006 and 2008 the murders were in pairs, all adults, followed by Tuney and now Iverson.

They haven’t been able to make sense of the crimes approaching them from the killer’s perspective and Graham thinks it’s time to change that focus. Command won’t like it. Everything they have, from RCMP, even from the FBI, produced a tunnel vision aimed at random killing.

Graham believes there’s a common factor and that by looking into the lives of the victims he’ll find it. He may be totally off on the vigilante angle, but his gut is leading him in this direction. 

Graham pushes his hands through his hair and takes a sip of cold coffee.

He wishes there was more to remember about his brother’s murder than what he has, which is nothing. The day before, Graham and his mother took Lance to the store to buy Steven a birthday present. A wind-up space rocket that claimed to exceed twenty-five feet in a single launch. After breakfast the next day, Lance helped their mother wrap the present. He signed his name to the birthday card then tore out of the house to find Steven and start the days’ adventures. Graham was fifteen. He had a job at the Tune Shop where he spent most of the day. His father called him at the end of his shift to tell him that Lance was missing. That neither boy showed up for the birthday party. He asked Graham if the boys came around the shop, which they sometimes did to bum a soda off of Graham. He didn’t see them that day. He spent the night combing the beaches, pumping through the streets on his bicycle, searching the fields and nooks where the boys liked to play. By then they were already dead.

In the months following Lance’s death, the police were constant visitors to their home. They interviewed Graham several times, his parents even more. They never came with answers and offered little hope that would change.

Graham wants answers. He needs them. And maybe that’s why he joined the force after his baseball career went south.

Graham sits back in his chair and picks up the prelim on the ferry. His has a call to make, to the Rochettes’ next-of-kin, and questions that he’ll need to answer. Surviving family always want to know the how and why of their loss. The best he can do now is cull from observations, theories, and guesses regarding events that precipitated the sinking; it’s too soon for anything more in depth. The investigation into the accident will take months and involve agents from different agencies, including the U.S. Coastguard and the Vancouver Harbor Police.

Most people don’t realize that commercial transport never runs at the exact passenger load posted. There’s a window of reliability and the weight of forty more people than was optimal, which is the estimate given by detectives, is within it. The ferry probably didn’t capsize due to excessive weight. Age of the craft and stress-related damage to the main ballast front the theories.

Graham drops the report and picks up the passenger list again. The names are highlighted by county, but Graham combs through them all to make sure no one from King’s Ferry was missed. That’s when he stumbles over her name: Natalie Forrester.
Admitted-Victoria.

Natalie Forrester is on the island.
If she’s still alive
.

His secretary recognized the name and its importance and made some calls.

She suffered injuries severe enough the hospital gave her a bed. That’s saying something, when it’s possible area hospitals will take in nearly two hundred victims. Graham wonders if she’s conscious. And why is she here? Why now? The family left King’s Ferry in nineteen-ninety-seven and never came back.