I Will Come for You (7 page)

A pair of heavy knuckles rap on the door and then Carter pushes his head through the opening.

“Hey. You’re not still mad, are you?”

“Mad?” Graham drops the report on the table, set aside from the KFK case notes. “This isn’t high school, Carter.”

“Just checking.” Carter steps into the room and closes the door behind him. “We’re all running a little tense. Of course, that happens when the crime is murder. When it’s personal.”

“Serial murder,” Graham stresses. “And yes, it’s personal,” Graham admits, and waits for Carter to pick that over.

“It’s not just you,” Carter says. He takes the seat across from Graham and taps his fingers against the stack of case files. “It’s the whole town. It’s like living in Leningrad.”

“We’re a small community and we’ve lost a lot,” Graham says. “There’s a psycho stalking us and no one really knows who’s next.” Of course people are panicking.

Carter considers this and nods, then dives into another subject close to home. “You know you have a tweaker out there waiting on you, don’t you?”

“A tweaker?”

“Some guy who looks like drugs got the better of him,” Carter explains. “He’s been there an hour. His hands are starting to shake.”

Graham stands and walks to the windows that look over the squad room. He lifts a blind and spots Randy Jackson pacing in front of his secretary’s desk.

“That’s my brother-in-law.”

“No kidding?”

Graham shrugs. “Ex-brother-in-law.”

Carter’s eyebrows lift until they’re lost in his hairline. “He’s buggy.”

“It’s not drugs. The guy has a mental condition.”

“Schizophrenia?”

“No, his sister got that.”

“Your wife?”
Carter’s voice is high and patchy with disbelief. “No. Say it isn’t so.”

“She was.”

Graham leaves the office, closing the door behind him so that the agent stays put.

“Randy?”

“Graham. Hey. How’re you doing?”

His brother-in-law stops pacing and bounces on his feet. His brown hair has grown past his collar and he skipped shaving this morning.

“I’m good. What’s up?”

“Just some conversation,” Randy says.

Usually, Graham only sees Randy when his brother-in-law needs help. Sometimes money, though he’s holding down a job now at Abundant Gardens, a landscaping supply store. The last time Graham saw Randy it was to bail him out of the tank. He mixes beer with his meds and becomes a swaggering drunk.

“I’m pretty busy right now,” Graham says.

“I know. I know. The King’s Ferry Killer. He’s back.” And Randy drops his head. “That pretty school teacher.” He stuffs his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “She wasn’t always nice, you know.”

“You knew her, Randy?”

“She kept a garden,” Randy confirms. “Peonies in the summer; wild oat in the winter. She tried tomatoes last year but the sea air turned them sour.”

“But she wasn’t nice?”

“She was nice to look at.” Randy smiles then thinks better of it. “She had some boys digging up her garden, putting down hummus. Her students, I guess. Some of them didn’t want to be there. She said, ‘You should have thought about pay back before you ripped the pages out of your textbook.’”

Old school.
Graham likes that. Too few kids are made to accept accountability for

their
actions; many of them weave a path to Graham’s door.

He’ll need to follow up on Randy’s story. Approach the parents of the boys and question Iverson’s relationship with their sons. It could fall either way. Maybe the boys changed out of their dirty clothes after serving their time. Maybe there’s an explanation as easy as that.
And maybe not.

“Whatever happened to detention, right?”
             

“Yeah.”
Randy laughs then changes the subject. “How’s Isaac?”

“He’s good. You should come by and see him sometime.”

“Yeah, I haven’t been good about that.” He nods and his shaggy hair falls into his eyes. “You know, Alana’s back in town?”

Randy is afraid of his sister.
Although nearly ten years older, Randy never held a position of authority with Alana. Graham remembers in high school, when they first started dating, that Alana’s brother kept his distance. That’s when Randy was around. By their junior year, he was doing a stretch inside Commitment, a mental health facility. It wasn’t his first visit.

“I didn’t know.”

But that’s not unusual. Alana often arrives without notice and leaves the same way. Sometimes, Graham finds out days after she’s been here that she passed through. She doesn’t always visit with Isaac when she makes land.

“I saw her getting into her car outside the Minute Mart. She doesn’t look good,” Randy says.

Graham can’t remember a time when Alana looked anything but good. Even in her worst moments, she kept her physical beauty. Her constant weeping broke his heart. Her screaming and

keening
, which usually began in the early morning darkness, burrowed into his soul.

Genetics.
Graham hopes none of it shows up in Isaac. A specialist he consulted assured him environment was as big a playing card as DNA. Divorcing Alana became an act of salvation, for him and his son.

“Keep your distance,” Graham suggests now. “There’s no reason you have to visit with her.”

“She comes to the house,” he says.             

Their parents left the house equally to both children, but Alana refused the offer. Last year, the house was vandalized.
Nothing was stolen, but windows were smashed. The TV, too. Photographs, many of them of Alana, were pulled out of albums and shredded. The burners on the gas stove were lit and the ashes of paper and the remains of a pair of curtains torn off the kitchen window, were piled on the floor.

Is Alana crazy enough to do something like that?

Graham has seen her do worse.

“You put new locks on the doors, right?”

“She doesn’t need a key to get in,” Randy says. “You know she doesn’t need anything like that to get where she wants to go.”

There were times over the four years since he divorced Alana that Graham suspects she entered the house without his knowledge. He came home to the scent of her perfume lingering in the bedrooms and the bathroom. He’s come home to the shower still wet from use. And to an oven that was on. And neither he nor Isaac could explain it.

“Look,” Graham says. “Keep your doors locked, Okay? Call in if Alana comes around.”

He places a hand on Randy’s shoulder. The man is thin, but his muscles are wiry. “I have to get back to work. You just call in if she shows up.”

Randy nods. “I will. This time I will.”

Graham walks back to his office. There’s a little boy inside his brother-in-law. A kid that never grew up, that fears loud noises, shadows on the be
droom walls, and his own sister.

He wonders about that. He never understood what went on in the Jackson household that produced two children with very different temperaments--one timid, the other strong--but both manifesting mental illness.

Chapter Eight

Sunday, 4 pm

Graham stands in front of the white board, where he and Carter have written down the names and ages of the victims, the physical location of the bodies, the approximate times of death and the dates of discovery. They jotted down any possible connection one victim may have had with another. His brother Lance and Steven Forrester were friends. Farb and Baker were lovers. Cowen and Howe were co-workers. That leaves two single victims with no apparent connection to any of the others and Iverson. And despite an impressive number of man hours put into investigating each murder, no deeper connections were discovered.

Graham stares at the board, trying to pick up on a pattern of behavior. He’s done exactly this many times over the years with no success. Something, the identifying marker of their serial killer, is not on their board, not in their files, not a blip on their internal radar. But it’s close. If Graham could see past what they do know, and into the scheming mind of evil, they would have their man.

So he picks through facts, turning them over and inside-out, tossing aside theories that haven’t worked.

More victims appear in summer than any other season, but by less than ten percent.

Negligible, Graham thinks.

The years between murders are never constant and the
commencement of the crimes don’t bare a signature. They are not triggered by holidays, by natural disasters, or dates in infamy. 

Graham considered the manner of discovery and for a while that held promise. It was always a family member of one of the victims who found the bodies. For a while, Graham wondered if the killer was seeking to punish the ones left to live. But it didn’t wash. Serving an adulterer to his wife, in a skewed sense, would validate her feelings of betrayal.

Al Farb, who owned the Two Pence Diner and was murdered in 2006, had an affair with Melody Baker. Farb’s body was found, at the diner after closing, by Farb’s wife. Cowen was found by her sister, aged thirteen. Lance and Steven were discovered by Natalie Forrester, who was barely eight years old.

That’s where the theory of justice served cold took a nose dive. Children, made to bear witness to horror, are as damaged as the bodies left behind.

He thinks there’s more to be found in the choices the killer made. Why these victims? Why these two
together
?

“Motive,” Graham says, hands on hips. He stretches his neck to relieve some tension. “That’s what’s missing. Not what drives him to kill, but what drives him to kill
these
victims.”

“Convenience,” Carter says
.

“No. I don’t believe that.” Not anymore. The department worked that theory for years and it brought them no closer to the killer than where they stood that first day, on the bluffs over Deep
Bay, beside his brother’s lifeless body.

“We beat that into the ground,” Graham says. “There’s no life in it.” He picks up a marker and writes ‘
adultery’
next to the names of Farb and Baker. “It’s rooted in the individual

victim
.”

Graham understands how the detectives connected the dots and came up with easy-access as the common denominator between the victims. There was just enough
there
, like the sticky strands of a spider’s web, to snare their attention. A middle-aged tourist who lingered past season; two young women; two little boys.

Access to victims seemed plausible in the early stages of the investigation, but the more he killed, the more victims he left behind, the more they learned about him. A meticulous crime scene, free of viable evidence, lacking all signs of struggle, points to a killer who prizes order, who requires, who feeds off, the high that comes with possessing absolute power. Control is the KFK’s pride. Until Iverson, he exacted punishment upon each victim without flaw. Lying in wait, approaching his targets from behind, sometimes inside their own homes, and sliding the knife through their carotid artery screamed calculated domination.

Graham knows Carter isn’t going to like his next words, but he’s more sure now than ever that the way to the killer is through his victims. He’s changing the direction of the investigation.

“This is about punishment,” Graham says.

Carter steps back from the board, rubs his face with his hands and refocuses.

“No, it’s not. The profile says he’s on a head trip. It’s all about power,” Carter reminds him.

“What’s more powerful than to be judge, jury and executioner?”

“The psychs says the guy is insecure. That he was probably abused as a
kid, lived under condemnation and constant physical and maybe sexual abuse until he sprouted wings and flew the coop.”

“Forget the profile for a minute,” Graham says, his voice charged with frustration. “It’s not working for us. Let’s look at the evidence with a new theory. Tell me you don’t see avenging angel in it.”

Carter shakes his head. “You’re talking about kids, here,” he protests. “This all started with two little boys. What could they have done?”

Graham’s brother was a sweet kid who chased pirates and wanted to be Indiana Jones when he grew up.

“I’m not saying the killer is justified, for crying out loud. I’m not saying he’s even sane. I’m thinking perceived sins. Maybe the perp saw our victims commit a questionable act. Or, maybe something about our victims pulled a loose thread in the killer’s mind. I don’t know how the connection was made, only that the killer targeted each of them. It appealed to his need for control. To punish. ‘You do the crime you do the time.’”

“Again, we’re talking about kids.”

But Graham ignores him. Crimes against children are never understood and the trigger is always found in the perpetrator.