I Will Come for You Page 2

  “He didn’t die,” Carter says.

  “No,” Graham agrees. “And he isn’t rotting in a prison cell somewhere.”

  “So much for theory.”

  “Wishful thinking,” Graham corrects. They hoped the King’s Ferry Killer died in a car crash or was serving time for an unrelated crime. It happens often enough.

  The longest stretch of time between victims is seven years. That was after the first set of victims--his brother, Lance, and his summer friend, Steven Forrester. This time, there are forty-four months between kills and they began to wonder if the KFK was silenced. No such luck. No luck at all when it comes to this case. The guy strikes according to his own timetable and no amount of technology and combined intellect can figure out what becomes of the killer between murders.

  “Number nine,” Carter says. “And now more women than men.”

  Five female victims, four male.

  All victims living in or otherwise connected to King’s County.

  A murderer venting his rage, according to the behavioral profile.

  A mind twisted beyond human reason. Incapable of compassion.

  And it all started with Graham’s brother, sixteen years ago August tenth, and brought the island to a shrieking standstill.

  Graham was fifteen years old and watched the tales of murder unfold, first in the living room of his own home, and then on television. Two boys, aged ten and eleven, found on the bluffs above Deep Bay. Graham saw the pictures after he became a cop. The sweet horror of them makes a full night’s sleep a dream and taunts the starts and ends of each day. Graham knows his brother was the first victim because the other boy, Steven Forrester, reached out and laid his hand on top of Lance’s. Then he, too, died.

  Everything here at the Iverson scene matches the other victims, everything except the size seven footprint found in Shelley Iverson’s blood and a single strand of dark hair retrieved from her body. Someone stood beside her while she died; knelt in her blood when it was still fresh, in a position that suggests was a compassionate vigil. That doesn’t match the cold and calculated killer known to Vancouver Island for more than fifteen years as the King’s Ferry Killer.

  Forensics used the impressions in the woman’s blood to come up with an approximate weight and height of the person. It could have been a kid, or a small woman. Iverson was found by her father, a man who weighed as much as, if not more, than Graham. The doors and the windows were locked, with no sign of tampering. He knows they’ll find no fingerprints of interest. The DNA evidence they recover will belong to the victim, her family or known visitors. Probably this brown hair, too.

  But Graham will approach Saul Doss again anyway. The man is somewhat of a local legend in psychological circles, having achieved new levels of success in reclaiming the lives and the minds of many thought lost to mental illness. The department consulted Doss on a number of occasions regarding the King’s Ferry Killer over the years. Graham spoke to him and made note of their conversations in the case file. Doss described a killer of cold thought and precise action. When asked who he should be looking for, Doss replied, “A depleted soul. Evil dressed in human form.”

  Well, welcome to the world of serial killers.

  Graham pressed for a more concrete marker from Doss, something more tangible that would help him pick the killer out of a crowd of deviants, but the man was of little help. And there was something about him, maybe it was the way the man hesitated before answering Graham’s questions that he felt, on an instinctual level, was more than careful thought. Graham suspected Doss of withholding information. When challenged, Doss rose in denial and in the end, Doss’ observations matched the psychological profile developed by the experts at the RCMP. But the man’s behavior continued to tease Graham’s suspicion, even after checking Doss’ whereabouts at the time of the murders and coming up with a hard alibi for each.

  The original profile predicted white male, aged twenty-two to forty-seven at the first strike. It gave a probable description of the killer’s mind and even used some of the same vocabulary Doss used--cold and calculated, even the smallest detail considered and accomplished.

  Compassion, or any emotion like it, does not fit this crime.

  Graham doesn’t believe the KFK took a partner, but he has to investigate the possibility anyway, because someone knelt beside Shelley Iverson as she died.

  Their ninth victim in nearly sixteen years.

  Graham’s brother and a friend in 1997. Then seven years later, a single victim, a fifty-two year old woman visiting the island during the summer tourist season. Another pair, man and woman, forty-two and twenty, known to be having an affair, were killed in December 2006. Then two women, co-workers aged nineteen and twenty-two, murdered three days apart in 2008. In 2009, a high school senior, Simon Tuney, was murdered outside his home. Now Shelley Iverson, twenty-six, school teacher.

  The King’s Ferry Killer is not the most prolific of serial killers. Bundy, and even Dahlmer, have him beat.

  But he is the most personal. For Graham.

  “Iverson doesn’t have kids,” Graham says.

  “No. I interviewed her mother. Iverson was single, no children of her own.”

  “Is she dating anyone?”

  “Not that her mother knows about.”

  “Did you see the kids’ clothing we bagged?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Boy’s clothing, the size a nine year old might wear. And a bigger pair of jeans, sized maybe for an eleven year old.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That’s the only thing that stands out. About her, specifically,” he stresses. And now Graham is thinking maybe they’re going about this investigation all wrong. Maybe it’s not so much about what the killer is doing and more about what the victims have been up to.

  Was Iverson having inappropriate contact with her students? He doesn’t want to go there. He doesn’t want to think about the growing trend of impropriety in the schools or the frequency with which teachers are exposed on the news, in handcuffs or before the courts for crimes of this nature. He doesn’t want to think about Isaac, sitting in her classroom, vulnerable and needing

  attention. But it’s possible.

  They already have two adulterers in the mix. Who else, among their victims, were guilty of immoral or even criminal acts?

  And how do Lance and Steven Forrester fit? What could two young boys have been up to that would result in their murders?

  Graham shakes his head. This is where he stumbles.

  They don’t fit. Not if Graham thinks logically. Not if he thinks with his heart. It’s always challenging, following the flawed and fatal reasoning of a serial killer. There are as many twisted paths in the criminal mind as there are lines on a map. Throw in Graham’s personal connection, and it’s like tiptoeing through quicksand.

  Carter interrupts his thoughts. “What grade does she teach?”

  “Fifth,” Graham says. “Isaac had her three years back.”

  “That fits.”

  “Yeah.”

  Isaac was in the woman’s classroom, under her influence during a time when his son was made vulnerable by his mother’s mental deterioration and their divorce. His son never showed signs of abuse and Graham knows what to look for, but even experts miss clues.

  “What do you make of the baby Jesus?”

  Graham tries to shake off his worry for his son. He knows the statistics. Teacher abuse of her students is rare; media attention makes it seem more rampant. It’s never happened in King’s Ferry, nor on Vancouver Island, that Graham knows about; maybe not even in Canada at all. So, he’ll look for another explanation. For an acceptable reason a twenty-six year old woman would have in her possession clothes fitting a school boy.

  “The baby Jesus,” he says, anchoring himself in the moment.

  They found a small figurine of the Christ child clutched in Iverson’s hand. The King’s Ferry Killer always leaves an icon of the Christian faith with his victims and Graham
and the department have to dig through the victim's life in order to find the connection. Some continue to puzzle them. Others are obvious. The object is the only attempt by the killer to communicate with authorities.

  “My first thought?” Carter continues. “I wondered if she was pregnant.”

  Graham nods. “Could be. And maybe the killer saw her purchase a pregnancy test. Or works at a clinic.”

  Carter rattles through his notes. “No pregnancy test was found. No date in her calendar book indicating a doctor’s appointment.”

  “The M.E. will let us know.”

  “It’s hard for a woman to sit on that kind of news,” Carter says. “We can find out a lot faster if we ask around.”

  “You know that from experience?” Carter is single and as far as Graham knows, not a father.

  “My sisters told anyone who would listen,” he says.

  “Are your sisters married?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So maybe Iverson would keep a lid on it.” But Graham shrugs. Why wait for tomorrow

  if they can know in twenty minutes. “Ask about it.”

  “Straight out?”

  Graham nods. “We’re running on negative time. Pose it as a question, but if you pick up on reluctance, work it.”

  The door opens again and a middle-aged Asian man, Tong Oakes, joins them on the patio.

  “She’s ready to go,” he says.

  Graham nods. “Stick to protocol.”

  “Of course,” Oakes agrees.

  He stuffs his hands in his pockets and stares past the detectives and into the fog rolling off the ocean. Graham senses his hesitation. He’s only known Oakes to be a cautious, methodical man. The best at what he does.

  “What’s on your mind?” Graham prods.

  “He’s going to kill again,” Oakes says. “Soon.”

  Graham lets the words settle. He knew this, too, the moment he saw the wound. And the need for a smoke, to feel the nicotine hit his blood and sing through his veins, becomes stronger.

  “What did you find?”

  “Anger. Increased pressure to the wound. The exact measurements will be taken at the lab, but,” Tong adds, “the cut is deeper. Preliminary, I’d say he hit bone this time.”

  He knows Tong is talking about the spine, describing a near decapitation without going in for the fanfare, but he presses to be sure.

  “Are we talking a nick?”

  Oakes shakes his head. “More than that but less than a complete severing of the spinal column. There’s more than soft tissue intact.”

  “That’s a lot of anger,” Carter says.

  “So maybe his behavior is escalating,” Graham poses. “Or maybe he knew his victim this time.”

  “If the hair proves conclusive,” Tong says, “and doesn’t belong to a known subject, I’d go with him knowing the victim. He was too distracted to keep the scene clean.”

  Chapter Three

  Sunday 7:35 am

  The ferry was overloaded. A sign above the wheel house claimed responsibility for 305 passengers and 57 autos. Natalie did an approximate count: 350 people. She thought of recent tragedies, in the Philippines, in Greece, where ferries burdened with too much human cargo capsized. She began to word tomorrow’s headlines: Ferry Headed for Victoria Sinks, 300 Perish. She’d always been an optimistic person; she didn’t understand her focus on death; didn’t like how the thoughts crept into her mind and then seemed to play out in life. She didn’t believe in ESP, in parallel worlds, in messages from beyond the grave. She didn’t believe in ghosts. Yet, she’d known of her father’s cancer days before the diagnosis. At dinner, she’d looked up from her meal, intending to address a comment her father had made, when she saw a pale image of him standing beside the real thing. This ghost image had bottomless, mournful eyes and skin mottled by what Natalie would come to know as an aggressive melanoma.

  She wanted to believe it was a hallucination. Her physician assured her that she was suffering from the shock of discovering a dead body. A criminal death. The man in the woods was murdered. Her doctor told her that the human mind often worked without our consent, weaving connections to other deaths we may have experienced. In Natalie's case, the death of her brother.

  Tragedy was stacked against her. There was so much of it in her life it was beginning

  to impact her ability to reason. That she understood.

  Most people have nightmares after they fall asleep, but Natalie's choose daylight, when they had her full attention. That made sense to her. She could accept more easily that she had post traumatic stress than a supernatural gift. Her mind was simply recreating one incident over and over, dressing it differently. Everything she saw didn't come to fruition, and those that did were coincidence.

  But then her father had come home with the diagnosis, and three months later, died. And now Natalie doubted even her ability to discriminate between reality and the images concocted by her mind.

  Like now, as she looked over the strait, she saw it littered with the bloated bodies of fellow passengers. And it seemed very convincing. She recognized the elderly man who parked his Impala in front of her pickup; the Japanese tourist who’d asked her to snap a picture of him and his wife; the woman who’d run past her earlier, frantically calling, “Michael! Michael!” Natalie looked among them for herself.

  She has light around her, like the pictures of Jesus. Michael doesn't think she’s from the bible, though. She wears clothes like everybody else, pants and shoes, and she’s smiling. All the pictures in his children's bible have people with flat mouths. None of them look right at you.

  Michael steps closer, tries to put his hand into the light, but it disappears. He tries to find the sun in the sky, but all he sees are clouds. His mother said it was getting ready to rain. She made him pull on a hat and scarf and now he’s hot and itchy. He turns around on the heels of his brand-new light-up high tops, looking for any place the sun might be peeking through, and catches a glimpse of star bursts dancing over his head. It happens sometimes, when he moves too fast and gets dizzy. He spins himself over to the rail and stands next to the lady, thinking the

  light might come back.

  The bow of the ferry thumped over a patch of choppy water. Natalie didn't get sea sick, but her stomach did a somersault and she held more tightly to the rail.

  Natalie needed answers about her brother's death. She’d been dreaming about Steven more than usual. Almost every night since her father died. The dreams didn't last long, but slipped through her REM sleep several times a night. Steven holding up a snapping turtle and laughing as their father focuses the camera; Steven splashing through the surf, shoes on, his head bent and searching; she can't remember what he was looking for only that she’d followed in his wake, a sense of urgency moving her forward. In the last moment of the dream, Steven appeared to her as he was the last time she’d seen him, in his casket, hands folded over his chest. Only his eyes were open and scared. Pleading.

  Steven lived exactly ten years. The day he’d disappeared they picked up his birthday cake from the bakery and wrapped his presents in Batman paper. Her father walked into their rented house in King’s Ferry mid-afternoon carrying a large box she later discovered was a telescope. Kids from the neighborhood, whom Steven and Natalie had played with the past three summers, started ringing their doorbell at 2 pm, but her brother and his best friend, Lance Marquette, had not shown up. Her mother started the games while her father went looking. The next day, the Royal Mounted Police began a search that included dragging the shallow water of the bay. But it was Natalie who’d found Steven. And that was where everything became fuzzy. She knew she’d found her brother and his friend; her father had told her so. She even remembered the police asking her questions, but not their exact words and not the answers she’d given them. Natalie and her parents left Vancouver Island, brought Steven home for burial, and never returned.

  She drew a deep breath and loosened her hands on the railing. The wind picked up and
>
  she let the mist from the strait bathe her face. She wished she could wash the soot from her memories as easily, see them clearly for the first time, cut through their cloying bands and free herself, but only knowledge would do that. She lived with Steven's death every day, connected to it in a way she didn't understand. She wanted to change that.

  "You're going to get all wet."

  Natalie looked down. A little boy, maybe seven years old, bundled in wool and Gortex.

  "I hope so."

  He frowned. She’s a grown up and his mother just told him to stand back from the rail or he'd get soaked.

  "You want to get wet?"

  "Absolutely," Natalie agreed. "Don't you?"

  It was too late if he didn't. His face was covered in a film of mist and a layer stuck to his clothes.

  He nodded, put his hands on the rail and hoisted himself up so that he could look over at the water.

  "You see any whales?" he asked.

  "Not yet."

  "They migrate now. In families. The babies swim with their mothers."

  "That’s right," Natalie said. "But I haven't seen any.”

  "Michael!"

  The sharp voice was accompanied by a hand on the boy's shoulder.

  "Get off that railing and come over here. I told you not to get too close."

  The boy lets his feet drop to the deck, but the disappointment on his face lifted to a look of wide astonishment. Natalie followed his gaze.

  "A whale! A whale!" he cried. He jumped up and down and shook off his mother's hand. "Do you see the babies?"

  Natalie didn't. She watched the arc of the whale's tail, the spray it shot through the air, and then its plunge back beneath the water. Her heart beat a little faster.

  "Beautiful," she murmured.

  "Powerful."

  A man filled the space beside her. She felt his presence as much as she heard his voice. It was not a pleasant sensation; her skin felt slightly burned, even through the layers of her clothing.