I Will Come for You Read online

  “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.

  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 f
erry 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.