I Will Come for You Page 7

  In his gut it feels right. They’re tracking a killer who thinks he’s an avenging angel, either a sociopathic super hero, delivering justice for all, or a garden sociopath who sees in every one of his victims his own tormentor. Somehow, every victim fits into the killer’s rationale, Lance and Steven Forrester, included. Graham needs to know why his brother died, for his own closure, and he’ll have the luxury of figuring it out, after the killer is caught and King’s Ferry is safe.

  The two women, Howe and Cowen, were found two days apart, one in her apartment, the other inside her car. They were young. Howe was twenty and Cowen twenty-two. One was blond; the other was a brunette. They worked together at the same coffee shop for nearly a year before moving into separate vocations, but maintained contact. A note in Cowen’s file, made by Graham himself, read, “Apartment manager says the two, ‘could have shared the rent, they saw so much of each other.’”

  Simon Tuney was seventeen years old when he was murdered. He was a junior at the local high school and was left to bleed out on the back porch of his family’s home in suburban King’s Ferry. His sister found his body. Right away, Graham picks up on the boy’s offense. Three and a half years ago, through interviews with the teen’s friends and teachers, allegations of date rape surfaced. The girl never pressed charges, but rumors spread through the school to the point that students and teachers knew of it. Graham attended Tuney’s crime scene and stayed with the physical evidence while Carter’s predecessor worked the people side of the murder. In his notes, the officer indicated that he approached the girl but she refused to implicate Tuney. She also appeared withdrawn and cried when the detective told her Tuney was certainly dead; he did not consider her a viable suspect in the kid’s murder, should forensics rule out the KFK.

  Graham has his secretary dig up the phone numbers of key personnel at the school and begins calling. The principal has since retired and moved, but the school secretary leads him to a math teacher willing to talk.

  “Do you remember the name of the girl?”

  Graham feels the woman’s hesitation over the phone as the silence gathers. He already knows the girl’s name; he needs the teacher to confirm it.

  “Is that necessary?”

  “I wouldn’t ask otherwise, Mrs. Neal. We’ll be responsible with the information,” he promises.

  “Cathy Gresham.” The name falls by the syllable from the teacher’s mouth. “She graduated in 2009. I remember it so well, because she came to me. Hysterical. I should have done more.”

  “What did you do?” He keeps his voice even, not wanting to get the teacher’s guilt up, but he’s unsuccessful.

  “I tried to help her,” she insists. “I let her talk. I told her that it was wrong. Very wrong. I turned Simon Tuney into the principal who called the police. But then Cathy got scared. She stopped talking.”

  “Did anyone talk to Tuney?”

  “The police did.”

  “When was that?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Maybe a few weeks later.”

  “Still in the month of March?” Case file notes say March twenty-first.

  “Yes.”

  Tuney was murdered in October of that year. Several months later.

  “Do you know where Cathy is now?”

  “Talk of what happened did not let up. It was hard to be Cathy, living in a small town. People still remember. Whisper. It wasn’t her imagination. Even when she came back last summer, to visit her parents, she didn’t stay for long. She attends South Falls State University. That’s in Idaho.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Neal. We appreciate your help.”

  “I told all of this to the police four years ago. And, really, I don’t understand what good it does anyone now. Simon Tuney is dead.”

  “Yes, he is,” Graham says. “And I plan to do something about that.”

  “I wish someone would have done something for Cathy.”

  Someone did, Graham thinks. Someone is punishing sex offenders. Guilty or innocent. Tried or not.

  Graham hangs up the phone and taps his pencil against his pad while he waits for Carter to finish up his call. So far, it seems, the sins committed are sexual in nature. They’ll need to change their line of questioning. This is good. Tighter. Graham tries to order up his tunnel vision, stay the course. It doesn’t matter that some things don’t yet fit. He doesn’t think like a killer. Some details will never be understood, not until the last moment, when Graham is sitting in the box with the animal. And maybe not even then.

  He makes a note to send an officer to the Gresham residence; he wants confirmation from her parents that Cathy Gresham was raped.

  “Well, that was painful, and completely unproductive,” Carter says.

  “Howe’s mother?”

  Carter nods. “She cried the whole time. Did you get anything?”

  He tells Carter about Simon Tuney and Cathy Gresham.

  “Why didn’t we know about this before?” Carter asks.

  “We did. We considered it unrelated. We knew Tuney was killed by the KFK, not by Gresham or anyone related to her, and there was no indication at the time that the connection between victims was sexual offenses.” Perceived or otherwise.

  Carter sits back in his chair, lets this new piece of information slip into place.

  “So you think Tuney was killed for raping Gresham?” Carter poses. He nods as he considers it. “I like that. It fits. No trimming the edges, no forcing the piece.” Carter

  smiles. “Yeah, I like it a lot.”

  “Me, too. We’re not looking for a guy out there policing the world. We’re looking for a perp with sexual hang-ups.”

  “I believe the profile says something about that,” Carter folds his hands behind his head and beams at him.

  “I believe you’re right.” And it feels good, chasing down a theory that floats. “It’s starting to feel a lot less itchy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. I’m back in my comfort zone,” Carter agrees. “But what about your brother and his friend? They weren’t even old enough to know anything about sex.”

  “You’re right. They don’t fit. Not yet. That doesn’t mean they won’t. Or that we’ll understand motive when we have it.” Graham stands and stretches. “Remember, it doesn’t have to make sense, and it probably won’t.”

  “I’m going to start working Cowen,” Carter says. “We need to make one of the women fit. I’ll feel a lot better if three of the nine vics are a sure thing. Iverson may not pan out.”

  Carter is right. All they really have on Iverson is suspicion.

  “I have a few people left on my list, that knew both Howe and Cowen,” Graham says. “I’ll get those.”

  Graham looks at the clock. Five-forty. They’re fast approaching twenty-four hours on the Iverson murder. He feels it in his gut, the fork of a hammer clawing his flesh. All murder investigations work in negative time, and there’s no catching up, simply because no amount of time will bring back the dead. When it’s serial murder, when the potential for another victim is just about guaranteed—and in a given number of hours—time takes on the steel edges of a skill saw blade.

  Graham is on his seventh call, after a series of answering machines, one angry refusal to talk ‘now, what about four years ago?’ And a warbling conversation with Cowen’s mother, he hears Carter slapping his desk to get his attention.

  “Really, ma’am?” Carter is saying into the phone. “You’re sure about this?” He listens some, and then says, “She told you that herself? Hmm. Uh-huh. And was there anything about the two, when they were together, that made you think they were lovers?”

  Graham’s mind starts working that. A lover’s triangle? Were the two women seeing the same guy? Were they seeing each other?

  Carter hangs up and turns a Cheshire grin his way. “Well, I think your right. Our killer isn’t after just your run of the mill sinner. You have to be a ‘sexual sicko’ in order to make his list.”

  “What makes Cowen a sicko?”

&nbs
p; “According to a former friend and co-worker at the New Grind, you can gain that status by being a lesbian.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s right. She confirmed Howe and Cowen were lovers. She said she first noticed it at work. They were very ‘touchy-feely.’”

  “Why didn’t she say anything four years ago?”

  “She wasn’t on the island four years ago. She was living in Seattle with her loser boyfriend, whom, by the way, was also a sexual sicko. I didn’t ask her to elaborate.”

  Graham nods. “It fits. If you’re deranged.”

  “Or a simple southern Baptist.”

  Graham stands up, grabs his coat.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To feed my kid.” He starts toward the door. “You get something to eat, too. Make sure you get Edwards out to the Gresham house now. We need a statement from the girl’s parents supporting the date rape. See if Victoria has come up with anything on local pedophiles that will interest us. Then go eat.”

  “Right boss.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Sunday, 6:10 pm

  Isaac watches the man waiting for his father from the upstairs window of his bedroom. He’s a shaman. He looks like one, anyway, with his long white hair and those eyes. Clear, almost metallic, and persuasive. Isaac felt himself drawn to him, found himself moving toward the door without realizing he was pulled there by the shaman’s will. Isaac has heard that some of the Shinshi can do that. Use their minds to control people and objects. It’s a gift similar to hypnosis. Isaac has never seen it in practice. When he was a little kid he half-believed it, because everyone knew the stories, and all the stories were the same, all about the mind-grabbers who lived among them during the day, looking like everyone else, but at night turned into spirits and seeped into the minds of humans as easily as breath. Isaac stopped believing this when he was eight or nine years old. His father calls the stories local lore. Isaac also heard him call them crap. Until tonight, he thought his father was probably right.

  Whether the man is Shinshi or not, Isaac doesn’t doubt that he has a gift. The man practically admitted it. He told Isaac that not everything is as it seems. Meaning that maybe the guy isn’t all bad? But Isaac has a hard time believing it. The shaman wants something from Isaac and he’s not asking for it. If he could, if he was able to, he would breech Isaac’s consciousness and take what he wants and more.

  So far, Isaac escaped the man’s attempts.

  He broke away when he watched his hand lifting toward the door, knowing he was going to open it, let the shaman in, even though his mind was screaming not to. It wasn’t that he was ordered to do it; more like the man’s will had tamed his own.

  Isaac knows enough to get as far away from him as he can, but going outside is not an option. The man is part of the night, a spirit who can take on the shape of the wind and the trees. It’s not just the old ghost stories talking, Isaac carries the impression of the man in his mind. That’s the thing about intruding upon someone’s psyche--you leave as much as you take. Isaac suspected that he had the ability to enter a person, from the flashes of memory that rolled like film in his mind when he was attending to the dying. He knew their names, the names of their spouses, their children, their pets. It had to come from somewhere. And so Isaac is very careful not to submerge himself too deeply into the dying, fearing he’d be swept away with them.

  He and this man seeking his father, share a similar gift. This troubles Isaac, because anyone can figure out that their gifts come from the same source. Isaac wonders if, beyond the pale light, lies a groping darkness. And he worries that at some point the two will meet, good and evil, like they always do in comic books and the movies, and that he is no match for what lies ahead.

  He stands at the window and looks down on this man who could be his enemy, who could be here to harm him, and knows that running upstairs is not far enough. He still feels the shaman, prodding the seams of his mind.

  He is sitting on the deck, facing the back yard, his fingers strumming the arm rest, not fast and impatient but a slow, steady rhythm. Isaac feels those fingers, the blunt, rough tips, needling for entry into his thoughts.

  I won’t let him do it, Isaac thinks. He backs away from the window and looks around his room for a distraction. If he doesn’t think about the man, maybe he won’t be able to find Isaac. Not on that level. Isaac knows that his approach to the dying is quickened by their urgency. For communication to exist outside the physical realm, both parties have to be willing.

  He paces the length of his bed, watches his reflection pass through the mirror over his dresser, thinks he should probably get a haircut. His mother, the way his mother was before her mind went south, would want him to. His bangs are in his eyes. He pushes them aside and looks for his mother in his face. He doesn’t like his freckles; his mother thinks they’re cute. Even now, when he does see her, she brushes her fingertips over his cheeks and says, “Sun-kissed.” She says it like it’s a prayer, then smiles so deeply Isaac can find it in her eyes.

  His mother’s skin is smooth and white. She has a tiny scar under her lip, where she bit through her flesh during a fall. It’s so small he can only see it when she smiles and the skin stretches thin there. She was just a kid when it happened. Six or seven and already in school. Isaac remembers that she hated the stitches and told him she walked around for two weeks with her hand over her mouth to hide them.

  It isn’t hard for Isaac to imagine the kid his mother was. In her worst moments, when she was folded up like a fist and shaking on the floor in her bedroom, her cries sounded like a little girl’s. She called for her father, mostly. And sometimes she said bad things about him. She screamed at him to go away, that he couldn’t live inside her anymore. Memories of him haunted his mother and long before her mind went soft she removed his pictures, wrapped them in newspaper and took them outside where she smashed them against the chop block.

  So maybe her mind was already headed towards crazy at that point. Maybe that was the beginning.

  Isaac wonders if her father, who died before Isaac turned one, put the scars on his mother’s body. There are more than the one under her lip. She has marks on her arms and legs, too. He doesn’t like thinking about his mother hurting. About a father who hit her. He tries not to think about the aftermom, which is how he divides and packages the times in his life; good and bad are before and after. His mother’s laughter, her perfect face, even when she was smiling, are his best memories of her.

  But even focusing on his mother doesn’t work a hundred percent.

  He feels the shaman in his head, inside his skull, peeling at the layers of soft tissue. That’s what it’s like. The man has gained access into his physical person, and is searching persistently for entrance into Isaac’s self.

  Natalie pushed her food around on the tray. Egg noodles with turkey gravy and spinach. A sealed container held what looked like Jell-O. A meal fit for someone without teeth, or someone with no gag reflex. It was a no-choke dinner, except for the taste, which Natalie only guessed at. She couldn’t bring herself to try it. She held the spork in her hand, pushed it through the lump of cooling green leaves, and wondered, also, what was up with the spork? The plastic demi-tool was her only utensil.

  She was beginning to think the hospital was trying to save her from herself.

  Earlier she’d gotten up to use the bathroom and found a sheet of reflective tin instead of glass in the mirror. She put on her bathrobe and searched for, but couldn’t find, the sash for it.

  She thought about asking the nurse for a nail file but knew she would truly freak out if she brought Natalie an emery board instead.

  She’d convinced herself that she was still suffering from the effects of overexposure, a knock on the head, the loss of the little boy she’d tried to save. She refused to think about their conversation, not the one she’d thought they had in this room this morning, but the one they’d had on the ferry, before it sank, before she’d been hit with debris and
chilled to a Popsicle.

  The one where he had spoken and a jangling river of clashing swords had come out of his mouth.

  No head injury to explain that away.

  She had heard the words he had spoken and they had swirled around in her head, smacking against reason, making no sense at all. At first. And then emerging from the rubble had been the warning. To believe in herself. Urging her to move forward, knowing that she may die.

  Natalie had come to the island knowing that death might be her only release from the torment that was the aftermath of Steven’s death. She had come ready. Michael’s words hadn’t scared her on that level; they’d frightened her because she’d understood them, on a level that was primal. He hadn’t spoken in a language her mind recognized, but in words that she knew intuitively. It was even possible they’d communicated without spoken language at all.

  Graham pulls up to the window at the Quick Chix and exchanges cash for a bucket of crispy chicken and some sides. He feels time slipping beyond his fingertips, that no matter how fast he runs, he’s always a mile short.

  The KFK is hunting and killing those whom he feels are guilty of sexual misconduct. Graham doesn’t have to be a genius to figure out their killer was probably sexually abused as a child, that he is exorcising judgment against the man or woman who victimized him, sacrificing the innocent, or at least those innocent until charged and tried.

  He doesn’t know how two small boys fit into this scenario. And he doesn’t know how to use fact and instinct to come up with the next possible victim. So they’re in damage control now. Before he left the station he asked the desk sergeant to spread the word to all officers: any recent complaints of sexual misconduct, big or small, going back three months, should be reported. Some complaints are minor, the charges dropped by the victim before even a report can be written. In these cases, the officer will make a note of the disturbance. Graham wants those notes. He wants all official reports culled from the active files and waiting for him when he returns from dinner. Carter is working the sex offender list. Additional men are alerting sub stations, briefing them on the possibility of their new theory and its implications. But even with all of this, they aren’t within striking distance. They’re closing in, spreading their nets, but there’s enough room for a killer as elusive as the KFK to slip through undetected.