I Will Come for You (9 page)

Isaac tries to shake the feel of evil from his mind. There’s something about that kind of darkness; it was smothering. Isaac felt it all over him, prying at his mind, looking for a way in. It was sharp and mean and shaking with rage.

He hopes he never runs into the guy again. Ever.

Not a lot spooks Isaac anymore. When you’re a companion to the dying, everything pales in comparison. But as he turns away from the window, he catches his reflection in the glass, and beyond it a flash, a ripple of white that could have been a sheet hung out to dry, lifting in the wind, except they have a dryer.
Isaac steps closer to the door, until his nose is almost pressed to the glass, and watches the flurry of white draw closer.

It’s not a ghost. It has the levity and the transparency of
a spirit, but Isaac has never seen a ghost. Not ever. When the dying draw their last breath, when they let go of this world, they do it quietly. They are simply gone and what remains is a loneliness that is so much more than what even Isaac feels in his mother’s absence. He
knows
they are gone. They are not waiting around for the right moment to spook someone.

Isaac flips the switch for the outside light and the darkness is instantly pushed back. A man is standing in the backyard, as casually as if he’s waiting for a bus. His hands are pushed into the front pockets of his jeans; his down vest is buttoned against the cold and as the wind stirs, the guy’s white hair lifts,
waves like a flag.

As though taking the light as an invitation, the man treads across the grass, mounts the cedar steps and crosses the deck to the back door. Isaac’s breath fogs the glass. He wipes at it but
doesn’t take his eyes off the man, who is familiar in a way Isaac doesn’t yet understand.

This isn’t good. Isaac is responding to the energy the man gives off, which is not the bright, clean light of someone who is led by an open heart; he’s responding to the steady, almost hypnotic gaze of the man who stops in front of Isaac and places his hand against the glass, where Isaac’s hand wipes at the cool vapor. What Isaac didn’t clear away evaporates. Heat seeps through the glass and touches Isaac’s palm like a flame.

Isaac snatches his hand away and the man’s lips pull back in a smile that is full of discovery.

“Yes,” the man whispers. ”This is right.”

He looks into Isaac’s eyes, holding him within the intensity of his gaze. And it feels like a prison.

“What role do you play in all this, Isaac Marquette?”

Did he say the words? Or did he put them in Isaac’s mind? He doesn’t remember the man’s lips moving beyond the knowing smile. It’s his eyes. They’re distracting and seem to pull Isaac closer with a sensation of moving through the paned glass as easily as if he was a ghost. Moving until he thinks he could be pulled into those eyes and lost.

Isaac forces himself to look away. He steps back from the door, wonders if this man can move beyond the glass
his
way. Enter the house without an open door.

“Who are you?”

“Not the devil, but don’t take my word for it.”

From the corner of his eye, Isaac watches the man shift on his feet. A hand falls loose from
his pocket, rises and taps against the glass.

“Sorry about that, Isaac. I don’t usually use the voodoo on someone I’ve just met. But then, you have a few tricks yourself, don’t you? I wonder what they
are?”

Isaac says nothing. He concentrates his energy on trying to get a deeper feel for him. Evil, the way it fell off the man in Ms. Iverson’s house, isn’t present here. But neither is the
light he’s seen in children, in Mr. Frik, who lives next door; in the good among them. That’s one of the tricks Isaac has up his sleeve. He can see, sometimes, if a person is good or bad.

The man knocks again. “Are you going to let me in?”

“No.” And to make himself perfectly clear, because in some of the reading Isaac did

on
the supernatural he came across what seemed like fairy tales to him at the time but what may have been based on a kernel of truth: that some spirits can only enter a home with permission, he states it again, “You’re not invited in. You’re not welcome here.”

The man laughs, softly. Isaac can tell he’s amused, not chiding him.

“Don’t put your life into those old tales, Isaac. If someone wants in, in the natural or supernatural, they’re as good as in.”

Isaac figured as much, which means he’s at this man’s mercy, one way or another.

“I won’t come in, Isaac. At least, not until your dad gets here.”

Isaac looks into the man’s face, forgetting for a moment the strength of his eyes and the possibility of danger.

“What do you want with my dad?”

“Nothing,” he says. “He wants something from me.”

He holds Isaac’s gaze and raises his arms as if to say, No harm, no foul. The intensity is gone and Isaac notices color, texture and intent. The man’s eyes are weathered by age to a pale, colorless gray.  His face, dark enough he could be native, is heavily lined. He looks like someone’s grandfather, but he doesn’t share the light. He isn’t marked for good. Not that Isaac can tell.

“You’re young. Still a boy,” the man says. “You have a lot of talent to grow into yet.
A lot of wisdom to attain. Not every soul will come before you open. Not every soul is marked by the blemishes of action and inaction.”

“You can read my mind.”

“Not so much your mind,” the man says.  He steps back, points to a chair on the deck

and
says, “I’ll wait here. Your father was pretty insistent. I can understand why. Can you?”

“Miss Iverson?” Isaac guesses. Of course, it wasn’t hard. The murder is on everyone’s mind. And this man knows more about it than others. More than his father knows; maybe even more than Isaac knows.

Chapter Ten

Sunday, 5:30 pm

Graham and Carter are on the telephone, Carter working through the family members and friends of the pair murdered in 2008 and Graham digging through Simon Tuney’s past. What little of it there is. If they can find that at least one other victim committed similar infractions against morality, they’ll have an emerging pattern. They’ll need to establish the same with the remaining dead, including his brother, but that can come later, after they capture the KFK. Right now, Graham wants,
needs,
direction. Action he can believe in. Time is critical and unforgiving. He has no choice but to put all of his energy into one theory, all of his man power and technology a united force in one direction, if he’s going to get to the KFK before his next kill.

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.”