I Will Come for You

by Phillips, Suzanne

  “You’re right,” the nurse said, and her tone made it clear that she was as surprised as a dog in a tree. “Natalie Forrester. Room five-oh-three. Look,” she said and held the chart for Natalie to see. In Bold red lettering it said: ‘NOT A PATIENT OF THE PSYCHIATRIC WARD.’

  “Really?” Natalie said.

  “Really. We were short of beds,” the nurse revealed. “We had more than a hundred patients come in from that ferry accident. Seven of you took beds here.” She laughed, a light and airy sound now. “Think of that, I was ready to fill you up with diazepam.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sunday, 11 pm

  Isaac doesn’t usually wait up for his father. He knows processing a crime scene takes hours and the fact that this one belongs to the King’s Ferry Killer means that his father will stay long into the night, supervising the collection and control of evidence. Isaac sits in the living room, flipping through stations on the TV, and watches the clock. He can’t call his father too soon; he’ll be busy, stressed and impatient to get off the phone. But Isaac doesn’t want to go to bed until he hears his father’s voice, until he knows for sure how his father feels about Isaac’s gift.

  He doesn’t like it. Isaac is pretty sure about that. It scares his dad, that Isaac defies time and place, that he ministers to the dying. His father is most comfortable with facts. He understands the spiritual, embraces the idea that they were made by God and that when you’re troubled, He’s the One to turn to. But he means through prayer; not by tripping into another realm. His father respects the beliefs of others, but has little time for what he calls fantasy. Isaac watched his dad temper native talk of returning spirits and star-guidance with casual, noncommittal remarks. He does not think outside the box.

  And that’s too bad, Isaac thinks. Because the only way to get the King’s Ferry Killer, the only way to make the island safe again, is to think and move in a realm his father refuses to believe exists. The realm in which this evil thrives. A realm not too unlike their own reality,

  where good and evil coexist and the innocent are prey.

  Except that his father saw, with his own eyes, Isaac caught between parallels of time.

  Isaac can help him, if his father will let him. If Isaac can find the courage to face evil, to fight it, to either finish it or lose his life to it.

  He may never get a good look at the killer’s face, he may never be able to pick the guy out of a line-up, but Isaac has a feel for him. When in his presence, the world is still, silent; the air is heavier, almost no oxygen at all, but the sudden evaporation of it. If Isaac doesn’t sense him when he’s out among the citizens of King’s Ferry, there may be a way to track him. The killer waited for Isaac, then he lured him upstairs and into the nursery. He used innocence, and Isaac’s calling, to get him up those stairs. Maybe Isaac can play evil the same way, maybe he can bait and hook the KFK. Maybe he won’t have to wait until they meet again over the body of another victim.

  Isaac is always too late.

  He wants to do more than usher the dead into the world beyond. It’d be nice if he could stop a few from making that journey too soon.

  Jeremy was only a few years older than Isaac. He didn’t even have the chance to graduate from high school.

  On the TV a commercial segues into the start of the late night news and Isaac sits forward on the couch. He presses the mute button and frees the audio. The King’s Ferry Killer is top priority, though reporters don’t know yet that he struck again. But they suspect it:

  “. . .the home is flooded with police and just moments ago the coroner arrived. This doesn’t look good, King’s Ferry.”

  Live footage of the house takes up the full screen. Police cars are parked in the gravel

  drive way; a black van, from the forensics lab, is perched on the front lawn. Reporters press against the police barricade. All the windows in the house are lit from within, a clear, yellow glow that Isaac will always associate with the color of fire; the color that burned his eyes when he tried to look directly at the evil salivating over the baby’s crib. That thickness in the air returns; he breathes slowly, sure he swallowed a butterfly; its wings flap in his throat. His skin flushes with heat. When he returned from the house he had Jeremy’s blood on his hands.

  He looks at them now, as stained as they were when he knelt beside Jeremy. The blood is back. Isaac washed his hands after his father left his bedroom, then left the house, calling over his shoulder that he was on his way to Deschuetts Road. He washed them with soap and hot water. He watched the blood flow down the drain until the water ran clear and his hands were clean.

  He stands up, deciding to wash at the sink in the kitchen, and begins walking towards the back of the house. He feels again, that sensation of someone sifting through his mind, peeling through layers of memory, searching.

  Saul Doss is spying on me, Isaac thinks. The old man found a way into his mind, but not into his active thoughts. Not yet.

  Or maybe it isn’t Doss. Maybe it’s the KFK. Just thinking about the killer could have brought him here. They communicated that easily in Callen’s Cross, with Jeremy’s body still warm in the room downstairs.

  Isaac tries to shake the feeling. It’s too much like his mother. Towards the end, before her diagnosis and medication, his mother’s best friend was paranoia.

  That’s not what I’m feeling, Isaac thinks. I’m not scared. Creeped out, yeah. Anyway, he senses a presence inside his head the same way he knows evil has arrived before it shows itself.

  That’s real.

  He pads over the ceramic tile in his bare feet. At the sink, he turns on the taps and squirts dishwashing liquid into his palms, but his attention is caught by his reflection in the window. He looks the same. The same as he did when he woke up that morning: hair a little too long, freckles that make him look like a preschooler. He lets his eyes fall from his face to his shoulders, to the collar of his flannel shirt which is open and reveals his neck and a terrible gash that should be life draining. He’s wearing the wounds of Jeremy Kroeger.

  Chapter Twenty

  Monday, 6:20 am

  Graham is standing in the foyer when the medical examiner wheels out the body of Jeremy Kroeger. The black bag conceals the work of the King’s Ferry Killer, but Graham won’t forget how death settled slowly on the boy. On discovery, perhaps thirty minutes after Kroeger died, his skin had a bluish tint and the puddle of blood around him was purple. The next time Graham stepped into the room, the teen’s skin was white, glazed and almost translucent, even his lips and nail beds appeared bleached. The boy’s hazel eyes were flat from loss of body fluid. An hour ago, rigor began its steady pursuit of small and large muscle, fixing the boy’s stare and freezing his mouth in an open, quizzical manner.

  Graham thinks about Isaac. His son appeared before this boy, remained at Jeremy’s side until his last breath was drawn, and then Isaac returned, with the victim’s blood on his hands and an explanation that challenged Graham’s tenacious hold on reality.

  If he was thinking like a cop, Graham would have swabbed Isaac’s hands, gotten a sample of the blood to compare to Jeremy’s. Not because Graham thinks Isaac might be involved in the boy’s death, but because Graham would like to prove that it wasn’t Jeremy’s blood after all. That Isaac was nowhere near Deschuetts Road at the time the KFK took his tenth victim.

  Isaac was home when Jeremy Kroeger was murdered. He did his homework, ate dinner and showered. And Graham is his alibi.

  And yet Isaac was also somewhere else. He was so far outside his body, he didn’t respond to Graham’s voice or his touch. So far out, that the absence of what is essentially Isaac lightened his body, made it buoyant.

  Isaac’s description of the crime scene was detailed and accurate. So why couldn’t he have been here?

  Because it defies all logic.

  Because Graham wants his son to be a normal kid, not a nurse to the dead and dying.

  Since discovering Isaac suspended several feet off the floor
in his bedroom, Graham’s mind has been a battlefield, a tug of war, over the acceptable and the unacceptable.

  His son is a time traveler, but in no way similar to anything H.G. Wells prepared Graham to encounter. Isaac’s destinations are predetermined; he is called and gifted by a power much greater and more complex than a mere author.

  His son attended Jeremy Kroeger’s murder. And Iverson’s, too. He must have. He left his prints in her blood—size seven and Graham would bet a month’s salary that the shoe pattern matches the Nike Trail Blazer. But the DNA at the scene did not belong to Isaac, whose hair is brown but who is definitely not suffering from a blood-based illness. Isaac just saw the doctor.

  He a physical every winter to prepare for spring ball.

  And, anyway, the way Isaac describes it, he can’t leave anything of himself behind.

  “Chief?”

  Tong Oakes stops in front of Graham, breaking through his preoccupation. His face,

  despite his fifty-some years, is free of wrinkles. In a career that can pull you under, Oakes manages to put a limit on the amount of tragedy he’ll absorb. Graham should put some time into learning his secrets.

  “Prelim?” Graham asks.

  “Only the obvious,” Oakes says. “It’s him, all right. I’d put money on it. No deviation from his MO that I can see. Not here and not in Iverson’s case, either.”

  Graham nods but doesn’t bother to pull out his notebook, to jot down the doctor’s words. At face value, the work is recognized by all of them.

  “The cut is deeper. Like Iverson. Forensics went over the body before we bagged it. No hairs this time.” Oakes steps closer, lowers his voice. “Positive on the pregnancy.”

  “How far along?”

  “Fourteen weeks.”

  Graham nods. “Anything else.”

  Oakes shakes his head. “Give me a few more hours. I’m working on the cell structure in the cuticle of the hair, trying to match it to disease. I’ll be able to narrow it to genus, at least, and a lot faster than you’ll hear from Ontario.”

  “Call me as soon as you know something,” Graham says and moves beyond the foyer, stopping at the first room, where he found Jeremy’s body six hours ago. A tech guy from forensics is working the computer.

  “Let’s talk about the crucifixion first,” he says. “It was a simple download.” He pushes back from the desk, stretches his arms above his head. “A two year old can download a screen saver. We can trace the product back to the seller, but that will take time and it’ll generate a list

  of a thousand names we don’t have the man power to investigate.”

  “He’s smarter than a two year old,” Graham says. “Let’s see if he left something else. Did the kid keep a journal? Was he active on chat groups?”

  He can see how the screen-saver, with its depiction of Christ on the cross, fits the Kroeger crime scene. If Jeremy Kroeger and Shelley Iverson are connected, if they were involved and the pregnancy was the result of the relationship, than Kroeger is Christ to Shelley Iverson’s Mary Magdalene.

  “What else did you find?”

  “He had a MySpace account, but I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. No plans to meet up with anyone and all of his entries were about school activities, friends and possible dates. He kept a diary on here,” the tech says. “I broke the password but the only thing that doesn’t make sense is his brooding about some teacher. He goes on about it. He starts every entry with, ‘Here’s to you, Mr. Weimer.’”

  “Whose Weimer?”

  “Biology teacher.”

  “Any personal e-mails between the two?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We’ll check him out,” Graham says. “I’d like to see transcripts of all recent e-mails, diary entries, too. MySpace comments. Go back a week.”

  “Diary and MySpace are already generated,” the tech says and pats a stack of folders. “I’m just starting on the e-mails. There are a lot from today.” He moves the mouse around and clicks a few times then says, “Fifty-seven total e-mails, sent and received, starting at twelve-oh-one yesterday morning and ending at eleven-fifty-nine. Fourteen of those were sent after six pm. I’ll print out the list.”

  He clicks on the utility icon and the printer begins to whirl and seek paper.

  “Any internet searches?” Graham asks.

  “Oh, yeah. More than forty, and that’s just from noon. I narrowed the timeframe, though, started the print list at four o’clock, when he would have been home from school. They’re in there.” He nods at the folders. “Some of them are pretty dark. A porno site or two. Membership only. And someone checked out the registry of sex offenders. I printed that out for you, too.”

  “Really? What time was that accessed?”

  “Two forty-seven. That’s pm.”

  “Is it possible to find out the name of the person that was searched?”

  “Name and address. I’ll need to get this back to the lab first.” He pats the computer. “But it won’t take long at all.”

  “Good. Do that first.”

  The technician picks up the paper as the printer spits it out. He gives it a quick scan and says, “Chief? You’re going to want to see this.”

  He holds up the paper and points to an e-mail address that begins with Graham’s last name.

  “Is that yours?”

  “No. It’s my son’s.”

  “Well, it looks like he received an e-mail from this computer. And judging from the

  time, it could be from the killer.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Monday, 6:45 am

  His father stayed all night at the Kroeger crime scene and when he arrives home Isaac is already up and moving through his morning routine. He didn’t call his father last night; he got caught up in the scar that belonged to Jeremy but was wrapped around Isaac’s throat like he was the victim. It took hours for the jagged scar to fade and the first thing Isaac did when he woke up this morning was look at himself in the mirror.

  His gift is changing. Or maybe it’s always been waiting to express itself by leaving the marks of the murdered on his body. He wonders if he brought back more than Shelley Iverson’s blood. She, too, was cut in the throat, left to bleed out, but maybe the killer did something more. Something not visible on the surface. Isaac doesn’t know what to expect next, but knows there’ll be a next time. The King’s Ferry Killer is still on the island. Isaac feels him in the heaviness in the air.

  He tries to put his gift out of his mind for now, tries to focus on something other than the King’s Ferry Killer. His father is taking the stairs two at a time, calling his name and he isn’t happy.

  Isaac meets him in the hall, a towel bunched in his hands.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Did you know Jeremy Kroeger?” his father asks, shouldering past him and heading for Isaac’s bedroom.

  “No.”

  “He e-mailed you,” his father insists.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Isaac,” his father pauses, draws a long breath, and then holds up a manila file folder. “This says he did.”

  “What is that?”

  “Activity on Kroeger’s e-mail account. Your address is in here. He e-mailed you yesterday.” His father checks the report and reads, “At seven-twenty-two pm.”

  His father pauses, and certainty gathers in the silence between them.

  “Jeremy was already dead,” Isaac confirms.

  “And there was no one else in the house,” his father says.

  “No one. Except the killer. And the baby.”

  His father nods. “I had hoped—” that the e-mail was from a friend, not a serial killer.

  Isaac would prefer this, too.

  His father tosses the folder on Isaac’s bed then approaches the computer on the desk.

  “Have you checked your e-mail lately?”

  “Not since yesterday afternoon. I’ve been kind of busy,” Isaac says.

  His father boots up Isaac’s
computer. It dings and the screen flickers and begins flipping through its paces. His father turns to Isaac.

  “Yeah. You have been busy.”

  “The crime scene,” Isaac says. “Was it like I said it would be?”

  His father nods. “Exactly.”

  “And Jeremy, too.”

  “Yeah.” He pushes both hands through his hair. “So, what do you think about this?”

  “My gift?”

  His father nods, settles his hands on his hips, and looks into Isaac’s face. “Is it a gift?”

  “I think so. I’m supposed to help people.”

  “You’re twelve. I want you to be twelve.”

  “Joan of Arc was eleven,” Isaac points out, another piece of trivia he picked up when he was researching his gift. “A lot of kids are called to do unusual things.”

  “What about school and baseball and girls?”

  “I still go to school,” Isaac says. “Baseball starts in March. And the girls don’t notice me.”

  His dad smiles, lays a hand on Isaac’s shoulder and gives it a squeeze. “But it’s not easy,” he says. “I know you won’t tell me that.”

  “It’s not hard,” Isaac says. “I’m used to it now.”

  “I wish it never happened,” his father admits, “and I want it to stop. But it won’t, will

  it?”

  Isaac shrugs. “Maybe someday. Maybe only kids get to do this job. Maybe I’ll have the ability my whole life.”

  His father face gets that pinched look of worry.

  “I was born for this,” Isaac says.

  His father tries to put a positive spin on it, “Like Michael Jordan was born for the hoops?”

  Isaac nods. “Just like that.”

  “I want to know about it,” his father says. “Every time it happens.”

  “OK.”

  “I want you to talk to me about it,” his father continues. “I want to know what you see—“ The lines around his mouth deepen and he shakes his head. “You’re too young for the things you see.”

  “It’s changed the way I look at the world,” Isaac agrees. “But that’s a good thing.”