Natalie nodded, though she felt that Doss was holding back information and that it had something to do with her. “What happened?” she asked. “What went wrong?”
“I tapped into the mind of a murderer.” He seemed to tumble back in time, mentally arriving at the moment he had connected with the killer. “Terrifying. I was stuck in there, inside his mind. His memories were so horrific, they blinded me. I couldn’t feel my way out. No. I stayed in there a long time, cowering among the victims he had slaughtered, hoping he wouldn’t find me.” He sought and connected with Natalie’s gaze. “I forgot that my gift held me out of reach. I forgot, and made myself a prisoner inside this man’s head. I doubted, for just a moment and at a time when the battle was full-drawn. That’s what happened. By the time I found my way out, he had already escaped.”
“What does that mean?”
“His spirit,” Doss explained, “escaped. He found another body and took it for himself. Not a week later, he murdered. Everything I learned about his crime matched what I had seen when inside this man’s mind. The victims were different. Time and place, all different, but method and the drive to kill were the same.”
“He killed Steven and Lance,” Natalie said.
“Yes.”
She wasn’t buying his host theory yet. And who’s to say the spirit didn’t just jump into the first available man--Saul, himself?
“Do you know who the man is?”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s you?”
“I thought so, too. But I can account for myself, and not just place and time for one or two victims, but for every one who was murdered by the King’s Ferry Killer.”
She wasn’t sure yet what it meant to transcend, but she had another suggestion and she wanted to see what he would do with it.
“Maybe you transcended. Maybe you were “in spirit” for each of the murders.”
“Transcendence is available only to the purest of hearts.”
Natalie let that sink in. Doss didn’t deny the ability to transcend. He didn’t deny his responsibility in setting loose the evil that was claiming lives. He’d reduced his world to black and white. Good and evil.
“Why did the ferry sink?”
Doss shrugged but didn’t meet her gaze. “Old metal.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“It’s not the first ferry to sink, Natalie.”
“I know enough now to count on everything being connected.”
He nodded. “For every action there’s a reaction. For every positive a negative. This can be proven scientifically. But what do I believe?” he paused. “That for every good that transpires, evil is fast on its heels.” He sighs. “That’s an observation, based on sixty-eight years of living.”
“And what do you think, based on your gift?” Natalie persisted.
His voice grew deeper with warning. “It wasn’t an accident. As strong as the force calling you here, is the darkness that would do anything to keep you from uniting. The good are clearly marked, Natalie, as are the evil. And both want to survive.”
Doss kept returning to this idea of unity.
“What did you mean when you said we were assembled?”
“The Holy Trinity,” Saul said. “It only makes sense that it would take the unification here
on Earth of those with pure intent to wipe out the evil.”
“The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” Natalie repeated his words.
“Yes. The father and son have been here. We were just waiting on you.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Monday, 1:15 pm
Isaac leaves his bike in the street and rolls to the curb. The impact with the black top wasn’t jarring. In fact, he doesn’t remember making contact at all and he wonders if he passed out. He pushes himself up, with his palms flat against the road, pressing into gravel and natural debris, but he doesn’t feel that either. He stands, willowy on his feet and lightheaded. The wind moves through his hair, brushes against his skin, but Isaac doesn’t feel this. His only evidence is the ripple effect it has on his t-shirt. The only thing he does feel is the pain in his chest and he studies it, follows it from the ache in his rib cage, to the burn under his sternum, ending in his lungs. He is not out of breath, just working harder for it. The pain is sharper at inhalation, as though his lungs are held between the fingers of a contracting hand. He decides to sit it out on the curb and pulls his knees to his chest. He tries to take long, shallow breaths, which are easier on his lungs. He wonders what’s happening to him.
He doesn’t believe one of the dying passed illness to him. He is not a filter but an aide.
It’s probably a cold. He hasn’t had one all winter. In fact, he hasn’t been sick since his mother lived with them more than four years ago. He’s due for a few bad days.
He thinks he probably refused to get sick, knowing that his mother wasn’t around to
change his sheets, heat soup, test his forehead with hers. He’d miss her more sick than healthy, more when he’s sad than happy. Maybe that’s why he refused to dive into all that high-strung emotion, the what-about-me a lot of the kids at school moan about. Isaac’s parents aren’t the first to split up; Isaac isn’t the only kid at Langston Middle School who was left behind. He is the first kid he knows about whose mother fell off the deep end, though. In a town as small as King’s Ferry, and when your father is chief constable, everyone knows about it, no one talks about it, not to your face, anyway, and there’s no changing history.
It is what it is.
Isaac waits until his heart is beating normally, until his lungs expand with only the memory of pain, before he gets up, grabs his bike and starts pedaling again. He pumps slowly, knowing the bluffs aren’t going anywhere. The bluffs where his uncle’s body was found along with that of another boy, both cut at the throat and left to die.
Isaac rounds a corner and dips into a series of slow, twisting hills that will bring him to the cliffs over Deep Bay. He can see the ocean from here, sparkling under the sun. Sail boats tack out of the bay; farther out trawlers bob on the current, harvesting catch. He pauses, inhales deeply to test his lungs and settle his mind. He has to live in the moment, focus on feeling out the KFK, and he can’t do that if he’s swamped with sadness about his mom. He knows he can rely on his perception, if it’s not colored by emotion. He’ll pick up on changes in the environment, if the air grows darker, heavier with present evil, he’ll know he’s close. If it turns suffocating, he‘ll know he’s not alone. If it lays like a patina over the sea grass and sand, he will know that it passed through the area, but a long time ago.
Isaac starts forward. The numbness is fading. He feels his hair stir as he faces the wind. The thin cotton of his t-shirt stretches against his skin. It’s like the slow wearing off of Novocain; he doesn’t have full feeling yet, but he will soon.
A two lane ribbon of black top separates the cliffs and the ocean from houses built into the hills like lookout towers. Isaac passes turnouts where tourists can stop their cars and take photographs, and several public access parking lots before the land turns primal, thickly covered with sea grass as tall as he is. Erosion causes abrupt departures in the jagged line, where the drop to the sand below can reach as long as seventy feet.
Isaac stashes his bike and immediately encounters a wood fence in the style of old western horse tie and a sign that warns in words and symbols that exploring beyond this point of safety could be hazardous. He pushes past them.
He’s walking ten minutes, parallel to the water, when the quality of the air shifts. It grows heavier. A haze seems to drop upon the area, dimming the strength of the sun. Goose bumps break out on Isaac’s skin, but he pushes forward, into a growing darkness that casts undulating shadows over the wild sea grass.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Monday, 1:45 pm
Graham is at the white board again, staring at the words until they blend and become nonsense. He drew a circle and planned to write Alana’s name in it,
but once he did that suspicion would be cast and something like that had the tendency to leave a milky film over a person, even after they were cleared of the crime. He wasn’t ready to do that. Not to Alana. Definitely not to Isaac. So he makes a mental list of all the people with whom Alana had ties. He limits it to men. To characters who are shaky at best. The trouble is, Graham didn’t know Alana back then. They were separated in high school by a year, with Alana graduating before him. He remembers her as a dark, willowy beauty who seldom showed up to school. Graham spent his time on the field or in the batting cages. When he was in class he was in the books. He had girlfriends and attended football games and dances and he tries to remember if he ever saw Alana at one. And if so, who was she with?
He doesn’t start when the door opens. He doesn’t turn. He and Carter separated in the parking lot, after returning from Oakes’ autopsy, with Carter muttering something about carrying the stink of the dead around like after shave.
“You over your snit about the suit?” Graham asks.
“Not yet,” Carter returns. “But she goes a long way to getting me there.”
Graham turns. Natalie is standing inside the door to the conference room. And Carter’s grinning like a cat that got into the fish tank.
“Natalie.” Graham feels the pull toward her and resists it.
“Hi.” Her gaze skitters around the room, pausing on victim photographs, the words scribbled on the whiteboard, the stacks of files and sealed evidence bags.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” Graham says.
“Shouldn’t I?”
“You been keeping something from me, Chief?” Carter interrupts.
Graham spares Carter a glance. “I told you I was driving to Victoria.”
“You told me it was a bust.”
“I think I said, ‘Nothing yet.’”
“Well, I didn’t really have anything then,” Natalie enters the volley.
“You do now?” Graham steps closer, drawn by the promise in her words.
“It was Doss,” Natalie says. “Robert Doss. The guy Alana was with that summer.”
Graham feels that ticking in his blood; that part of him that knows a good lead kicks into full alert.
“You’re sure?”
Natalie nods. “And the tattoo, it’s a heart with the word ‘Mom’ written over it.”
“What brought this on?”
“I went to see Saul Doss.”
Graham hooks Carter’s gaze and says, “Go get him. Bring him in for questioning.”
“He was at the bait shop earlier.”
“You saw him?”
“Yes, I was looking for his father—”
“Did he recognize you?”
“No. I don’t think so.” She seems to be thinking back to that moment. “He said he was a Marine. A chaplain. And then he lost his faith.”
“Holy hell,” Carter whispers.
“A damn good connection.” It felt so right Graham wanted to scream. “Go,” he says to Carter. “Now. And take a uniform with you.”
Graham turns back to Natalie. “I want to hear more about your conversation, with both father and son.”
He moves around her, his arm brushing hers, the touch electric and skimming through his blood. He closes the door and then leans against it.
“Look at me, Natalie.”
He waits for her to turn, to lift her gaze to his.
“Did he feel like the one? When you were talking to him, did you get a memory? An emotion—fear or dread?”
“Nothing. He was. . .behind his words. . .absent, I guess is the feeling I got. Empty, maybe? He was a lot of wind, but not much else.”
“What did Robert Doss have to say?”
“He teased me mostly,” she admits. “I was looking for his father and he suggested that we had a personal relationship.”
She gives him the details and Graham feels tension weave his muscles into knots. Charm is, perhaps, a serial killer’s most deadly asset.
“What about Saul Doss?” Graham wants to know. “What did he have to say?”
“He approached me on the ferry,” Natalie reveals. “There’s something about him I don’t like. Don’t trust.”
He reads the hesitancy in her voice, watches her fingers play along the strap of her purse.
“He made you nervous.” He steps closer, covers her fingers with his own. “Why?”
“He. . .knows things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Or maybe it’s that he believes them and so they seem like a sure thing.”
“What, Natalie? What did he say to you?”
She opens her mouth. He can see the words forming on her lips, but then she changes her mind. She shakes her head. She would step out of his reach, but Graham follows her.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says and he’s not sure if he’s talking about Doss, or about himself. Because he’s so close to her now that his words bathe her face. The first touch is fire. It’s that cold burn followed by an intense heat that could consume them. It’s hundred proof and volatile.
As wrong as a blood-red summer. As right as redemption.
Her tongue slides against his. Her hands curl into his shirt. And it rocks him. A totally off the axis moment quickly spinning out of control. He buries his hand in her hair, the other holds
her hip, and he shapes her to his body. So soft it’s hard to believe that this could shred what is left of his sanity.
Salvation? he begins to wonder.
Rescue or ransom?
He grasps for the fluttering ends of reason.
There’s no healing in this only more carnage.
This is a dead end. A car crash—one neither of them can survive.
Her hands flatten against his chest and push. She felt his disconnect or experienced it herself. She knows the danger as well as he does.
When she steps out of his arms, he lets her.
“We can’t do this again,” he says.
“It will kill me.”
He feels it too, the shifting in his heart, a darkness he could easily fall into. A never-ending descent into hell.
“Probably.” It will finish both of them. “When this is over you’ll leave the island.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t come back.”
He takes her elbow, ignores the sparks the touch evokes, and steers her toward a chair. “Sit down.” He grabs a bottle of water from the middle of the table and hands it to her and then takes the seat next to hers. “Start at the beginning, when you got to Doss’ house.”
She settles into the chair, uncaps the water and drinks from it, and is slow to shift from the present to even the most recent past.
“That’s when the memory of Robert Doss came to me. I stood there before, at the gate, and wondered about Doss’ house. I was scared—when I was a little girl—I didn’t want to go into the yard.”
“But you did?”
“Yes. I knew Steven was there.”
“And Lance?”
“Yes.” She nodded and Graham watched her face tighten as she moved further into the memory. “They were both there, with Saul Doss.”
“What were they doing?”
Her fingers pick at the label on the water bottle, peeling the paper away in long strips.
“Doss said the boys were gifted,” Natalie reveals. “He said that Isaac is too.”
“He mentioned Isaac? By name?”
“Yes. He called us—you, Isaac, me—the Holy Trinity.” She’s focused on the label, her thumb nail flicking the paper, but looks up at him, and holds his gaze. “He said our unity is what will capture the killer. That we’re the before, the during, and the after dead.”
Graham sits back, pushes his hands through his hair, and regards her with a level gaze. There’s the religious connection again. Doss mapped it out for her, and though he hasn’t made sense of it yet, it makes Graham like him even more for the crimes. It could be father or son. Or both.
“What are y
ou leaving out, Natalie?”
“What are you?”
He ignores her question.
“The before, the during, and the after dead? What is that?”
“You’re the after dead,” Natalie says. “That’s the easy part. You come in, you investigate…”
“I speak for the murdered,” he finishes.
“Yes.”
“And you? What part do you play in this?”
“The before.” The admission isn’t a guess, a shot in the dark, a puzzling out of roles and responsibilities. She simply knows it as truth, Graham can hear it in her tone.
“Why? How?”
“I see things.”
“Like premonitions? Or prophecies?” Doubt adds weight to his words. An uncomfortable wiggle, like the curl of a finger inside his mind, beckons him. He shakes his head. “No.”
“I see the dying,” Natalie says, soft but insistent. “Only the dying.”
“That’s a result of the trauma. Of losing Steven.” Of possibly witnessing her brother’s murder. But even as he searches for the science behind her revelation, he asks, “Did you see Steven and Lance? Did you know before it happened?”
“No. I don’t think so. This is new. I didn’t believe it myself, not until I got here. And then it fell into place so perfectly, fighting it was futile.”
She leans toward him, her eyes piercing, seeking, determined.
“That leaves Isaac,” she points out. “What is his role?”
“He doesn’t have one. He’s a kid.”
“So were our brothers.”
“He’s my son.”
“Doss said the boys transcended. He said the ability was available only to the purest of hearts.”
“Steven and Lance?”
“And Isaac, too.”
Graham stands. He looks down at her as he slides into his jacket.
“Doss knows too much. Or thinks he does.” And is baiting Graham. Only with Isaac dangling on the line, Graham isn’t playing. “I’m going to go pick up my son.” And keep him close. “And you’re going to stay put.”
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