I Will Come for You (18 page)

He coasts over bumps in the road, his backpack thumping. When his father was at the crime scene Isaac broke into his computer, cracked his password (Isaac spelled backwards--how easy is that?) and checked out the files his father stored on the King’s Ferry Killer. Really what Isaac wanted were the names of the victims and the locations where each body was found. He got that, but also the grim details of their deaths, including the King’s Ferry Killer’s obsession with leaving covert messages. Nothing as gruesome as writing in his victim’s blood, but religious icons that condemned the people he killed.

The message the King’s Ferry Killer left in Isaac’s computer confuses him, too. He knows it’s from scripture, although Isaac’s exposure to the Bible is minimal. A few Sunday school classes when his mom was still living with
them, and church on Christmas and Easter. The message was short, one line, and typed in lower case letters,
“father, why have you forsaken me?”
His father quickly covered it with his hand and asked Isaac to leave the room, but it was too late. Isaac read it and began to wonder about it. Then his father packed up Isaac’s computer and had some techie guy from the station come and get it.

Isaac takes a corner
wide, nearly colliding with a parked car, then pushes himself harder. He wants to visit the sites of each murder. He wants to see if he feels anything while he’s there. He thinks his father will probably find him before he’s done. Him or one of his officers. But at least he’ll know if he’s on to something. If there’s a way to lure the killer out of hiding.

He’ll go in order, starting with the first killings, his uncle Lance and another boy, both younger than Isaac is today.  

His father lost his brother. Isaac wonders if he carries his uncle around inside him like Isaac does his mom, as a stone rattling around in his heart.

Isaac turns a corner and climbs yet another hill. King’s Ferry is full of them,
wide, curving streets that eventually all meet at the water. He’s in the older part of town. The houses face west and everyone looks different from the others. He likes that. All the new houses look the same and Isaac is sometimes amazed people don’t get lost trying to find their drive ways.

He turns on Laurel Drive and stops his bike in front of the stone house with the ship’s portals for windows. His mother grew up here; uncle Randy still lives in it, still sleeps in the same bedroom he slept in when he was Isaac’s age. Isaac knows, from being inside the
house, that you can see all the way down to the Pacific Ocean from the upstairs hall window. His father told him there used to be a widow’s walk up there, but that Isaac’s grandfather tore it down when he turned the attic into bedrooms for his mom and uncle.

His mother doesn’t like the house. She once told Isaac
that she hasn’t been back inside since the day she left. That nothing could get her back inside that house. But many times she slowed the car as they passed it. She sat in the driver’s seat, staring at the dark windows. Sometimes she cried.

As Isaac watches, the curtains are pushed aside from the living room window. The rod crashes to the floor and standing in the big square of glass is his mother. The discovery gives his heart a kick. His mother, with her long, curly black hair floating away from her face, bundles the curtains up in her arms and then stands there, staring out the window. He feels her eyes on him, as hot as fire. Then she steps back, into shadow, turns and retreats to a back room.

Isaac pushes his bike off the street and stashes it in the front yard. He walks up to the front door and gives it a try. It’s locked. He frames his face with his hands and looks through the marbled glass. It’s a straight shot from the front door to the kitchen and Isaac is able to watch his mother as she dumps the curtains in a pile on the kitchen floor. He can’t tell what else is there. Maybe some blankets.

Isaac knocks on the door, rattles the door knob. But either his mother doesn’t hear him or doesn’t want to.

She paces back through the hall, her heels hard on the soft wood floor. There are boxes strewn through the living room, the tops open, clothes draped over the edges. She kicks some aside, roots through others, and leaves with an armful of old clothes. Sweaters. When she has them all in a mountain on the kitchen floor, Isaac watches her pull out a book of matches and begin striking them.

His uncle Randy complained in the past that Isaac’s
mother was coming to the house, that she was breaking mirrors and tearing up photo albums. He told Isaac’s father that he returned home one afternoon and found all the pictures of his mother ripped out of albums and frames, and left shredded on the floor. She was even torn from the pictures where she was posed with other family members. Isaac thought that was weird. He knows she hates her father and expected she would cut up those photos. Now he understands she was trying to erase her existence.

But then what does that say about him? What will she have
to do to him in order to make herself disappear?

She won’t harm him. His mother was never violent. At her worst, she seemed to break into a million pieces and scatter on the floor. And then she held him to her like he was her only hope.

Isaac pushes away from the front door and circles the house. The back door opens into the kitchen. The top half is all window. He stands on the back step and gazes at his mother as she strikes then drops lit matches into the pile of curtains and clothing on the floor. He can see now that the sweaters belonged to a man, probably her father. Uncle Randy never complained about her destroying his stuff. Just objects that stirred memories. Bad memories. In addition to the photos, Isaac knows his mother trashed trophies she earned in a junior bowling league and recipe cards.

The matches flare and then smolder when they hit the clothing.

Isaac taps on the glass to get his mother’s attention. This time she looks up, looks at him but doesn’t see him. Her eyes are big, flat and show no recognition. But for a moment she forgets about the book of matches in her hand.

“Mom?
Open the door.”

“Mom?” she says. “Your mother isn’t here.”

“You’re my mother.”

Her mouth relaxes a little. “Yes, you’re right.” She
agrees. “I’m busy now,” she says. “Why don’t you go find your sister? You have just enough time for a game of Yahtzee before dinner.”

Isaac stares at her through the glass. She thinks he’s Randy. She thinks
she’s her mother.

“I’m Isaac, mom,” he tells her.
“Your son Isaac.”

“Run along now.” She turns back to the pile of clothes, where a thin ribbon of smoke is rising, growing thicker. She opens the book of matches and tears another one loose.

He wants to tell her to stop, but understands the futility in it. He wants her to remember him, to touch his face again the way she used to, so that he feels sunshine and smells the clean spring air. But that isn’t going to happen.

Fear crawls up his throat and he watches in silence as
she strikes another match, and yet another, and adds them to the pile.

She’s not his mother. Not in any real sense. And Isaac feels as lost as if he never existed. Before, she was just miles away physically, now she’s as gone as dead.

For
a while he forgets about where he was going, what he had in mind. He forgets about

T
he King’s Ferry Killer and his blood anger, and just pumps the pedals on his bike, headed nowhere in particular. He takes each corner blindly and for a few minutes or maybe an hour or two, he believes he can out race the sorrow. He believes if it washes over him, like a rogue wave, he has no chance against it. He even wonders if dying is such a bad thing.

Isaac encounters another hill and begins the climb, feeling slightly out of breath, a little light headed. Sweat breaks out on his forehead and curls around his ears. It shouldn’t take this much out of me, he thinks. He should be able to ride his bike a couple miles without running out of energy.

Last year, he and his father competed together in a father-son, twenty-five mile bike ride to raise funds for the baseball team. They finished in the middle of the pack.

Isaac wipes away the sweat before it can sting his eyes. He flexes his shoulders to loosen the tension gathering between his shoulder blades. It doesn’t help.

He didn’t know his heart could hurt so much it became physical. He didn’t know a person could die from it.

He is nearly to the top of the hill, close to the bluffs overlooking Deep Bay, when his heart stops, knots in his chest, and begins a free fall. Isaac’s feet slip from the pedals and he drops forward, over the handle bars. It’s a long, slow tumble and he feels like he’s riding the air like a kite. So long, he wonders if he’ll ever hit bottom.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Monday, 7:30 am

The drive into Victoria is forty minutes with long stretches of road that roll out next to the Pacific. This early in the morning there are scarves of fog clinging to the surface of the water. Traffic is sparse but bottlenecks at the intersections. Graham uses his lights when he has to and merges into the opposite flow of traffic to get around the knots of commuters starting their day.

It’s been thirty-two hours since Iverson was discovered dead and eleven since Graham first stepped into the Kroger home. The KFK has never taken more than two victims at a strike. He’s probably scurrying under a rock right about now, leaving the trail cold and hope without a flicker of life.

Graham leaves the coast road for Victoria’s business district, turning into the hospital’s parking lot as the shift is changing—men and women in soft-soled shoes and scrubs are flowing into the building. Graham climbs out of the cruiser and joins them.

The woman at reception is less than happy to see him.

“Visiting hours begin at nine o’clock,” she points out.

“This is police business,” he returns. His voice is tight
and, along with sleep, his patience is sinking into negative numbers.

She’s slow to respond and barely gives an inch, “Ms. Forrester was given a room on

the fifth floor. That’s our psychiatric wing. We were short on beds,” she explains. “You can go up, but from there you’ll need her doctor’s permission to see her.”

Graham is headed toward the bank of elevators before she’s finished speaking. He climbs into a car and leans against the metal railing as it ascends.

Weariness makes his joints rubber.

The KFK shifted his focus to Isaac.
‘father why have you forsaken me?’

Why
that quote? Why did he send it to Isaac?

The doors of the elevator open and Graham exits into a small foyer.

It’s a locked floor. He’s greeted with double doors, a call button and a small palmetto withering in its pot.

Graham curses and smashes the button with his finger. He expects a curt voice, broken static and the talent of Houdini to get in. Instead, the doors slide open with a short hydraulic whoosh. The corridor is long, shadowed and completely empty. He hesitates before stepping over the threshold. The muted notes of a classical piece reaches his ears followed by a clap of thunder.

“You plan on coming in, Chief Constable?”

The voice is large, female and matches the stormy face that rises above the nurse’s station.

Graham hates psych hospitals. He’s been in a few, visiting or admitting his ex-wife.

“The door is on a timer,” the nurse prompts.

Graham crosses into the ward and passes several doors that stand ajar but emit only silence.

“Our residents are in occupational therapy,” the nurse fills him in.

“Natalie Forrester too?”

“She’s not a resident,” the nurse says. “I’m not so sure she shouldn’t be, though.”

“Why’s that?”

She shrugs. “She’s confused. Dream and reality, I don’t think she can tell them apart.”

“I’d like to see her.”

“Yeah, that’s what the receptionist said. That’s why I let you in.” She steps out from behind the desk and leads the way. “I’m sure she’d like that, too. The girl has been anxious since she woke up. She wants out of here. She has plans.”

“What plans?”

“I just got a glimpse at her to-do list. The name Steven was on there more than once. Saw your name, too. I wonder why that is?”

Because Natalie Forrester is as haunted as Graham is by the death of her brother. Because she wants answers, like everyone else left devastated by the actions of the King’s Ferry Killer. And she knows that Graham is supposed to have them.

The nurse knocks once and pushes open the door.

“Good morning, Miss Forrester.” The greeting is too loud, as if the nurse is hoping to shake Natalie loose from her thoughts.

It’s not effective.

Natalie is standing at the window wrapped in a thin cotton robe the color of an autumn sky.
The color of her eyes. He remembers that. She and Steven had similar coloring, both blond

and
blue-eyed.

She doesn’t turn when they enter the room. She doesn’t acknowledge them at all other than to say,