Free I Will Come for You by Suzanne Phillips Page B

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