At Rope's End Read online

  “Listen to me, you little turd, if you think I’m tedious now, just wait till we’ve been here for ten hours and I’ve asked you the same questions twenty-seven times just because I’m getting paid overtime for this and you’re not.”

  Whitney flinched. It was small pleasures like this that helped make up for the many frustrations of being a detective and dealing with scumbags.

  As she was savoring Whitney’s discomfort, her phone began vibrating once more. Verraday again. She felt her anger rising hot within her, pissed off now at both Verraday and Whitney. She turned her phone off completely. In the five seconds it took Maclean to deal with the distraction of her phone, Whitney’s lawyer had recovered enough to mount a counterattack.

  “Detective Maclean, you’re attempting to intimidate my client. I must ask that you keep your distance.”

  “It’s okay, Frank,” said Whitney with easy familiarity. Then he turned to Maclean and gave her a smile that was almost a leer.

  “You know, Detective, if you ever want to trade in that frowsy pantsuit for something a little strappier—maybe boots, a corset, and a whip? I could get you eight hundred dollars an hour just for dishing out that attitude . . . and a bit of light punishment. There are some very wealthy and respectable people in Seattle who would just love to take orders for a change instead of giving them. If you want, I can even—”

  “Just shut the fuck up,” shouted Maclean, annoyed as much by Verraday as by Whitney. “You do not talk unless I ask you a question. Got it, asshole?”

  “Oooh,” responded Whitney with an exaggerated squeal. “Feisty too. But I don’t think I want to answer any more of your questions right now.”

  “Good,” replied Maclean. “Then you’re welcome to camp out in the lockup until you’re feeling more talkative. We’ve got some crackheads and Crips that I’m sure would love to meet you. Have a nice night, Mr. Whitney.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Verraday’s call went directly to voice mail on the third try. He knew that Maclean had turned off her cell so she could ignore him.

  “Damn it, Maclean. I’m telling you, the killer’s still out there. And you know what that means. Call me.”

  Verraday terminated the call and put his phone down. Agitated, he went to the kitchen, took his Seattle World’s Fair tumbler out of the dish rack, then grabbed the bottle of brandy from the counter and went back upstairs to his den. He unscrewed the cap and was about to pour it, saw that it was still early, then screwed the cap back on the bottle and put it up on his bookcase where it wouldn’t be within immediate reach. Damn it. Maclean’s comment about good old-fashioned legwork stung him. But maybe there was something to it. He was already certain about the psychology of the victims and the perpetrator or perpetrators. But that wasn’t going to bring them any closer to catching the killer. Not yet. There was a missing piece of the puzzle that they had to find first.

  He pulled up the screengrab that Kyle Davis had taken of Rachel Friesen dancing with the unidentified blonde girl. She might be able to tell them what Rachel no longer could. He zoomed in on her to look for any identifying marks. She had lots of piercings, including one in her nose, but all the studs and rings were nondescript. Her legs were mercifully free of the tattoos that marred so many otherwise beautiful young women these days. But that would make it harder to identify her. He scanned her chest, arms, and face. Finally, he spotted something distinctive. On her shoulder was a tattoo of the Norse goddess Freya.

  Verraday reasoned that since this unknown young woman had been part of Rachel’s scheme to work the webcam sex circuit doing girl-on-girl scenes, there was a better-than-even chance that she too might have a web page on Assassin Girls. He went to the site and scanned through hundreds of photos of alt girls: brunettes, blondes, redheads, girls with black hair, and girls whose hair was streaked with pink or maroon or blue. But the blonde woman from the screengrab remained elusive.

  He decided to be more direct and typed in a search for “Escorts + Seattle.” There were pages and pages of links and scores of girls on each, hundreds even on some of them. He worked methodically through each site. His task of searching for the unknown blonde was made more difficult by the fact that most of the photos were cropped so that they stopped just above the chin, or the faces had been pixilated to protect the identity of the girl posting the ad. There was a mind-boggling assortment of young women offering themselves. Many claimed to be university students. He wondered if it was true, if any of the young women who sat in his lecture hall twice a week had been driven to the sex trade as the only way to finance their education, forced to pay tuition fees that were twice as high as what their parents and most of their clients had had to pay. He felt a pang of depression at that thought, then returned to scanning the photos. He went through another two hundred or so and was about to take a break, when he spotted a blonde whose face, like most of the others, had been intentionally blurred. Her listing identified her as “Destiny.” Her hair was longer than that of the blonde in the screengrab and was pulled up into a French twist, with several long strands left hanging down on either side of her obscured face. Her body was wrapped in a black latex dress that clung as tightly to her as a secret, covering the young woman from her wrists up to her neck, and all the way down to midthigh. Although there were no identifying features visible on Destiny, there was something familiar about her. Verraday pulled up Kyle Davis’s screengrab.

  His pulse began to race. He realized then it wasn’t the pixilated girl he had recognized. It was the dress. In her ad on the escort site, the faceless blonde named Destiny was wearing the same dress that Rachel was wearing in Kyle’s photo of her and the blonde dancing together. If Verraday’s hunch was right, then Destiny and Rachel, like a lot of young female friends who were on tight budgets, had been sharing wardrobes to get the most fashion bang for the buck. Verraday clicked on the link to the young woman’s gallery of thumbnail photos. In all of them, her face was pixelated, but the camera explored her body voyeuristically, in ways designed to arouse desire in a potential customer. Verraday scrolled through a dozen of them. Then he spotted it: the Freya tattoo.

  This woman was one of the last people to see Rachel alive, and she might provide the clues they needed to catch Rachel’s killer. And, Verraday realized, she might be in danger herself. Verraday groped around the site, looking for a contact link. He went back to Destiny’s main page and at the bottom, under her description, found a text number. He grabbed his cell and quickly typed, “Hello, Destiny. I would like to hear from you as soon as possible. Please message me anytime.” He hit send.

  He debated calling Maclean again. Maybe she’d pick up this time. So he gave it a try but got her voice mail again. Frustrated, he grabbed the bottle of brandy off his bookcase, hesitated, then thought, Fuck it, and poured himself a double shot.

  * * *

  Verraday had forgotten to set his alarm. He had awakened several times during the night, his mind beset by disturbing thoughts and images. He hated that state, that limbo that provided neither the rejuvenation of sleep nor the clarity of wakefulness. He had a slight headache from the brandy, so he took some ibuprofen. As a result of oversleeping, he didn’t have time to go to the gym to blow away the cobwebs. He had to content himself with some stretches followed by push-ups, crunches, and free weights. The fog of the brandy and his troubled sleep began to fade away a bit.

  What wasn’t fading away was his foul mood at being dismissed by Maclean, practically fired. Not that he could be fired. He wasn’t getting paid for this. Hadn’t even wanted to take this on. It wasn’t his job. If he’d told his lawyer he was helping out a homicide cop, he’d have gotten a warning that he was endangering his own case.

  Even so, Maclean’s lack of faith irked him. Verraday felt certain about the killer still being out there. He checked his phone. Destiny still hadn’t texted him back. He tried again in case she was a morning person.

  He headed for the foyer to pull on his boots and bomber jacket. Evidently Dest
iny was a morning person, because by the time Verraday had stepped onto his front porch, he heard the beep that alerted him to an incoming text. He took out his phone and saw that it was from her.

  “Hey creeper, stop sending me messages or I’ll call the cops. Now fuck off and leave me alone.”

  Verraday felt a sudden twinge of shame from the hostile reaction he had provoked from the sender. His intent was to protect her, but he couldn’t deny that his chivalry was tinged with some attraction, and he wondered if somehow she had picked up on that. Between the vestiges of a mild hangover, Maclean’s abrupt termination of his involvement in the case, and now this scathing rebuke from a stranger he’d try to help, he had a momentary urge to erase the chastising message and make it go away as if it had never existed. Make all of it go away. But he resisted that impulse in case the message would somehow be useful in the future. He slipped his cell phone into his jacket and locked the door. He checked his watch and saw that he had hurried through his morning ablutions and exercise so effectively that he was actually a few minutes ahead of schedule, so he decided to walk to the campus instead of taking his car.

  Verraday made sure his front gate was latched behind him then set off on foot, walking south a few blocks then cutting through Ravenna Park over the Twentieth Avenue pedestrian bridge. As he crossed the gully, he noticed that the leaves of the maple trees were turning color now, the green giving way to yellow and orange at the tips. It would advance slowly but relentlessly over the next few weeks until the life had been choked from the leaves. Then they would disengage, drift down into the ravine below to be returned to the earth. He always felt ambivalent about the fall. The harvest and the autumn colors gave him a sense of comfort and continuity, but there was an unsettling duality to it. It was fleeting. The bounty and brilliant colors were followed by the inevitable months of bleakness. It gave him a vague sense of depression. He mused over the emotions that were stirred up in him every year at this time. Was it some metaphor for life that he hadn’t decoded yet? Or was it just that the literal representation of the nature of life itself, no metaphor required, that released darkness into every corner of his consciousness?

  It wouldn’t be long until the Thanksgiving decorations went up in the drugstores and supermarkets—uncharacteristically jovial Puritans as well as smiling images of their unsuspecting victims, the turkeys, and their equally unsuspecting victims, the Native North Americans. Thanksgiving for Verraday was an early reminder of how his family had been torn apart. The day after Thanksgiving, when those absurd decorations came down, the blandly cheerful Santas and elves and reindeer would go up, and the air in every mall and shop would be filled with insipid versions of Christmas music. Worst of all for him was the dreaded “Deck the Halls,” because it had been playing on the car radio when Officer Robson T-boned their family’s vehicle and had become frozen in Verraday’s mind as the official soundtrack to his mother’s death and his sister’s lifetime of disablement.

  Verraday exited the park, continuing down Twentieth toward the university. Despite the disquieting chain of thoughts set off by seeing the changing color of the big-leaf maples, his blood was beginning to pump, the ibuprofen had kicked in, and by the time he reached the campus, the last unpleasant vestiges of the hangover and his insomnia had nearly faded away.

  CHAPTER 16

  The class that Verraday was teaching that morning was Introduction to Criminal Psychology. Some of the students who took the course were also in his cognitive psychology class. Some planned to make a career in psychology or criminology. And then there were the ones who enrolled because they had developed a morbid interest in serial killers by watching too many documentaries on TLC or Netflix. There was always one in every class—that is, if you were lucky and weren’t subjected to two or even several of them.

  Verraday was about ten minutes into the lecture when a hand went up in the second row. It was Koller again. It was always Koller. After ignoring him long enough to finish his own point and remind the kid which of them was in charge, Verraday glanced at him.

  “Yes, Mr. Koller, you have a question?”

  The gangly youth nodded. “Yeah, like, I saw this documentary on Charles Manson. They said he had what they called ‘indescribable power’ over his family of followers, and they saw him as the modern-day messiah. He had to be pretty smart to manipulate all those people into killing other people for him, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” replied Verraday, “Charles Manson is so smart that he’s spent approximately eighty-seven percent of his adult life in jail. He got caught within three months of ordering people to kill for him and won’t be eligible for parole until he’s ninety-two. He didn’t even get the house address right. He didn’t make any significant income off his criminal activities nor did he wield any real power, except over a handful of social misfits and certain areas of the media that benefitted from peddling his story. For the record, his IQ is reportedly one hundred and nine—slightly above average, but not exactly rocket scientist material. I would wager most of the people in this room would score at least that high on an IQ test. Not everyone, but most.”

  There were scattered giggles in the room. The other students were as sick of Koller as Verraday was. But Koller showed no signs of giving up.

  “But don’t you think he must have had something going for him to persuade people to kill for him?”

  “Yes. What he had going for him is that he is a psychopath who, because of his neurology, is incapable of feeling emotional empathy for other people. He used techniques he read in a book by Dale Carnegie called How to Win Friends and Influence People. But his shtick didn’t work on most well-adjusted human beings. The members of his so-called ‘family’ were unbalanced and emotionally vulnerable. You don’t have to be a genius to influence weak people. You just need to be completely unscrupulous. Gary Ridgway, a.k.a. the Green River Murderer, killed forty-nine women right here in Washington. He had an IQ of eighty-four. That’s only five points above what’s considered impaired. I wouldn’t have trusted him to rotate my tires. Richard Macek was a serial killer from Illinois. Along with raping and killing his victims, he liked to bite them while in a state of sexual frenzy, so not a particularly rational behavior. He bit his victims so hard that he left distinctive wounds all over their bodies. When he finally realized that the marks he left would enable police to identify him, he took the rather extreme precaution of having all his teeth pulled out and replaced with dentures so the bite marks couldn’t be matched to him. In my book, yanking out your teeth is a long way to go just to indulge a momentary impulse and definitely not indicative of high intelligence. My point is that it’s not superior intellect that gives psychopaths power over other people. What gives psychopaths power is that they don’t have feelings for the people they hurt, and they don’t play by the same rules as the rest of us.”

  Koller still wasn’t done. “But then doesn’t that make them more successful than other people from an evolutionary standpoint?”

  “That’s a common impression perpetuated by some media,” said Verraday. “In reality, yes, certain psychopaths do extremely well because they’re intelligent enough to make it work for them. But they’re not killers. At least not directly. They might run a hedge fund, for example, and buy the rights to a lifesaving drug and jack up the price by twelve hundred percent to increase profits and share value. People who then can’t afford the drug might die as a result. But no one will call the hedge fund manager a serial killer. In fact, they’ll say he’s a genius and give him a two-million-dollar bonus. Or he might be the CEO of a company that closes down manufacturing operations here, throwing thousands of Americans out of work. Then he exports the jobs to China, where people who live under a brutal totalitarian regime are forced to work seventy-hour weeks for two hundred dollars a month. So many workers there kill themselves that they have to put up suicide nets around the factories. But we don’t call that guy a serial killer either, do we? No, we give him a multimillion-dollar bonus too.
Now that’s a successful psychopath. Not some loser who has to have his teeth pulled out because he couldn’t control his impulse to strangle someone and bite them in the ass.”

  Verraday saw some skeptical looks from some of the business students who were taking his course as an elective, probably having thought that finding out about serial killers would make a pleasant diversion from calculating gross domestic product and the yields on convertible debentures. They could give him all the skeptical looks they wanted, thought Verraday. But in a few years, most of those business students would be out in the corporate world. And the odds were extremely good that all those people smiling at him dubiously from the back rows would at some point become victims of a psychopath: a coworker who would take credit for their best ideas while simultaneously sabotaging them behind their back; a boss who would make them work twelve hours a day for years, control even their minutest decisions, then when something went wrong, blame them for incompetence and have them escorted out the front door by security. Ideally after screwing them out of a pension.

  “I’m serious,” Verraday continued. “Psychopaths are believed to represent only one percent of the general population. But some studies suggest that as many as one in ten CEOs are psychopaths. Do the math. That’s where it’s an evolutionary advantage: in a corrupt system that values profits over human welfare. But a serial killer? Sorry, no evolutionary advantage to murdering your fellow human beings then becoming the target of society’s retribution. So to get back to your original question, just because someone is a psychopathic killer, it does not mean they’re smart like Hannibal Lecter and can talk somebody into biting their own tongue off. It is entirely the invention of fiction writers, though I can certainly understand the appeal. There are times I wish I knew how to talk people into biting their tongues off.”