At Rope's End Page 9

  The phone rang. The man with the topknot answered. Maclean saw her chance and crept up toward the handle of the door to the back room, checking over her shoulder to make sure Whitney wasn’t watching. She saw that he was now completely engrossed in his phone conversation, which seemed to be about a lost shipment. She opened the door a crack and peered in.

  The room was dimly lit, but she could see a loading dock door at the far end. Between her and the dock was an array of antique furniture. It didn’t look like it was in storage, but rather that it was arranged to some purpose. As Maclean’s eyes adjusted to the light, she realized it was some sort of erotic dungeon. In its center was a device that looked like a massage table with leather restraining straps and sections cut out of it in places that Maclean supposed corresponded to strategic points of human anatomy. A few feet away from it was another device featuring diagonal wooden crossbars the approximate length of an adult human. It too was heavily padded and had restraints placed at various points around it. In a wooden rack located within easy reach of all these devices was an array of whips, paddles, and floggers. If there was anything that Whitney didn’t have in the way of bondage and discipline paraphernalia, Maclean literally would have had no idea what it was. To one side of the room was an area hidden behind crimson velvet drapes that hung like a stage curtain. She took one last look to make sure that Whitney wasn’t coming, then stealthily moved across the room. She pushed the heavy drapes aside and felt a surge of adrenaline. There, immediately in front of her, was a six-foot-long stainless steel industrial basin. In the bottom of it was an assortment of unidentifiable bones and skulls, bathing in what smelled like a bleach solution that stung the inside of her nose.

  She spotted rubber gloves, scrub brushes, and a hazmat suit hanging up nearby. A pair of industrial grade rubber boots stood on a bench a few feet away. She reached into her jacket, pulled out her handheld radio, and called the uniformed officer waiting outside.

  “Move in. We’ve got our suspect.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Verraday had been distracted throughout his lecture. He was excited by Maclean’s news and a bit resentful at having to stay behind while she went out to investigate the suspect. As soon as the last student exited the hall, he called Maclean. Her cell immediately went to voice mail. Verraday left the lecture hall and decided to head home to do some work on the midterm exam while he was waiting to hear back from Maclean.

  When he arrived at his house, Verraday checked his messages. Maclean hadn’t called his landline, but there was a new message from his sister. He played it back.

  “Hey, it’s Penny. Still haven’t heard back from you about next week. Let me know if we’re on for dinner, okay?”

  Penny was one of the few people he knew who still relied on actual phone calls instead of e-mail or texting. He dialed her number.

  She picked up after the fourth ring.

  “Hey James,” she answered. “Just a sec, okay?”

  She paused for a moment. He could hear rustling in the background on her end of the call. She sounded like she was in the middle of doing something. That was typical of Penny, who was a perpetual-motion machine when she wasn’t asleep or meditating. He wondered if her constant activity was because of her physical handicap or in spite of it.

  “Okay, I’m back. How you doing?” she asked cheerfully.

  “Just calling to confirm dinner next week.”

  He heard more rustling of paper.

  “What’s all that noise in the background?” he asked. “Sounds like a giant hamster.”

  Penny laughed. “Sorry, I was just opening up a package when you called. I’ll put it down ’til we’re done. I was just kind of curious to see what was in it.”

  “Now I’m curious to know too,” he said. “What kind of stuff?”

  “Looks like a pair of welder’s goggles and a top hat. But never mind.”

  “Wait, you can’t follow the words ‘welder’s goggles and a top hat’ with ‘never mind.’ I want to hear about this.”

  “I’m going to a steampunk convention in Vancouver next weekend. I’m cosplaying Kenneth Branagh’s version of Doctor Loveless from Wild Wild West. I’m getting my costume together. You should see what I’m doing to my wheelchair. I built a smokestack for it and I’ve got a little dry ice compartment so it will actually look like steam is coming out of the pipe. I’m going to blow everybody’s mind when I roll in.”

  Penny never disappointed him. She always had something up her sleeve.

  “I didn’t know you were into steampunk,” said Verraday.

  “One of my clients turned me on to it. They’re a really fun bunch.”

  “Is this the ‘neat thing’ you said I might be interested in?”

  “Yes. You should come along with me. Some of those steampunk cosplay girls are super cute. Maybe you could meet someone.”

  “I’d love to, but I can’t.”

  “Now you sound like Dad.”

  That stopped him in his tracks. Did he sound like their father, always backing away from life instead of engaging with it? Ever since the accident that had killed their mother, their father had become withdrawn, even from his own children.

  “You’re a good-looking guy,” Penny continued. “I could picture you in a zeppelin commander’s outfit, or maybe more of a secret agent look: you know, Dalton Huxley, Chronomic Regulator.”

  “Can’t say I’m familiar with that Mr. Huxley or with chronomic regulation,” said Verraday with a trace of sarcasm.

  Penny was undaunted. “Well, it’s a Callahan frock coat, some double-row front-button trousers, a gambler hat. And a chronomic regulator.”

  “Chronomic regulator?”

  “Looks sort of like a blunderbuss, except it’s brass with vacuum tubes and it fires time-adjustment rays instead of bullets.”

  “You waited all this time to tell me about time-adjustment rays?”

  Penny laughed. “It looks sharp, I’m telling you. Those steampunk girls would go nuts over you.”

  His first impulse was to dismiss Penny’s idea as ridiculous. Then it hit him that that’s exactly how their father would have reacted to anything that bore even the remotest suggestion of fun.

  “Sounds good, but I’ve got to work on the midterm exam over the weekend. I don’t want to give the students the same old crap the department’s been recycling for the last ten years.”

  “Oh come on, James, have some fun. Twenty years from now, what are you going to care about more? Having created the bitchin’est psychology midterm exam in the history of U Dub, or making some cool friends and maybe meeting a nice girl who looks like Lady Mechanika.”

  Verraday had no idea who Lady Mechanika was, but whoever she was, she was probably a hell of a lot more fun than working on a midterm exam. Then he thought about Maclean and his promise to help her. He was beginning to regret having said yes.

  “Honestly, I’d love to come, but I also promised someone I’d help them with something, and they’ll probably need me this weekend.”

  “Is it really that important?”

  “Yes. I’ll tell you when I see you, okay?”

  “Is she good-looking?”

  “Yes, but it’s not that kind of thing.”

  “There’s no such thing as not that kind of thing.”

  “Will you stop?”

  “All right. So are we still on for dinner next week? You’re not going to bail on me, are you?”

  “No. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Great. Because I’ve got a new personal mobility device. I want you to see it.”

  He was a bit surprised that Penny was so excited about something as mundane as an electric buggy to get around in. But he guessed that if you didn’t have the use of your legs, anything that removed a barrier would be exciting. Penny still played wheelchair basketball—aggressively. So instead of expressing his surprise, he just said, “Sure. I’d like to see it.”

  “Okay. See you then. Six o’clock?”

&n
bsp; “Sounds good.”

  “And if you change your mind about the steampunk convention, let me know.”

  “I will.”

  After he hung up, Verraday went to his study, switched on his computer, and Googled the store Maclean had gone to check out. It was kinky and morbid but with a hint of kitsch. There was a lot of fetish gear and nineteenth-century curios that suggested a fixation on the macabre and sadistic. He clicked on the “About Us” link and was taken to an artfully composed, high-contrast photo portrait of the proprietor, one Aldous Whitney. He was half in shadow, half in light. There was a gorilla skull near Whitney’s elbow, but the photo had intentionally left the details obscure. An eye socket, a couple of large canine teeth, and the dim outline of a cranial ridge were the only clues as to the identity of the strange object lurking in the dark. In the foreground was a taxidermy “mermaid.” Verraday guessed that this “mermaid” was comprised of the head, arms, and chest of a macaque grafted to the silvery body of a carp. It was topped off by a blonde Barbie doll–style wig.

  Within a glass counter just in front of Whitney’s chest lay an array of disturbing devices that defied their beholder to envision precisely how they might be used. But judging by the various clamps, straps, prongs, nodules, and screws on the devices, he thought it safe to assume they were intended for people of either very sadistic or very masochistic tastes.

  These were the accessories with which Whitney chose to associate himself in order to project a visual impression to the rest of the world. Sex and death. That, concluded Verraday, is what drove this man’s psyche. Then again, sex and death is what drove most humans’ psyches—at least if you believed Freud. Not that Verraday did.

  Now Verraday turned his attentions from the props to the man himself. Whitney’s facial expression was smug and his slight smile was almost a sneer. Verraday found it distasteful and vaguely provocative. The fact that Whitney enjoyed surrounding himself with the preserved corpses of animals that had first lost their lives and then their dignity through a taxidermist’s whims was both morbid and sadistic. Whitney had created a sexual aura around himself because it was good for business. But he no doubt had also chosen this line of work because he enjoyed it and the attention it brought him.

  Verraday looked Whitney up on Facebook. It didn’t take long to find him. Clearly he was a man who enjoyed a party, particularly if that party was a fetish night. He had upwards of fifteen hundred Facebook friends, presumably too many for him to be on a first-name basis with them all. It appeared to be more of an affinity list. Checking Whitney’s “likes” section, he discovered a swingers’ club and semiannual fetish wear conventions in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Vancouver. Many of the photos in his album had been taken at these events, where Whitney had a booth and was promoting his store and its wares. In all his photos, he was surrounded by a throng of people in fetish gear, mostly shapely young men and women. Like the ringleader at a circus, Whitney was the central focus in all of them. There were a number of people tagged in his photos, mostly young men. Verraday systematically clicked on the tags so that he was taken to their individual Facebook pages. It soon became apparent that Whitney’s love of antiques did not extend to his partners, who were mainly young men with leather fetishes, and who appeared to be about half his age. In one photo, Whitney was locking lips on the dance floor with a man dressed in a kilt. In another photo, on the page of someone named Darryl G., who described his occupation as “model/agent provocateur,” Whitney stood in the midst of a cheering crowd. He was posing like a warrior, holding two leashes, at the end of which were two muscular, twenty-something leather-clad men wearing studded collars and harnesses. One of them was “Darryl G.” Verraday picked up his phone and keyed in Maclean’s number.

  CHAPTER 14

  In interrogation room number six at the Seattle PD headquarters on Fifth Avenue, Maclean was leaning hard on Whitney. He was a creep, the sort of man who took pleasure in making women feel uncomfortable, and she despised him for it. And she was growing extremely tired of his flippant responses to her questions.

  “Mr. Whitney, do you remember sending payments to Rachel Friesen or Alana Carmichael, or having phone calls with either of them?”

  He responded in a tone of voice that was both dismissive and evasive, which punched a button inside Maclean that set her on slow boil. “Detective, I purchase vintage and antique curios from many sources for discerning collectors all over the world. I can’t possibly remember all of them by name.”

  “I’ve got a hunch it’s not their names that you’d remember. And neither one of them were old enough to qualify as antiques. But maybe this will jog your memory.”

  Maclean produced the photo of Alana Carmichael in the garden holding the tray of daiquiris, as well as the picture of Rachel Friesen that Kyle Davis had submitted with the missing persons report.

  “I can show you receipts for my transactions with them.”

  “I’m sure you can. Though I don’t think the IRS will take kindly to you writing off sex with hookers as antique purchases. You’ll also have a tough time getting either one of them to corroborate your story, since by unhappy coincidence, they’re both dead.”

  She laid the crime scene photos of the two murdered women down on the Formica desktop in front of Whitney and his lawyer.

  Whitney’s lawyer took a breath and leaned forward like he was about to say something in protest, but the sight of the beaten bodies of the two young women seemed to give him pause. Maclean thought she detected a flicker of revulsion in the lawyer’s face. He folded his hands as he considered what to say, squeezing them so tightly that Maclean noticed his tendons were tensed and his knuckles were white.

  “And besides the fact that Rachel Friesen and Alana Carmichael were both murdered,” continued Maclean, “do you know the one other thing these girls had in common? You.”

  Maclean felt her phone buzzing. She was going to ignore it but then saw Verraday’s name on the call display. She had intended to return his earlier message, but things had been moving along too quickly with the investigation. However, she felt that the crime scene photos of the two murdered women were just the thing to leave Whitney and his lawyer stewing over for a few minutes so decided to take the call.

  “I’ll be back in two,” she said to the uniformed officer.

  She stepped out into the hall. Gazing through the two-way mirror, she saw a concerned expression on the lawyer’s face and the suspect himself looking uncharacteristically flustered. She smiled to herself. She would enjoy making Whitney squirm.

  “Hey Verraday. Good news. We’ve brought the owner of the shop in for questioning. His name is Whitney. He confessed to having made payments to both Alana and Rachel. He seems pretty rattled. I’m letting him and his lawyer chew on the crime scene photos for a couple of minutes. Then I’m moving in for the kill. I’m going to push him for a full confession.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” replied Verraday.

  “What do you mean? I’ve got his ass nailed to the wall.”

  “Whitney’s not the killer.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve checked him out. He doesn’t fit the profile. I know there’s a commercial relationship between them, but there’s no way it was ever intimate.”

  “With all due respect, James, this guy may not fit some academic ‘profile’ of a killer, but Whitney’s walking like a duck and quacking like a duck. It makes my skin crawl just to breathe the same air as him. And there’s another connection. He paid the exact same amount to both Alana and Rachel: five hundred dollars. I doubt they were both selling him their grandparents’ silverware.”

  “I agree. He’s involved with them, but it’s not sexual. Whitney is gay. There are about a zillion pictures of him online with young men, and I’m pretty sure they’re not discussing taxidermy. My guess is that he hired Rachel and Alana to have sex, but not with him. Maybe with his clients.”

  “Listen, James, I
appreciate your help. But you didn’t see Whitney’s face when I laid those photos down on the table in front of him. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.”

  “Yes, because now he’s afraid the Seattle PD will start shaking down his clients. You think of that?”

  “No, but that’s an excellent idea. I’ll remind him of that as soon as I go back into the interrogation room. You know, I respect what you do with your profiling. I really do. But sometimes it’s just good old-fashioned police legwork that gets the job done. And this is one of those times. This guy is a total creep. I’ve got my man.”

  “I’m sure Fowler thought the same thing.”

  “I am nothing like Fowler,” Maclean shot back. “Listen, I’ve got to get back to the interrogation room before my interview cools down. Trust me, I’ve got this under control. I’ll be in touch when everything’s wrapped up.”

  “Wait, no—”

  Maclean ended the call and reentered the interrogation room, where Whitney and his lawyer were huddling together, whispering something. She felt her cell phone vibrating again.

  Jesus, you’re stubborn, she thought, then clicked the deny button to send Verraday to voice mail. She strode across to the table and stood over Whitney, taking some private pleasure out of the way her physical proximity seemed to irritate his lawyer.

  “Okay, where were we?” she asked.

  “Let’s see,” said Whitney, pantomiming someone earnestly searching their memory. “Oh, yes, I remember now. You were becoming tedious.”

  She felt the heat rising in her cheeks and fought an urge to slap Whitney hard enough to rattle his fillings. Instead she leaned in just inches from his face, intentionally close enough that he could feel the heat of her breath on his skin, the way he had done it to her in his shop.