At Rope's End

by Edward Kay

  CHAPTER 8

  Verraday entered the foyer, kicked off his boots, and hung his leather jacket up on a large Victorian hall tree. It was the only family heirloom he possessed. His great-grandparents had bought it new just after they made the move west to San Francisco from Toronto in the 1890s. There was something reassuring about this piece of Victoriana. After more than a century of existence, its color had deepened to the warm hue of aged whiskey, and it remained solid, like the people who had crafted it. Unlike the disposable, box store crap that was everywhere today, it had been built to last.

  Verraday lived alone and kept the thermostat low when he was out, so the house was cold and made him feel like he hadn’t shaken off the chill of the morgue. He slid the thermostat needle up to 74 degrees and heard the furnace rumble to life below him in the basement. He checked his landline and saw from the display that someone had left a voice mail. He punched in the code to play it back. It was Penny.

  “Hey James, it’s me. Just checking to see if you’re still coming over for dinner next week. Also, there’s this neat thing happening that you might be interested in. Call me when you get a chance.”

  He was curious about what the “neat thing” she was talking about might be. Penny was always upbeat and optimistic, and he was tempted to call her. But the day had left him feeling unsettled. All his professional training emphasized that reaching out and sharing his feelings was the recommended way of coping with unpleasant emotions and traumatic experiences. It was one of the most basic pieces of advice that psychologists gave to their patients—and to each other. But he didn’t feel up to speaking to anyone now, at least not about himself.

  Ironically, talking to criminals didn’t bother him anymore. But that was because he shared nothing of himself with the convicts he interviewed. They were always eager to take part in studies. Some thought it might help buy them early parole. Others just liked being interviewed because even an audience of one made them feel important. The psychopaths were the most challenging interview subjects. They came from many different social, economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. But Verraday noted that there were certain characteristics that they all had in common. Chief among them was that they were cocky, self-assured, and always shifted blame for their crimes onto their victims. “She should have known better than to get in the car with a stranger,” or “Anybody who keeps that much cash around is just asking for trouble.” He had observed that psychopaths contrived to avoid first-person pronouns. They used a distinctive syntax that employed a passive voice and made the victim the subject of the sentence rather than the object so that a statement of fact like “I killed her” or “I beat him and robbed him” became “She lost her life” or “He was beaten and robbed,” so that they, the perpetrator, were strangely absent from their accounts of the crimes they had committed.

  Their uniquely self-serving manner of speech had irritated him when he had first started going into prisons to interview convicted murderers for his profiling research. But Verraday was now inured to their manipulative behavior, unaffected by their bullshit, their attempts to curry favor and minimize the heinousness of what they had done. What did affect him still, and deeply, was the thought of the victims’ ordeals, their deaths or life-shattering injuries, and the toxic outcome it had, not only on them, but on their families, spouses, and significant others. He knew what it felt like to be one of those survivors, knew what it had done to his father and his sister.

  Verraday strode across the living room into the kitchen and extracted a bottle of red wine from a rack, a big Cabernet from the hot, dry Yakima Valley. He uncorked it and poured himself a large glass. He swirled it around, inhaled its nose of blackberries and leather, and allowed himself the sensual pleasure that momentarily transported him away from the ugliness of the world. He took a sip of the wine and held it in his mouth a moment, savoring it, imagining he could feel the heat of the sun locked within it.

  He carried the glass into the living room and, still feeling a chill despite the warm air now rising out of the vents, switched on the gas fireplace. Trying to shake off the leaden emotions that the day had left him with, he selected a book that Penny had given him for Christmas the year before last, The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Inner Peace. Penny had told him, in her blunt but affectionate manner, that it might help him with his anger and anxiety issues. His older sister had a particular gift when it came to dealing with the vicissitudes of life.

  She had been a star basketball player at her school. Her skill on the court was so extraordinary that at the age of twelve, her school counselors had predicted that she would go to university on a full athletic scholarship. That is, until the night thirty years ago when Verraday, his mother, and his sister were returning from an evening of Christmas shopping and Officer David Robson of the Seattle Police Department ran a red light and broadsided their car. The police cruiser rammed into the driver’s side door, killing their mother instantly. Penny had been sitting directly behind her. The force of the impact crumpled the family’s sedan in on her, crushing her legs and pelvis and irreparably injuring her spinal cord. She had been paraplegic ever since. It had taken two years of physiotherapy for Penny to have even a semblance of physical independence. But though she managed to accomplish a surprising number of everyday tasks on her own, she had never managed to escape from the wheelchair that the accident had put her in. And barring some medical miracle yet to be devised, she never would. Somehow, despite the fact that the crash had robbed her of a scholarship and the use of her legs, Penny was more stoic and accepting of her situation than her younger brother, who had been sitting farthest from the point of impact and so had received only cuts and bruises.

  Verraday was rushed along with his mother and sister to the emergency ward at Harborview. His mother was pronounced dead upon arrival. Verraday was kept overnight for observation and released into his father’s care the next day. Penny however, stayed in the hospital to begin the long rehabilitation from her grievous injuries. Though arduous, the rehab regimen had also given her years to talk through her feelings with therapists and work through not only her physical traumas but her emotional ones as well, with the aid of sympathetic and knowledgeable adult ears. But because Verraday didn’t have any physical injuries, he never needed to see a doctor again and received no counseling on how to cope with the loss of his mother. His situation was aggravated by the fact that the city, the police department, and their lawyers circled the wagons and did their best to discredit Verraday’s memory of the accident, shifting the blame away from their officer and onto his mother, who, being dead, was conveniently unable to speak for herself.

  Even as an adult, the memories of the cajoling and bullying by police and their legal counsel in the weeks after the crash were enough to provoke an adrenaline response in Verraday, raising his blood pressure and making his muscles tighten involuntarily. After a police lawyer had repeatedly failed to find a flaw in Verraday’s recounting of the events during cross-examination, the counselor had told the judge in a faux-compassionate tone that “a child that age, having been subjected to such a distressing event, can’t be expected to recall it accurately. To place that burden on the boy would be cruel to him and grossly unjust to the accused.” The judge agreed. The case was thrown out of court for lack of evidence and Robson was allowed to keep his job on the force.

  Verraday sat down in front of the fire with his wine and the Dalai Lama’s book. Penny, he knew in his heart, was rational and wise to a degree that he never would or could be. She didn’t feel rage about injustices the way he did. She just made her personal corner of the world as uplifting as possible and seemed to accept the rest as an inevitable part of the human condition. Verraday knew that Penny’s tribulations far exceeded his and continued to affect every moment of her waking life. Yet here she was, as far as he could tell, full of grace and laughter. He loved and respected his sister enough that normally, he would at least try to take her advice. But not tonight. He skimmed a few paragrap
hs of the Dalai Lama’s book and found it singularly unhelpful.

  “Sorry, Penny,” he said as he set the book aside.

  The only thing that would bring him any inner peace tonight would be to find out who had tortured and killed Rachel Friesen and Alana Carmichael and make sure the son of a bitch never had the chance to do it to anyone else.

  He finished his wine and switched off the gas fireplace. The heat dissipated immediately and the chill air began to close in around him once again. Verraday went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of brandy, and headed for his study, resigned to the darkness that awaited him there.

  CHAPTER 9

  Verraday set his brandy and the two envelopes down on his desk. He opened his filing cabinet and pulled out the crime scene photo of Rachel Friesen that Maclean had given him the previous day. Then he sat down, reached into the center drawer, and took out the Boeing letter opener that his father, a lifelong machinist with the company, had given him as a graduation present. He slit the seals and laid the contents of the envelopes out in two separate piles, one for Rachel Friesen’s case, the other for Alana Carmichael.

  He decided to begin with Rachel Friesen’s file, rationalizing that since he’d already seen her at the morgue and knew what to expect, it would ease him into the disagreeable task of examining the unfamiliar crime scene photos of Alana Carmichael. At the top of the file were photos of tracks, which, the report noted, appeared to have been made by tires of the sort found on full-size commercial vans. They had been sent to the police lab and identification was pending. The report stated that the owners of the cranberry farm, the Kerkhoff family, owned a heavy International Harvester truck as well as a Dodge Ram pickup but that neither of those vehicles’ tires matched the tracks found near the crime scene. There were photos of the bog itself, as well as the forested area around it. One was an aerial view with marks on it showing where the body was found and where the tire tracks were in relation to the cranberry bog. In the overhead shot, he could see that the farm was surrounded on three sides by encroaching new suburbs. Verraday supposed it would be only a decade at most until the farm ceased to exist and was sold off to developers to make cookie-cutter bungalows and townhouses.

  At last Verraday had to face the inevitable close-ups of the body. The fact that he had seen Rachel Friesen’s corpse in the flesh less than twelve hours earlier didn’t make looking at the photos any less disturbing. There were several angles showing Rachel Friesen’s body in relation to the flooded bog and the shoreline. And there were several more from the same series Maclean had given him the previous day, but they were far more graphic. Examining the photos, he saw that there were numerous angles of the bruises and welts that covered her shoulders, back, buttocks, and thighs. They were wide and dark, not the type that would be made by most lovers engaged in sadomasochistic play. The blows needed to leave the marks that were on Rachel Friesen could only be the product of someone whose anger was uncontrollable once unleashed.

  Verraday took a sip of his brandy. Then he examined the second set of crime scene photos and the reports that Maclean had copied from Fowler’s investigation of the Alana Carmichael murder.

  First, Verraday looked at one of the missing persons pictures supplied by Carmichael’s mother to the police department when her daughter first disappeared. It was a snapshot that looked like it had been taken in a back garden on a sunny July afternoon. In it, Alana wore a retro, pastel-green summer dress, something that looked like it was from the early 1950s. Her hair was even darker than Rachel’s, dyed black probably, thought Verraday, and cut medium-length in a Dita Von Teese, rockabilly style. Like Rachel, she had more piercings than most young women, but unlike the other victim, Alana’s were more prominent. She had a stud through her right eyebrow, as well as a nose ring. On her left ear, which was the side visible in the photograph, she had three rings at the bottom, in her lobule, and two more at the top of the ear, along the helix, beside two prominent studs. But what stood out the most was a cupid’s arrow. It was stainless steel, about two inches long and ran diagonally across her upper ear. The entry point, from which the arrow’s fletchings stuck out, was on the upper front helix. The arrow’s head emerged from a point at the back of her ear about three-quarters of an inch lower than the entry point. There was a black-and-red tattoo running down the left side of her throat, curving round her neck. The picture was small, but it appeared to be a cluster of roses. There was a second tattoo on her right arm, stretching from just above her wrist to a few inches above her elbow. This also seemed to be a cluster of roses, but in a more colorful red, yellow, and blue rendering. She held a tray on which there were two glasses and what appeared to be a pitcher of daiquiris. She wore a comically exaggerated expression of cordiality that morphed that “perfect hostess” smile seen so often in midcentury women’s magazines into a satirical “mad housewife” effect.

  Clearly something in the visual culture of that era appealed to Alana, and a lot of young women like her, yet they felt the compulsion to mock it at the same time. But despite her sardonic mugging, Alana’s eyes didn’t have the brightness and light of a true smile. There was melancholy behind the vivid colors she surrounded herself with and the wit and style she projected. In another life, thought Verraday, someone with Alana’s highly developed aesthetic sense might have become an in-demand art director, costume designer, or set decorator. He wondered what her story might have been had she never been sexually assaulted by a stepfather, had never experienced all those setbacks that put her on a trajectory that would ultimately intersect with that of her killer.

  That was Alana Carmichael in life. Now came the inevitability of observing Alana Carmichael in death. With a sense of foreboding, Verraday slid the first crime scene photo out from beneath the missing persons report. It was an overhead view of a dumpster. On top of broken furniture, pizza boxes, discarded flowerpots, and other detritus of everyday life lay the naked body of Alana Carmichael. Her head was slumped to the left, hanging over the side of a garbage bag. On the inside of her upper left thigh was a green tattoo, a forest or jungle of some sort. Upon closer examination, Verraday saw that it was the Garden of Eden, with Eve, an apple, and a serpent lurking within it.

  Then he pulled out another photo of the crime scene, this one showing Alana Carmichael’s face and neck from the same overhead viewpoint, only in close-up. Like the photos of Rachel Friesen from the cranberry bog, it revealed deep ligature marks around the victim’s neck. Whatever the killer had used to strangle Alana Carmichael, it had been pulled so tightly that it had begun to cut into her skin. The blood vessels in her eyes had hemorrhaged from the force of the strangulation, just as Rachel Friesen’s had.

  The next photo he removed from the pile was another close-up, this time a view of her left side. It revealed the neck tattoo he had seen in the backyard photo. At first glance, it appeared to be what he had observed before, a cluster of roses at a slightly odd angle. For some reason, beyond the fact that they were tattooed onto what was now a young woman murdered in a particularly vicious fashion, the image gave him a strangely uneasy feeling when he viewed it up close. He lifted the photo up and slowly rotated it around its axis. When he viewed it from a point behind the victim’s left ear, the now nearly upside-down tattoo suddenly revealed itself to be a cleverly macabre optical illusion. Someone viewing Alana close up and from behind would have been surprised, as Verraday now was, to see the roses artfully morph into a black-and-white skull surrounded by fronds and petals. He noticed something else not visible in the overhead shot: that the Cupid’s arrow pin that Alana Carmichael had been wearing in the backyard photograph was missing. He also noted that like Rachel, she had a piercing in her navel, but there was no ring or stud there in any of the crime scene pictures.

  Then Verraday pulled out a photo taken at the morgue. It revealed that the victim’s back, buttocks, and thighs were heavily bruised and covered in welts, the same way Rachel Friesen’s were. According to the coroner’s report, the one major di
fference was that semen had been found on Alana’s panties, and it matched that of the accused, Peter Cray. It was an odd discrepancy. There was considerable forethought in the commission of both crimes. Whoever did this had chosen his victims, as well as his means of killing and disposing of them, with great care. Leaving traces of semen behind had been a major gaffe. Or had it?

  Verraday set the coroner’s report down then pulled out Peter Cray’s file, starting with the mug shots. Verraday gazed at the photos and took an immediate dislike to him. Cray was a stocky man in his early thirties, with a neck that seemed bigger in circumference than his head. He had a pugnacious set to his jaw and gazed out from piglike eyes with a look that was simultaneously belligerent and stupid. It was an expression that Verraday had seen scores of times. It was the look of the repeat offender. Verraday’s instinctive dislike of Cray only increased when he read his rap sheet, a revolving door of charges and occasional convictions dating back to age fifteen. There were two arrests for beating up prostitutes and another for indecent exposure. Rounding out his record were several thefts, a robbery, a couple of assaults committed while intoxicated, and a few charges of receiving stolen merchandise that were dismissed because of lack of evidence. There was a break-and-entry charge that he’d beaten only because he was so drunk and high on OxyContin that he had fallen asleep behind the wheel of the getaway car while his partner was apprehended inside the victims’ home. When police questioned Cray, he claimed that he had no idea his friend was planning a break-in. He insisted that he had thought that the man was getting out to relieve himself, and that Cray had nodded off while waiting for him to return. Cray might not wind up on death row through his own efforts, thought Verraday, but he’d likely spend a lot of his life in prison for crimes not yet committed. Unless by some miracle, he rehabilitated himself, which seemed unlikely. Verraday’s eyes were beginning to sting, and his lids felt heavy. He took a sip of his brandy then closed them just for a moment to give them some rest. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sleeping when the motion of his head slumping forward jerked him awake. He pushed his chair away from the desk and headed to his bedroom, where he quickly peeled off his clothes and climbed under the covers before the effects of the natural melatonin could wear off and the misery and bleakness of the photos could creep back into his consciousness.